But then you end up with the reverse situation whereby innovation becomes stifled because copyright protects for so long.
The current length is a problem, and I think we should go back to 14 years with an optional 14 year extension. but it's not an inherent problem with copyrights in general (which the GPP is essentially advocating doing away with), it's a problem with the implementation.
The rights tend to go off to 'enforcement' companies that then collect.
The biggest problem with the enforcement/licensing companies is that they don't work effectively for a large portion of the artists they "represent." This is, again, an implementation problem.
An excellent and persuasive argument. With your silver tongue and compelling logic I suspect you've probably won over many.
That's how it ought to be. You do work, you get paid. Wanna get paid again? Do more work.
So in other words, the only reasonable model of economic exchange is fee-for-service? Do you hate all kinds of abstract agreements of ownership -- say, over a company or a cooperative -- or is it just copyrights? Do you feel dividends from any kind of entity are also wrong, or is it just music you've singled out?
I can agree that copyrights have become ridiculously long and the legal hedge around them too thick. But the basic copyright bargain makes as much sense as it did 200 years ago: giving people greater protections for the fruits of their creative labor is one powerful way to give them a greater incentive to invest in it. The fact that this idea has limits and balancing consideration we've tipped past doesn't change its merits.
Which, by the way, is how art used to be compensated.
So, clearly, patronage should be the only way to do it, right?
I would prefer to have health insurance, which is much cheaper than a "free zyrtec!" must-carry monstrosity whose sole purpose is to shift the cost of unhealthy people onto healthy people.
Um.... if you're trying to get at might be the problems with first-dollar coverage, I think that's a point I can agree on, but there's no such thing as insurance that doesn't shift the costs of unhealthy people onto healthy people. That's what any risk pool does: the people who don't end up needing it end up subsidizing the people who do. People join anyway because most of us don't know which one we're going to be.
The parent is correct, but a bit terse. I thought I'd elaborate a bit:
"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
The stats don't back up the idea that any public institution or law bears the brunt of the responsibility for problematic lending.
It also doesn't make much sense. Take the fingers pointed at the CRA. It didn't force banks to make risky loans. They could deny an application based on income, credit rating, or any other relevant factors. What it *did* force them to avoid was "red-lining": denying loans based on the current living location (used as a proxy for the applicant's race). A person's race and living location might have some correlation with risk of defaulting, but as we all know here on slashdot, correlation is not causation, and a responsible financial institution would deal with the more directly relevant information: an individual's income/asset information and their credit history.
Like someone once said: If a person wishes to rule, that person should in no way be given any power.
Yeah, the problem is that we seem to adapt only marginally to the alternatives, which are:
1) Randomly select (and periodically change) leadership 2) Distribute leadership over as much of the group as possible.
I suppose there's another model, which is to entirely eschew systemic power, but that runs on the assumption that if you don't architect a system there won't be one.
Right. This proves that government would be the solution if we had absolutely superhuman, omniscient lawmakers.
The same standard might well apply to businesses, co-ops, non-profits, religions, and pretty much any other human organization.
The important isn't necessarily which kind of social institution you're bringing to bear on a problem, it's whether or not it's adaptable and accountable to the people it touches.
Direct loans were cheap, and the consolidation brought them down to ~5% afair.
I had a similar experience -- don't think I ever paid more than ~4% and some of them were cheaper. A lot of it depends on your lender/servicer, though, and they're not always particularly nice institutions...
thats because some idiot decided having non-direct loans and promising a profit to everyone who serviced them. Doh!
... student loan debt tends to be some of the easiest debt to get forbearance or deferment for.
If you get the right lender / loan manager, of course. In the last few years it's been revealed there's a lot of abuse in the student lending system, not everyone involved is trustworthy.
pacifica.org - Rank: 1,647,109. Really putting teh beat down on Limbaugh, aren't they?
You might want to clarify if there should have been some extra zeros after any of those numbers, because there appear to be some hanging commas that make it somewhat unclear whether or not you're being sarcastic.
If he does better on the internet, that's interesting. I would have thought it'd be a reasonable assumption that the audiences would be roughly proportional, apparently that's wrong.
But that's unfair, because PRI is a news service, and Rush is opinion.
I don't believe I'm the one who originally brought them into the discussion side by side.
What ISN'T rational is the belief that, if TFD were to be reinstated, that the internet would be ignored
I don't see any reason to believe they would. That belief only makes sense if you assume bad faith on the part of people who conceived TFD or are interested in seeing it return. The idea that broadcast outlets who enjoy their position because of a government granted monopoly on scarce spectrum should be required to examine a number of points of view may have pros and cons, but it's a reasonable principle, reasonable enough that you could assume people who want it are genuinely interested in carving out space for underrepresented viewpoints. The idea that the Internet as a whole or even a single website requires state intervention to make sure opposing viewpoints are represented doesn't have any such cover, not even ostensibly. Everybody knows that if you feel like the Daily Kos isn't telling the whole story it's not that hard to start your own site that does. Everybody also knows that if you want your own radio or TV station it's a lot more involved.
The ENTIRE reason Democrats have been pushing the return of TFD is the utter dominance of conservative talk radio.
I'm aware of this, which brings us back to my larger point: the conservative consternation over TFD reveals that the common conservative wisdom that the media landscape is unfavorable to their politics is a sham.
Those quotes show that the goal is to get rid of conservative talk radio. How? By forcing broadcasters - aka content providers - to carry liberal shows as well.
Shows aren't the requirement of TFD. Equal time isn't the requirement, even if shows were. There was considerable latitude in how you handled access, and in practice, it wasn't particularly fair. Perhaps you're old enough to remember how the 10 minute segments some channels used to fulfill their requirement right before airing the test pattern for the rest of the night.
How does this work on the internet? Well, since ATT/Comcast etc. are trying to be classified as "content providers" because they can make more money that way, that would make them responsible for political opinion that comes through their network. And by looking at those website stats, Pacifica could easily claim that ATT/Comcast has stepped over the threshold of neutrality, given that Rush's traffic is greater than Pacifica's by a couple orders of magnitude. Now, since the "content providers" can't force people to visit the Pacifica website, what to they do? The only practical course would be to throttle rushlimbaugh.com. Sure, people could get to it, but it would be so slow that it would have the effect of limiting the content.
I don't know what to say to this other than I suspect this is about as likely as the idea the Obama will arm Americorps and use them as a domestic military force, and I'm considering starting up an electronic market to profit from beliefs such as yours. In short, I'm willing to bet some cold hard cash that despite my very low faith in the carriers and in the ability of Congress to understand the issues surrounding net neutrality, what you're describing will not happen under the current congress or under an Obama administration. How sure are you that you're correct?
Funny, both my posts on this topic have been downmodded.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation, and I'm sure that if I've said something particularly stupid, it should be a piece of cake to refute me and help your own case rather than skulking around trying to sink arguments you don't like with negative moderation.
Why even bother to distinguish between the potential inference that we're talking about "democrats in general" vs "some minority of democrats"? Same difference, I guess.
We do not usually demand this level of precision from our headlines
Level of precision? Keeping a single word that was already in the title of the TFA that helps point people towards making the distinction above?
Um...how many programs do you think PRI ran in 2002? They have 33 now. Rush only has the one...
Yeah, I knew somebody who didn't realize I wasn't the one who decided put Rush and PRI next to each other (please see the GP) was going to bring that up.
If you'd like to pick some other individual program X and put it next to Rush's while implying that if the Fairness Doctrine were in place it would threaten to throttle Rush's program to X's levels, feel free.
If the ISP's are treated as content providers, then the Fairness Doctrine will have more impact when it gets reapplied - they can try to force ATT, Comcast, L3, etc. to manipulate their traffic in a way that promotes "fairness". So the carriers could be forced to, say, throttle traffic from Rush Limbaugh's website so that its traffic level matches, say, Public Radio International (PRI). Or the NRA's website until it matches the Brady campaign.
This assumes a construction of a new "Fairness Doctrine" that bears little resemblance to the old one, which essentially required broadcast media to give time to opposing views as they reached certain editorial thresholds as partisan outlets.
The web isn't really a broadcast medium, and it's already very easy to publish an opposing point of view on it. There's not much of a way TFD could be brought to bear.
throttle traffic from Rush Limbaugh's website so that its traffic level matches, say, Public Radio International
"As of 2006 Arbitron ratings indicated that The Rush Limbaugh Show had a minimum weekly audience of 13.5 million listeners."
"According to the 2002 Arbitron ratings, 15.2 million people listened to PRI programming each week."
I guess that'd really suck for Rush.
Which brings up a point: We all know that by and large The Media(TM) isn't just liberal, it has a radical liberal agenda, right?
If that's the case, shouldn't The Fairness Doctrine actually benefit conservatives far more than it benefits liberals?
72 Senate DemocratsSo... yeah. I'm grumpy on Saturday mornings, too, but geeze.
I don't think it's too much to ask for that the Slashdot title not imply a fictitious whole, particularly when TFA has a perfectly accurate and communicative title: "Some Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality." Why'd we lose the "some"?
Ah, the old "It's not what you know, but who you know" trick.
To the extent you're referring to the meaning behind the adage which roughly translates "personal connections count for more than talent does when it comes time to select for social/economic advancement".... no, I don't mean that at all.
I mean knowing where and when to ask for help with a concept or a problem.
If you're a developer, you know the drill. You get stuck on a bug, and you can spend a few hours or even days pounding your head against the way. Or, after you've done basic personal diligence, you can poke your head over to the next cube, or IM a buddy, or find a good forum on the internet and save days.
If you're a student, you can certainly plug away by yourself on an assignment. But a student who uses faculty office hours, goes to the labs, and works with other students while doing their own basic diligent study is going to learn more with their time.
Who you know? Yeah. It makes a big difference. You should know who else is good at thinking about the kinds of problems you're working on, and you should get to know them well enough that you can collaborate with them sometimes.
The questions on average would need to be very hard, but with varying degrees of difficulty to distinguish accurately whether someone is IQ 135, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160... etc.
Meh. You can successfully distinguish levels of domain knowledge well, who knows their computer science or mathematics better, maybe you can successfully make distinctions about someone's logical thinking capacity and vague distinctions about their problem solving approach.
But the question of which hard questions distinguish high levels of intelligence -- particularly intelligence necessary to create a good product? That itself is going to be subjective.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance?
Arguably, the ability to seek good outside assistance says as much about your likelihood of success in a University context as any other ability you might have.
The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
If you depend entirely on standardized metrics, you're also going to be unfair: your metrics won't correlate perfectly and perhaps not even well with what you're trying to measure (particularly intelligence, the measure of which is itself somewhat subjective). And even to the extent they do, at some point, they will fail to distinguish between applicants, at which point you're back to using subjective or random criteria. And this is to say nothing about those with the resources to game any known system of metrics.
This doesn't mean that standardized metrics have no merit; there's a reason why higher education continues to use them even though everyone knows they have real limits. There's also a reason why there tends to a point in the process for subjective human judgments: it offers a chance to make distinctions where the metrics can't, it offers a chance for amelioration the the metrics may have blind spots, and finally, since at the end of the day it's pretty much unavoidable there will be some subjective and potentially unfair element, you may as well try to make the subjective part of the decision as refined and plain as possible.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
If there's any reason why these kinds of things tend to be bullshit, it has nothing to do with the fact that these are engineering students, or that engineers can't or shouldn't learn to use language as a tool (or, for that matter, that they shouldn't learn to bullshit).
The problem comes in the intersection of the purpose of the essay and the formation of the questions. It's an admissions essay, which means that whatever you're asked to say or whatever you're ostensibly saying, the purpose is to say whatever impresses admissions officers and get admitted to the college. Everybody knows this, and it reduces the ability of most people to speak authentically (and increases their tendency to bullshit). Particularly with essays that ask people to talk about themselves, because no matter how many distinct things there are about individual people, even smart people, there's an awful lot of sameness running through the human condition. Meanwhile, admissions officers are looking for distinction. Talk about cross-purposes.
Clare Bayley's suggestion "change the prompts, not the length" is some clear thinking. Prompt the applicant away from a self-focus and you untangle the better part of the tension I describe above, while still allowing applicants to reveal expressiveness and distinctive thinking.
It's true! 30 seconds of technically focused, high quality education can obviate the need for months of practice! I know kung-fu!
OK, I'm exaggerating for effect (and for the chance to make a Matrix reference), but the fact is, there's research that shows practice over time is essential and that increased time devoted will in fact raise scores. Some of it's in TFA.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? ... they're at least diping their toes in the water on the topic:
"there is a strong case for adding time to the school day.
Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year.
"Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don't forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes."
Not necessarily the optimal-schedule-for-instruction research you may have been looking for, but at least someone's looking at evidence that more time yields increased scores.
During the summer months, our system is not to "send the kiddies to the field" as Obama's inept education administration official claims
I don't think that's the claim they're making. The only marginally close statement I can find is one by Duncan which agrees with you: "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," e.g., our calendar has some agrarian roots, but by and large we don't have that population anymore.
The key in where the president is actually coming from is probably in this paragraph:
"The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go."
It fits with the President's roots as an activist for the urban poor, which probably shape his perspective. And a lot of the research does say that poor/disadvantaged kids do the worst in making progress during the summer. Institutional support during summers could do a lot to help them become more productive and self-sufficient adults.
Those differences aside, I'd say you have a good point. Summer vacation isn't just downtime from school, it's still an opportunity to work (even if it isn't in the fields) and learn. Moreover, slack has value as recreational time and as a catalyst for creative foment -- not just for the kids, teachers use the time to refine their approaches as well. Extra days could put more into the curriculum for achievers or allow for a gentler curve for stragglers, but narrowing it down is going to have tradeoffs.
It sounds to me like the fifth grader in the article seems to have the balance about right: summer programs offer opportunities to kids that they might even enjoy (and which would meet Obama's goals), but don't force everyone into one particular tradeoff.
Slashdot Mirror
But then you end up with the reverse situation whereby innovation becomes stifled because copyright protects for so long.
The current length is a problem, and I think we should go back to 14 years with an optional 14 year extension. but it's not an inherent problem with copyrights in general (which the GPP is essentially advocating doing away with), it's a problem with the implementation.
The rights tend to go off to 'enforcement' companies that then collect.
The biggest problem with the enforcement/licensing companies is that they don't work effectively for a large portion of the artists they "represent." This is, again, an implementation problem.
To that I can only say one thing: fuck off.
An excellent and persuasive argument. With your silver tongue and compelling logic I suspect you've probably won over many.
That's how it ought to be. You do work, you get paid. Wanna get paid again? Do more work.
So in other words, the only reasonable model of economic exchange is fee-for-service? Do you hate all kinds of abstract agreements of ownership -- say, over a company or a cooperative -- or is it just copyrights? Do you feel dividends from any kind of entity are also wrong, or is it just music you've singled out?
I can agree that copyrights have become ridiculously long and the legal hedge around them too thick. But the basic copyright bargain makes as much sense as it did 200 years ago: giving people greater protections for the fruits of their creative labor is one powerful way to give them a greater incentive to invest in it. The fact that this idea has limits and balancing consideration we've tipped past doesn't change its merits.
Which, by the way, is how art used to be compensated.
So, clearly, patronage should be the only way to do it, right?
I would prefer to have health insurance, which is much cheaper than a "free zyrtec!" must-carry monstrosity whose sole purpose is to shift the cost of unhealthy people onto healthy people.
Um.... if you're trying to get at might be the problems with first-dollar coverage, I think that's a point I can agree on, but there's no such thing as insurance that doesn't shift the costs of unhealthy people onto healthy people. That's what any risk pool does: the people who don't end up needing it end up subsidizing the people who do. People join anyway because most of us don't know which one we're going to be.
The parent is correct, but a bit terse. I thought I'd elaborate a bit:
"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
The stats don't back up the idea that any public institution or law bears the brunt of the responsibility for problematic lending.
It also doesn't make much sense. Take the fingers pointed at the CRA. It didn't force banks to make risky loans. They could deny an application based on income, credit rating, or any other relevant factors. What it *did* force them to avoid was "red-lining": denying loans based on the current living location (used as a proxy for the applicant's race). A person's race and living location might have some correlation with risk of defaulting, but as we all know here on slashdot, correlation is not causation, and a responsible financial institution would deal with the more directly relevant information: an individual's income/asset information and their credit history.
Here's some other links:
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
http://www.ccc.unc.edu/news/news.021809.php
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Commentary/2000/1100.htm
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/ls564.htm
Wikipedia also has a summary.
Like someone once said: If a person wishes to rule, that person should in no way be given any power.
Yeah, the problem is that we seem to adapt only marginally to the alternatives, which are:
1) Randomly select (and periodically change) leadership
2) Distribute leadership over as much of the group as possible.
I suppose there's another model, which is to entirely eschew systemic power, but that runs on the assumption that if you don't architect a system there won't be one.
Right. This proves that government would be the solution if we had absolutely superhuman, omniscient lawmakers.
The same standard might well apply to businesses, co-ops, non-profits, religions, and pretty much any other human organization.
The important isn't necessarily which kind of social institution you're bringing to bear on a problem, it's whether or not it's adaptable and accountable to the people it touches.
Direct loans were cheap, and the consolidation brought them down to ~5% afair.
I had a similar experience -- don't think I ever paid more than ~4% and some of them were cheaper. A lot of it depends on your lender/servicer, though, and they're not always particularly nice institutions...
thats because some idiot decided having non-direct loans and promising a profit to everyone who serviced them. Doh!
Yep. According to this article on student loans, that would apparently be congress circa the mid 1990s.
Over the last 4-5 years, it's been increasingly recognized that this has led to abuses that's getting to be systemic.
... student loan debt tends to be some of the easiest debt to get forbearance or deferment for.
If you get the right lender / loan manager, of course. In the last few years it's been revealed there's a lot of abuse in the student lending system, not everyone involved is trustworthy.
pacifica.org - Rank: 1,647,109. Really putting teh beat down on Limbaugh, aren't they?
You might want to clarify if there should have been some extra zeros after any of those numbers, because there appear to be some hanging commas that make it somewhat unclear whether or not you're being sarcastic.
If he does better on the internet, that's interesting. I would have thought it'd be a reasonable assumption that the audiences would be roughly proportional, apparently that's wrong.
But that's unfair, because PRI is a news service, and Rush is opinion.
I don't believe I'm the one who originally brought them into the discussion side by side.
What ISN'T rational is the belief that, if TFD were to be reinstated, that the internet would be ignored
I don't see any reason to believe they would. That belief only makes sense if you assume bad faith on the part of people who conceived TFD or are interested in seeing it return. The idea that broadcast outlets who enjoy their position because of a government granted monopoly on scarce spectrum should be required to examine a number of points of view may have pros and cons, but it's a reasonable principle, reasonable enough that you could assume people who want it are genuinely interested in carving out space for underrepresented viewpoints. The idea that the Internet as a whole or even a single website requires state intervention to make sure opposing viewpoints are represented doesn't have any such cover, not even ostensibly. Everybody knows that if you feel like the Daily Kos isn't telling the whole story it's not that hard to start your own site that does. Everybody also knows that if you want your own radio or TV station it's a lot more involved.
The ENTIRE reason Democrats have been pushing the return of TFD is the utter dominance of conservative talk radio.
I'm aware of this, which brings us back to my larger point: the conservative consternation over TFD reveals that the common conservative wisdom that the media landscape is unfavorable to their politics is a sham.
Those quotes show that the goal is to get rid of conservative talk radio. How? By forcing broadcasters - aka content providers - to carry liberal shows as well.
Shows aren't the requirement of TFD. Equal time isn't the requirement, even if shows were. There was considerable latitude in how you handled access, and in practice, it wasn't particularly fair. Perhaps you're old enough to remember how the 10 minute segments some channels used to fulfill their requirement right before airing the test pattern for the rest of the night.
How does this work on the internet? Well, since ATT/Comcast etc. are trying to be classified as "content providers" because they can make more money that way, that would make them responsible for political opinion that comes through their network. And by looking at those website stats, Pacifica could easily claim that ATT/Comcast has stepped over the threshold of neutrality, given that Rush's traffic is greater than Pacifica's by a couple orders of magnitude. Now, since the "content providers" can't force people to visit the Pacifica website, what to they do? The only practical course would be to throttle rushlimbaugh.com. Sure, people could get to it, but it would be so slow that it would have the effect of limiting the content.
I don't know what to say to this other than I suspect this is about as likely as the idea the Obama will arm Americorps and use them as a domestic military force, and I'm considering starting up an electronic market to profit from beliefs such as yours. In short, I'm willing to bet some cold hard cash that despite my very low faith in the carriers and in the ability of Congress to understand the issues surrounding net neutrality, what you're describing will not happen under the current congress or under an Obama administration. How sure are you that you're correct?
Funny, both my posts on this topic have been downmodded.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation, and I'm sure that if I've said something particularly stupid, it should be a piece of cake to refute me and help your own case rather than skulking around trying to sink arguments you don't like with negative moderation.
Because strictly speaking it is always "some."
Sure:
1) Numbers are prime.
2) Some numbers are prime.
Both true, right?
Why even bother to distinguish between the potential inference that we're talking about "democrats in general" vs "some minority of democrats"? Same difference, I guess.
We do not usually demand this level of precision from our headlines
Level of precision? Keeping a single word that was already in the title of the TFA that helps point people towards making the distinction above?
Um...how many programs do you think PRI ran in 2002? They have 33 now. Rush only has the one...
Yeah, I knew somebody who didn't realize I wasn't the one who decided put Rush and PRI next to each other (please see the GP) was going to bring that up.
If you'd like to pick some other individual program X and put it next to Rush's while implying that if the Fairness Doctrine were in place it would threaten to throttle Rush's program to X's levels, feel free.
If the ISP's are treated as content providers, then the Fairness Doctrine will have more impact when it gets reapplied - they can try to force ATT, Comcast, L3, etc. to manipulate their traffic in a way that promotes "fairness". So the carriers could be forced to, say, throttle traffic from Rush Limbaugh's website so that its traffic level matches, say, Public Radio International (PRI). Or the NRA's website until it matches the Brady campaign.
This assumes a construction of a new "Fairness Doctrine" that bears little resemblance to the old one, which essentially required broadcast media to give time to opposing views as they reached certain editorial thresholds as partisan outlets.
The web isn't really a broadcast medium, and it's already very easy to publish an opposing point of view on it. There's not much of a way TFD could be brought to bear.
throttle traffic from Rush Limbaugh's website so that its traffic level matches, say, Public Radio International
"As of 2006 Arbitron ratings indicated that The Rush Limbaugh Show had a minimum weekly audience of 13.5 million listeners."
"According to the 2002 Arbitron ratings, 15.2 million people listened to PRI programming each week."
I guess that'd really suck for Rush.
Which brings up a point: We all know that by and large The Media(TM) isn't just liberal, it has a radical liberal agenda, right?
If that's the case, shouldn't The Fairness Doctrine actually benefit conservatives far more than it benefits liberals?
72 Senate DemocratsSo... yeah. I'm grumpy on Saturday mornings, too, but geeze.
I don't think it's too much to ask for that the Slashdot title not imply a fictitious whole, particularly when TFA has a perfectly accurate and communicative title: "Some Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality." Why'd we lose the "some"?
... you buy the ticket *before* they refuse you entrance, and if the owner is inclined to refund you.
Even if the analyst at Gartner is wrong, neither Gartner nor the analyst will be held to account for the prediction.
Ah, the old "It's not what you know, but who you know" trick.
To the extent you're referring to the meaning behind the adage which roughly translates "personal connections count for more than talent does when it comes time to select for social/economic advancement" .... no, I don't mean that at all.
I mean knowing where and when to ask for help with a concept or a problem.
If you're a developer, you know the drill. You get stuck on a bug, and you can spend a few hours or even days pounding your head against the way. Or, after you've done basic personal diligence, you can poke your head over to the next cube, or IM a buddy, or find a good forum on the internet and save days.
If you're a student, you can certainly plug away by yourself on an assignment. But a student who uses faculty office hours, goes to the labs, and works with other students while doing their own basic diligent study is going to learn more with their time.
Who you know? Yeah. It makes a big difference. You should know who else is good at thinking about the kinds of problems you're working on, and you should get to know them well enough that you can collaborate with them sometimes.
The questions on average would need to be very hard, but with varying degrees of difficulty to distinguish accurately whether someone is IQ 135, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160... etc.
Meh. You can successfully distinguish levels of domain knowledge well, who knows their computer science or mathematics better, maybe you can successfully make distinctions about someone's logical thinking capacity and vague distinctions about their problem solving approach.
But the question of which hard questions distinguish high levels of intelligence -- particularly intelligence necessary to create a good product? That itself is going to be subjective.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance?
Arguably, the ability to seek good outside assistance says as much about your likelihood of success in a University context as any other ability you might have.
The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
If you depend entirely on standardized metrics, you're also going to be unfair: your metrics won't correlate perfectly and perhaps not even well with what you're trying to measure (particularly intelligence, the measure of which is itself somewhat subjective). And even to the extent they do, at some point, they will fail to distinguish between applicants, at which point you're back to using subjective or random criteria. And this is to say nothing about those with the resources to game any known system of metrics.
This doesn't mean that standardized metrics have no merit; there's a reason why higher education continues to use them even though everyone knows they have real limits. There's also a reason why there tends to a point in the process for subjective human judgments: it offers a chance to make distinctions where the metrics can't, it offers a chance for amelioration the the metrics may have blind spots, and finally, since at the end of the day it's pretty much unavoidable there will be some subjective and potentially unfair element, you may as well try to make the subjective part of the decision as refined and plain as possible.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
If there's any reason why these kinds of things tend to be bullshit, it has nothing to do with the fact that these are engineering students, or that engineers can't or shouldn't learn to use language as a tool (or, for that matter, that they shouldn't learn to bullshit).
The problem comes in the intersection of the purpose of the essay and the formation of the questions. It's an admissions essay, which means that whatever you're asked to say or whatever you're ostensibly saying, the purpose is to say whatever impresses admissions officers and get admitted to the college. Everybody knows this, and it reduces the ability of most people to speak authentically (and increases their tendency to bullshit). Particularly with essays that ask people to talk about themselves, because no matter how many distinct things there are about individual people, even smart people, there's an awful lot of sameness running through the human condition. Meanwhile, admissions officers are looking for distinction. Talk about cross-purposes.
Clare Bayley's suggestion "change the prompts, not the length" is some clear thinking. Prompt the applicant away from a self-focus and you untangle the better part of the tension I describe above, while still allowing applicants to reveal expressiveness and distinctive thinking.
Thanks. Missed that episode. :)
According to this link, median home price didn't even break $120k at the height of the bubble in Springfield Kentucky.
Not. $120K buys you a shack in BFE.
Perhaps that's your impression of North Orem. :) But that's where I saw this 3 bedroom back in 2006. Only about 35 years old, pushing 2000 sq feet.
Quality of education is important, not quantity.
It's true! 30 seconds of technically focused, high quality education can obviate the need for months of practice! I know kung-fu!
OK, I'm exaggerating for effect (and for the chance to make a Matrix reference), but the fact is, there's research that shows practice over time is essential and that increased time devoted will in fact raise scores. Some of it's in TFA.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? ... they're at least diping their toes in the water on the topic:
Not necessarily the optimal-schedule-for-instruction research you may have been looking for, but at least someone's looking at evidence that more time yields increased scores.
During the summer months, our system is not to "send the kiddies to the field" as Obama's inept education administration official claims
I don't think that's the claim they're making. The only marginally close statement I can find is one by Duncan which agrees with you: "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," e.g., our calendar has some agrarian roots, but by and large we don't have that population anymore.
The key in where the president is actually coming from is probably in this paragraph:
"The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go."
It fits with the President's roots as an activist for the urban poor, which probably shape his perspective. And a lot of the research does say that poor/disadvantaged kids do the worst in making progress during the summer. Institutional support during summers could do a lot to help them become more productive and self-sufficient adults.
Those differences aside, I'd say you have a good point. Summer vacation isn't just downtime from school, it's still an opportunity to work (even if it isn't in the fields) and learn. Moreover, slack has value as recreational time and as a catalyst for creative foment -- not just for the kids, teachers use the time to refine their approaches as well. Extra days could put more into the curriculum for achievers or allow for a gentler curve for stragglers, but narrowing it down is going to have tradeoffs.
It sounds to me like the fifth grader in the article seems to have the balance about right: summer programs offer opportunities to kids that they might even enjoy (and which would meet Obama's goals), but don't force everyone into one particular tradeoff.
So: are we smarter than a fifth grader? :)