But in this case if you are uploading a picture through the mobile service, then there is no reason to believe that the NSA or whoever does not have it. A picture does not have to be permanently stored 'in the cloud' for it to be vulnerable. As long as the telco has it for a minute, and it has to if the picture is moved from the phone to the computer through their network, then there is a copy of it somewhere at least for a little while, and privacy is an issue. I have heard that current case law says that if it is transmitted through a third party then no warrant is needed.
The only secure way is use a USB cable or your home network to connect the phone to the computer.
I know that one issue, at least with Apple, was that photos could not be deleted from the service. This meant all picture were public always. Now the only issue is if the picture is still in a backup somewhere.
Like all social sciences it is fake science because it nearly impossible, if not unethical, to create the lab conditions as we do in real science. Each student is an individual and cannot, probably should not, be treated as an interchangeable cog. So one cannot just write a procedure, or curriculum, and say that if everyone does exactly this, reading from this script, giving these tests, and failing a statistically satisfactory number of students that education will be achieved.
With cogs I know exactly how many should fail inspection and either be reworked or trashed. In real science I know exactly what confidence level will give me adequate certainty.
So here is what a teacher is supposed to do. Try to adjust a curriculum to meet the ability of teacher and the student. This later, to me is very important. While a teacher must 'cover' all material, a teacher who is free to teach material that is of interest to everyone is going to do a better job. That does not mean that a teacher leaves out evolution of the holocaust or the romantic literature, but that some topics may be more concentrated than others.
Grades can be derived in several fashions. The traditional method, which tends to minimize the grade a student receives, grades papers over time and averages them in a straightforward fashion. The effect of this is that students who are able to grasp material quickly gain an advantage over students who struggle. For instance, one might give frequency quizzes and the periodic exams. Students who do well on quizzes, i.e. grasp a concept quickly, would tend to have a higher grade than a student who slowly build knowledge, studies to consolidate knowledge prior to the exam, and shows mastery at that time.
If a teacher gave a student who failed all the short quizzes a high grade because the student showed mastery on the exam many would complain of grade inflation. And frankly it is. In college one is expected to master material quickly and with little help. If one is slower student, then it is arguable that the grade should be lower, as that may indicate a less suitable college future. OTOH, if a kid masters the materiel, should that kid be punished because it did not happen quickly enough for the teacher?
There is of course a real issue of how hard a class is or how easy it is. This is nothing new. When I was in public school most classes consisted of lectures and then hours of homework. There was not that much help. I had to work out how to complete the tasks. Then there were friends who went to other public schools, where high grades were rewarded if you went to class everyday. Then there were my friends who went to less that perfect private schools, where the teachers were paid to get high grade, even if they had to do they work themselves.
Anyone who takes grade inflation as a new thing is delusional. Even the SAT was designed to inflate the grades of certain groups.
What is new is the number of students entering college. I don't think they are any less prepared, as s group, it is just that we are trying to educate a larger percentage of the population which will tend to dip more into the first SD or our hypothetical normal curve.
BTW, even class rank is not useful. A smart student who is focused on class rank can arrange to avoid teachers who would risk the GPA. They could avoid the more challenging classes. They could constantly complain about grades and have administration simply change a grade because it is easier than dealing with a whiny child.
Is someone who does not know calculus unable to state the calculus might be beneficial to high school students? Is a parent who is illiterate not able to look on the work, see the value of reading and writing, and want that value for their kid.
I would hate to live in the world that so many or/. readers seem to live, in which only people who know how to do something can do it, or where coding is a magic that must be protected from the masses. When I learned coding my parents did not know if it would good or bad because few people could do it, but in middle school I was sat down at a teletype machine for an hour a day to learn. I high school I sat down at a terminal and learned to code for real. This taught me problem solving, algebra, trigonometry, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I would haven't learned as well otherwise. Which is beside the point, as coding itself, like reading, writing, and maths has value
I must also mention that I was fortunate because I had teachers who actually knew programming as work skill, one from IBM, so I was not learning it as wrote, but as craft. There were no tests to pass, other than being able to create a product.
And really teaching to code is not that hard, at least if you are not worried about tests and objectives and things that generally ruin the educational environment. A few summers ago I taught a group of kids, 12-17 years old, how to make an online application in Python, using nothing but a terminal application and online account, creating one sub-domain for each student.
So I don't care how is encouraging kids to code. i don't care if they are going to fail every test that comes out. All I would want to do is expose every student to a method of problems solving, let them go through some activities that doesn't involving copying code snippets to make a robot move, and allowing them to have some success and build confidence in them selves. Not a test, not a competition, not a game, just good old fashion legitimate problem solving.
My view is it like the human population is continuously attempting to expand. The estimates that are in place now reflect when the expansions led to widespread colonization. For instance we may say that Australia had not human inhabintants prior to 50K years ago, but that does not mean it is impossible that we might find a small family group prior to that. After all, it was 200 years between the rediscovery of the continent and the first colony.
In any case I don't know where your data comes from. There was significant population in Europe almost two million years ago, with significant finds correlating to this one 1 million years ago. It is true that Neandertal was a couple hundred thousand years ago, but that was a species thing, not the presence of Hominidae.
It is true that through the 20th century the single migration theory out of africa was the preeminent explanation for how humans migrated. However, we are no seeing the picture is more complex.
10 to 15 years ago MS tried. That is why so many companies have the IE/Outlook lock in. It was supposed to be secure. In many ways it was, using whitelists. Certain things could not be sent over Outlook. IE would keep certain things from running. You could set permissions and proxies and the like. Everytime a user logged in scripts could be downloaded and run on local machines to set new security regimes.
This worked in limited cases, but not in business where workers are not volunteers, time is absolutely money, and full access is is often needed. The fundamental problem, that IE and Outlook were integrated into the OS so that MS could attempt to hijack the internet, cannot easily be solved. The kludge of whitelists has already been shown to be impractical. If they were it would be more widely implemented. Currently, for instance, the only real widespread applicaiton is allow certain domains to run Java on local machines.
I certainly would hope that this standard would be applied to all parts of government, and in particular that congresspeople would model this standard by not only making claims that are supported by multiple reproducible studies For instance Boehner smokes and defends smoking even though all science states that he should not. Most of the sponsors of this bill probably thinks climate change is not a human induced thing, even though the majority of reproducible science shows it is. Most medical trials are barely science, funded by the companies who will profit off them, ghostwritten by unethical researches for pay, yer we still allow drugs we know are probably dangerous to enter the market, some to treat trivial conditions like a mild case of acne.
but evidently didn't notice this line in bold print, just above the "Donate" button
It would be good for people to be careful, but in our capitalist society it is more important to make transactions as fluid as possible. For instance, can you imagine what it would be like if you went to the store and had to read every can of beef soup because some company might have put rat in it to save money. Sure, this is an extreme example but we have laws about transparency in commerce not to protect consumers, but to maximize the velocity of money through high consumer confidence.
There are certain transactions that have such a high fraud rate and are are of little economic value that the common sense approach is just to avoid them. Door to door magazine sales, services that claim to give you your credit rating every month, donations over the phone, most extended warranties, have so much find print or or just outright fraudulent that they have killed what could have been a reasonable market model.
For instance, I liked Best Buy but stopped shopping there because of the stories of employees losing their job because of not selling extended warranties. I don't buy them most of the time, and did not want the guild. Likewise, I no longer give donations over the phone because of substantiated reports that in the some cases the firm doing the collecting takes a majority cut, leaving little for the charity. I know many who do the same. These firms are put in danger because some are not on the up and up.
So here the problem. For an individual point of view, selling an selling an iPad box for $200 is a great profit margin. From the point of view of an economy that needs to push tablets to grow, it is not so great. From the point of view of a narcissistic committee who sees their donations plummeting, setting up a misleading, though totaly legal, and the idiots who donate deserve to be robbed website, is a good idea. But from the point of view of nation who wants to make donating to public candidates as easy and painless as possible it is bad.
Like donations to the fire department fund that do not benefit the firefighters, this kind of misdirection is going to hurt the entire political donation industry. Already if one is going to be so foolish as to make a donation over the phone, one has a checklist of 20 items to go through. Pretty soon making a donation over the internet is going to be same hassle, which means it will not happen. Of couse, when most of your contributions come from a few rich corporations and not the grass root this does not matte.
The gold standard of TV are things that people will tune in to watch at the time of broadcast. This is really why scripted shows are going away, people will still tend to record it, even if to time shift only a few minutes to jump over commercials.
Sports is the current gold standard for a certain demographic, and many in that demographic will pay huge sums of money to gain access, even giving up other necessities if my observations are correct. For perhaps a non overlapping demographic the gold standard are shows like American Idol, and, to a lesser extent, reality TV. Both are cheap to make and people seem to care about knowing the winners and losers at the same time as everyone else.
So scripted shows are increasingly going to be on cable where revenue is not just generated from ad revenue. But of course this is all about cable cutting, which brings us to Hulu and Amazon Prime. The later is trying to encourage people not to cancel cable by increasingly restricted access to cable subscribers.
or subscribe to Aereo. it is free for a month, so there is your olympics. I see it on the guide, maybe even record it. And the networks are trying to put them out of bussiness, so maybe every little money and user helps.
I don't know if this is what they mean, but here is my guess.
Max Plank was the person who stated that energy might be quantized. That mean that energy cannot just appear in any quantity, but must exist in multiples of a specific quantity, E=hv, where h is Planks constant, and indicates that fundemental minimum energy. This was a desperate act to solve a possible problem and was really a change in direction for Planck. It was one of those mathematical things where one takes a logical step and conclusions are there, as distasteful as they might be.
In any case, 100 years of experiments have shown quantization models the universe well. One of the first problems in physics solved by this 'quantum mechanics' was the ultraviolet catastrophe, in which it was predicted that an Easy-Bake oven would produce infinite energy, something that is experimentally not the case.
One we had energy quantized, and the energy mas relationship, and De Broglie's wavelength, everything began to have a 'Planck' effect. There is a smallest time that it makes sense to talk about called the Planck time. There is a smallest distance that be differentiated, can the Planck length. All times and distances are multiples of these.
So one assumes that a Planck Star is simply the smallest volume that one can have. This is significant because we are no postulating that mass cannot be compressed indefinitely to a singularity. This is analogous to Einsteins notion that we cannot go at infinite speeds, something that Newtonian Mechanics did not rule out, or that we cannot have infinite energies, something that Classical E&M did not rule out.
One problem with Relativity, the science that gave us infinite black holes is that when combined with Quantum Mechanics it gave us lots of infinities, which great minds like Hawkings allegedly worked out.
If there is a Plank star, then there is no longer an infinite singularity. The density will be very very big, but not infinite. And information will not be lost, which is good from a classical thermodynamics point of view.
Also, to the people who Beta, we get it. Everyone knows beta sucks. Maybe it will destroy/. But who cares. Stop wasting everyones time with your whining. Go out and find someone to cuddle.
Such disasters are one of the things data storage companies like Iron Mountain try their hardest to prevent.
It seems to me that preventing disasters such as this is the primary reason such firms exist. Anyone can be a data archive firm. I have known a few people who dabbled in this high profit business. One contracts with the big guys because they (should) know to insure this never happens.
So this is suspicious. Maybe not the case cited, but maybe something else is going on. It is not likely that Iron Mountain allowed itself to make such a big mistake.http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/02/05/2131205/fire-destroys-iron-mountain-data-warehouse-argentinas-bank-records-lost#
Say what you will, but Comcast is the only broadband provider in some of my very urban-one-of-the-largest-cities-in-the-US area. Not the suburbs, but minutes from downtown.
Verizon is building huge in the area, but not everywhere. ATT is building huge in the area, but not everywhere.
So there is clear oppotunity for a third party to come in and compete and acutaly make life better for many people. To provide a broadband service for those who really don't have it. But what did Google decide to do? Go to another city who was 100% wired with multiple vendors almost everywhere.
This is why I do not believe google fiber is the answer. They are not going into dense cities who are underserved. They are going into over served areas and trying to take the low hanging fruit. They are not creating markets and demand and new users. They are taking customers who already have service. Which is fine. But this is no way a moral fight. It is no way an underdog trying to save us from the oppressors. It is powerful company saying we are going to undercut other companies so that we can be a monopoly and set prices as we wish with no transparency, just as they do in ads.
It is amazing the number of people who do not believe in free market capitalism. What many haters of the US want is a zero sum game where our purchasing power cannot increase with productivity. In this zero sum philosophy, growth can only occur with the seizing, or more efficient use of land, and the seizing of precious metal. Clearly in a world were a person can make a living by posting videos or books, i.e. creating no physical product at all, this philosophy is incompatible with a vibrant economy where everyone is expected to support themselves. In fact, mot printing money is only compatible with a control economy in which the government has to insure there is minimum capital so that the people do not get uppity.
The innovation of the US is the realization that prosperity is not dependent on limited zero sum resources. That we do not have to have a command economy where resources are divided equally between the people, because to some extent through technology those resources are not as limited as we think. Now, the people who are afraid of economic growth, who have already achieved a standard of living and are afraid that others may achieve an equal standard, those are the people who push a zero sum economy. They are afraid of borrowing. They are afraid of expanding the money supply to match the economy. They are afraid of innovation.
Counterfeiting has always been a highly technical sport. The right paper, the right inks, the right pressures, the right initiation of countermeasures, all involve chemistry, physics, and application of whatever technologies are available.
In addition, remember that one of the few scientifically sound principles that predates Galileo was a result of the detection of counterfeiting. The story goes that King Heron wanted to make a crown from a certain amount of pure gold, or a s pure as he could get. The king gave the gold to the person who wold manufacture the crown, and after a while got the crown back. The king, however, suspected that the jeweler had replaced some of the gold with counterfeit material, and asked Archimedes of Syracuse to see if he could figure out if the crown were real or counterfeit. Now, another universal principle is that any thinker worth his or her salt will do his or her best thinking while in the tube, which is what Archimedes did. When his fingers got all wrinkly, he jumped out of the tub, shouted Eureka, which means I have spent too long in the tub, and figured that all gold of equal weight should displace the same amount of water.
I wonder why kids go to school these days if they are not going to learn anything useful.
Honestly, if one has a "mind numbingly boring job that is essentially a career killer in the Air Force" then as an American tax payer all I can say is find another job. The military, no matter what fantasy conservatives have, is not a jobs program. I think we should not even have enlistment time limits. Train for a while with no pay, build up a debt for the training, then pay off the debt either with service or explicit payments. From what I see, there are plenty of kids who would happily do this, and we would no longer have the takers who just want free room and board, and pay for doing nothing.
The real damage of this and other scandals, however, is that the people in the military are somehow more honorable and that honor is a value. If these kids were honorable, they would not cheat. I know honorable kids and they do not cheat. They take pride in completing tasks, pride that they are able to what others can't.
This, along with the general lack of fitness of our military, shows that we really need increase the expectations of recruits. Maybe Increase the expectations in the JROTC. Instead of just requiring the low level skills, require the junior cadets take and excel in high level classes. As it is, academic success provides the JROTC members very little status.
The greatest thing I found about the OO.org distribution from a few years ago was that it would open MS Office document better than MS Office. People would come to me and say they could not open a MS Word document, I would pop it up in OO.org, save back in MS Word format, and they were good to go.
I assume that since the OO and LO are the same base, that those capabilities are similar. I don't know because I only recently started looking at LibreOffice. I did download a couple years ago, but it crashed. Really the main reason I never used it is because the Libreoffice people seem to have an irrational hate of OO.org, and since OO.org has save my ass on so many occasions, I don't really have any time for those who feel the need to disrespect it instead of just compete.
That said, the modern OO distribution does not seem to be able to deal with the modern MS Office files. I don't know if that is MS fighting back or OO/LO not being able to keep up.
The more accurate summary maybe that that most people who have a choice and know better do not use IE. This has always been the case since the internet began. IE has never been a decent or secure browser. It was an ok application front end, ane most people used it because there was no choice, and why run two different browsers. To this day I have websites written in legacy code that only run in IE.
TO be honest, for a few years, maybe 1997-2000, there were a few, mostly intranet, bussiness cases that did justify the use of the MS Internet. Mostly it was just laziness, which we are still paying for,
So yes, in the wide world IE may still have a majority, or a least be the largest minority in the web browser use. The web browser war, though it over, and the MS IE strategy has lost.
The web is necessarily a universal solution and the standards necessarily have to be compromise between what an individual would like and what the universal solution requires.
For instance when MS tried to destroy the web so it could position MS Windows as the only OS that would run on the web it attacked one particular venerability. That there was no gaurantee layout in a particular browser. Of course that is the way the web works by design. HTML was and is a markup language that identifies bits of text so that they can be presented in a natural way. The standard does not speak about how to present the marked up text. This is so it can be presented on any device.
In any case the control freaks who generally are the PHB and the art department loved the MS idea that one must be in complete control of the users browser, and we had many years of the medieval interwebs where MS controlled way to many a website.
In fact layout control was a good idea and was something developers wanted, so CSS came into being. It was an imperfect solution, but was a standard that could be implemented in any browser, ignored as wanted to the end user was still in control of the browsing experience, and the web was once again saved with a Renaissance.
Google is now in a similar position of MS. It has a product, chrome, that if everyone used would give a great deal of power to control the markets. There is consumer demand to make the web browser run on less powerful hardware Google has a desire to have less powerful hardware in general use because that would tend to mean more user data stored at Google.
Is Google, like MS, willing to break the Web to do this? Evidently so. Is this a big deal. Maybe not right now, but recall MS started small, the integrated the entire COM architecture into IE.
It is really hard for people who do not understand the workings of the internet to comprehend the consequences. These people simply use the internet with little understanding, or fear it and don't work to leverage it to their advantage. Tarrantino is a wonderful writer and director, but I don't know that has any technical skills or how much he understands what is possible and not possible. He may or may not see that linking is just a citation. This is probably true of a lot of other people.
My favorite story of this is SMBC, the web comic. The writer of this comic got really, really mad when some right wing religious nuts linked to the comic. I mean threw a real temper tantrum. A lot of allegedly intelligent people also went along with him. What I found funny is that SMBC clearly was using a prepackaged web application, and just like most prepackaged web application for comics, there was instructions right below the comic telling anyone who wanted to how to link to the comic so they could display the comic on their own webpage. Now, if whoever ran the website were technically proficient, or even just knew how to read, they could have adjusted the text so that people could would have to make a copy of it rather than pull it off the server every time, or they could have added a note saying that only certain like minded people were allowed to read the comic, and everyone else was to go away. Likewise, if SMBC did not like deep linking, it is possible to filter requests based on domains. I have worked on custom web servers, and I assure it is non trivial but not difficult.
So to answer your question, never. Most people are never going to understand the technology.,
The killer app, apparently, is going to be p0rn. An app apparently is already in the works, though Google officially says such things are not to be done.
My question is what does Google, in the current form, expect the glasses to be used for. In the current incarnation, it is the equivalent of wearing mirrors on the top of your shoes. Releasing them without some alternative storyline was a mistake.
Now, when these become available I can see buying a pair and putting prescription lenses in them. OTOH, it does show that Google does not really know what to do with a new product. Everything else it has done in the consumer space has been a refinement or copy. Search using graph theory, phones that were open and now less so, a languishing Office app. What it does with Glasses will determine the future. It could be really good, if they release as a tool instead of a toy.
I don't know if muslim or jewish schools teach fake science. I doubt they use curriculum and books for Fox News to talk about the white man is inferior because he did not have stirrup until about 1000 years after Asia. I know that Talmudic and sharia law is the bugaboo of the evangelical christian, and this is probably what is taking about here, using public money to teach these values. But here is news. There is not much daylight between evangelical and other fanatical religious laws. They all want to control when we enjoy ourselves, they all want to control women, and they all want a select few to control what we know.
In any case, this is speaking of very specific topic, which is teaching creationism using public funds. One would have to provide evidence that schools other than evangelical Christians are doing such things in a rigorous manner. For instance get a worksheet that is corrected when the student says he prays to allah instead of a christian g-d.
As far as the Texas thing is concerned, Texas is not a state where one can be a total dumbass and still succeed. There are only so many MBA or drug sales jobs for the evangelical scientific illiterate person. Schlumberger and BP are not going to tolerate the average public school teacher educating kids in fake science. The oil patch needs people who can build electronics, not pray for a strike.
Tenure in higher education reflects an ability to publish. It reflects a freedom to do research,to work with young people and develop them into future educators, researchers, and leaders.
Tenure in other education setting working with people who are not adults. Teachers are rewarded for connecting with kids, not called an African American child the n-word as a principle recently did, have a week of lesson plans every week for the entirety of your career, showing up to work on time every day for the entirety of you career(and no this is not always mandated, I have had many jobs where my showing up to work time was somewhere between 8-10)), and not going out a getting drunk and posting it on instagram. Most people would make ok teachers in terms of presenting content and the like. What makes a great teacher, what most students wants, it someone who can make them feel special and make them feel motivated and make them learn. Frankly, most kids will only learn when pressured.
So why all this attack on tenure. Well, in some cases teachers who are not so good will get into the system, and if your child is with one of these teachers, and if your child is doing badly, you will attack the teacher instead of looking at the child. The teacher, for instance, might not be able to control a class, and your child might take advantage of that. Rather than disciplining the child, it is simpler to blame the teacher.
In other case it is the work of administrators. The more teachers one needs to hire every year, the more inexperienced teachers are in a school system, the more young teachers you have who need supervision, the more administrators can be justified. So school leadership convinces parents that everything is going to hell in a hand basket, and viola, a new layer of PHB are created, educational consultants who are friends of the administration are called in at $10,000 a day, and everyone is happy. Except for the students who now have less experienced teachers in front of larger classes.
The real problem here is that we have a generation of parent who believe that an high school diploma will magically get kids in a good college with will magically get them a good job. That somehow the state can magically create conditions where their child can be fully educated without parent conditioning of the student to be a learner. Where somehow whining to an authority figure will fix problem in ourselves. Yes, school is a fundamental part of what gives US children a special opportunity int he world, and teachers are a critical part of that. But what we need are a more diverse group of teachers that reflect a large toolbox of what is possible in teaching, and a core of experienced teachers that can help the younger teachers find their way. This lawsuit is about making every teacher into a cookie cutter copy of what some people think teachers should be. When I llok back at my schooling, my teachers were all different. Some might have even been fired under current expectation because they gave us activities to explore instead of always telling us what to do or who to do it, or that it was wrong because it did not conform with rules.
The opposition party, in this case the republicans, are going to tend to opposed to surveillance. This is because surveillance tends to be conducted on the opposition. This makes the opposition paranoid, as we saw on the fake IRS tea party scandal. For Republicans, whose fiscal policy depends on spending on such things, that they are saying it is a problem is significant. Whether it is a calculated political ploy or an actual move towards small government and fiscal responsibility is something we will have to wait to see.
More money for CS programs is not going to help. You can't just have a CS class in high school. Kids need to learn to use computers as tools,not just for games and browsing. Not even just for learning. Kids have to be trained that computes are creative devices.
This has to happen from the early grades, and for this to happen the teachers have to know how to use computers. As is, many teachers can write in MS Word. I have seen college graduates from very good schools not even know how to create an engaging presentation.True, few people know how to do this, but still, it should be a requirement.
And no, putting polygons on the screen is not enough for CS.
So what we need to is a teacher population that is extremely highly compute literate, to the point where many can code, maybe to the point of a dynamically generated web page. This should be test prior to any teacher certification, just like pedagogy is. Second, using a computer as a tool must be incorporated into the curriculum at all grade levels. This will be easier as more students get computers. Right now there is funding for every student to have regular access to computer at least starting grade 5 or 6. The challenge will be incorporating valid lessons, such as writing a program will solve a two step equation.
The second challenge is pay. Right now teacher pay structure, which is some areas is as low as $17/hr for a college graduate with no felonies, not on any sexual assault list, and stable enough not to kill the children. This is enough to get graduates with few practical skills, but not the type of people we need if we are going to push technical competency.
Slashdot Mirror
The only secure way is use a USB cable or your home network to connect the phone to the computer.
I know that one issue, at least with Apple, was that photos could not be deleted from the service. This meant all picture were public always. Now the only issue is if the picture is still in a backup somewhere.
With cogs I know exactly how many should fail inspection and either be reworked or trashed. In real science I know exactly what confidence level will give me adequate certainty.
So here is what a teacher is supposed to do. Try to adjust a curriculum to meet the ability of teacher and the student. This later, to me is very important. While a teacher must 'cover' all material, a teacher who is free to teach material that is of interest to everyone is going to do a better job. That does not mean that a teacher leaves out evolution of the holocaust or the romantic literature, but that some topics may be more concentrated than others.
Grades can be derived in several fashions. The traditional method, which tends to minimize the grade a student receives, grades papers over time and averages them in a straightforward fashion. The effect of this is that students who are able to grasp material quickly gain an advantage over students who struggle. For instance, one might give frequency quizzes and the periodic exams. Students who do well on quizzes, i.e. grasp a concept quickly, would tend to have a higher grade than a student who slowly build knowledge, studies to consolidate knowledge prior to the exam, and shows mastery at that time.
If a teacher gave a student who failed all the short quizzes a high grade because the student showed mastery on the exam many would complain of grade inflation. And frankly it is. In college one is expected to master material quickly and with little help. If one is slower student, then it is arguable that the grade should be lower, as that may indicate a less suitable college future. OTOH, if a kid masters the materiel, should that kid be punished because it did not happen quickly enough for the teacher?
There is of course a real issue of how hard a class is or how easy it is. This is nothing new. When I was in public school most classes consisted of lectures and then hours of homework. There was not that much help. I had to work out how to complete the tasks. Then there were friends who went to other public schools, where high grades were rewarded if you went to class everyday. Then there were my friends who went to less that perfect private schools, where the teachers were paid to get high grade, even if they had to do they work themselves.
Anyone who takes grade inflation as a new thing is delusional. Even the SAT was designed to inflate the grades of certain groups.
What is new is the number of students entering college. I don't think they are any less prepared, as s group, it is just that we are trying to educate a larger percentage of the population which will tend to dip more into the first SD or our hypothetical normal curve.
BTW, even class rank is not useful. A smart student who is focused on class rank can arrange to avoid teachers who would risk the GPA. They could avoid the more challenging classes. They could constantly complain about grades and have administration simply change a grade because it is easier than dealing with a whiny child.
I would hate to live in the world that so many or /. readers seem to live, in which only people who know how to do something can do it, or where coding is a magic that must be protected from the masses. When I learned coding my parents did not know if it would good or bad because few people could do it, but in middle school I was sat down at a teletype machine for an hour a day to learn. I high school I sat down at a terminal and learned to code for real. This taught me problem solving, algebra, trigonometry, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I would haven't learned as well otherwise. Which is beside the point, as coding itself, like reading, writing, and maths has value
I must also mention that I was fortunate because I had teachers who actually knew programming as work skill, one from IBM, so I was not learning it as wrote, but as craft. There were no tests to pass, other than being able to create a product.
And really teaching to code is not that hard, at least if you are not worried about tests and objectives and things that generally ruin the educational environment. A few summers ago I taught a group of kids, 12-17 years old, how to make an online application in Python, using nothing but a terminal application and online account, creating one sub-domain for each student.
So I don't care how is encouraging kids to code. i don't care if they are going to fail every test that comes out. All I would want to do is expose every student to a method of problems solving, let them go through some activities that doesn't involving copying code snippets to make a robot move, and allowing them to have some success and build confidence in them selves. Not a test, not a competition, not a game, just good old fashion legitimate problem solving.
In any case I don't know where your data comes from. There was significant population in Europe almost two million years ago, with significant finds correlating to this one 1 million years ago. It is true that Neandertal was a couple hundred thousand years ago, but that was a species thing, not the presence of Hominidae.
It is true that through the 20th century the single migration theory out of africa was the preeminent explanation for how humans migrated. However, we are no seeing the picture is more complex.
This worked in limited cases, but not in business where workers are not volunteers, time is absolutely money, and full access is is often needed. The fundamental problem, that IE and Outlook were integrated into the OS so that MS could attempt to hijack the internet, cannot easily be solved. The kludge of whitelists has already been shown to be impractical. If they were it would be more widely implemented. Currently, for instance, the only real widespread applicaiton is allow certain domains to run Java on local machines.
I certainly would hope that this standard would be applied to all parts of government, and in particular that congresspeople would model this standard by not only making claims that are supported by multiple reproducible studies For instance Boehner smokes and defends smoking even though all science states that he should not. Most of the sponsors of this bill probably thinks climate change is not a human induced thing, even though the majority of reproducible science shows it is. Most medical trials are barely science, funded by the companies who will profit off them, ghostwritten by unethical researches for pay, yer we still allow drugs we know are probably dangerous to enter the market, some to treat trivial conditions like a mild case of acne.
It would be good for people to be careful, but in our capitalist society it is more important to make transactions as fluid as possible. For instance, can you imagine what it would be like if you went to the store and had to read every can of beef soup because some company might have put rat in it to save money. Sure, this is an extreme example but we have laws about transparency in commerce not to protect consumers, but to maximize the velocity of money through high consumer confidence.
There are certain transactions that have such a high fraud rate and are are of little economic value that the common sense approach is just to avoid them. Door to door magazine sales, services that claim to give you your credit rating every month, donations over the phone, most extended warranties, have so much find print or or just outright fraudulent that they have killed what could have been a reasonable market model.
For instance, I liked Best Buy but stopped shopping there because of the stories of employees losing their job because of not selling extended warranties. I don't buy them most of the time, and did not want the guild. Likewise, I no longer give donations over the phone because of substantiated reports that in the some cases the firm doing the collecting takes a majority cut, leaving little for the charity. I know many who do the same. These firms are put in danger because some are not on the up and up.
So here the problem. For an individual point of view, selling an selling an iPad box for $200 is a great profit margin. From the point of view of an economy that needs to push tablets to grow, it is not so great. From the point of view of a narcissistic committee who sees their donations plummeting, setting up a misleading, though totaly legal, and the idiots who donate deserve to be robbed website, is a good idea. But from the point of view of nation who wants to make donating to public candidates as easy and painless as possible it is bad.
Like donations to the fire department fund that do not benefit the firefighters, this kind of misdirection is going to hurt the entire political donation industry. Already if one is going to be so foolish as to make a donation over the phone, one has a checklist of 20 items to go through. Pretty soon making a donation over the internet is going to be same hassle, which means it will not happen. Of couse, when most of your contributions come from a few rich corporations and not the grass root this does not matte.
Sports is the current gold standard for a certain demographic, and many in that demographic will pay huge sums of money to gain access, even giving up other necessities if my observations are correct. For perhaps a non overlapping demographic the gold standard are shows like American Idol, and, to a lesser extent, reality TV. Both are cheap to make and people seem to care about knowing the winners and losers at the same time as everyone else.
So scripted shows are increasingly going to be on cable where revenue is not just generated from ad revenue. But of course this is all about cable cutting, which brings us to Hulu and Amazon Prime. The later is trying to encourage people not to cancel cable by increasingly restricted access to cable subscribers.
or subscribe to Aereo. it is free for a month, so there is your olympics. I see it on the guide, maybe even record it. And the networks are trying to put them out of bussiness, so maybe every little money and user helps.
Max Plank was the person who stated that energy might be quantized. That mean that energy cannot just appear in any quantity, but must exist in multiples of a specific quantity, E=hv, where h is Planks constant, and indicates that fundemental minimum energy. This was a desperate act to solve a possible problem and was really a change in direction for Planck. It was one of those mathematical things where one takes a logical step and conclusions are there, as distasteful as they might be. In any case, 100 years of experiments have shown quantization models the universe well. One of the first problems in physics solved by this 'quantum mechanics' was the ultraviolet catastrophe, in which it was predicted that an Easy-Bake oven would produce infinite energy, something that is experimentally not the case. One we had energy quantized, and the energy mas relationship, and De Broglie's wavelength, everything began to have a 'Planck' effect. There is a smallest time that it makes sense to talk about called the Planck time. There is a smallest distance that be differentiated, can the Planck length. All times and distances are multiples of these. So one assumes that a Planck Star is simply the smallest volume that one can have. This is significant because we are no postulating that mass cannot be compressed indefinitely to a singularity. This is analogous to Einsteins notion that we cannot go at infinite speeds, something that Newtonian Mechanics did not rule out, or that we cannot have infinite energies, something that Classical E&M did not rule out. One problem with Relativity, the science that gave us infinite black holes is that when combined with Quantum Mechanics it gave us lots of infinities, which great minds like Hawkings allegedly worked out. If there is a Plank star, then there is no longer an infinite singularity. The density will be very very big, but not infinite. And information will not be lost, which is good from a classical thermodynamics point of view. Also, to the people who Beta, we get it. Everyone knows beta sucks. Maybe it will destroy /. But who cares. Stop wasting everyones time with your whining. Go out and find someone to cuddle.
It seems to me that preventing disasters such as this is the primary reason such firms exist. Anyone can be a data archive firm. I have known a few people who dabbled in this high profit business. One contracts with the big guys because they (should) know to insure this never happens.
So this is suspicious. Maybe not the case cited, but maybe something else is going on. It is not likely that Iron Mountain allowed itself to make such a big mistake.http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/02/05/2131205/fire-destroys-iron-mountain-data-warehouse-argentinas-bank-records-lost#
Say what you will, but Comcast is the only broadband provider in some of my very urban-one-of-the-largest-cities-in-the-US area. Not the suburbs, but minutes from downtown. Verizon is building huge in the area, but not everywhere. ATT is building huge in the area, but not everywhere. So there is clear oppotunity for a third party to come in and compete and acutaly make life better for many people. To provide a broadband service for those who really don't have it. But what did Google decide to do? Go to another city who was 100% wired with multiple vendors almost everywhere. This is why I do not believe google fiber is the answer. They are not going into dense cities who are underserved. They are going into over served areas and trying to take the low hanging fruit. They are not creating markets and demand and new users. They are taking customers who already have service. Which is fine. But this is no way a moral fight. It is no way an underdog trying to save us from the oppressors. It is powerful company saying we are going to undercut other companies so that we can be a monopoly and set prices as we wish with no transparency, just as they do in ads.
The innovation of the US is the realization that prosperity is not dependent on limited zero sum resources. That we do not have to have a command economy where resources are divided equally between the people, because to some extent through technology those resources are not as limited as we think. Now, the people who are afraid of economic growth, who have already achieved a standard of living and are afraid that others may achieve an equal standard, those are the people who push a zero sum economy. They are afraid of borrowing. They are afraid of expanding the money supply to match the economy. They are afraid of innovation.
In addition, remember that one of the few scientifically sound principles that predates Galileo was a result of the detection of counterfeiting. The story goes that King Heron wanted to make a crown from a certain amount of pure gold, or a s pure as he could get. The king gave the gold to the person who wold manufacture the crown, and after a while got the crown back. The king, however, suspected that the jeweler had replaced some of the gold with counterfeit material, and asked Archimedes of Syracuse to see if he could figure out if the crown were real or counterfeit. Now, another universal principle is that any thinker worth his or her salt will do his or her best thinking while in the tube, which is what Archimedes did. When his fingers got all wrinkly, he jumped out of the tub, shouted Eureka, which means I have spent too long in the tub, and figured that all gold of equal weight should displace the same amount of water.
I wonder why kids go to school these days if they are not going to learn anything useful.
To Wit Many weapons, though a common person cannot understand how they work, at least understand how they can be used and effective.
The real damage of this and other scandals, however, is that the people in the military are somehow more honorable and that honor is a value. If these kids were honorable, they would not cheat. I know honorable kids and they do not cheat. They take pride in completing tasks, pride that they are able to what others can't.
This, along with the general lack of fitness of our military, shows that we really need increase the expectations of recruits. Maybe Increase the expectations in the JROTC. Instead of just requiring the low level skills, require the junior cadets take and excel in high level classes. As it is, academic success provides the JROTC members very little status.
The greatest thing I found about the OO.org distribution from a few years ago was that it would open MS Office document better than MS Office. People would come to me and say they could not open a MS Word document, I would pop it up in OO.org, save back in MS Word format, and they were good to go. I assume that since the OO and LO are the same base, that those capabilities are similar. I don't know because I only recently started looking at LibreOffice. I did download a couple years ago, but it crashed. Really the main reason I never used it is because the Libreoffice people seem to have an irrational hate of OO.org, and since OO.org has save my ass on so many occasions, I don't really have any time for those who feel the need to disrespect it instead of just compete. That said, the modern OO distribution does not seem to be able to deal with the modern MS Office files. I don't know if that is MS fighting back or OO/LO not being able to keep up.
The more accurate summary maybe that that most people who have a choice and know better do not use IE. This has always been the case since the internet began. IE has never been a decent or secure browser. It was an ok application front end, ane most people used it because there was no choice, and why run two different browsers. To this day I have websites written in legacy code that only run in IE. TO be honest, for a few years, maybe 1997-2000, there were a few, mostly intranet, bussiness cases that did justify the use of the MS Internet. Mostly it was just laziness, which we are still paying for, So yes, in the wide world IE may still have a majority, or a least be the largest minority in the web browser use. The web browser war, though it over, and the MS IE strategy has lost.
For instance when MS tried to destroy the web so it could position MS Windows as the only OS that would run on the web it attacked one particular venerability. That there was no gaurantee layout in a particular browser. Of course that is the way the web works by design. HTML was and is a markup language that identifies bits of text so that they can be presented in a natural way. The standard does not speak about how to present the marked up text. This is so it can be presented on any device.
In any case the control freaks who generally are the PHB and the art department loved the MS idea that one must be in complete control of the users browser, and we had many years of the medieval interwebs where MS controlled way to many a website.
In fact layout control was a good idea and was something developers wanted, so CSS came into being. It was an imperfect solution, but was a standard that could be implemented in any browser, ignored as wanted to the end user was still in control of the browsing experience, and the web was once again saved with a Renaissance.
Google is now in a similar position of MS. It has a product, chrome, that if everyone used would give a great deal of power to control the markets. There is consumer demand to make the web browser run on less powerful hardware Google has a desire to have less powerful hardware in general use because that would tend to mean more user data stored at Google.
Is Google, like MS, willing to break the Web to do this? Evidently so. Is this a big deal. Maybe not right now, but recall MS started small, the integrated the entire COM architecture into IE.
My favorite story of this is SMBC, the web comic. The writer of this comic got really, really mad when some right wing religious nuts linked to the comic. I mean threw a real temper tantrum. A lot of allegedly intelligent people also went along with him. What I found funny is that SMBC clearly was using a prepackaged web application, and just like most prepackaged web application for comics, there was instructions right below the comic telling anyone who wanted to how to link to the comic so they could display the comic on their own webpage. Now, if whoever ran the website were technically proficient, or even just knew how to read, they could have adjusted the text so that people could would have to make a copy of it rather than pull it off the server every time, or they could have added a note saying that only certain like minded people were allowed to read the comic, and everyone else was to go away. Likewise, if SMBC did not like deep linking, it is possible to filter requests based on domains. I have worked on custom web servers, and I assure it is non trivial but not difficult.
So to answer your question, never. Most people are never going to understand the technology.,
My question is what does Google, in the current form, expect the glasses to be used for. In the current incarnation, it is the equivalent of wearing mirrors on the top of your shoes. Releasing them without some alternative storyline was a mistake.
Now, when these become available I can see buying a pair and putting prescription lenses in them. OTOH, it does show that Google does not really know what to do with a new product. Everything else it has done in the consumer space has been a refinement or copy. Search using graph theory, phones that were open and now less so, a languishing Office app. What it does with Glasses will determine the future. It could be really good, if they release as a tool instead of a toy.
I don't know if muslim or jewish schools teach fake science. I doubt they use curriculum and books for Fox News to talk about the white man is inferior because he did not have stirrup until about 1000 years after Asia. I know that Talmudic and sharia law is the bugaboo of the evangelical christian, and this is probably what is taking about here, using public money to teach these values. But here is news. There is not much daylight between evangelical and other fanatical religious laws. They all want to control when we enjoy ourselves, they all want to control women, and they all want a select few to control what we know. In any case, this is speaking of very specific topic, which is teaching creationism using public funds. One would have to provide evidence that schools other than evangelical Christians are doing such things in a rigorous manner. For instance get a worksheet that is corrected when the student says he prays to allah instead of a christian g-d. As far as the Texas thing is concerned, Texas is not a state where one can be a total dumbass and still succeed. There are only so many MBA or drug sales jobs for the evangelical scientific illiterate person. Schlumberger and BP are not going to tolerate the average public school teacher educating kids in fake science. The oil patch needs people who can build electronics, not pray for a strike.
Tenure in other education setting working with people who are not adults. Teachers are rewarded for connecting with kids, not called an African American child the n-word as a principle recently did, have a week of lesson plans every week for the entirety of your career, showing up to work on time every day for the entirety of you career(and no this is not always mandated, I have had many jobs where my showing up to work time was somewhere between 8-10)), and not going out a getting drunk and posting it on instagram. Most people would make ok teachers in terms of presenting content and the like. What makes a great teacher, what most students wants, it someone who can make them feel special and make them feel motivated and make them learn. Frankly, most kids will only learn when pressured.
So why all this attack on tenure. Well, in some cases teachers who are not so good will get into the system, and if your child is with one of these teachers, and if your child is doing badly, you will attack the teacher instead of looking at the child. The teacher, for instance, might not be able to control a class, and your child might take advantage of that. Rather than disciplining the child, it is simpler to blame the teacher.
In other case it is the work of administrators. The more teachers one needs to hire every year, the more inexperienced teachers are in a school system, the more young teachers you have who need supervision, the more administrators can be justified. So school leadership convinces parents that everything is going to hell in a hand basket, and viola, a new layer of PHB are created, educational consultants who are friends of the administration are called in at $10,000 a day, and everyone is happy. Except for the students who now have less experienced teachers in front of larger classes.
The real problem here is that we have a generation of parent who believe that an high school diploma will magically get kids in a good college with will magically get them a good job. That somehow the state can magically create conditions where their child can be fully educated without parent conditioning of the student to be a learner. Where somehow whining to an authority figure will fix problem in ourselves. Yes, school is a fundamental part of what gives US children a special opportunity int he world, and teachers are a critical part of that. But what we need are a more diverse group of teachers that reflect a large toolbox of what is possible in teaching, and a core of experienced teachers that can help the younger teachers find their way. This lawsuit is about making every teacher into a cookie cutter copy of what some people think teachers should be. When I llok back at my schooling, my teachers were all different. Some might have even been fired under current expectation because they gave us activities to explore instead of always telling us what to do or who to do it, or that it was wrong because it did not conform with rules.
The opposition party, in this case the republicans, are going to tend to opposed to surveillance. This is because surveillance tends to be conducted on the opposition. This makes the opposition paranoid, as we saw on the fake IRS tea party scandal. For Republicans, whose fiscal policy depends on spending on such things, that they are saying it is a problem is significant. Whether it is a calculated political ploy or an actual move towards small government and fiscal responsibility is something we will have to wait to see.
This has to happen from the early grades, and for this to happen the teachers have to know how to use computers. As is, many teachers can write in MS Word. I have seen college graduates from very good schools not even know how to create an engaging presentation.True, few people know how to do this, but still, it should be a requirement.
And no, putting polygons on the screen is not enough for CS.
So what we need to is a teacher population that is extremely highly compute literate, to the point where many can code, maybe to the point of a dynamically generated web page. This should be test prior to any teacher certification, just like pedagogy is. Second, using a computer as a tool must be incorporated into the curriculum at all grade levels. This will be easier as more students get computers. Right now there is funding for every student to have regular access to computer at least starting grade 5 or 6. The challenge will be incorporating valid lessons, such as writing a program will solve a two step equation.
The second challenge is pay. Right now teacher pay structure, which is some areas is as low as $17/hr for a college graduate with no felonies, not on any sexual assault list, and stable enough not to kill the children. This is enough to get graduates with few practical skills, but not the type of people we need if we are going to push technical competency.