Maybe the point is that some students sign up for online classes to hide their bad habits. A prof or a TA could spot you reading slashdot in a lecture hall, but nobody will call you out if you're AFK during an online lecture. The thought may be that an online class could benefit from more real-time forms of feedback.
Of course that leads to those dreadful online Flash training lessons we have to take at work. "Move the mouse over the frowning face to see why insider trading is illegal." "Click on the padlock to see three ways to recognize a phishing email." Fifteen minutes later I'm no more informed than I would have been if I was just given a simple memo that would take about a minute to read and sign.
In reality, the rapid feedback only benefits the student. The prof doesn't have to care until mid-terms (technically, they don't have to care even if they flunk you out.) It's the student that doesn't know if they're learning enough or not, and it would help them more to know early on that they need to change something.
I had a similar experience. A couple of things that helped me were discipline grown from experience ( keeping an eye on the calendar is easier once you mature), a good pair of comfortable noise canceling headphones, an office door to shut out the rest of the house and family during class time, and the 1.5X speed-up button on the lectures (2.0X for the really... slow... umm... profs.)
I never let myself get behind by more than two weeks worth of unwatched lectures (I was almost always current within a day or two.) I started homework the moment it was assigned, instead of trying to weave it into a schedule assuming I'd find the time before the due date. I convinced myself that "unfinished homework was uncomfortable", and I kept myself uncomfortable until it was submitted.
Basically, it was all the same good study habits we were taught as kids, but actually wanting to apply them as I now saw the beneficiary was myself.
The AR Drone (by Parrot) comes with two shells, one that's a simple body cover, and the other includes integrated rings around the propellers (called the "indoor" shell.) The idea is you determine the level of safety you require in the situation you're in, with safety either applying to the environment, to the plane, or both. The tradeoff is weight, which translates to reduced flight time.
In this case they're using a room with fabric drapes to absorb the impact of a stray rotor so they can maximize flight time.
The hidden drawback is that one clever person can decimate an industry. Take plumbing, for example. Fitting iron pipes together required sweat, hacksaws, pipe threaders, and a lot of time to plumb a building. Then along came copper tubing, which was lighter and faster, and a six week job became a four week job. PVC turned drainage work into a cut and glue operation, shaving off more time. And now we have Pex with which a plumber can run a house as fast as he can drill holes in two by fours and snap a few fittings on, finishing in mere days. Where we needed seven plumbers 50 years ago, today we need one.
And every industry is looking to technology to make laborers "more efficient". Smart people make advances in crop harvesting, reducing the demand for farmers. Boring machines have replaced tunnel diggers. Given the average car's reliability has risen sixfold due to continual improvements in engineering, machining, and materials, how many mechanic jobs are left? The size of the motors that electricians would have once repaired keeps going up as commodity pricing has made even large motors cheaper than the cost of a rebuild.
The job of a laborer isn't being off shored, but it is still being threatened.
They learned at least two things from this incident, not one. The first lesson is that it was "miswired" (agreed, a fishy statement), but it means they can test some wiring or insulation in existing and future planes to make people think they're doing enough to get the planes back in the air. Second, and more importantly, they learned that the batteries can burn as a group, and that they need to minimize the damage a battery fire can cause by better restricting the ability of the fire to spread. So the next time this happens, the plane won't be at as much risk.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid does better than the father, the father feels inadequate).
That's not new, and is not limited to recent immigrants. A few years ago my son became the first member of my wife's side of the family to graduate from college. They've been in America since the 1800s, and were mostly farmers, laborers, and the occasional missionary. The most education of any of his antecedents on that side had was a trade school degree. Many had dropped out from primary school at an early age in order to work the family farms. College educations were not encouraged - my mother-in-law was valedictorian, yet her formal education ended at high school. Even my wife's desire to go to a technical college was not encouraged. Her family even chided me when we were dating her because I was a "college boy". Sadly, I don't think their situation is all that unusual in rural America.
I never noticed an "inadequacy" issue with the men in her family. The son being able to out-earn the father was a measure of success, and a point of pride, every time I saw it happen. (I'm hoping mine kicks my butt in that respect, too.)
On another hand, far too many parents in the more "traditional Americanized" (i.e., assimilated) strata are convinced that "little junior is perfect" and that any failing must be the school's, teachers' or someone else's fault rather than considering the possibility that their perfect genetic offspring from their perfect loins might, maybe, not be working as hard as they could.
This is a real problem with the Entitlement Generation, and came from the twisted idea that it's demoralizing to tell Junior he's failing. It's good to be demoralizing - that's the feedback that causes improvements!
Regarding standardized tests, they grew out of a known inequity between schools, not from an overall decline in education. People looked at students who came from certain public schools and wondered why some kids were doing great while kids from other schools were struggling. Standardized testing allowed schools to measure the differences, highlighted the gaps, and got people looking for solutions. If this school that performs well has a lot of kids in early childhood education programs, does that mean that EC programs fix problems? Try it out. If this school that performs poorly has a lot of kids from impoverished neighborhoods, do free lunches help? What about free community education classes for the parents? Do after school programs help? The tests help school administrators see the results.
Without the tests, we're flying blind as to what actions actually make an improvement, and which are a useless waste of money. Standardized tests are designed to measure school efficacy, not students' intelligence. Politicians who have alternate agendas, and others with a poor understanding of the process, often don't understand (or otherwise misuse) the distinction.
Does that mean we shouldn't use those tests as a measure of an individual student? It means that if you do, you might interpret results of things they were not designed to measure. The tests are NOT trying to ascertain the limits of the individual mind. They're looking for a broad picture of education.
And do you want to remember and tap that obscure name into the phone's keyboard? I also have many pages of apps, but with a decent set of named folders to organize them, I can get to any of them in a few taps.
Foe example, I know I have an app of the periodic table, but I certainly don't remember it's named "EMD PTE" (by the way, that's an absolutely terrific free periodic table app if you need one), yet I swipe and tap into my "Weather and Science" folder and there it is.
And if they already had their license revoked for a prior DUI and was driving drunk anyway? This would be a case involving someone who doesn't respect the laws, yet got behind the wheel without a license and killed someone. (I'm putting up a worst-case example for the purpose of the discussion, but these kinds of deaths are tragically common so it's a very real scenario.) Should a judge have the ability to sentence him involuntarily to take the vaccine? I don't want to say "as a condition of his release," because that would be voluntary on the part of the felon. I am interested if there are circumstances where the judge could *force* the vaccine upon him.
So dead satellites and broken satellite parts as a result of micrometeor impacts are among the flotsam, and the orbiting boosters and other debris are jetsam. I don't see why the phrase doesn't apply here.
A drunken Scot was on his bicycle pedaling unsteadily home after closing time, with his flask in his back pocket. His tire fell in a rut and he crashed into a wall. Dazed, he sat up and felt a wet trickle running down his thigh. He muttered a prayer, "dear God, I hope that's blood."
Few features on the iPhone are as unwanted or un-Appley as the stupid 'search' feature. And here's Canonical, the guys who made Linux's GUI suck harder by porting it to their platform, about to inflict their GPLed brand of user-hostility on some unsuspecting phone users?
Here's a tip to all cell phone vendors: prepare a thick stack of RMA forms for the onslaught of unhappy customers.
I just said I'd like to see it, not participate! I think it will make for some interesting ethics discussions.
Imagine a drunk driver convicted of vehicular homicide being involuntarily sentenced to receive the vaccine. Is that ethical? Ask the victim's family if it's ethical to release him from prison without the vaccine?
I don't think the reporters care all that much. I got off the phone with a reporter in Buenos Aires a minute ago, and he just hung up mid-conversation. I get the impression they aren't taking it seriously.
Say that when it hits earth and you're dead cause somebody couldn't do math. Let the looting begin.
??? You think the ability to solve math is a mutation that somehow enables one to alter the trajectory of an asteroid? I've got some 2+2=4 to sell you...
The overall content varies. Some water is sequestered (living objects, glaciers, snowcaps, lakes and reservoirs, fracking, etc) and some water is destroyed (chemical processes, contamination), but overall it doesn't change much. Adding more overall water to the planet would be very hard, and isn't important. Being able to use more of the water we have is. The simplest approach is desalinization, but desalinization takes energy. It's much cheaper to use natural sources, like rainwater, where solar power provided all the energy for free. But that leaves us at the mercies of the weather, and we're at the point where droughts are severe enough to impact life.
Weather patterns carry evaporated water off the oceans and over land, where it can fall as rain or snow. If the rain falls on the ocean, or on the shore running back into the sea, it doesn't replenish inland reservoirs. If a winter is very mild, less polar water will be frozen in place, meaning the snowmelt won't be enough to keep the rivers full all summer. The evaporation process is also the natural desalinization process, making rainwater the most critical supplier of freshwater. That's why droughts and global patterns like El Niño and El Niña so important.
The overall amount of water on the planet is (mostly) constant, bet the amount of accessible freshwater is a tiny fraction of it, and is highly dependent on the weather and the rate of consumption.
I don't think the scientific discoveries are in conflict with faith, but rather with the words published in the various Bibles (all of which were written by humans, regardless of various claims to divine inspiration.) I think that as a scientist, the observable facts would have to always take precedence over the written down stories. What impact will that have on the framework of belief or faith in the divine? Are you able to go back to your church and say "this book was an allegory written to explain things back when the world was simpler"? And won't that statement require the next logical question, which is, "who's to say which parts of the book are right and which parts are wrong?"
Braun is doing something related with their shavers. I bought one a few years back, and on the shelf next to it were replacement blades, along with information in the packaging telling me to replace the blades every year. So I bought the blades annually as advised, and one year I start having a horribly uncomfortable shave. Upon further inspection, I discovered their replacement blades (advertised as being correct for my shaver) were no longer of the same geometry, and not sharpened the way previous blades were. So a product that should have lasted 15 years or more was binned after only six years because the replacement parts were substandard. This was a barely visible change, and I suspect a lot of people simply assumed their shavers were "worn out" and needed replacement (by a new $150 model).
To me, this was a completely unethical move. But now I'm trying to figure out how you would propose we deal with this kind of situation. Caveat emptor? Regulations on replacement part availability? Capitalism and competition?
So if I break the strap clip, you're saying my choices should be limited to buying a new $4,000 camera body, sending it to Nikon for $200 in repairs, duct tape, or "suck it up."
Thanks. It's just a private hangar built 70 years ago, and I think he's pleased that someone added electricity back in the 1970's. Since he's a l33t h4x0r, he's building an Arduino connected to a GSM module to trigger it via secret SMS message.
The Phalanx is an American Close In Weapons System. It features a Vulcan M61 and a magazine holding 1,500 rounds of armor-piercing ammo (either tungsten or depleted uranium). Once switched on, it does not distinguish friend-or-foe, it just shoots at anything inbound that is traveling towards the ship and within range. It has configurable minimum and maximum velocities, and was designed to take out anything from planes and bombs to missiles. One of them could easily handle an entire Zerg rush of propellor driven aircraft. Two or more ships can defend each other during reloads.
And that's assuming the fighter pilots have gotten bored with their bonanza of target drones*, and are now too busy writing "thanks for all the fun targets!" notes to the aggressor.
Modern weapons are extremely effective at engaging with an incredible range of possible threats.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the point is that some students sign up for online classes to hide their bad habits. A prof or a TA could spot you reading slashdot in a lecture hall, but nobody will call you out if you're AFK during an online lecture. The thought may be that an online class could benefit from more real-time forms of feedback.
Of course that leads to those dreadful online Flash training lessons we have to take at work. "Move the mouse over the frowning face to see why insider trading is illegal." "Click on the padlock to see three ways to recognize a phishing email." Fifteen minutes later I'm no more informed than I would have been if I was just given a simple memo that would take about a minute to read and sign.
In reality, the rapid feedback only benefits the student. The prof doesn't have to care until mid-terms (technically, they don't have to care even if they flunk you out.) It's the student that doesn't know if they're learning enough or not, and it would help them more to know early on that they need to change something.
I had a similar experience. A couple of things that helped me were discipline grown from experience ( keeping an eye on the calendar is easier once you mature), a good pair of comfortable noise canceling headphones, an office door to shut out the rest of the house and family during class time, and the 1.5X speed-up button on the lectures (2.0X for the really ... slow ... umm ... profs.)
I never let myself get behind by more than two weeks worth of unwatched lectures (I was almost always current within a day or two.) I started homework the moment it was assigned, instead of trying to weave it into a schedule assuming I'd find the time before the due date. I convinced myself that "unfinished homework was uncomfortable", and I kept myself uncomfortable until it was submitted.
Basically, it was all the same good study habits we were taught as kids, but actually wanting to apply them as I now saw the beneficiary was myself.
The AR Drone (by Parrot) comes with two shells, one that's a simple body cover, and the other includes integrated rings around the propellers (called the "indoor" shell.) The idea is you determine the level of safety you require in the situation you're in, with safety either applying to the environment, to the plane, or both. The tradeoff is weight, which translates to reduced flight time.
In this case they're using a room with fabric drapes to absorb the impact of a stray rotor so they can maximize flight time.
People were saying that a trade job is nice and safe, because it can't be offshored. I simply pointed out that it's not a guarantee of safety.
The hidden drawback is that one clever person can decimate an industry. Take plumbing, for example. Fitting iron pipes together required sweat, hacksaws, pipe threaders, and a lot of time to plumb a building. Then along came copper tubing, which was lighter and faster, and a six week job became a four week job. PVC turned drainage work into a cut and glue operation, shaving off more time. And now we have Pex with which a plumber can run a house as fast as he can drill holes in two by fours and snap a few fittings on, finishing in mere days. Where we needed seven plumbers 50 years ago, today we need one.
And every industry is looking to technology to make laborers "more efficient". Smart people make advances in crop harvesting, reducing the demand for farmers. Boring machines have replaced tunnel diggers. Given the average car's reliability has risen sixfold due to continual improvements in engineering, machining, and materials, how many mechanic jobs are left? The size of the motors that electricians would have once repaired keeps going up as commodity pricing has made even large motors cheaper than the cost of a rebuild.
The job of a laborer isn't being off shored, but it is still being threatened.
They learned at least two things from this incident, not one. The first lesson is that it was "miswired" (agreed, a fishy statement), but it means they can test some wiring or insulation in existing and future planes to make people think they're doing enough to get the planes back in the air. Second, and more importantly, they learned that the batteries can burn as a group, and that they need to minimize the damage a battery fire can cause by better restricting the ability of the fire to spread. So the next time this happens, the plane won't be at as much risk.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid does better than the father, the father feels inadequate).
That's not new, and is not limited to recent immigrants. A few years ago my son became the first member of my wife's side of the family to graduate from college. They've been in America since the 1800s, and were mostly farmers, laborers, and the occasional missionary. The most education of any of his antecedents on that side had was a trade school degree. Many had dropped out from primary school at an early age in order to work the family farms. College educations were not encouraged - my mother-in-law was valedictorian, yet her formal education ended at high school. Even my wife's desire to go to a technical college was not encouraged. Her family even chided me when we were dating her because I was a "college boy". Sadly, I don't think their situation is all that unusual in rural America.
I never noticed an "inadequacy" issue with the men in her family. The son being able to out-earn the father was a measure of success, and a point of pride, every time I saw it happen. (I'm hoping mine kicks my butt in that respect, too.)
On another hand, far too many parents in the more "traditional Americanized" (i.e., assimilated) strata are convinced that "little junior is perfect" and that any failing must be the school's, teachers' or someone else's fault rather than considering the possibility that their perfect genetic offspring from their perfect loins might, maybe, not be working as hard as they could.
This is a real problem with the Entitlement Generation, and came from the twisted idea that it's demoralizing to tell Junior he's failing. It's good to be demoralizing - that's the feedback that causes improvements!
Regarding standardized tests, they grew out of a known inequity between schools, not from an overall decline in education. People looked at students who came from certain public schools and wondered why some kids were doing great while kids from other schools were struggling. Standardized testing allowed schools to measure the differences, highlighted the gaps, and got people looking for solutions. If this school that performs well has a lot of kids in early childhood education programs, does that mean that EC programs fix problems? Try it out. If this school that performs poorly has a lot of kids from impoverished neighborhoods, do free lunches help? What about free community education classes for the parents? Do after school programs help? The tests help school administrators see the results.
Without the tests, we're flying blind as to what actions actually make an improvement, and which are a useless waste of money. Standardized tests are designed to measure school efficacy, not students' intelligence. Politicians who have alternate agendas, and others with a poor understanding of the process, often don't understand (or otherwise misuse) the distinction.
Does that mean we shouldn't use those tests as a measure of an individual student? It means that if you do, you might interpret results of things they were not designed to measure. The tests are NOT trying to ascertain the limits of the individual mind. They're looking for a broad picture of education.
And do you want to remember and tap that obscure name into the phone's keyboard? I also have many pages of apps, but with a decent set of named folders to organize them, I can get to any of them in a few taps.
Foe example, I know I have an app of the periodic table, but I certainly don't remember it's named "EMD PTE" (by the way, that's an absolutely terrific free periodic table app if you need one), yet I swipe and tap into my "Weather and Science" folder and there it is.
And if they already had their license revoked for a prior DUI and was driving drunk anyway? This would be a case involving someone who doesn't respect the laws, yet got behind the wheel without a license and killed someone. (I'm putting up a worst-case example for the purpose of the discussion, but these kinds of deaths are tragically common so it's a very real scenario.) Should a judge have the ability to sentence him involuntarily to take the vaccine? I don't want to say "as a condition of his release," because that would be voluntary on the part of the felon. I am interested if there are circumstances where the judge could *force* the vaccine upon him.
So dead satellites and broken satellite parts as a result of micrometeor impacts are among the flotsam, and the orbiting boosters and other debris are jetsam. I don't see why the phrase doesn't apply here.
A drunken Scot was on his bicycle pedaling unsteadily home after closing time, with his flask in his back pocket. His tire fell in a rut and he crashed into a wall. Dazed, he sat up and felt a wet trickle running down his thigh. He muttered a prayer, "dear God, I hope that's blood."
Few features on the iPhone are as unwanted or un-Appley as the stupid 'search' feature. And here's Canonical, the guys who made Linux's GUI suck harder by porting it to their platform, about to inflict their GPLed brand of user-hostility on some unsuspecting phone users?
Here's a tip to all cell phone vendors: prepare a thick stack of RMA forms for the onslaught of unhappy customers.
I just said I'd like to see it, not participate! I think it will make for some interesting ethics discussions.
Imagine a drunk driver convicted of vehicular homicide being involuntarily sentenced to receive the vaccine. Is that ethical? Ask the victim's family if it's ethical to release him from prison without the vaccine?
I don't think the reporters care all that much. I got off the phone with a reporter in Buenos Aires a minute ago, and he just hung up mid-conversation. I get the impression they aren't taking it seriously.
Just launch a triangular ship and shoot at it in two dimensions. When you get in trouble try hyperspace.
OMG! Now there are TWO asteroids! We're doomed for sure now!
Say that when it hits earth and you're dead cause somebody couldn't do math. Let the looting begin.
??? You think the ability to solve math is a mutation that somehow enables one to alter the trajectory of an asteroid? I've got some 2+2=4 to sell you...
As a medicine, continuing treatment with ant-abuse is voluntary. As a vaccine, it's a life altering event.
I'd be interested to see the first DUI case where a judge says "six months in the workhouse OR the vaccine."
The overall content varies. Some water is sequestered (living objects, glaciers, snowcaps, lakes and reservoirs, fracking, etc) and some water is destroyed (chemical processes, contamination), but overall it doesn't change much. Adding more overall water to the planet would be very hard, and isn't important. Being able to use more of the water we have is. The simplest approach is desalinization, but desalinization takes energy. It's much cheaper to use natural sources, like rainwater, where solar power provided all the energy for free. But that leaves us at the mercies of the weather, and we're at the point where droughts are severe enough to impact life.
Weather patterns carry evaporated water off the oceans and over land, where it can fall as rain or snow. If the rain falls on the ocean, or on the shore running back into the sea, it doesn't replenish inland reservoirs. If a winter is very mild, less polar water will be frozen in place, meaning the snowmelt won't be enough to keep the rivers full all summer. The evaporation process is also the natural desalinization process, making rainwater the most critical supplier of freshwater. That's why droughts and global patterns like El Niño and El Niña so important.
The overall amount of water on the planet is (mostly) constant, bet the amount of accessible freshwater is a tiny fraction of it, and is highly dependent on the weather and the rate of consumption.
I don't think the scientific discoveries are in conflict with faith, but rather with the words published in the various Bibles (all of which were written by humans, regardless of various claims to divine inspiration.) I think that as a scientist, the observable facts would have to always take precedence over the written down stories. What impact will that have on the framework of belief or faith in the divine? Are you able to go back to your church and say "this book was an allegory written to explain things back when the world was simpler"? And won't that statement require the next logical question, which is, "who's to say which parts of the book are right and which parts are wrong?"
Braun is doing something related with their shavers. I bought one a few years back, and on the shelf next to it were replacement blades, along with information in the packaging telling me to replace the blades every year. So I bought the blades annually as advised, and one year I start having a horribly uncomfortable shave. Upon further inspection, I discovered their replacement blades (advertised as being correct for my shaver) were no longer of the same geometry, and not sharpened the way previous blades were. So a product that should have lasted 15 years or more was binned after only six years because the replacement parts were substandard. This was a barely visible change, and I suspect a lot of people simply assumed their shavers were "worn out" and needed replacement (by a new $150 model).
To me, this was a completely unethical move. But now I'm trying to figure out how you would propose we deal with this kind of situation. Caveat emptor? Regulations on replacement part availability? Capitalism and competition?
So if I break the strap clip, you're saying my choices should be limited to buying a new $4,000 camera body, sending it to Nikon for $200 in repairs, duct tape, or "suck it up."
I don't see any reasonableness in your statement.
Thanks. It's just a private hangar built 70 years ago, and I think he's pleased that someone added electricity back in the 1970's. Since he's a l33t h4x0r, he's building an Arduino connected to a GSM module to trigger it via secret SMS message.
The Phalanx is an American Close In Weapons System. It features a Vulcan M61 and a magazine holding 1,500 rounds of armor-piercing ammo (either tungsten or depleted uranium). Once switched on, it does not distinguish friend-or-foe, it just shoots at anything inbound that is traveling towards the ship and within range. It has configurable minimum and maximum velocities, and was designed to take out anything from planes and bombs to missiles. One of them could easily handle an entire Zerg rush of propellor driven aircraft. Two or more ships can defend each other during reloads.
And that's assuming the fighter pilots have gotten bored with their bonanza of target drones*, and are now too busy writing "thanks for all the fun targets!" notes to the aggressor.
Modern weapons are extremely effective at engaging with an incredible range of possible threats.
* Hint: this will never happen.
The only winning move is for both sides not to play.
FTFY.