If this is true, are you sure you're asking enough of your students? I mean, I know it's not up to you personally what they learn, but I'm sure you know as well as anyone that if the school set higher standards, many students would have mastered long division in 3rd grade. Don't you see this as a sign of failure that kids have nothing more to learn once you release them from the schoolhouse? Just imagine how much you could do for them if the state let you hold them to a higher standard, one which they're clearly capable of!
From the study mentioned, we learn that US high school students definitely do improve their performance by doing homework. It seems that we wait until high school before we start holding our students accountable for their own learning. And I think it's no accident that we are way behind most developed and many developing countries in elementary education, especially in science, math and literacy. The same studies show that we start catching up a bit in high school. This all makes a pretty clear picture! So my question is, why the hell are we waiting until high school? Aren't we doing a great disservice to this country?
Homework isn't the problem, US currucula are!
on
Schools Banning Homework?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I definitely remember doing grade-school homework. I had to; everyone did, especially in Math, because things moved really fast. But that was only before I came to America.
When I arrived in the US, I realized my fellow 5th graders had no idea about geometry, sets and a whole bunch of other mathermatical concepts that I thought were completely basic. In 9th grade geometry, they basically made me repeat the math I learned in 4th grade. And I'll admit it: I was totally baked in very many of my geometry classes and it was still an easy A.
But what I really wanted to say is this: I don't dispute the results of the study. I can easily imagine that homework doesn't help American students do better at the American grade school curriculum. That's because in America, the slowest kid in the class sets the pace for everyone else, and that kid dosn't do homework anyway. No wonder it takes no work to keep up! But we absolutely can aim higher standards. Kids are capable of learning a lot more than people expect. Many can learn Calculus before they enter high school. Homeschooled kids with competent mentors do this all the time. My dad was teaching calculus when he was 16 (his dad taught math and there was no other qualified sub in their little town).
If doing homework doesn't show any benefit in how kids do in school, that screams to me that whatever they're doing in school is messed up. I suspect they dumbed down everything so that doing homework doesn't teach you anything you didn't already learn in class. Now (surprise, surprise!) they release a study showing that doing homework doesn't help you perform in class, and they react to it by cancelling homework. How stupid! Why don't they instead set higher goals in school, so that you would learn something important when doing homework?
Many reports now indicate that Vista will load even a Core 2 Duo cpu at 20-30% just to run the interface. When you compare this to my normal 0-1% for WinXP or KDE, you'll see that you won't be saving any power at all with Vista unless you turn off the default interface. (Add to this also the extra load on your GPU from running Aero...)
Yeah, I thought the same thing. But if AAC really is such an open standard, why are there no LAME-like OSS projects to build a good encoder based on that standard? I doubt it's for lack of interest, so I thought it was for lack of legality. AAC would totally make sense if it really is as open as you say. After all, the iPod supports it!
I'm no big fan of Merck the company, but this is one case where I'm totally behind them. This is an incredibly effective vaccine. As far as they can tell, it might be 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer, and has many other good effects on health. By any accounting, the costs of vaccination far outweighs the cost of treatment, not to mention the cost in quality of life. Cancer sucks, and HPV even when it doesn't lead to cancer is a bad thing. It has a lot to do with various genital warts and contributes to that fishy smell that some women get. HPV also affects men, who generally catch it from women. So vaccinating girls would have giant benefits for men as well, and actually, I think we should vaccinate men as well!
This might be the first time, in a battle of a giant pharmacutical company versus a grassroots opposition effert, that I am 100% on the side of the pharmacutical. And not because I'm under the impression that they are saints. It's just that by any accounting, their vaccine would make the world far better!
I think that depends on the laser's efficiency, which I would guess is low. If we beam energy from space, the best way to do it will be with microwaves.
Ugh, do we really have to read the article for you? Well, here you go:
Most age-related results are impacted by
drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
due to the proprietary nature of these data.
Re:Easier way to colonize the universe
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, if you get it to work. But how about a compromise then: a dozen frozen people and a million zygotes, along with many fancy reusable artificial wombs. The initial part of the colonization might not need many people, as it would mainly involve directing robots in making the first on-surface habitat. At this time, all the humans would almost certainly be in orbit, in a pretty crowded ship. If they wanted to set up a human-supporting ecosystem, they'd also have to bring along lots of terrestrial bacteria, flora and fauna (the latter would also gestate in artifical wombs, I presume).
Re:Easier way to colonize the universe
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
Huh? I was raised by a televison, you weren't? Of course I'm just kidding, but I'm pretty sure that the AI of 2050 will be a far better parent than Britney Spears.
I actually think it would be fascinating to design a parenting robot. We could do a decent job even with today's technology, if we were really prepared to put the work into the project. Children are not that easy to screw up. Remember also that only the first generation would be raised exclusively by computers. The subsequent generations would be co-raised by people (it's not like you'd retire the robots, and it would make sense to birth babies faster initially than what would be practical if human parents were exclusively in charge of their upbringing). Remember that these ships would almost surely contain much of the Earth's valuable data, like all the great books, journals, documentaries, interactive textbooks, etc. The children who grew up with those things would be much closer to us culturally than their contemporaries back on Earth!
The real technological problem would be in establishing a human-friendly habitat in the distant system. For that, you'd need some serious automation, as in, robots that can mine the resources of a planet so as to make duplicates of themselves, generate electricity, build facilities for humans to live in, etc. It will take much longer to make machines this sophisticated than it will to make a wonderful parenting robot. Their precursosrs will be self-replicating robots that mine asteroids and perhaps Mercury. Perhaps they would build solar panels, sling them into space and assemble them there in order to power a future supercomputer.
But I'm digressing: I think the idea of sending smaller slow ships with frozen genetic material is far more practical than any proposed by the article, and I'm glad to see that someone agrees.
I see your point, but it's not that simple. Like it or not, Gnome is the first thing that many people see on their way to using the software Linus does care about, which is the Linux kernel. It's like the lobby of the Linux hotel. And it's hard to blame Linus for saying "Clean up that fucking lobby, you stoners! I've dedicated my life to the internals of this hotel, they're aswesome, but once people see the filthy lobby, they run away without even noticing the good stuff!"
You pretend anyone in the USA is going to care about this. They won't. But I'll tell you who will: Everybody else in Latin America. You might not realize it, but Cuba is the most literate country in Central America, and there is no small amount of admiration for Cuba in that part of the world. Add to that the economic muscle of Venezuela, as well as Chavez's almost dictatorial resolve to make things work, and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world will be watching carefully whether this succeeds. If it comes off well, it wouldn't surprise me that Linux would be the OS they would all use.
There are many smart and patriotic people in Cuba and Venezuela, and I suspect they will mess with Linux until it really works right for the purposes that the government has in mind. This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS, which is what most other developing countries choose.
In summary, this is incredibly good for Linux, and only people who think the USA is the entire world could think otherwise.
These are all good questions, and every user who volunteers their computer for something like this should find answers to them. I'm quite sure that the stuff discovered by distributed networks does not automatically enter the public domain, but in cases like SETI and protein folding, the organizers explicitly state that it will. But it wouldn't be illegal for a drug company to use volunteers' computers just for corporate profit. You have to judge the merit of each of these projects on a case-by-case basis. Remember also that there is a cost to participating: you have to run your computer at peak power, and this will add several hundred dollars to your utility bills each year while polluting the planet with extra coal smoke and CO2.
BitTorrent is not the answer when it's the internet backbone that's getting saturated. BitTorrent would just keep it saturated, since it doesn't care whether it gets data chunks from nearby or far away.
Compare this to Usenet, which doesn't stress the backbone at all: it's a connection between my local ISP and my computer, so it's fast and doesn't require taking a piss in the global bandwidth pool. BitTorrent will only prefer downloading data that's geographically closer when connection to the stuff that's far away is so saturated that it starts coming in really slowly. But even then it will try to get as much data as it can from that saturated connection. And that's exactly the problem. We don't want the world's long-distance connections to be permanently saturated. That squeezes everything else that's competing to use them, like VoIP.
Thank you, that's a really thoughtful comment! You seriously ran a dozen balanced coax cables? You mean, all twelve from point A to point B? Funny, I also considered doing something like that in my present house, since coax cable is so easy to come by. I use cable that Time Warner discarded to run audio and composite video from my bedroom computer to my living room TV, looks pretty good. The trickiest part of that setup was bringing in the USB receiver for my wireless mouse/keyboard into the living room. USB only supports short runs without re-amplification.
A 100' cable length would definitely be enough for me. Since HDMI is digital, there really should be no quality degredation over that run, right?
Anyway, I think you're totally right about not taking any steps now, and I don't intend to. I also don't live in my fantasy house yet, and who knows how many years will pass before I do. I'm jumping the gun on the fantasizing, I guess!
No, I'll judge my cynicism to be misplaced when I actually see string theorists agree on a falsifiable prediction. And that hasn't happened yet, at least not as far as I can tell. I'm not against people elaborating string theory, and I'm actually rooting for the empirical predictions that are thus far missing. I think that would be awesome for science. But the way the cynicism got there in the first place is the slipperiness of string theory. Let me put it this way: there is no conceivable observation that would make string theorists give up their theory. That's a state in which string theory cannot live indefinitely.
Well, I was pulling those numbers from thin air a bit. This isn't a plan yet, this is more of a wish for the future. There is no projector (that I can afford anyway) which can meet the specs I outlined.
So what would it take to make a cable that accomodates long runs and can transfer over 6 Gb/s? Would long runs require an even higher bandwidth because they would need a higher overhead? And how would you accomodate that with a cable? More signal-carrying wires? And how about fiber? The line loss on that would be much smaller, but could it ever be practical?
I'm picturing a future where every household with have a big computer in the basement, perhaps doubling as a water-heater (why not put the excess heat to practical use?). Since programs of the future will be designed for parallelism, I can imagine these machines will be seriously expandable, as in, daughterboards with extra numbercrunching units. And since I expect future games will be real-time ray-traced, all that numbercrunching power will get used. But this rules out thin clients, which do the rendering where the user sits. Since the rendering will need lots of numbercrunching, it too will need to get done in the basement. Which means that modern houses will need KVM outlets wherever there is a TV or a monitor. And they will need a video cable standard compatible with all of these needs and the high resolutions/framerates of the future. The computer's graphics display might support four or eight different video-out signals simultaneously, so that every display in the house could show something different. But it probably couldn't accomodate 8 different game-players, since each would only get 1/8 of the computer's rendering power. But if you play on it alone, games would look pretty awesome. Anyway, that's how I imagine the future, and it won't be possible without a seriously high-bandwith video cable.
Since I blurted all this out, I'd appreciate reactions, if you have any - especially if you have reasons to think something about my guess is unrealistic.
I'd heard about the Quake3 thing somewhere else. It's pretty cool with Quake4. What really impressed me, though, is that when they multiplied the number of polygons in the scene by several orders of magnitude, rendering performance fell only 60% or so. This makes it seem like an increase in processing power will accomodate an expoential improvement in scene detail. This confirms my suspicion that real-time ray tracing is the future of game graphics.
The fact that ray-traced Quake3 works OK in real time on present (though big - but not specialized) hardware makes me think that Intel's chip might be able to do some impressive real-time ray-tracing already, and a 2012 version of the chip would render nicer scenes through ray-tracing than would conventional GPUs made with 2012 technology.
Well, if I hadn't posted in this thread I would have modded you informative.
So did I understand correctly that POV-ray at this point doesn't support parallel processing? If that's so, it would be a shame and it must really limit its usefulness in big projects.
It would be cool if, just as the routines got more sophisticated, they'd get a consumer-grade processor that could run them in real-time.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident that it won't happen, and that it won't slow down even one of those string-theory-mystics that make up today's physics departments. They'll just be like "Oh, our theory only really makes the predictions that are actually observed." But I hope my cynicism is misplaced!
I learned nothing in that article. Here are some issues that interest me: Which of these standards can support very long cables with perfect digital reproduction at 1080p/120Hz? Because I'm looking forward to ceiling-mounted projectors capable of this and I'll need a long cable from the display source, probably a computer.
The ideal cable for me would be one that I could pre-network the house with, so that I could choose to display the output from any of several computers in my house. That way, I could get a monster computer with gigantic fans that lives in the basement, and I could interface with it in one of several different rooms. This seems to me like the future of home computing, and I don't think any of the display connector technologies are up to it. I'm not talking about "thin client" stuff. I'm talking about one big computer with a massive graphics card which supports at least two users simultaneously, or one user that takes advanage of the system's full horsepower.
I still haven't run across a game where I could play a female dwarf with a beard. This could only be becaus of some racist and/or sexist stereotype. It's like society can't accept male dwarves who shave and female dwarves who don't!
When I read about this I didn't get all worked up, since I imagine that it will be almost impossible for realistic applications to keep all 80 cores busy and get the teraflop benefits. But then I read about the possibility of using this for real-time ray tracing, and got very intrigued!
Ray tracing is embarassingly parallelizable, and while I'm no expert, two terraflops might just be enough calculating power to do a pretty good job at scene rendering, maybe even in real time. To think this performance would be available from a standard 65nm die that uses 65 watts... that really could make a difference to gamers!
I'm confused about what the contract says. Will the phones be locked by contract to work only on Cingular, or is the deal that Cingular will be the only carrier to offer them to their customers?
In other words, will there be an unlocked iPhone available into which I can install my T-Mobile sim card? It's not clear to me that the five-year deal precludes that. Besides, even if it does, I'm sure unlocked iPhones will be available on the internet, since they will be demanded in other countries. Is there anything standing in the way of them just working with a T-Mobile sim card, like any other unlocked phone?
Slashdot Mirror
From the study mentioned, we learn that US high school students definitely do improve their performance by doing homework. It seems that we wait until high school before we start holding our students accountable for their own learning. And I think it's no accident that we are way behind most developed and many developing countries in elementary education, especially in science, math and literacy. The same studies show that we start catching up a bit in high school. This all makes a pretty clear picture! So my question is, why the hell are we waiting until high school? Aren't we doing a great disservice to this country?
When I arrived in the US, I realized my fellow 5th graders had no idea about geometry, sets and a whole bunch of other mathermatical concepts that I thought were completely basic. In 9th grade geometry, they basically made me repeat the math I learned in 4th grade. And I'll admit it: I was totally baked in very many of my geometry classes and it was still an easy A.
But what I really wanted to say is this: I don't dispute the results of the study. I can easily imagine that homework doesn't help American students do better at the American grade school curriculum. That's because in America, the slowest kid in the class sets the pace for everyone else, and that kid dosn't do homework anyway. No wonder it takes no work to keep up! But we absolutely can aim higher standards. Kids are capable of learning a lot more than people expect. Many can learn Calculus before they enter high school. Homeschooled kids with competent mentors do this all the time. My dad was teaching calculus when he was 16 (his dad taught math and there was no other qualified sub in their little town).
If doing homework doesn't show any benefit in how kids do in school, that screams to me that whatever they're doing in school is messed up. I suspect they dumbed down everything so that doing homework doesn't teach you anything you didn't already learn in class. Now (surprise, surprise!) they release a study showing that doing homework doesn't help you perform in class, and they react to it by cancelling homework. How stupid! Why don't they instead set higher goals in school, so that you would learn something important when doing homework?
Many reports now indicate that Vista will load even a Core 2 Duo cpu at 20-30% just to run the interface. When you compare this to my normal 0-1% for WinXP or KDE, you'll see that you won't be saving any power at all with Vista unless you turn off the default interface. (Add to this also the extra load on your GPU from running Aero...)
Yeah, I thought the same thing. But if AAC really is such an open standard, why are there no LAME-like OSS projects to build a good encoder based on that standard? I doubt it's for lack of interest, so I thought it was for lack of legality. AAC would totally make sense if it really is as open as you say. After all, the iPod supports it!
This might be the first time, in a battle of a giant pharmacutical company versus a grassroots opposition effert, that I am 100% on the side of the pharmacutical. And not because I'm under the impression that they are saints. It's just that by any accounting, their vaccine would make the world far better!
I think that depends on the laser's efficiency, which I would guess is low. If we beam energy from space, the best way to do it will be with microwaves.
Sure, if you get it to work. But how about a compromise then: a dozen frozen people and a million zygotes, along with many fancy reusable artificial wombs. The initial part of the colonization might not need many people, as it would mainly involve directing robots in making the first on-surface habitat. At this time, all the humans would almost certainly be in orbit, in a pretty crowded ship. If they wanted to set up a human-supporting ecosystem, they'd also have to bring along lots of terrestrial bacteria, flora and fauna (the latter would also gestate in artifical wombs, I presume).
I actually think it would be fascinating to design a parenting robot. We could do a decent job even with today's technology, if we were really prepared to put the work into the project. Children are not that easy to screw up. Remember also that only the first generation would be raised exclusively by computers. The subsequent generations would be co-raised by people (it's not like you'd retire the robots, and it would make sense to birth babies faster initially than what would be practical if human parents were exclusively in charge of their upbringing). Remember that these ships would almost surely contain much of the Earth's valuable data, like all the great books, journals, documentaries, interactive textbooks, etc. The children who grew up with those things would be much closer to us culturally than their contemporaries back on Earth!
The real technological problem would be in establishing a human-friendly habitat in the distant system. For that, you'd need some serious automation, as in, robots that can mine the resources of a planet so as to make duplicates of themselves, generate electricity, build facilities for humans to live in, etc. It will take much longer to make machines this sophisticated than it will to make a wonderful parenting robot. Their precursosrs will be self-replicating robots that mine asteroids and perhaps Mercury. Perhaps they would build solar panels, sling them into space and assemble them there in order to power a future supercomputer.
But I'm digressing: I think the idea of sending smaller slow ships with frozen genetic material is far more practical than any proposed by the article, and I'm glad to see that someone agrees.
I see your point, but it's not that simple. Like it or not, Gnome is the first thing that many people see on their way to using the software Linus does care about, which is the Linux kernel. It's like the lobby of the Linux hotel. And it's hard to blame Linus for saying "Clean up that fucking lobby, you stoners! I've dedicated my life to the internals of this hotel, they're aswesome, but once people see the filthy lobby, they run away without even noticing the good stuff!"
Wait, so you're saying you won't use any tool that Communists use and love? Well, you'll have to give up a lot of stuff, buddy.
There are many smart and patriotic people in Cuba and Venezuela, and I suspect they will mess with Linux until it really works right for the purposes that the government has in mind. This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS, which is what most other developing countries choose.
In summary, this is incredibly good for Linux, and only people who think the USA is the entire world could think otherwise.
These are all good questions, and every user who volunteers their computer for something like this should find answers to them. I'm quite sure that the stuff discovered by distributed networks does not automatically enter the public domain, but in cases like SETI and protein folding, the organizers explicitly state that it will. But it wouldn't be illegal for a drug company to use volunteers' computers just for corporate profit. You have to judge the merit of each of these projects on a case-by-case basis. Remember also that there is a cost to participating: you have to run your computer at peak power, and this will add several hundred dollars to your utility bills each year while polluting the planet with extra coal smoke and CO2.
Compare this to Usenet, which doesn't stress the backbone at all: it's a connection between my local ISP and my computer, so it's fast and doesn't require taking a piss in the global bandwidth pool. BitTorrent will only prefer downloading data that's geographically closer when connection to the stuff that's far away is so saturated that it starts coming in really slowly. But even then it will try to get as much data as it can from that saturated connection. And that's exactly the problem. We don't want the world's long-distance connections to be permanently saturated. That squeezes everything else that's competing to use them, like VoIP.
A 100' cable length would definitely be enough for me. Since HDMI is digital, there really should be no quality degredation over that run, right?
Anyway, I think you're totally right about not taking any steps now, and I don't intend to. I also don't live in my fantasy house yet, and who knows how many years will pass before I do. I'm jumping the gun on the fantasizing, I guess!
No, I'll judge my cynicism to be misplaced when I actually see string theorists agree on a falsifiable prediction. And that hasn't happened yet, at least not as far as I can tell. I'm not against people elaborating string theory, and I'm actually rooting for the empirical predictions that are thus far missing. I think that would be awesome for science. But the way the cynicism got there in the first place is the slipperiness of string theory. Let me put it this way: there is no conceivable observation that would make string theorists give up their theory. That's a state in which string theory cannot live indefinitely.
So what would it take to make a cable that accomodates long runs and can transfer over 6 Gb/s? Would long runs require an even higher bandwidth because they would need a higher overhead? And how would you accomodate that with a cable? More signal-carrying wires? And how about fiber? The line loss on that would be much smaller, but could it ever be practical?
I'm picturing a future where every household with have a big computer in the basement, perhaps doubling as a water-heater (why not put the excess heat to practical use?). Since programs of the future will be designed for parallelism, I can imagine these machines will be seriously expandable, as in, daughterboards with extra numbercrunching units. And since I expect future games will be real-time ray-traced, all that numbercrunching power will get used. But this rules out thin clients, which do the rendering where the user sits. Since the rendering will need lots of numbercrunching, it too will need to get done in the basement. Which means that modern houses will need KVM outlets wherever there is a TV or a monitor. And they will need a video cable standard compatible with all of these needs and the high resolutions/framerates of the future. The computer's graphics display might support four or eight different video-out signals simultaneously, so that every display in the house could show something different. But it probably couldn't accomodate 8 different game-players, since each would only get 1/8 of the computer's rendering power. But if you play on it alone, games would look pretty awesome. Anyway, that's how I imagine the future, and it won't be possible without a seriously high-bandwith video cable.
Since I blurted all this out, I'd appreciate reactions, if you have any - especially if you have reasons to think something about my guess is unrealistic.
The fact that ray-traced Quake3 works OK in real time on present (though big - but not specialized) hardware makes me think that Intel's chip might be able to do some impressive real-time ray-tracing already, and a 2012 version of the chip would render nicer scenes through ray-tracing than would conventional GPUs made with 2012 technology.
So did I understand correctly that POV-ray at this point doesn't support parallel processing? If that's so, it would be a shame and it must really limit its usefulness in big projects.
It would be cool if, just as the routines got more sophisticated, they'd get a consumer-grade processor that could run them in real-time.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident that it won't happen, and that it won't slow down even one of those string-theory-mystics that make up today's physics departments. They'll just be like "Oh, our theory only really makes the predictions that are actually observed." But I hope my cynicism is misplaced!
The ideal cable for me would be one that I could pre-network the house with, so that I could choose to display the output from any of several computers in my house. That way, I could get a monster computer with gigantic fans that lives in the basement, and I could interface with it in one of several different rooms. This seems to me like the future of home computing, and I don't think any of the display connector technologies are up to it. I'm not talking about "thin client" stuff. I'm talking about one big computer with a massive graphics card which supports at least two users simultaneously, or one user that takes advanage of the system's full horsepower.
I still haven't run across a game where I could play a female dwarf with a beard. This could only be becaus of some racist and/or sexist stereotype. It's like society can't accept male dwarves who shave and female dwarves who don't!
Hey, are we acually doing anything in that space station, except fixing it?
Ray tracing is embarassingly parallelizable, and while I'm no expert, two terraflops might just be enough calculating power to do a pretty good job at scene rendering, maybe even in real time. To think this performance would be available from a standard 65nm die that uses 65 watts... that really could make a difference to gamers!
In other words, will there be an unlocked iPhone available into which I can install my T-Mobile sim card? It's not clear to me that the five-year deal precludes that. Besides, even if it does, I'm sure unlocked iPhones will be available on the internet, since they will be demanded in other countries. Is there anything standing in the way of them just working with a T-Mobile sim card, like any other unlocked phone?