First, money down the drain. In any corporate venture acquisition costs are only part, and often not the majority cost, of utilizing a capital item. For instance, when I was working at a University about 50% were added to most purchase orders to pay for acquisition and running costs. At schools, which tend to pay for future costs, such as maintenance and supplies, out of the current budget, initial purchase prices always seem a bit high.
Second, I would strongly argue that pre WWII people were better educated than we are, or than the current generation of kids are. I know many many kids who know more Calculus than I did when I was in high school. Kids now much more about genetics, astronomy, physics that I did at there age. Kids were so dumb back then that, assuming they knew the planets, they thought Pluto was one of them.
Specifically talking about technology, all money invested is well worthwhile. In my high school we had a mainframe. Best investment the district could have made. We all left high school with skills that were in demand, and with the basis to acquire the skills that would soon be in demand. I am sure everyone was saying 'but can they read' and 'how are the test scores'. But no cared. We were going into the work force to make a lot of money or to the top colleges.
The key thing was that we were using, what at the time, was pretty advanced if not cutting edge technology to not only learn but to use as a tool to complete tasks. Is your argument that when kids graduate they are going to use pencils and slide rules? Are the females going to be sequester in a room to be human calculators? Maybe they will be manually flying airplanes?
The thing is that we are educating more kids in more complex techniques and skills that we ever have. Sometime people look at the educational outputs and see some kids that would have traditionally been successful and see them less so and from that infer that education is doing worse. But is it not. On the whole literacy rates have risen. Kids can do simple tasks, like program a DVR, while their parents cannot. The need for the trivia based educational system has been completely proven obsolete by the problem solving tasks that kids need to do know. Machines are so complex that a user manual is too inefficient, and knowing the vernacular of the machines is the only way to be successful. Oxford reports that in 20 years half of todays jobs will be gone. You will not be able to make a living in construction or sales. Technology has already significantly reduced the need for lawyers, the age of the massive law firm and large number of high earning partners is gone.
Tablets are the way to get machines into every students hands. It is affordable and practical. This is what kids will doing in 20 years. Don't you think it is what we should be teaching them?
I was thinking about this. We are now at a point where people who want to create art, not just sell records, are on an equal footing. Art has never been about a constant aesthetic. Just look at the change of music over the past 100 years. What is quality has mostly been driven by technological changes rather than artistic choices. We went from yelling into a horn microphone to record sounds onto wax cylinders, to crooning in electronic mics, to over driving operational amplifiers, to overdubbing using cassette tape. What would be marketed was what could be produced at a low enough cost so it would generate huge profits.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this in terms of art. For instance when paints were packaged into tubes, the plein air movement was developed. When photographs were pushing portrait painters out, there was a movement to more abstract images, that could not at the time be created by a machine.
And all this current music issues are really just lazy rich people complaining that are going to have to start working because the gravy train is over. They claim aesthetics because they want to be the masters of what is true and whole. They claim that everyone else has less talent, and not just less ethics, because they want to believe that they are the arbiters of who is qualified. They want to say their methods are the only ones that ever existed because they are not creative enough to understand that art is something that changes over time, i.e. we are no longer painting unproportioned animals on cave walls.
In the end art always benefits and those doing it only for money are ignored by history. Except for Andy Warhol, and he many not make it to the next century.
If one is going to be a volume business in the mobile phone business, one has to sell android. It is the only thing that competes with Apple. Nokia is volume. At it's height Nokia had about twice the sales of Apple phones sales. Ms has been at this for 15 years and has never broken 20% of the market, and has generally had duds. Now with MS money they can be a boutique shop selling phones that do nothing. Unless Google stops backing up Android with lots of free to the user stuff, or unless MS starts supply free stuff to the end user(big skydrive, free cloud exchange, free online office) people are not going to pay for the phone then monthly fees to use MS services. Even Apple keeps prices low.
Here is what I find interesting. I hear tv people talking about this through various media outlets and one big issue they have with streaming is that they can sell 15-20 minutes of commercials per hour of TV, but less than half that for streaming. Of course watching a tv is a much difference experience than streaming, On a TV value of the commercials are kept by producing commercials that can have an impact even with fast forward, and that people will wander around during the long commercial breaks. On the computer the commercials tend to be viewed.
Streaming is back to the begining of TV when 30 minute shows like the Honeymooners run 27 minutes instead of 22, and hour shows like gunsmoke was 50 minutes. If steaming includes 20 minutes of commericials per hour, then everyone is going to have ad blockers. Just like so many people flash blockers to keep the pollution of web pages.
Yes. In fact recent discoveries in physics has shown many of Newton's laws to be incorrect. We still teach them in high school and college, but that is probably just because physics people are particularly lazy. I am sure much of what
To be serious, science is a process, not a collection of trivia. This is often the disconnect of science people and non science people. For example we once thought there was an æther that light traveled. It was then found that there was not. Those who don't understand science take this as an indictment of science and it's inferiority to other paths to knowledge. Scientist, however, see it as evidence of the resilience and ability of science to lead us to more effective models of nature.
I guess we should distinguish between entertaining and providing entertainment. Many of my professors were entertaining. Most of the younger TAs and lecturers provided entertainment, if only eye candy. Good professors know how to keep a lecture interesting through varying of content and pattern. One of my professors would break up the lecture with his adventures at los alamos.
When I was young I saw Richard Feyman, had to be end of high school. It was the most engrossing couple hours of my life. A few years later when I took Modern, it motivated me to learn how to do a rudimentary Feynman Diagram. Admittedly he is unique in that he is an entertainer who was a Physicist, and not just a physicist who happens to play bongos.
For many years I have been able to buy TV remotes that work with any brand TV. My first universal remote was programmed in exactly this way, but copying the signal from the original remote. Now we have remotes that have a database of signals built in and you just punch in the signal.
It seems to me that there is a finite number of signals any security manufacturer will use, just like there are a finite number of 4 or six digit codes. The difference is that while a human may only be able to try 10 codes a minute on a keypad, a scanner should be able to increase that rate by a factor of 5. Thus a criminal could sit in a car across the street for 20 minutes and check 1000 codes to see if they can disarm the alarm. Or pretend to be delivering a package, leave the device there, and come back when in an hour to see if the house have been left insecure.
As an aside, many years ago when automatic garage doors became popular, and IR or radio transmitters were not cheap, I am told that they worked off car horns. The story goes that teens would drive down the street at night, honking their horns, to watch the garage doors go up. Security is always a compromise between convenience and actual security. The former does tend to win out.
In my experience as a freshmen in college, tenure or tenure track made no difference. Some of it, I think, had to do with class size. I had small honor classes with professors that I really was inspired to do well even if I did not. I basically bombed my major classes because they were large, and were taught by profs. I was in a small calculus class that was taught by a new young guy, basically was later told by a full prof at another university that we was lucky to have a job, and that was not so good. I am now in a class where we are taught, at least in part, by full professor, kind of middle aged, and it really reinforces my idea that being taught, as an adult, by someone who really understands the content is critical. Yes, as a child, or teen, pedagogy is important, but I do not think the purpose the college lecturer is classroom control or engagement over deep analysis. There are other places for kids to go to learn if they are not serious enough for college. The issue is hardly lazy teachers, but lazy college students conditioned who have not yet understood that learning is a personal task, not something that can be forced on them by an external agent. Or that college is not really about a sheet of paper that will make you rich.
I think there are a lot of variables that were not considered in this report. In any case, I wonder how important it is to 'inspire' in college. My degree plan did not have a lot of flexibility. I was inspired to go into another major, but that was because there were more opportunities to interact with full professors and more camaraderie among my fellow students. Not to mention a more laid back atmosphere and the assumption that the students were intelligent.
Here is what a valid experiment would look like. Find a similar research and non research university with comparable student populations. Again, in my experience, non research universities have professors much more beholden to the whims of the students, and must work to be entertainers. Controlling for standard variables, and giving a pretest and post test and entry survey and exit survey, see which students have more satisfaction and have grown more. I will concede that the non research university might win out at the end of the freshman year. But the freshman year does not a degree make.
I don't know if you read this correctly. I am not talking about buffoons selling the Tesla. I am talking about extremely high end firms who can connect to base that will buy a Tesla. Someone comes into to buy a Mercedes, see a Tesla, and maybe buys it. I have seen this happen. Or maybe when the used market comes up, this provides a trusted venue to buy them. This type of thing happened to me when I was looking for car. Thought I was going to buy one thing, ended up buying a Volvo, though never thought we would.
Honestly the dealer on these cars don't make money on repairs. The types of cars are reliable. They are built to last half a million miles. There are many that are in excellent condition that have been on the road for 40 years. After warranty, just like any other car, there are free lance mechanics that provide superior service to the dealer. I drive by one that is always crammed with mercedes, Ferrari, Porches, BMW, Audis, even old fiats.
As far as reliability of electric car, one of my friends has one. There is a lot of money to be made in it. It required expensive service.
In any case, as mentioned, maybe this will, in the long run, end the dealer monopoly. That would be fine. And maybe in few years when I am ready for another car if Tesla is not only for the 1% I might buy one, but only if they have charging stations. But I will believe that Tesla is going to produce a car for less than 40K when I see it.
I will also say right now I don't see why Tesla does not work with existing high end dealers in Texas. There are several that are extremely reputable that work with a number of high end cars(lotus, maybach) and are specifically able to deal with the clientele that Tesla wants. Recall that the original gliders were supplied by Lotus.
This is really just a fluke of history, like in some states you can't buy alcohol except from the state. I think, even though I agree that in the long run Tesla should be able to sell cars directly, at this point is simply the elite having a pissing match over who is going to get rich. It does not really effect any real person directly.
In fact the article makes a complete misstatement. I don't know anyone in Texas who could afford a 70K car could go to the local mall where Tesla has a viewing room, then buy a ticket to purchase the car. The only thing keepping such people from buying the Tesla, and would be many given the number of Lotus, Rolls Royce, not to mention a mercedes in every driveway, that exists in Texas, is the lack of charging stations, Right now there is one.
When Tesla has 10 charging station in Texas, then maybe they can complain. When even my grocery store has a charging station, one wonders why the problem is with Tesla.
RIght, it is the integration of the product. The iPhone actually is not a good phone, but it is a good pocket mobile device. If you want a phone, or a a TV streaming device, or a hotspot, then but another product that is engineered to do that.
The iPod was the same thing. No wireless, less space than a nomad, but I eventually replaced my nomad with an iPod because the firewire less me transfer music quickly, the build quality was much better, and the fact that I could move music quickly meant that I did not need very expensive removable storage on the Nomad.
We see this where computers where some laptops are sold on the basis on number of USB and HDMI ports.
The problem with the watch is that it has to be integrated with the phone and the computer or whatever cloud repository there is for data. To me the present use case for a watch is that the phone stays in your pocket and many thing, reading emails, making calls, video calls, etc are done through the watch. Pebble does a good job of this on Android, not so good job on iPhone. One can blame Apple for this, due to lockdown, but Samsung has not been able to do much better with their watch which works with exactly one upcoming phone.
So Apple will make the engineering compromises that will allow the watch to function as something, not quite a watch, not quite a wrist computer.
One thing about English is that is has been simplified and standardized. For a common language that is important. True, too many people whose families have spoken English for generations do not see to get as good a grasp of it as people who learned it as second, but that shows the resilience of the language.
Language is either about culture and politics or about communications and building a society. We see this in English now. People trying to keep the language 'pure', use it a political wedge, or otherwise try to segment society. But in the US, fortunately, we have a strong practical base that keeps the fundamentalist from destroying the country.
Still I would not say that China has a problem or that it needs to do something different. China is a huge country and given the number of people, and geography, it may not be practical to have everyone speak the same language. In the US there are places one can probably get by on Spanish or French. In much of China you are very much closer to India or the 'stans than Bejing.
On the hardware and software side, MS always focuses on more stuff, but not how that stuff is going to help anyone. MS Windows machines has always competed on more memory, faster processors, more USB ports, more slots. The software has feature lists long enough to choke a goat, but it was the mid 90's before we could change screen resolution without rebooting the computer, a small but significant annoyance.
The issue is that MS is not always to establish value. In software, the value of MS Office, for instance, to something like OpenOffice, is far from clear, at least to the consumer. MS Vista, 98, ME, all failed to establish value with many corporate interests and most consumers. I was unfortunate enough to have bought a computer when all you could get on PC was MS Windows 98, the computer never worked.
Then there is hardware. Faster processors, for instance, often do not lead to an improved end user experience either because MS has written an OS that is an unnecessary power hog, like Vista, or because other parts of the hardware, like a FSB or HD is slows everything down. Maybe there are a lot of USB ports, but maybe they are all USB 2.0.
Which is why when a MS product is simply buzzword compliant some make fun of it. We have seen it all before. Surface RT should have been a pretty good product. MS Kin should have been a pretty good product. But they are were simply pretty pieces put together into a pretty ugly whole.
increasingly teachers do not come from education backgrounds. They come backgrounds in which they majored in the subject and then got certifications to teach. The next step in this process is to have administrators get masters in a real subject, not just education or physical education or basket weaving.
At the primary school level, where pedagogy is so much more important than content, books and software is going to continue to play a key role. The goal here is to motivate a kid to achieve and learn, not really to teach content. It is too broad. Every primary school, however, should have music, math, visual arts, performing arts, science, and physed ancillary programs run by a person who has a degree in the subject and some level of professional experience.
Unions are trying to keep experienced teachers from being replaced by cheaper inexperienced teachers. States are trying to cut costs by making sure every classroom is staffed by a babysitter with at most three years experience. Both are defensible form a certain point of view. Experienced teachers, however, those who have made it to work for 160+ virtually contiguous days and engage their students in meaningful learning activities are worth keeping.
The results are known to most teachers. For instance, programs like AVID, which work well in the original group, are highly sensitive to population and teachers, so tend to be not so successful in larger application. These finding are widespread. Software programs are usually very good with average and above average motivated students, but not for unmotivated students. And showing understanding of a topic but not doing well on achievement tests is also a well known effect. A good teacher will motivate a student to achieve, but a test has no such ability. If someone stopped you on the street and asked you to write a five paragraph essay for no apparent reason, would you do you best? This is what it seems to so many students. Agree or not, this is what is going on. They have done well during the year, then we ask them to take a meaningless test that has little to do with anything. It is hard for child's mind to understand why.
12-24 year old define themselves with peer groups. At one time that meant smoking, even though no one forced anyone to smoke. It is just what one did. Before that you went to the malt shop.
Facebook for most people was a phase.I see more kids get over it earlier as their parents spend more time on it. Now companies are using it to try to reach a generation that is not on tv, and it me moving from a phase to a cost of doing business. No one forces you to cut out coupons to buy name brand products, but we do. It could be that facebook ends up being the broker of the kind of relationships that some people like to have with retail brands, in which case value will be added for some people. And the kids who like the freedom that facebooks gives them will not go away, just like when we smoked ciggarettes.
Certain stem degree does mean that you can compete. The highest LSAT score comes from phyics/math majors with engineering being a close second. Prelaw is one of the lowest. Math and physical science tend to the be highest scores on the MCAT. Premed tends to be the lowest.
I have said this before. A good stem education, which means that you are well versed in the physical sciences, math including linear algebra and calculus, the engineering process with a good understanding of mechanical and electrical systems, and able to use technology to leverage your abilities, will prepare you for whatever jobs you need to take in the future. Not the job right out of college or high school, any intelligent hard working person is going to make decent money in his or her 20's and maybe even 30's. Such an education will prepare you for the mid and end or career jobs and changes in career jobs that inevitable for many of us in a world where technology means jobs may not even last a generation. When I was in school we still had a teletype, and now we have mobile platforms. Wow.
The thing is that this was even known when I was in school. Parents were told that we were being prepared for high paying engineering jobs that were in abundance, because that is what parents want to hear. That their kids are guaranteed a high paying job. And this is true, at least where I grew up, where everyone I know, even from low ranking colleges, ended up with a job after they graduated engineering school. But to the students we were told that even if we did not end up in engineering, which many of us did not, this was one of the best possible preparations for college and jobs. And that was correct, although for me with a stem education I was much better prepared to get a tech job than easily succeed in college. But I am one data points, and many of my friends did very well in college.
I think that so many people are against funding a stem education because it does not create employees, or customers, for Walmart. It does, however, create people who can go and, like me and many people I know, even if a job is not available, can use their skills to hustle for a job. That is compete well in the market place and succeed. With widespread STEM opportunities, and I am not fan of that term BTW, we can capture the students with drive, motivation, and talent and focus their efforts on making the world a better place. Instead of just having them trinkets that no one needs.
Having a child accidentally die is a tragedy, and sometimes the parents are to blame. Like when they leave a loaded gun around a 5 year old. Or leave a pot of boiling water with the handle sticking out. Our toxic household chemicals on a low shelf. These are very preventable deaths.
But with buckeyballs it was a product that was very fun, and the cause of injury was not immediately apparent. That is, the kid has to swallow more than one and they had to coincidentally be in the GI tract at the same time but in different locations. Even I am not sure how this happens since they are magnets and tend to stay together. I guess eating them about an hour apart? In fact it seems that less than 30 children were injured and no died. For comparison, the about the same number die every year from ingestion of household products, and 143 children dead from gun violence.
So there are many things that parent might be charged for murder with, but buckeyballs are not one of them. They are not the reason kids die. But the lack of toys like buckeyballs is the are the reason kids grow up stupid and uncreative. yes, let give them star wars themed lego where they can just copy what other have done. They are safe, empty of all adventure.
Doing what you love, if you are good at it, does put bread on the table. I know plenty of musicians that make a living. The problem is when you make things sound too exciting. Particle physics is cool, but when I was in school everyone knew it was a very competitive environment. It was not what very many physics students would do. In fact, if you were willing to go into the rat race of post docs, you just got your masters and went to work for an oil company or whatever. Every saw the number of students on their third or fourth post doc. Everyone knew someone who just gave up and accepted a teaching position at community college or high school.
But if you loved what you did, and even if you didn't get to do particle physics all your life, teaching or whatever does put bread on the table, and you got to do what you loved for a while.
It is like sports. I knew this lawyer who loved baseball. He went to college on a full baseball scholarship. He was so envious of the people who could play baseball well enough to make money. But he wasn't, so became a lawyer. But playing baseball was what put bread on the table, through scholarships, until then.
I would say it was more an issue of managing expectations and the fan base expecting something for nothing.
When you "crowdfund" something you are giving money with really no basis for expecting anything in return. This is why I would rather just buy something instead of crowdfund it. I don't do investment, it is risky. I do do Kiva though for small amounts.
This is problem with kickstarter and the like. Managing expectations. It looks like you are buying a product when in fact you are giving money to someone to develop an idea. This illusion of buying a product is reinforced by the limitation on 'fund my life projects'.
In this case a game was produced. It sounds like due to financial constraints of running the game certain compromises had to made. This is standard. The initial concept is almost always unfeasible. Certain comprises have to be made during the engineering process. But the fact remains that apparently the money was used to develop a product that was, in general, like the product being advertised.
What the firm maybe should have done is said that the original product could not be developed, and, BTW, we have no contract to give you anything, so we will just take the work done and make this complete other product, which looks almost the same, but we promise isn't, and you can pay just like anyone else. Which really is what they did but they tried to sugarcoat a bit better than that.
First, I read this paper yesterday and for a piece of social science I was rather impressed with the methodology. I think they took care to cover the variables and carefully limit their conclusions to what could be inferred fro the experiment.
That said, the media reports, as normal, tend to focus on the headline value rather than the research. Although the paper does talk about poverty, it is in the context of having to live in poverty, not being poor. From the conclusion
The findings, in other words, are not about poor people, but about any people who find themselves poor.
The paper specifically talks about providing scaffolding to those who find themselves with funds, instead of just expecting them to act like an average person with enough money. The authors call the normal methods of intervention as incurring 'cognitive taxes' and say that things such as "Filling out long forms, preparing for a lengthy interview, deciphering new rules," should be minimized on the basis of this research. T
So I think that just saying poor people make poor financial decisions, or variations of that, is not really what is being concluded. We all make poor decisions, even if we are well off. I buy pints on Hagan Das for $4 that I really do not need with money I really do not have. Other people lease a BMW or go out and spend huge amounts on wine. Even if one has money today, it is hard to justify these extravagances for a purely rational point of view. A person spending every penny the make is certainly to some degree irrational no matter how much they make.
Rather, I think that the research can tell us what happens to people when they become fiscally stressed. People who are pepertually in this state are certain a prime concern, and we must take any effect on cognitive behavior into account, but anyone in financial straights are going to be effected as well. In the paper they use farmers as an example, and attempt to show that better decisions are made after a good harvest rather than later when thing are less abundant.
Here is how I would think about it using an example from the housing bubble. At first, when times were good, people bought hoses to live in or rented as they could. They paid their mortgages or rent and all was well. At time went on, and their friends were living better, and they felt poor, these people bought homes or bigger homes, often with adjustable rate, interest only, or buble mortgages. At some point they actually did become financially stressed, as property taxes went up, or repairs had to be made, or interests rate rose, and they begin to make truly poor decisions, such as borrowing equity from their homes to pay for vacations, or beer, or fancy dinners, or a new BMW.
Now clearly these people did not make these poor choices on their own. They were helped, even prodded. Which is, IMHO, the point. Perhaps we should not have policy that tend to push people into worse situations. It may not really the homeowners fault that they lost their house if cognitive function decreases with financial stress. It may not be students fault that they have big students loans if the school took advantage of, and ever promoted, the financial stress on the student or parents.
The problem with educational research and the 'PhD' they produce is that they really know little about research.For instance much of the research is done on the elementary, if we are lucky, the middle school level, and then extrapolated to high school students. This makes some sense as the basis or pedagogy is young children, and we have only seriously been trying to actively educated the genealogy teenage population for less than a hundred years, but really, get with the times. Even medical researchers have realized that if you are going make statements about women and heart attacks, you have to actually do the research on women, not just men and extrapolate.
Then there is the anecdotal evidence of the research. This guy programmed his TI, so everyone did and the reason no one does is because of the iPad. That is the silliest statement in the history of silly statements. I went to a school where everyone was taught to program in grade 9. Very few opted to take programming courses after that. For most people programming involved copying code out of a magazine. Saying that kids don't code because of iPad is like saying kids don't read because their library has no interesting books. Kids who want to do something will.
In any case, the basic premise is false. One can program on an iPad. Like in the old days, on can run use the iPad as a terminal. I prefer this because too many times kids learn to use an IDE rather than program. Last time I taught a programming course to high school students I set up accounts on my web server and the used a client on the PC to code. I used my iPad for demonstration. In a month they programmed a online game. If kids are not learning program, the issue is not hardware, but online resources for them play. In this world of Clouds, it is a shame that we don't have online development tools.
For those who are religiously attached to the idea that programing means you are local, there are Python interpreters for the iPad. I haven't used on because I am not learning to program. I have my tools already set up on my laptop. If these Pythons interpreters are not real, I am sure someone will let me know.
I am sure there are not powerful, but when on is thinking of the so-called habits of mind, power is not neccesary. One big thing programing does is concretely illustrate why cause and effect. It forces a student to think about process, and how to break that process up into steps. This is a freakingly hard this for many students to get. Also, if you learn how to swap values in variables you know something that not many do. And looping has it uses.
The tablet computer is a tool, and it is a incredibly useful tool. It does too much, so for some students it will be a distraction. But the same was said about the calculator and the PC. I am thankful every day that my teachers were not afraid to let me play with technology just because it might be distracting or dangerous. I would not have had any of my jobs if my teachers had held back my education in this way, or if my parent thought having a computer at home would just mean I would play games all the time(which I did too much). Everyone says we have to educate kids in modern methods, but too many educators think those modern methods are what was in vogue when they were in high school.
The reality is that the only reason we still use TI calculators instead of phones or tablets is because educators want to give the mathematically illiterate an equal opportunity, but want control what the machine can do. Otherwise they would just let students have a useful tool, like an HP.
This is really a question of how you define create more jobs. Technology has certainly created more kinds of jobs, and have allowed some people to work in jobs not directly related to the accumulation of food, shelter, and general stuff. It has even allowed more people to participate in useful work as the requirements for such work has broadened. This has been the case, and there is no reason to believe it will not continue to be the case. The fact that there will be some in some generations that cannot adapt is simply to be expected. Not all people have equal ability to gain or exercise skill. Technology has certainly increased the rate of such generational shift from once every few generations to once or more per generation. So this question is not on the table.
But what is being discussed here in the example of mainframe staffing is not the number of jobs, or even the type of jobs, but the number of person-hours necessary to complete a job. This question is not on the table either. Technology will always increase the efficiency of the worker and always reduce the number of people needed for a job until it is effectively zero and those people have to find other ways to work. For instance making clothes and food preparation has become so cheap that it has become more economically advantageous to outsource those jobs from the individual family to the corporate suppliers. How many people make a cake from scratch? Even the simplest food to make, rice crispy squares, are store bought. Cookies are made from dough, not from flour and eggs.
What is arguable is where the increased in efficiencies For the most part these efficiencies seem to be reflected in corporate profits, rather than worker benefits. As time goes on, if we are going to have a consumer culture where people are working, these efficiencies are going to have to be reflected in worker compensation. I would suggest that the total compensation is not going to increase, but the amount expected work hours will have to decrease so we can employ more people. For a average worker the pay will have to rise from $20 to $30 an hour as the work day moves from 8 hours to 6 hours. I know that for some people thinks this would make us very lazy, but i assume we already look lazy from those who worked in the early 20th century.
As a casual gamer, who enjoys playing video games but is not a fanatic about it,I would say this about most game companies. EA lost me a long time ago because they did not let me play my games on whatever computer I wanted. It just made it too hard to play a game that I bought. Lately I did play the freemium mobile games, but it also just got annoying. I would buy stuff so but there would still be ads. The game would require one to buy more stuff to do things that were once just part of the game. I think in many cases firms believe they can only make money from the hard core gamers who pay a premium and are willing to jump some hurdles for the privileged of playing the game. It may be so, and if so I will go off and do something else
I don't understand how people think technology destroys jobs, or at least on a net basis destroys jobs. In 1950 the US had a population of perhaps 80 to 100 million potential paid workers, that is people 18-65. This number was reduced as women often worked unpaid in the home, and not so many people worked until 65. Today that number is approaching 150 million. This is with more women working, more cases where both parents work, and more cases where people work up to, even beyond, 65. In addition, the population age 25-44, the prime working age, has doubled and now encompass about 2/3 of the working population, up from about half.
If technology destroys jobs, they we would see a hugely increasing unemployment rate as more workers enter the workforce and are unable to find these destroyed. Yet the long term unemployment rate has only increased one or two percentage points over the past 60 years.
Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now. Could it be that really, now one wants to be the guy that pumps the human poop from the style latrines. Certainly those jobs are still available, but severely reduced.
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Second, I would strongly argue that pre WWII people were better educated than we are, or than the current generation of kids are. I know many many kids who know more Calculus than I did when I was in high school. Kids now much more about genetics, astronomy, physics that I did at there age. Kids were so dumb back then that, assuming they knew the planets, they thought Pluto was one of them.
Specifically talking about technology, all money invested is well worthwhile. In my high school we had a mainframe. Best investment the district could have made. We all left high school with skills that were in demand, and with the basis to acquire the skills that would soon be in demand. I am sure everyone was saying 'but can they read' and 'how are the test scores'. But no cared. We were going into the work force to make a lot of money or to the top colleges.
The key thing was that we were using, what at the time, was pretty advanced if not cutting edge technology to not only learn but to use as a tool to complete tasks. Is your argument that when kids graduate they are going to use pencils and slide rules? Are the females going to be sequester in a room to be human calculators? Maybe they will be manually flying airplanes?
The thing is that we are educating more kids in more complex techniques and skills that we ever have. Sometime people look at the educational outputs and see some kids that would have traditionally been successful and see them less so and from that infer that education is doing worse. But is it not. On the whole literacy rates have risen. Kids can do simple tasks, like program a DVR, while their parents cannot. The need for the trivia based educational system has been completely proven obsolete by the problem solving tasks that kids need to do know. Machines are so complex that a user manual is too inefficient, and knowing the vernacular of the machines is the only way to be successful. Oxford reports that in 20 years half of todays jobs will be gone. You will not be able to make a living in construction or sales. Technology has already significantly reduced the need for lawyers, the age of the massive law firm and large number of high earning partners is gone.
Tablets are the way to get machines into every students hands. It is affordable and practical. This is what kids will doing in 20 years. Don't you think it is what we should be teaching them?
why just criticize without adding anything to the conversation.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this in terms of art. For instance when paints were packaged into tubes, the plein air movement was developed. When photographs were pushing portrait painters out, there was a movement to more abstract images, that could not at the time be created by a machine.
And all this current music issues are really just lazy rich people complaining that are going to have to start working because the gravy train is over. They claim aesthetics because they want to be the masters of what is true and whole. They claim that everyone else has less talent, and not just less ethics, because they want to believe that they are the arbiters of who is qualified. They want to say their methods are the only ones that ever existed because they are not creative enough to understand that art is something that changes over time, i.e. we are no longer painting unproportioned animals on cave walls.
In the end art always benefits and those doing it only for money are ignored by history. Except for Andy Warhol, and he many not make it to the next century.
If one is going to be a volume business in the mobile phone business, one has to sell android. It is the only thing that competes with Apple. Nokia is volume. At it's height Nokia had about twice the sales of Apple phones sales. Ms has been at this for 15 years and has never broken 20% of the market, and has generally had duds. Now with MS money they can be a boutique shop selling phones that do nothing. Unless Google stops backing up Android with lots of free to the user stuff, or unless MS starts supply free stuff to the end user(big skydrive, free cloud exchange, free online office) people are not going to pay for the phone then monthly fees to use MS services. Even Apple keeps prices low.
Streaming is back to the begining of TV when 30 minute shows like the Honeymooners run 27 minutes instead of 22, and hour shows like gunsmoke was 50 minutes. If steaming includes 20 minutes of commericials per hour, then everyone is going to have ad blockers. Just like so many people flash blockers to keep the pollution of web pages.
To be serious, science is a process, not a collection of trivia. This is often the disconnect of science people and non science people. For example we once thought there was an æther that light traveled. It was then found that there was not. Those who don't understand science take this as an indictment of science and it's inferiority to other paths to knowledge. Scientist, however, see it as evidence of the resilience and ability of science to lead us to more effective models of nature.
When I was young I saw Richard Feyman, had to be end of high school. It was the most engrossing couple hours of my life. A few years later when I took Modern, it motivated me to learn how to do a rudimentary Feynman Diagram. Admittedly he is unique in that he is an entertainer who was a Physicist, and not just a physicist who happens to play bongos.
It seems to me that there is a finite number of signals any security manufacturer will use, just like there are a finite number of 4 or six digit codes. The difference is that while a human may only be able to try 10 codes a minute on a keypad, a scanner should be able to increase that rate by a factor of 5. Thus a criminal could sit in a car across the street for 20 minutes and check 1000 codes to see if they can disarm the alarm. Or pretend to be delivering a package, leave the device there, and come back when in an hour to see if the house have been left insecure.
As an aside, many years ago when automatic garage doors became popular, and IR or radio transmitters were not cheap, I am told that they worked off car horns. The story goes that teens would drive down the street at night, honking their horns, to watch the garage doors go up. Security is always a compromise between convenience and actual security. The former does tend to win out.
I think there are a lot of variables that were not considered in this report. In any case, I wonder how important it is to 'inspire' in college. My degree plan did not have a lot of flexibility. I was inspired to go into another major, but that was because there were more opportunities to interact with full professors and more camaraderie among my fellow students. Not to mention a more laid back atmosphere and the assumption that the students were intelligent.
Here is what a valid experiment would look like. Find a similar research and non research university with comparable student populations. Again, in my experience, non research universities have professors much more beholden to the whims of the students, and must work to be entertainers. Controlling for standard variables, and giving a pretest and post test and entry survey and exit survey, see which students have more satisfaction and have grown more. I will concede that the non research university might win out at the end of the freshman year. But the freshman year does not a degree make.
Honestly the dealer on these cars don't make money on repairs. The types of cars are reliable. They are built to last half a million miles. There are many that are in excellent condition that have been on the road for 40 years. After warranty, just like any other car, there are free lance mechanics that provide superior service to the dealer. I drive by one that is always crammed with mercedes, Ferrari, Porches, BMW, Audis, even old fiats.
As far as reliability of electric car, one of my friends has one. There is a lot of money to be made in it. It required expensive service.
In any case, as mentioned, maybe this will, in the long run, end the dealer monopoly. That would be fine. And maybe in few years when I am ready for another car if Tesla is not only for the 1% I might buy one, but only if they have charging stations. But I will believe that Tesla is going to produce a car for less than 40K when I see it.
This is really just a fluke of history, like in some states you can't buy alcohol except from the state. I think, even though I agree that in the long run Tesla should be able to sell cars directly, at this point is simply the elite having a pissing match over who is going to get rich. It does not really effect any real person directly.
In fact the article makes a complete misstatement. I don't know anyone in Texas who could afford a 70K car could go to the local mall where Tesla has a viewing room, then buy a ticket to purchase the car. The only thing keepping such people from buying the Tesla, and would be many given the number of Lotus, Rolls Royce, not to mention a mercedes in every driveway, that exists in Texas, is the lack of charging stations, Right now there is one.
When Tesla has 10 charging station in Texas, then maybe they can complain. When even my grocery store has a charging station, one wonders why the problem is with Tesla.
The iPod was the same thing. No wireless, less space than a nomad, but I eventually replaced my nomad with an iPod because the firewire less me transfer music quickly, the build quality was much better, and the fact that I could move music quickly meant that I did not need very expensive removable storage on the Nomad.
We see this where computers where some laptops are sold on the basis on number of USB and HDMI ports.
The problem with the watch is that it has to be integrated with the phone and the computer or whatever cloud repository there is for data. To me the present use case for a watch is that the phone stays in your pocket and many thing, reading emails, making calls, video calls, etc are done through the watch. Pebble does a good job of this on Android, not so good job on iPhone. One can blame Apple for this, due to lockdown, but Samsung has not been able to do much better with their watch which works with exactly one upcoming phone.
So Apple will make the engineering compromises that will allow the watch to function as something, not quite a watch, not quite a wrist computer.
Language is either about culture and politics or about communications and building a society. We see this in English now. People trying to keep the language 'pure', use it a political wedge, or otherwise try to segment society. But in the US, fortunately, we have a strong practical base that keeps the fundamentalist from destroying the country.
Still I would not say that China has a problem or that it needs to do something different. China is a huge country and given the number of people, and geography, it may not be practical to have everyone speak the same language. In the US there are places one can probably get by on Spanish or French. In much of China you are very much closer to India or the 'stans than Bejing.
The issue is that MS is not always to establish value. In software, the value of MS Office, for instance, to something like OpenOffice, is far from clear, at least to the consumer. MS Vista, 98, ME, all failed to establish value with many corporate interests and most consumers. I was unfortunate enough to have bought a computer when all you could get on PC was MS Windows 98, the computer never worked.
Then there is hardware. Faster processors, for instance, often do not lead to an improved end user experience either because MS has written an OS that is an unnecessary power hog, like Vista, or because other parts of the hardware, like a FSB or HD is slows everything down. Maybe there are a lot of USB ports, but maybe they are all USB 2.0.
Which is why when a MS product is simply buzzword compliant some make fun of it. We have seen it all before. Surface RT should have been a pretty good product. MS Kin should have been a pretty good product. But they are were simply pretty pieces put together into a pretty ugly whole.
At the primary school level, where pedagogy is so much more important than content, books and software is going to continue to play a key role. The goal here is to motivate a kid to achieve and learn, not really to teach content. It is too broad. Every primary school, however, should have music, math, visual arts, performing arts, science, and physed ancillary programs run by a person who has a degree in the subject and some level of professional experience.
Unions are trying to keep experienced teachers from being replaced by cheaper inexperienced teachers. States are trying to cut costs by making sure every classroom is staffed by a babysitter with at most three years experience. Both are defensible form a certain point of view. Experienced teachers, however, those who have made it to work for 160+ virtually contiguous days and engage their students in meaningful learning activities are worth keeping.
The results are known to most teachers. For instance, programs like AVID, which work well in the original group, are highly sensitive to population and teachers, so tend to be not so successful in larger application. These finding are widespread. Software programs are usually very good with average and above average motivated students, but not for unmotivated students. And showing understanding of a topic but not doing well on achievement tests is also a well known effect. A good teacher will motivate a student to achieve, but a test has no such ability. If someone stopped you on the street and asked you to write a five paragraph essay for no apparent reason, would you do you best? This is what it seems to so many students. Agree or not, this is what is going on. They have done well during the year, then we ask them to take a meaningless test that has little to do with anything. It is hard for child's mind to understand why.
Facebook for most people was a phase.I see more kids get over it earlier as their parents spend more time on it. Now companies are using it to try to reach a generation that is not on tv, and it me moving from a phase to a cost of doing business. No one forces you to cut out coupons to buy name brand products, but we do. It could be that facebook ends up being the broker of the kind of relationships that some people like to have with retail brands, in which case value will be added for some people. And the kids who like the freedom that facebooks gives them will not go away, just like when we smoked ciggarettes.
I have said this before. A good stem education, which means that you are well versed in the physical sciences, math including linear algebra and calculus, the engineering process with a good understanding of mechanical and electrical systems, and able to use technology to leverage your abilities, will prepare you for whatever jobs you need to take in the future. Not the job right out of college or high school, any intelligent hard working person is going to make decent money in his or her 20's and maybe even 30's. Such an education will prepare you for the mid and end or career jobs and changes in career jobs that inevitable for many of us in a world where technology means jobs may not even last a generation. When I was in school we still had a teletype, and now we have mobile platforms. Wow.
The thing is that this was even known when I was in school. Parents were told that we were being prepared for high paying engineering jobs that were in abundance, because that is what parents want to hear. That their kids are guaranteed a high paying job. And this is true, at least where I grew up, where everyone I know, even from low ranking colleges, ended up with a job after they graduated engineering school. But to the students we were told that even if we did not end up in engineering, which many of us did not, this was one of the best possible preparations for college and jobs. And that was correct, although for me with a stem education I was much better prepared to get a tech job than easily succeed in college. But I am one data points, and many of my friends did very well in college.
I think that so many people are against funding a stem education because it does not create employees, or customers, for Walmart. It does, however, create people who can go and, like me and many people I know, even if a job is not available, can use their skills to hustle for a job. That is compete well in the market place and succeed. With widespread STEM opportunities, and I am not fan of that term BTW, we can capture the students with drive, motivation, and talent and focus their efforts on making the world a better place. Instead of just having them trinkets that no one needs.
But with buckeyballs it was a product that was very fun, and the cause of injury was not immediately apparent. That is, the kid has to swallow more than one and they had to coincidentally be in the GI tract at the same time but in different locations. Even I am not sure how this happens since they are magnets and tend to stay together. I guess eating them about an hour apart? In fact it seems that less than 30 children were injured and no died. For comparison, the about the same number die every year from ingestion of household products, and 143 children dead from gun violence.
So there are many things that parent might be charged for murder with, but buckeyballs are not one of them. They are not the reason kids die. But the lack of toys like buckeyballs is the are the reason kids grow up stupid and uncreative. yes, let give them star wars themed lego where they can just copy what other have done. They are safe, empty of all adventure.
But if you loved what you did, and even if you didn't get to do particle physics all your life, teaching or whatever does put bread on the table, and you got to do what you loved for a while.
It is like sports. I knew this lawyer who loved baseball. He went to college on a full baseball scholarship. He was so envious of the people who could play baseball well enough to make money. But he wasn't, so became a lawyer. But playing baseball was what put bread on the table, through scholarships, until then.
When you "crowdfund" something you are giving money with really no basis for expecting anything in return. This is why I would rather just buy something instead of crowdfund it. I don't do investment, it is risky. I do do Kiva though for small amounts.
This is problem with kickstarter and the like. Managing expectations. It looks like you are buying a product when in fact you are giving money to someone to develop an idea. This illusion of buying a product is reinforced by the limitation on 'fund my life projects'.
In this case a game was produced. It sounds like due to financial constraints of running the game certain compromises had to made. This is standard. The initial concept is almost always unfeasible. Certain comprises have to be made during the engineering process. But the fact remains that apparently the money was used to develop a product that was, in general, like the product being advertised.
What the firm maybe should have done is said that the original product could not be developed, and, BTW, we have no contract to give you anything, so we will just take the work done and make this complete other product, which looks almost the same, but we promise isn't, and you can pay just like anyone else. Which really is what they did but they tried to sugarcoat a bit better than that.
That said, the media reports, as normal, tend to focus on the headline value rather than the research. Although the paper does talk about poverty, it is in the context of having to live in poverty, not being poor. From the conclusion
The findings, in other words, are not about poor people, but about any people who find themselves poor.
The paper specifically talks about providing scaffolding to those who find themselves with funds, instead of just expecting them to act like an average person with enough money. The authors call the normal methods of intervention as incurring 'cognitive taxes' and say that things such as "Filling out long forms, preparing for a lengthy interview, deciphering new rules," should be minimized on the basis of this research. T
So I think that just saying poor people make poor financial decisions, or variations of that, is not really what is being concluded. We all make poor decisions, even if we are well off. I buy pints on Hagan Das for $4 that I really do not need with money I really do not have. Other people lease a BMW or go out and spend huge amounts on wine. Even if one has money today, it is hard to justify these extravagances for a purely rational point of view. A person spending every penny the make is certainly to some degree irrational no matter how much they make.
Rather, I think that the research can tell us what happens to people when they become fiscally stressed. People who are pepertually in this state are certain a prime concern, and we must take any effect on cognitive behavior into account, but anyone in financial straights are going to be effected as well. In the paper they use farmers as an example, and attempt to show that better decisions are made after a good harvest rather than later when thing are less abundant.
Here is how I would think about it using an example from the housing bubble. At first, when times were good, people bought hoses to live in or rented as they could. They paid their mortgages or rent and all was well. At time went on, and their friends were living better, and they felt poor, these people bought homes or bigger homes, often with adjustable rate, interest only, or buble mortgages. At some point they actually did become financially stressed, as property taxes went up, or repairs had to be made, or interests rate rose, and they begin to make truly poor decisions, such as borrowing equity from their homes to pay for vacations, or beer, or fancy dinners, or a new BMW.
Now clearly these people did not make these poor choices on their own. They were helped, even prodded. Which is, IMHO, the point. Perhaps we should not have policy that tend to push people into worse situations. It may not really the homeowners fault that they lost their house if cognitive function decreases with financial stress. It may not be students fault that they have big students loans if the school took advantage of, and ever promoted, the financial stress on the student or parents.
Then there is the anecdotal evidence of the research. This guy programmed his TI, so everyone did and the reason no one does is because of the iPad. That is the silliest statement in the history of silly statements. I went to a school where everyone was taught to program in grade 9. Very few opted to take programming courses after that. For most people programming involved copying code out of a magazine. Saying that kids don't code because of iPad is like saying kids don't read because their library has no interesting books. Kids who want to do something will.
In any case, the basic premise is false. One can program on an iPad. Like in the old days, on can run use the iPad as a terminal. I prefer this because too many times kids learn to use an IDE rather than program. Last time I taught a programming course to high school students I set up accounts on my web server and the used a client on the PC to code. I used my iPad for demonstration. In a month they programmed a online game. If kids are not learning program, the issue is not hardware, but online resources for them play. In this world of Clouds, it is a shame that we don't have online development tools.
For those who are religiously attached to the idea that programing means you are local, there are Python interpreters for the iPad. I haven't used on because I am not learning to program. I have my tools already set up on my laptop. If these Pythons interpreters are not real, I am sure someone will let me know.
I am sure there are not powerful, but when on is thinking of the so-called habits of mind, power is not neccesary. One big thing programing does is concretely illustrate why cause and effect. It forces a student to think about process, and how to break that process up into steps. This is a freakingly hard this for many students to get. Also, if you learn how to swap values in variables you know something that not many do. And looping has it uses.
The tablet computer is a tool, and it is a incredibly useful tool. It does too much, so for some students it will be a distraction. But the same was said about the calculator and the PC. I am thankful every day that my teachers were not afraid to let me play with technology just because it might be distracting or dangerous. I would not have had any of my jobs if my teachers had held back my education in this way, or if my parent thought having a computer at home would just mean I would play games all the time(which I did too much). Everyone says we have to educate kids in modern methods, but too many educators think those modern methods are what was in vogue when they were in high school.
The reality is that the only reason we still use TI calculators instead of phones or tablets is because educators want to give the mathematically illiterate an equal opportunity, but want control what the machine can do. Otherwise they would just let students have a useful tool, like an HP.
But what is being discussed here in the example of mainframe staffing is not the number of jobs, or even the type of jobs, but the number of person-hours necessary to complete a job. This question is not on the table either. Technology will always increase the efficiency of the worker and always reduce the number of people needed for a job until it is effectively zero and those people have to find other ways to work. For instance making clothes and food preparation has become so cheap that it has become more economically advantageous to outsource those jobs from the individual family to the corporate suppliers. How many people make a cake from scratch? Even the simplest food to make, rice crispy squares, are store bought. Cookies are made from dough, not from flour and eggs.
What is arguable is where the increased in efficiencies For the most part these efficiencies seem to be reflected in corporate profits, rather than worker benefits. As time goes on, if we are going to have a consumer culture where people are working, these efficiencies are going to have to be reflected in worker compensation. I would suggest that the total compensation is not going to increase, but the amount expected work hours will have to decrease so we can employ more people. For a average worker the pay will have to rise from $20 to $30 an hour as the work day moves from 8 hours to 6 hours. I know that for some people thinks this would make us very lazy, but i assume we already look lazy from those who worked in the early 20th century.
As a casual gamer, who enjoys playing video games but is not a fanatic about it,I would say this about most game companies. EA lost me a long time ago because they did not let me play my games on whatever computer I wanted. It just made it too hard to play a game that I bought. Lately I did play the freemium mobile games, but it also just got annoying. I would buy stuff so but there would still be ads. The game would require one to buy more stuff to do things that were once just part of the game. I think in many cases firms believe they can only make money from the hard core gamers who pay a premium and are willing to jump some hurdles for the privileged of playing the game. It may be so, and if so I will go off and do something else
If technology destroys jobs, they we would see a hugely increasing unemployment rate as more workers enter the workforce and are unable to find these destroyed. Yet the long term unemployment rate has only increased one or two percentage points over the past 60 years.
Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now. Could it be that really, now one wants to be the guy that pumps the human poop from the style latrines. Certainly those jobs are still available, but severely reduced.