Tesla was not competent enough to register the trademark in all markets it was going to do business, and someone else did. Rather than working out some medication where Tesla paid for the lack of foresight, it was simply taken away. I don't think that the ruling was wrong, obviously China does not value the free market the way the US does, but there should have a happy middle between millions of dollars and something reasonable to pay.
My real concern is that Google is in the advertiser business, and when someone ventures outside their core, one has to ask hy. Obviously customers connecting directly to Google servers makes data collection easier. Every website, every email, every chat, every call, logged categorized and even saved for the NSA or whatever other customer is willing to pay for it.
I run about 20gb/s. I have have higher connections elsewhere, and frankly I don't see a big difference most of the time as most web sites can only deliver data so fast, and most websites have to get data from many different location, including ad locations. I have said this before, but when a web page hangs there is a good chance it is google analytics.
Now, it is predictable that fox news would push everyone to sign up for a service where the government can more easily spy on all of us. But I am willing to wait for a service where I am paying a company to serve me, not where I am the product being sold.
Salaries are not good for engineers. The kind of money that was available even 25 years ago is not available today. Sure,a bunch of kids get hired out of college, and a few keep their jobs for more than a few years, or can move to other sectors, but the money that spurs real competition is not there. The free market that creates many opportunities is not there.
This is really why unions work. Although the free market is not a zero sum game, it is adversarial between competitors. Businesses form unions to help set the rules and negotiate the norms of their industry. Labor is the same thing. firms do not have more rights than people to free association. And working people ought to be able able to form a union to set rules and norms of thier industry, which is working.
There are questions about the limits and norms surrounding the organizations of such clubs. Those are valid.
It is general considered, under current research, that the pumping of water, resulting from fracking or oil extraction, back into the ground does cause a load sufficient to trigger a fault. This is not faith. It is simply a hypothesis that seems to gaining evidence. Fracking itself does not seem to a antecedent to seismic events. In the case of Missouri, there does not seem to be any waste disposal, but calling this faith simply shows a inability to process new information.
Thinking of this problem, it seems that k-6 is a pretty wide development scale. One problem is education is that everything is built for like 4-7, about 9-12 year old. Before that it is specialized early childhood. After that it is the equally mysterious teen age years. Both require a special set of practices, so most of the research that want to say 'one size fits all' is the 9-12 age.
So I would have a library that uses technology to engage the younger kids in the process of the library. Last time I was an adult in a k-6 library, most of the books were for the later grades. The earlier grades need manipulative, they need to read, they need to create. While sitting in a group and raptly listening to someone read, maybe project and have kids try to read, or write predictions about what will happen, or the like.
I would say be creative, try to combine technology and non-technology. The older kids have to read. They have to learn how to learn with computer. Keep games for the sake of games to a minimum. In middle and high school they are going to have use the computer to gain knowledge.
There was a speculative fiction TV show where ball lighting was a major plot on one episode. I think it was relatively short lived. Can't remember the name or find it using a standard search.
AP Calculus is offered by about 12,000 schools, while AP Computer Science is about 2000. This is fewer than practically any other course. It is not a popular course. I don't know, given that it is taught in Java, if it is a relevant course.
Students often take AP courses not because they are interested in studying the material in college, but because they aren't. For instance many people take AP calculus and AP Physics and AP English, etc, so they can 'test out' of the freshman courses, not only to save money, but also because they have no interest in the courses. Therefore using AP Calculus as a means judge who is interested in Computer Science is simply wrong. In addition, few people got into IT to work on 'Computer Science'. Most are going to build trivial web pages of fix computers.
So why does the apparent fact that few women or minorities take the CS exam. It is political. Historically College Board has been seen as an extremely bigoted organization. Some claimed that the SAT was manipulated so private New England stundents would get the best scores, while urban schools would generally have the worst. This was done by the way questions were field tested. If private schools students generally did badly on the field tested questions, then obviously those question were wrong. With AP, historically, the types of students and the types of schools that tended to give the test were not a cross section of the population. Lately AP has made a push to diversify the AP exam, it is not only politically advantageous but also important the College Board bottom line as the federal government will pay for many of those students to take the exam, but obviously this has not taken for AP CS. This is likely to do with the quality of the course.
Precisely. A cooperative has to cover their costs from a limited number of users. They are often in rural ares, where subscribers have to put in their own utility pole. We all pay a fee to subsidize, but the costs are mostly covered locally. In such a case it may not make sense to charge $40 for an all you can eat plan, where some are data they may not use, and if too many people use too much data then costs are not covered. I mean for many people 5 GB a month is plenty.
And when you go to the disney world you double opt in and have paid a great deal of money to be provided an experience. It is not like you are going camping or hiking or generally exploring a city. You are basically giving up most of your self determination to select from a few highly engineered choices. The more engineered,the more directed, the better the experience is going to be.
This is in fact where tracking is useful and will result in a better consumer experience. Complaining that you are being tracked at disney world is like complaining that google is selling you data to advertisers,
Here is another data point. In the mid 80's was when the drinking age was raised to 21. Prior to that there was an incentive to get a driver license as that is what got you into bars on your 18th birthday. For the 16-19 crowd there is really no reason to have one unless you want to smoke.
But cost of gas is one problem. Another is that the US now has about 80% of our population living in an urban area of 2500 or more people, and the top 50 or so urban areas make up over half of the US population. While adults in my area might commute 30-70 miles a day, easily, kids might only drive that in a week. I see a number of young adults moving to within a few miles of a the bars and stores.
Then of course there is car insurance. It is expensive to begin with, and if one has anything on the record can increase rapidly. This is addressed in the article.
The main, discussion, however, seems to be about driving licenses. When I was a kid, only about half of my group had driving licenses before we left high school. The rest did not have the money or because they did not have a car did not see the need. OTOH, I knew of a number of people who got hardship licenses at 15 because of school activities and like. I think those were easier to get than they are now.
Does this reflect the fact that many labels pay the artists upfront and fund the creation of the album and the lifestyle? It seems to me in many of these cases the labels are the ones taking the risk, while the artists are just enjoying the lifestyle. I don't know. It seems to me that if the internet is working the way many think it should, major labels would become a thing of the past. If you are breakout internet hit like Justin Bieber, I don't know why you would sell yourself to a label. Unless you just want the upfront cash. In which case you have sold yourself, so can't really complain that you don't get all of the profits.
Medical devices, AFAIK, have generally been made of those practicing the trade. Dr. Michael E. DeBakey hacked together blood vessels. Other doctors have taken general purpose tools and modified them for medical purposes.
The question is how these tools get into the hands of other practitioners. Are they going to go to the hardware store and modify the tools? Some will but many will want a commercial application, which means developing, marketing, and training.
The value of these ventures it that it allows others, who may not be able to support a commercial venture, to access these innovations. And it is not just outside the US. If someone want, for instance a new tool, maybe they can make it. What is to stop someone to make a brace and use it themselves to support their knee?
Yes, the vested interests are fighting this, but these type of things are not going to really cause any revolution in medicine. If someone wants a cheap prosthetic, one can already go to another country and get it. Same part, good doctors, just without the US markup.
I can't really get to the article right now, but one this that is true is that Standard deviations only make sense if a sample results in a normal distribution. Normal distributions has certain qualities, one is that the mean=median=mode. If this is not true then one can still have a skewed normal curve. Many distributions a skewed normal curves, which means that a standard distribution is not necessarily the best model. Yet they are still used. This can be a problem.
Here is why standard deviation is so important as a statistic. If one has a normal distribution, and one knows, for example that that a part has a nominal length of 1 cm and historical data shows that the machine makes the part with a standard distribution of 0.05 cm, then one has some confidence that almost 70% of the parts will be between 0.95 cm and 1.05 cm. Such knowledge is critical when putting things together and warranty issues. Over time if the parts are out of this range, or if the average changes, then one knows the machine is broken.
There are distibutions that are normal. There are many that are not, like distribution of wealth. As far as I can tell stating an average and a distribution in that is pretty silly.
I have crunched these number before. The amount of heavy metal, such as mercury, in a bulb is not that significant. It would take a truly overwhelming number of bulbs to impact anything significantly. The amount of mercury is continuously decreasing. Compared to the shipping, bulb waste, and inefficiency of incandescent bulbs, it is hard to make a serious case against CFL. Sort of like claiming we all need to go back to vacuum tube amplifiers and real turntable, which do produce superior sound,but only for the few records that are mastered properly
In any case the only ones who are really pushing for incandescent are the importers and those with significant investments in Asia. These are the ones who will benefit from the cheap bulbs. In the US innovation has produced bulbs for those who want them. It is those profiting from the low end Asian suppliers that are going to profit off a reprieve.
Order fulfillment is where Amazon gets in trouble. Low paid workers. Warehouses that are not air conditioned. Every worker treated like a criminal, having to pass extensive security. Or at least those are the stories.
And while we want jobs that are not critically dangerous, like mining, or just morally wrong, like selling psychotropics to kids, the jobs that Amazon provides are not considered ethical. I can certainly see the point. Amazon should spend more on wages for workers and providing a comfortable working environment.
Or they could just use robots, which is what the situation will be like in a generation, if Amazon is still going to exist. Order fullfillment by robots. Pull the truck in, robots unload the truck. Robots pick the products. Robots pack the products. I think that investing in robots makes a lot of sense.
Investing in customer service also makes a lot of sense. This is where robots and scripts are going to take a long time to take the place of a human. I think that if Google had a call center staffed with customer service agents, they would have much better reputation. I think their Android phone would have been better. But they chose to model themselves on MS. Too good for the peasant end user.
People are not clueless, they just sometimes don't get that the laws and regulations are context sensitive. For example, when some people play with a gun in the street it is assumed that they are responsible gun owners and will only use it to shoot vermin and people they think are criminals or people they think they can shoot and claim self defense.
Other if they have a gun are assumed to be criminals and be shot on sight, or brought up on charges for nothing more than having a gun. And this is silly because the NRA has clearly indicated that the problem with our society is there are too few gun owners, that gun owners should not have to register, that private sales, such as those that happen on instagram, should be legal and unregulated, and that only in certain extreme cases should gun ownership be regulated at all.
Such cases are very confusing to kids. Here is another one that is a pet of Rand Paul. A convicted drug dealer is serving a life sentence because he was caught several times over six years of so selling drugs. Now, I know that this kid had divorced parents, was abused, and is depressed, but I wondered how many people in jail do not have a similar set of circumstances. I don't agree with the drug laws, and think they need to be changed, but I do think that sometimes if someone is convicted of a crime several times something needs to be done. If nothing else they are a very stupid criminal and someone is going to get hurt. But Paul just says in this case we should forgive and forget.
Again, it is very confusing to kids. This guy rapes a girl, posts the rape on the internet and gets a year of probation, and you tell me that there are consequences. Adolescents, and developmentally challenged adults, which includes a large part of the population, think they are invincible and will tend to over estimate the odds that they will get away with stuff. If we are not sending every kid to jail for a few days who tries to buy alcohol with a fake ID, then what gets out on Twitrer is not that fake IDs are dangerous, but that you probably won't have any consequences so the risk is worth it.
It is the same thing with guns and dangerous products carried onto airplanes. In most cases, the TSA will just confiscate or destroy. There are no real consequences. Therefore if a terrorist organization wanted to destroy a plane, all they would have to do is setup multiple agents to go to multiple airports until one eventually got through. There is nothing the TSA does to keep this from happening. If you are a licensed gun owner, just say you forgot it was there. The harmless compenents to make a strong acid that can eat away the skin of the plane stored in your shampoo, will just be thrown away.
This reminds of of the definition of a meeting minute I once heard. A meeting minute is not what happened in meeting, as what happens in a meeting is dynamic process, but rather what the people in the meeting intended to have happened or decided after the full consideration of the events of the meeting.
So the constant data steam is dynamic and is not representative of the reality that we, in the fullness of time, find useful. We want a sanitized version of reality, like the Dow Industrial average even though we can get by second stock prices, though delayed. Likewise a trade show is the best that a company can produce, with swag and furniture.
I liked this quote
And if they're too under-capitalized or unprepared for a hotel, they're lurking in the Convention Center parking lot.
Certainly some people go to conventions underfunded and under prepared and certainly some think that is an advantage. But it is not. Especially in this day of constant information people make an effort to go to these places to see a SHOW, not just the tech. MS can afford to put on show. The challenge is can a smaller firm compete with less funds. If not at a trade show, then how does anyone think that they can compete in the open market?
It is interesting that when science supports what one wants everyone is like'yeah science' but when it doesn't everyone is like 'science bad'.
For instance w have seen long studies that show, in general. vitamins do no good and should not be allowed to make health claims. Big Business does not like this so the science is bad. We know that raising animals as we do is bad for the environment, atmosphere, lakes, rivers, etc, but Agribusiness does not like this so science is bad. We know that using antibiotics to increase the yield of livestock is bad for human health, but again Agribusiness does not like this so science is bad. Even in cases where we know that equal results can cheaply be achieved without antibiotics, such as pork, the antibiotics are still in use.
But all of the sudden when GMOs are vindicated, science is good. Make up your mind. Science is a process, not a religious proclamation where one gets to pick and choose. You can't flip flop like your average church and say meat is bad on friday, then change you mind the next fortnight. It does not work that way.
In reality we have few long term studies of GMO effect humans. What we do have is instances where GMO crop has infected other crops, even crops that are not nearby. We have instances where farmers who have been infected have been sued by the intellectual property owner, as if seeds, which have evolved to travel or be carried large distances, even over seas, can be controlled like a common household appliance. And we have major markets, such as China, India, and Russia that ban or severely restrict GMO crops.
At the end of the day this a free market issue, not a science issue. The world market has spoken and said that it does not want GMO crops and thinks that it can feed it's people without them. The perception is the key here as if something is perceived as less valuable, it will not generate as much profits. This is important for the US as we are a nation who wants premium wages, so we as nation must make sure to create premium products. We cannot be part of the race to the bottom. We have to continuously build value.
Now, GMO might have been a way to build value, and in time it might be. But right now GMO crops, in themselves and in the fact they infect other crops, reduce the value of the US product. We are jeopardizing the value of nation to satisfy on corporates entity for profit. That is not the way the US is supposed to work. This is independent of the science.
Let's take another example. Horse and other non-tradition US meats. Our meat supply is trusted because we slaughter relatively few animals. Other countries not only slaughter more types of animals, but also allow fillers. We, the US, however, have a supply of meat that is not going to be contimated by fillers or horse because that was the last thing that went through the line. Scientifically such a thing is of no value. I does not matter what meat we eat. But in terms of the free market, it is critical.
It has been my contention that when websites no longer serve malware through Ads, then they can start complaining that users blocks ads. This is not an uncommon occurrence, even for large websites, and the fix is not always immediate. I recall not that long ago when the New York Times was serving malware for the entire weekend.
The fallacy here, is that a library is solely a repository of books. At it's basis, a library can be considered to be a curated collection of books. As a library cannot hold all books, books must be squired and disposed of regularly to maximize the usefulness to the audience.
However, in opposition to popular belief, a library serves a purpose beyond recreation and toilets for people who may not have access otherwise. It is the basis of our educational system. When I was a kid, and did not have access to basics, I would go to the library, do research, pay to rent a typewriter, make a copy. Fifteen years ago when I was changing careers I would go to the library, consult with the librarians, read the journals, and educate myself.
For librarians who just want to curate books the book less library is an big problem. But for the library who wants to be at the basis of provided an education to the people, this is a wonderful move. For instance, many years ago to research a paper I had to go to indexes which were stored in hundred of linear feet of table space. I had to look up the topic for each year, look up the journals, find the journal, and if they were not there use ILL. None of this had to with educating myself. It was a skill, a now useless skill, though at the time I would monetize the skill for beer money.
A useless skill because Dialog came around and for a dollar I could do all that research online. Then it became free at the library and all that space taken by paper indexes were now taken by computers. Then the journals themselves became available electronically and the stack for the journals were taken over by computers. No the journals are online and you don't even have to go to the library.
And this the world that everyone thinks is do horrible. Where librarians can focus on assisting patrons to become more educated. Of course most of the world does not know how to use a library, or even where their library is. To be honest, I miss the going to the library looking through paper books, miles of indices, old journals. I discovered many wonderful treats by backtracking references. But I appreciate that I can now just pull up an article on my iPad and read it, rather than spending an hour trying to get it.
Of course I understand the difficulty with the tech for popular books. I also tried Overdrive and gave up. This is teething problem that is going to have to be solved. My hope is that publishers will move to a very cheap per checkout fee rather than an acquisition fee. Patrons that check out books but don't read them can be throttled to the number of books that can be checked out at at time.That there will be a system where any patron can check out any book that is in a national or even international directory.
Also understand that handling of paper books is very expensive.
Google has a right to do whatever it wants. This is a fact. It is a private firm, and if it wants to put up goatse.cx every time someone types in BING that is their right. I would defend it. However, such abuse would indicate they are not the right firm to depend for our internet searches, as does this event.
My understanding is that if someone typed in Rap Genius the site would not come up. This to me is simply unprofessional behavior on the side of Google. Yes, demote the ranking if someone uses another search term. Yes, put a mark next to it saying the site is on probabation. But to not list the site when that is what a user wants. Sheer child like temper tantrum.
I will tell you that when I do a popular search, I still get link farms, ad farms, and sites with only marginal content. On a recent search, the fourthwas one of those sites that just generate random words so they can get hits. How is this acceptable behavior?
Honestly I don't care about SEO manipulation. That is a google problem, and a problem they have created, and a problem they have not been able to fix, as far as I can tell. Punishing the free market for taking advantage of the fact that Google's algorithm is broken is not going to do anything.
A bit of history. Google replaced Alta Vista because Alta Vista used keywords. It depended on all websites to be honest and only put relevant keywords. Surprisingly, many websites were not honest and would track the most searched keywords and put those in so visitors would be directed to these sites, which often were nothing but link and ad farms, though no where as bad as what we see now. The problem was not solved by retaliation, but with a new search engine.
Google throws these temper tantrums because it can do nothing else. It can't innovate, it wastes so much money that it can't do research, and spends so much money killing other innovation that we can't get a new engine. So it sues, it creates these arbitrary rules, and it won't work.
Death is often related to drug abuse. Like guns, the drug does kill, the person does, usually themselves. Right now I would say the bigger issue is abuse of prescription drugs. On big problem is the doctors are complicit. The famous drug addict Rush Limbaugh, for instance, get all his drugs legally. There a millions of people who are addicted to legal prescription drugs, and death rates are as high, or higher, than 20 in 100,000 of the population.
Again, what we need to look for and provide help for is drug abuse which kills many people every year. For instance about 100,000 people a year die directly or indirectly from alcohol every year, in addition to the huge costs in place on society to to medical care such as liver transplants. We learned the way to solve this was not to ban alcohol, but to provide help and punish irresponsible behavior. For instance if the doctor who supplies Limbaugh were to be locked up for 20 years, others doctors might be less likely to supply drugs o known addicts.
In the past two generations the idea that drugs are the path to peacefulness and health has taken complete hold of our society. This is not a completely inappropriate idea. Drugs can help quality of life, and an intelligent person can often self medicate to solve many problems. However, the idea that personal behavior is totally outside of the realm of possibility is a problem. For instance I know people who take drugs because of acid reflux. Instead of taking personal responsibility and change their diet, the pop a pill every day. I really don't see any difference between this and someone who does cocaine. In either case it is medicating something that could probably be handled another way.
Finally there is enforcement. The fact is that some people are allowed to abuse and smuggle drugs and some aren't. Again we can look at Limbaugh. He was caught smuggling a schedule iii drug into the US. If were serious about stopping drugs and drug smuggling he would have been sentenced to up to 10 years of prison time. However, as we are just serious about harassing people, he was let go and has served no prison time.
Is this one of those cases where conservatives love the free market when it does what they want, but hate it when it results in something that might hurt one of them? GMO has great benefit and is likely going to be big part of feeding a growing world. However, Cheerios has nothing to do with feeding a hungry world. The hungry cannot afford Cheerios. General Mills is not going to advertise Cheerios to markets where everyone lives on $1 a day.
No Cheerios is a premium product marketed to those scientifically illiterate who are willing to pay extra just be part of the cluster fuck that needs a brand to feel complete.Any rational, scientific person is going to buy a bag of fake Cheerios for half the cost. That is what intelligent people do. Look for value.
Here a scientific fact. The market for breakfast cereals is dying. The breakfast sector is being taken over by other items such as yogurt. Within the framework of the free market then, i.e. one where irrationality rules, not government overloads, how can they increase the market share? Add to this that Cheerios has an advantage in that it is not only a breakfast food, but also a staple for young children, and parent being stupid and irrational tend to want feel they are giving the best to the kids, even it is only a feeling.
The simple answer is by focusing on their premium nature, and the best way to do this is to use what are perceived to be premium ingredients. This is going to do nothing to move the markets. Poor people will still have plenty of cheap GMO food. But it may help push pretty boxes of junk to the stupid people who will pay excessive funds for it.
Finally, just to show I can be as offensive as anyone else, anyone who believe the cost of the grain and sugar has anything to do with the cost of a box of cheerios is truly delusional.
On one level this is correct. MOOC can simply be seen an another way to educate students. It is relatively cheap, it is available, and might allow more students to be successful. On this basis, passing rate is irrelevant. Really, in a world where students can choose to study what they wish, at a pace that they wish, passing or failing really become besides the point. We are in the ideal world of learning, where self discovery, application, and geniune self worth is the measure of a person, not the arbitrary standards set by a third party.
However MOOC has not been presented as another way to educate students. It has been presented as better, cheaper, faster option to educate students. To be sure MOOC is going to be an more effective and cheaper means to teach some students. It is a proven fact in teaching that some students need less intervention, are more self directed, and have a better ability to master the material without excessive helpt than others. These are the type of students we are very experienced at teaching, and in fact the students that everyone wants in their school. They are discipline, respond well to instruction, and can investigate confusing topics on their own. Educating these students has never been difficult. Keeping them on tract to meet some arbitrary third party expectation can be difficult, but that is another matter.
So as long as these courses realize that they are not for everyone, all is good. As long they realize that many, if not most, student still need someone to customize and interpret the material, then I am willing to grant that failure rate is not an issue. But for many cases, I think that a good adaptive computer based system along with professional teachers providing scaffolding will be the future. I would not be surprised if in the near future we had most secondary classes were computer based facilitated by instructors, such as the current TFA people, while the professionals meet with them only once a week to diagnose issues and provide feedback.
Seriously, this is something that can be read when the attention span is longer and there is more context for the naughty bits. No one wants boring lists of who begat whom and who tried to kill whom. The incest and polygamy and slavery will appeal to many the undeveloped mind, but again, is this what kids should be exposed to?
If you want to indoctrinate a kid into the religious cult, use Little Pilgrims Progress. It is short, sweet, and makes everyone seems like loser. It is more effective at creating Christians than Twilight is a creating Vampires.
If you want just general 'miracles happen' try The Little Prince.
If you want debauchery and long winded elegant writing, then you are to the Canterbury Tales. This will help with the SAT scores
Yes, the bible is cultural model, but, as shown by the behavior of the average christian, it is not that is read as whole. Rather it is taken piecewise and then used to construct a reality that is acceptable to the user. As has been my experience, as one who was read it, the main use it to tell others that their bible based beliefs are much less than that. For instance, as those who push school prayer don't want to accept, the bible says that praying in a public secular setting is exactly what one does not want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Tesla was not competent enough to register the trademark in all markets it was going to do business, and someone else did. Rather than working out some medication where Tesla paid for the lack of foresight, it was simply taken away. I don't think that the ruling was wrong, obviously China does not value the free market the way the US does, but there should have a happy middle between millions of dollars and something reasonable to pay.
I run about 20gb/s. I have have higher connections elsewhere, and frankly I don't see a big difference most of the time as most web sites can only deliver data so fast, and most websites have to get data from many different location, including ad locations. I have said this before, but when a web page hangs there is a good chance it is google analytics.
Now, it is predictable that fox news would push everyone to sign up for a service where the government can more easily spy on all of us. But I am willing to wait for a service where I am paying a company to serve me, not where I am the product being sold.
This is really why unions work. Although the free market is not a zero sum game, it is adversarial between competitors. Businesses form unions to help set the rules and negotiate the norms of their industry. Labor is the same thing. firms do not have more rights than people to free association. And working people ought to be able able to form a union to set rules and norms of thier industry, which is working.
There are questions about the limits and norms surrounding the organizations of such clubs. Those are valid.
It is general considered, under current research, that the pumping of water, resulting from fracking or oil extraction, back into the ground does cause a load sufficient to trigger a fault. This is not faith. It is simply a hypothesis that seems to gaining evidence. Fracking itself does not seem to a antecedent to seismic events. In the case of Missouri, there does not seem to be any waste disposal, but calling this faith simply shows a inability to process new information.
Thinking of this problem, it seems that k-6 is a pretty wide development scale. One problem is education is that everything is built for like 4-7, about 9-12 year old. Before that it is specialized early childhood. After that it is the equally mysterious teen age years. Both require a special set of practices, so most of the research that want to say 'one size fits all' is the 9-12 age. So I would have a library that uses technology to engage the younger kids in the process of the library. Last time I was an adult in a k-6 library, most of the books were for the later grades. The earlier grades need manipulative, they need to read, they need to create. While sitting in a group and raptly listening to someone read, maybe project and have kids try to read, or write predictions about what will happen, or the like. I would say be creative, try to combine technology and non-technology. The older kids have to read. They have to learn how to learn with computer. Keep games for the sake of games to a minimum. In middle and high school they are going to have use the computer to gain knowledge.
There was a speculative fiction TV show where ball lighting was a major plot on one episode. I think it was relatively short lived. Can't remember the name or find it using a standard search.
Students often take AP courses not because they are interested in studying the material in college, but because they aren't. For instance many people take AP calculus and AP Physics and AP English, etc, so they can 'test out' of the freshman courses, not only to save money, but also because they have no interest in the courses. Therefore using AP Calculus as a means judge who is interested in Computer Science is simply wrong. In addition, few people got into IT to work on 'Computer Science'. Most are going to build trivial web pages of fix computers.
So why does the apparent fact that few women or minorities take the CS exam. It is political. Historically College Board has been seen as an extremely bigoted organization. Some claimed that the SAT was manipulated so private New England stundents would get the best scores, while urban schools would generally have the worst. This was done by the way questions were field tested. If private schools students generally did badly on the field tested questions, then obviously those question were wrong. With AP, historically, the types of students and the types of schools that tended to give the test were not a cross section of the population. Lately AP has made a push to diversify the AP exam, it is not only politically advantageous but also important the College Board bottom line as the federal government will pay for many of those students to take the exam, but obviously this has not taken for AP CS. This is likely to do with the quality of the course.
Precisely. A cooperative has to cover their costs from a limited number of users. They are often in rural ares, where subscribers have to put in their own utility pole. We all pay a fee to subsidize, but the costs are mostly covered locally. In such a case it may not make sense to charge $40 for an all you can eat plan, where some are data they may not use, and if too many people use too much data then costs are not covered. I mean for many people 5 GB a month is plenty.
This is in fact where tracking is useful and will result in a better consumer experience. Complaining that you are being tracked at disney world is like complaining that google is selling you data to advertisers,
Then of course there is car insurance. It is expensive to begin with, and if one has anything on the record can increase rapidly. This is addressed in the article.
The main, discussion, however, seems to be about driving licenses. When I was a kid, only about half of my group had driving licenses before we left high school. The rest did not have the money or because they did not have a car did not see the need. OTOH, I knew of a number of people who got hardship licenses at 15 because of school activities and like. I think those were easier to get than they are now.
Does this reflect the fact that many labels pay the artists upfront and fund the creation of the album and the lifestyle? It seems to me in many of these cases the labels are the ones taking the risk, while the artists are just enjoying the lifestyle. I don't know. It seems to me that if the internet is working the way many think it should, major labels would become a thing of the past. If you are breakout internet hit like Justin Bieber, I don't know why you would sell yourself to a label. Unless you just want the upfront cash. In which case you have sold yourself, so can't really complain that you don't get all of the profits.
The question is how these tools get into the hands of other practitioners. Are they going to go to the hardware store and modify the tools? Some will but many will want a commercial application, which means developing, marketing, and training.
The value of these ventures it that it allows others, who may not be able to support a commercial venture, to access these innovations. And it is not just outside the US. If someone want, for instance a new tool, maybe they can make it. What is to stop someone to make a brace and use it themselves to support their knee?
Yes, the vested interests are fighting this, but these type of things are not going to really cause any revolution in medicine. If someone wants a cheap prosthetic, one can already go to another country and get it. Same part, good doctors, just without the US markup.
I can't really get to the article right now, but one this that is true is that Standard deviations only make sense if a sample results in a normal distribution. Normal distributions has certain qualities, one is that the mean=median=mode. If this is not true then one can still have a skewed normal curve. Many distributions a skewed normal curves, which means that a standard distribution is not necessarily the best model. Yet they are still used. This can be a problem. Here is why standard deviation is so important as a statistic. If one has a normal distribution, and one knows, for example that that a part has a nominal length of 1 cm and historical data shows that the machine makes the part with a standard distribution of 0.05 cm, then one has some confidence that almost 70% of the parts will be between 0.95 cm and 1.05 cm. Such knowledge is critical when putting things together and warranty issues. Over time if the parts are out of this range, or if the average changes, then one knows the machine is broken. There are distibutions that are normal. There are many that are not, like distribution of wealth. As far as I can tell stating an average and a distribution in that is pretty silly.
In any case the only ones who are really pushing for incandescent are the importers and those with significant investments in Asia. These are the ones who will benefit from the cheap bulbs. In the US innovation has produced bulbs for those who want them. It is those profiting from the low end Asian suppliers that are going to profit off a reprieve.
And while we want jobs that are not critically dangerous, like mining, or just morally wrong, like selling psychotropics to kids, the jobs that Amazon provides are not considered ethical. I can certainly see the point. Amazon should spend more on wages for workers and providing a comfortable working environment.
Or they could just use robots, which is what the situation will be like in a generation, if Amazon is still going to exist. Order fullfillment by robots. Pull the truck in, robots unload the truck. Robots pick the products. Robots pack the products. I think that investing in robots makes a lot of sense.
Investing in customer service also makes a lot of sense. This is where robots and scripts are going to take a long time to take the place of a human. I think that if Google had a call center staffed with customer service agents, they would have much better reputation. I think their Android phone would have been better. But they chose to model themselves on MS. Too good for the peasant end user.
Other if they have a gun are assumed to be criminals and be shot on sight, or brought up on charges for nothing more than having a gun. And this is silly because the NRA has clearly indicated that the problem with our society is there are too few gun owners, that gun owners should not have to register, that private sales, such as those that happen on instagram, should be legal and unregulated, and that only in certain extreme cases should gun ownership be regulated at all.
Such cases are very confusing to kids. Here is another one that is a pet of Rand Paul. A convicted drug dealer is serving a life sentence because he was caught several times over six years of so selling drugs. Now, I know that this kid had divorced parents, was abused, and is depressed, but I wondered how many people in jail do not have a similar set of circumstances. I don't agree with the drug laws, and think they need to be changed, but I do think that sometimes if someone is convicted of a crime several times something needs to be done. If nothing else they are a very stupid criminal and someone is going to get hurt. But Paul just says in this case we should forgive and forget.
Again, it is very confusing to kids. This guy rapes a girl, posts the rape on the internet and gets a year of probation, and you tell me that there are consequences. Adolescents, and developmentally challenged adults, which includes a large part of the population, think they are invincible and will tend to over estimate the odds that they will get away with stuff. If we are not sending every kid to jail for a few days who tries to buy alcohol with a fake ID, then what gets out on Twitrer is not that fake IDs are dangerous, but that you probably won't have any consequences so the risk is worth it.
It is the same thing with guns and dangerous products carried onto airplanes. In most cases, the TSA will just confiscate or destroy. There are no real consequences. Therefore if a terrorist organization wanted to destroy a plane, all they would have to do is setup multiple agents to go to multiple airports until one eventually got through. There is nothing the TSA does to keep this from happening. If you are a licensed gun owner, just say you forgot it was there. The harmless compenents to make a strong acid that can eat away the skin of the plane stored in your shampoo, will just be thrown away.
So the constant data steam is dynamic and is not representative of the reality that we, in the fullness of time, find useful. We want a sanitized version of reality, like the Dow Industrial average even though we can get by second stock prices, though delayed. Likewise a trade show is the best that a company can produce, with swag and furniture.
I liked this quote
And if they're too under-capitalized or unprepared for a hotel, they're lurking in the Convention Center parking lot. Certainly some people go to conventions underfunded and under prepared and certainly some think that is an advantage. But it is not. Especially in this day of constant information people make an effort to go to these places to see a SHOW, not just the tech. MS can afford to put on show. The challenge is can a smaller firm compete with less funds. If not at a trade show, then how does anyone think that they can compete in the open market?
For instance w have seen long studies that show, in general. vitamins do no good and should not be allowed to make health claims. Big Business does not like this so the science is bad. We know that raising animals as we do is bad for the environment, atmosphere, lakes, rivers, etc, but Agribusiness does not like this so science is bad. We know that using antibiotics to increase the yield of livestock is bad for human health, but again Agribusiness does not like this so science is bad. Even in cases where we know that equal results can cheaply be achieved without antibiotics, such as pork, the antibiotics are still in use.
But all of the sudden when GMOs are vindicated, science is good. Make up your mind. Science is a process, not a religious proclamation where one gets to pick and choose. You can't flip flop like your average church and say meat is bad on friday, then change you mind the next fortnight. It does not work that way.
In reality we have few long term studies of GMO effect humans. What we do have is instances where GMO crop has infected other crops, even crops that are not nearby. We have instances where farmers who have been infected have been sued by the intellectual property owner, as if seeds, which have evolved to travel or be carried large distances, even over seas, can be controlled like a common household appliance. And we have major markets, such as China, India, and Russia that ban or severely restrict GMO crops.
At the end of the day this a free market issue, not a science issue. The world market has spoken and said that it does not want GMO crops and thinks that it can feed it's people without them. The perception is the key here as if something is perceived as less valuable, it will not generate as much profits. This is important for the US as we are a nation who wants premium wages, so we as nation must make sure to create premium products. We cannot be part of the race to the bottom. We have to continuously build value.
Now, GMO might have been a way to build value, and in time it might be. But right now GMO crops, in themselves and in the fact they infect other crops, reduce the value of the US product. We are jeopardizing the value of nation to satisfy on corporates entity for profit. That is not the way the US is supposed to work. This is independent of the science.
Let's take another example. Horse and other non-tradition US meats. Our meat supply is trusted because we slaughter relatively few animals. Other countries not only slaughter more types of animals, but also allow fillers. We, the US, however, have a supply of meat that is not going to be contimated by fillers or horse because that was the last thing that went through the line. Scientifically such a thing is of no value. I does not matter what meat we eat. But in terms of the free market, it is critical.
It has been my contention that when websites no longer serve malware through Ads, then they can start complaining that users blocks ads. This is not an uncommon occurrence, even for large websites, and the fix is not always immediate. I recall not that long ago when the New York Times was serving malware for the entire weekend.
However, in opposition to popular belief, a library serves a purpose beyond recreation and toilets for people who may not have access otherwise. It is the basis of our educational system. When I was a kid, and did not have access to basics, I would go to the library, do research, pay to rent a typewriter, make a copy. Fifteen years ago when I was changing careers I would go to the library, consult with the librarians, read the journals, and educate myself.
For librarians who just want to curate books the book less library is an big problem. But for the library who wants to be at the basis of provided an education to the people, this is a wonderful move. For instance, many years ago to research a paper I had to go to indexes which were stored in hundred of linear feet of table space. I had to look up the topic for each year, look up the journals, find the journal, and if they were not there use ILL. None of this had to with educating myself. It was a skill, a now useless skill, though at the time I would monetize the skill for beer money.
A useless skill because Dialog came around and for a dollar I could do all that research online. Then it became free at the library and all that space taken by paper indexes were now taken by computers. Then the journals themselves became available electronically and the stack for the journals were taken over by computers. No the journals are online and you don't even have to go to the library.
And this the world that everyone thinks is do horrible. Where librarians can focus on assisting patrons to become more educated. Of course most of the world does not know how to use a library, or even where their library is. To be honest, I miss the going to the library looking through paper books, miles of indices, old journals. I discovered many wonderful treats by backtracking references. But I appreciate that I can now just pull up an article on my iPad and read it, rather than spending an hour trying to get it.
Of course I understand the difficulty with the tech for popular books. I also tried Overdrive and gave up. This is teething problem that is going to have to be solved. My hope is that publishers will move to a very cheap per checkout fee rather than an acquisition fee. Patrons that check out books but don't read them can be throttled to the number of books that can be checked out at at time.That there will be a system where any patron can check out any book that is in a national or even international directory.
Also understand that handling of paper books is very expensive.
My understanding is that if someone typed in Rap Genius the site would not come up. This to me is simply unprofessional behavior on the side of Google. Yes, demote the ranking if someone uses another search term. Yes, put a mark next to it saying the site is on probabation. But to not list the site when that is what a user wants. Sheer child like temper tantrum.
I will tell you that when I do a popular search, I still get link farms, ad farms, and sites with only marginal content. On a recent search, the fourthwas one of those sites that just generate random words so they can get hits. How is this acceptable behavior?
Honestly I don't care about SEO manipulation. That is a google problem, and a problem they have created, and a problem they have not been able to fix, as far as I can tell. Punishing the free market for taking advantage of the fact that Google's algorithm is broken is not going to do anything.
A bit of history. Google replaced Alta Vista because Alta Vista used keywords. It depended on all websites to be honest and only put relevant keywords. Surprisingly, many websites were not honest and would track the most searched keywords and put those in so visitors would be directed to these sites, which often were nothing but link and ad farms, though no where as bad as what we see now. The problem was not solved by retaliation, but with a new search engine.
Google throws these temper tantrums because it can do nothing else. It can't innovate, it wastes so much money that it can't do research, and spends so much money killing other innovation that we can't get a new engine. So it sues, it creates these arbitrary rules, and it won't work.
Again, what we need to look for and provide help for is drug abuse which kills many people every year. For instance about 100,000 people a year die directly or indirectly from alcohol every year, in addition to the huge costs in place on society to to medical care such as liver transplants. We learned the way to solve this was not to ban alcohol, but to provide help and punish irresponsible behavior. For instance if the doctor who supplies Limbaugh were to be locked up for 20 years, others doctors might be less likely to supply drugs o known addicts.
In the past two generations the idea that drugs are the path to peacefulness and health has taken complete hold of our society. This is not a completely inappropriate idea. Drugs can help quality of life, and an intelligent person can often self medicate to solve many problems. However, the idea that personal behavior is totally outside of the realm of possibility is a problem. For instance I know people who take drugs because of acid reflux. Instead of taking personal responsibility and change their diet, the pop a pill every day. I really don't see any difference between this and someone who does cocaine. In either case it is medicating something that could probably be handled another way.
Finally there is enforcement. The fact is that some people are allowed to abuse and smuggle drugs and some aren't. Again we can look at Limbaugh. He was caught smuggling a schedule iii drug into the US. If were serious about stopping drugs and drug smuggling he would have been sentenced to up to 10 years of prison time. However, as we are just serious about harassing people, he was let go and has served no prison time.
No Cheerios is a premium product marketed to those scientifically illiterate who are willing to pay extra just be part of the cluster fuck that needs a brand to feel complete.Any rational, scientific person is going to buy a bag of fake Cheerios for half the cost. That is what intelligent people do. Look for value.
Here a scientific fact. The market for breakfast cereals is dying. The breakfast sector is being taken over by other items such as yogurt. Within the framework of the free market then, i.e. one where irrationality rules, not government overloads, how can they increase the market share? Add to this that Cheerios has an advantage in that it is not only a breakfast food, but also a staple for young children, and parent being stupid and irrational tend to want feel they are giving the best to the kids, even it is only a feeling.
The simple answer is by focusing on their premium nature, and the best way to do this is to use what are perceived to be premium ingredients. This is going to do nothing to move the markets. Poor people will still have plenty of cheap GMO food. But it may help push pretty boxes of junk to the stupid people who will pay excessive funds for it.
Finally, just to show I can be as offensive as anyone else, anyone who believe the cost of the grain and sugar has anything to do with the cost of a box of cheerios is truly delusional.
On one level this is correct. MOOC can simply be seen an another way to educate students. It is relatively cheap, it is available, and might allow more students to be successful. On this basis, passing rate is irrelevant. Really, in a world where students can choose to study what they wish, at a pace that they wish, passing or failing really become besides the point. We are in the ideal world of learning, where self discovery, application, and geniune self worth is the measure of a person, not the arbitrary standards set by a third party. However MOOC has not been presented as another way to educate students. It has been presented as better, cheaper, faster option to educate students. To be sure MOOC is going to be an more effective and cheaper means to teach some students. It is a proven fact in teaching that some students need less intervention, are more self directed, and have a better ability to master the material without excessive helpt than others. These are the type of students we are very experienced at teaching, and in fact the students that everyone wants in their school. They are discipline, respond well to instruction, and can investigate confusing topics on their own. Educating these students has never been difficult. Keeping them on tract to meet some arbitrary third party expectation can be difficult, but that is another matter. So as long as these courses realize that they are not for everyone, all is good. As long they realize that many, if not most, student still need someone to customize and interpret the material, then I am willing to grant that failure rate is not an issue. But for many cases, I think that a good adaptive computer based system along with professional teachers providing scaffolding will be the future. I would not be surprised if in the near future we had most secondary classes were computer based facilitated by instructors, such as the current TFA people, while the professionals meet with them only once a week to diagnose issues and provide feedback.
Seriously, this is something that can be read when the attention span is longer and there is more context for the naughty bits. No one wants boring lists of who begat whom and who tried to kill whom. The incest and polygamy and slavery will appeal to many the undeveloped mind, but again, is this what kids should be exposed to?
If you want to indoctrinate a kid into the religious cult, use Little Pilgrims Progress. It is short, sweet, and makes everyone seems like loser. It is more effective at creating Christians than Twilight is a creating Vampires.
If you want just general 'miracles happen' try The Little Prince.
If you want debauchery and long winded elegant writing, then you are to the Canterbury Tales. This will help with the SAT scores
Yes, the bible is cultural model, but, as shown by the behavior of the average christian, it is not that is read as whole. Rather it is taken piecewise and then used to construct a reality that is acceptable to the user. As has been my experience, as one who was read it, the main use it to tell others that their bible based beliefs are much less than that. For instance, as those who push school prayer don't want to accept, the bible says that praying in a public secular setting is exactly what one does not want to do.