the idea is that charging a fee for use would also incurr costs like increased customer expectations and service levels. realistically only about 1% would upgrade to a paid service, and that would be for active users. If one bills yearly, $10-$15, most of that would be used for adminstrative costs. web based serices on the order of FB charge on the order of $50-$75 dollars a year.
In either of those cases, the seller is the sucker. If the seller has to sell, then they cannot afford to wait for a good price and you get the deal. It is cynical, but also reality. one can say that both parties are recieving benifits, but that does not mean that one party is not getting greater benifits.
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to volenteer for a non profit. I was able to complete and maintain a project over a number of years. This allowed me to learn the tools, how to interact with stakeholders, deliver a product, and accept often overly critical suggestions.
i believe, this as much if not more than skills, is critical to freelance work. One must learn the maturity and ability to work through requirements, develop a solution that respects client wishes but is practicle to implement in reasonable time and moeny, and then not panic when all that changes after what you think is delivery.
In the end build something that shows that you know what you are doing Do not accept nothing from a for profit concern . When I was 19 I was billing over US$15 per hour with little experience. Of course not everyone who thought they knew MS Office was presenting themselves as compentant computer analysts and billing minimum wage.
it is not about the war on sex. the fact that young people don't have fun with sex, and think that pentration and conquest is the purpose of sex is a result on the war on sex, really a result of some peoples idea that sex is a means to an end or a weapon. The reason for child porn laws is to protect the privacy of the child, just like the reason for rape laws is to discourage men from spreading thier genetic material through force. The people resist laws to discourage this indicates they do not see women or children as equals.
this guy is takin an extremely low probability risk, and converting it into a reason to limit the privacy of other. It is like the Us governmnet using 9/11 as an excuse to hire perverts to fondl;e our genitils as we get on a plane.
Here is the thing with child p0rn, and I am not just talking about parent filming thier kids playing, If I were wearing google glasses and I did see a rape of some small child, first I presume that I would not be in posession of child porn, but in posession of evidence. Second I would hope that any google device would automatically strem all content to the world, but wouldhave some timel delay. Third I would hope that there would be a way to at least delete content ffom the google servers. From that point on possesion would indicate intent. I know these last two are antithetical to googles modus operandi, they want to keep and know everything, just look at the WiFI snooping which required at least two governemt requests to delete, data that they said the did not even want.
In any case the issue here is not the adult that might get caught up in an unfortunate sitation. We are adults, we can and do make decisions, and we know how to deal or not deal with the fallout. We know that we may see things we don't want to see and those of us who are mature and sane simply deal with it. We may choose to put explicity content online, and we deal with it. But a child is not in control and if we allow possesion then we implicitely allow distribution and this is a problem. Imagine a child is raped at 10. The footage is caught and not actively destroyed. 10 years later it reemerges and the adult has to deal with graphic images of his or her violation as a child. this is the violation of privacy to which I previously refered. Posesion of child porn promotes a double crime. It not only promotes the violation of the child, but also promotes the violation of the privacy of the adult.
They have not confirmed how much it will cost to opt out of ads. We don't know if the cheap LTE is going to be ad supported. In the end, as I argued beofre, we don;t know what the true cost of this device is going to be. Justy like an iPad is going to cost at least 680 for the first year, we don't really know that the kindle fire with lte is going to cost only $550 for the same period. Amazon wants us to believe that the Fire is $400 less than a comparaple iPad, but we really don't know. Not until the full details of pricing is released
BTW, one oif the most annoying features of the Fire is no obvious way to cusotmize the home screen. This is celarly a feature contemplated for a while now.
I still use google but that is just because I udepend on google docs. Otherwise I would use bing. Too many of google results are link farms and the like. Due to Google dependence on ads, and it's focus on fighting 'poiracy' basically most useful thigs are gone.
Seriously, I never thought the that Galileo mad this. I have read ome stuff, and never came across this claim. I don't know if he made anything. My understanding is that he came up with some idea, had a very skilled craftsperson model it and over time created a product or apparatus. The military compass is one example, though in that case he may not have the first to create it.
On the Apple ][ basic was included and third party compilers were very affordable. On the Mac up OS 9 documentation for the API was more complete than MS ever was, and compilers were very affordable. There was never the idea that developers had to pay for acces to the API use or information, as in MS charging $500 then $1000 for MSDN. For OS X he compiler was free, paying extra got real perks, not just access to a website. When the iPhone came out, the ability to code for the phone was included in the compiler, $99 a year to run the app, which is bargian. I know that some people say that MS gives away visual studio, but anyone who says that has not tried to write a non trivial app using the free version.
MS is just doing what it always does. Nickeling a diming consumers, pitting developers against each other, and making a killing in the proces.
I have not seen any details, as yet, on prices for data over 250MB. If they are going to be large, then the value of machine will not really meet the "$400" saving that Amazon is advertising. For instance, if each gig is another $100 a year, then 3 gig is 300, which is now approaching a year of data on ATT.
Also, how long is this deal going to available. Is it going to avalable for a second year, or it only with purchase. How are upgrades going to be handled? Do I lose my $50 is I upgrade to a larger plan. There are many ways to hide costs in this situation,
This is why I don't really care about 4G. The move from Edge to 3G was necessary because it converted a phone from a glorified mobile email device to a true internet device. Right now on my 3G iPhone, without even full bars, I have at least 1 Mbps connectivity, sometime approaching 3 mps. The ping time always sucks, sometime approaching half a second, but data transfer. Just like when I am a WIFi connection the problem seems to be bloated pages and Google Analytics. I might see a page spend several seconds looking for analytics. Slashdot for instance will require a bit extra time to find and render on my phone, but from what I can tell it is the rendering, and the need to get to multiple sources that take the very long time load. Even on a computer it can take 10 seconds, and that is with speeds in excess of 50 Mbps.
So in the first approximation, I have no idea if 4G is going to make the ping time any shorter. If ping time is 250ms, and there are 20 different sites that have to be polled for ads, then that is 5 seconds right there. Then of course is the data limits. Double the speed means double the amount of bloat that a web page can use. Just look at what happened when most people had broadband. Web developers decided it was ok to put twice as many ads with twice as much data each.
This may be for real, and may be a good model. Amazon already pays a blanket fee to distribute books to the kindle. They are probably not marking up what they pay for data very much to the end user. The device is the same price as the iPad, so they appear to be leveraging their bulk data buying to attract consumers.
This will certainly be a good selling point. I have 250MB limit on some of my devices. Given that most of my time is spent in WiFi vicinity, I don't really go over. For most people who are not going to watch movies on the road that will be enough. I do wonder if streaming from amazon is going to be including in the limit, or if they want to push the cloud enough to make it not count against the limit. If Amazon did allow you to stream movies that you bought without penalty, that would be a good reason to buy the kindle.
It is also interesting to compare this strategy against the Google strategy. Amazon has well priced good products with a customized Android interface backed by a cheap data plan and lots of content. The OEMs working with Google to put out chrome books and tablets tend to not have the content, are not leveraging data plans that Google certainly has the power to acquire, and in the end are not selling product. Look at the chromebook lease deals. $30 a month for a computer that will not work without an internet connection, and often does not include mobile connectivity options.
What I always found amusing is that a well regulated militia is limited to personal firearms. What battle in the late 18th century was won with personal side arms, though reading through gun nuts blogs shows a lack of knowledge of this. I mean one could even hardly storm a castle with just a automatic rifle. You would be taken down by the well protected archers on the walls, not to mention the hot oil. My issue with the organizations like the NRA is that they tend to promote the toys, but not the well regulated malitia that would stand between the populous and foreign or domestic raiding force. Where is the support of rocketry clubs that could actually provide a real defense against helicopters that would place boots on the ground? Clustering a few E engines in a simple shell could deliver enough reactant to be seriously annoying. But all they talk about is how a few pop guns are going to fend off the tanks and hummers.
Not all students cost the same to educate. This is proven in the fact that charter schools, schools like KIPP, who are not comprehensive, require parents to be proactive in gaining admission, and can more easily expel kids, all are based on that kids can be educated more cheaply. This is true if one filters out the expensive kids. In particular many schools do not provide special education programs, GT Programs, career programs, language programs because they cry to the government that they do not have money.
Much in "Educational Research" is nor valid research. Many terms are undefined, measuring student growth is nearly impossible, and controlling for SES is often not done in a statistically valid manner. Teacher performance can be as simple as an administrator seeing completed worksheets every day. Improved student performance may simply be a school that cheats on tests. It has been known to happen. The research too often is funded by interested parties looking for an outcome. Right now what the interested parties want is validation that generic recent college graduates are the best teachers, so hiring them for a few years, knowing they will leave before vesting, is the best thing to do. Teacher performance not correlating to student performance is key to this finding. OTOH, a teacher that is only going to stay in a couple years, is paid bonuses bassed on student performance, is not going to worry about losing a teaching license if she is caught letting her student cheat in the way that a career teacher who needs her job is.
We have to be brutally honest about poverty. Our society is based on the idea that some people are going to basically be consumers. There is not meaningful work for them. If they can raise a family to consumer product that manufacturers need to have consumed, that is enough. Have you been to Walmart when the government checks come in? That is what I mean. There is nothing wrong with this. OTOH we don't have to have every generation be simply a consumer. We can teach kids to be innovators. This is where a public education can help. This is where Gates Foundation can help, but I think they are trying to be cut rate about it.
This is especially a problem in the city. In a given suburbs or rural area everyone is basically at the same level of dispair. The houses are generally the same, the people are the same. You don't know that you are culturally retarded if there are no example of better cultures. But in the city the kids see the inequity, they see that life can be better, they just don't know how to get there. So if the school is not well funded, if the teachers are not creative, then the children are not going to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities around them. We will have lost the productivity that we could have gained from moving a child from a consumer to an innovator. This is what one must believe in if one is going to value education and create a culture where it is valued. That any child is a potential contributing member of society, no matter if that child is benignly neglected in a mansion, or actively loved in a shack, or neglected and living on who ever has a spare couch. We must believe that funding a child's basic needs is not charity, not something that we can fight about for political gain, but the right thing to do from moral and practical standpoints. This is what the US stands for. We are not an aristocratic society where the son of a rich man automatically is entitled to all he wants. We are a place where given the basic opportunity of food, shelter, education, anyone can grow up to add to the GDP, which is really all that should matter.
The idea is diagnosing issue between a student and a content. In a traditional classroom this would be done by a quiz, after which a student would review what was missed. This is time consuming for the teacher and student and often is not adequately implemented. In a computer classroom, ideally, the content would be introduced, some questioned answered, and based on those answers topics reviewed. In both cases a motivated student will take the questions seriously and use the feedback to increase learning. A less motivated student will simply try to complete the questions as quickly as possible, this making the review material much less target, more random.
In this blended case the content is delivered offline, the students work problem sets online, and the data from these problem sets are delivered to the teacher so customized review sets can be developed. This is really useful, but Khan is far from unique. Without really analyzing the problem sets and seeing them in action, it is difficult to know if they provide long term useful information. The advantage is that the service is free. That said, IMHO, an integrated solution in which review and assessment is integrated is the better model.
First, when one looks at the metaresearch done by qualified person, what one sees again and again is that much of the mainstream education research is not valid. It does not correct for effects of SES, motivation, effects of self reporting. In terms of education reform, there are many small programs that work at a local level but the actual mechanisms of improvement are so poorly understood that expansion to the production level often fails.
In term of longer school days and longer school years, many of the schools that do this are unique. Most of the schools are not compulsory or comprehensive. This means that parents have to go through some proces greater than simple registration to gain entry, and students are much easier to expel. This implies that parent are going to be more involved and rules are going to be easier to implement. For instance, one major high school program implements a uniform binder that allows teachers and parents to monitor progress. Such a program is harder to implement in a comprehensive high school where one is required to educate all children, not just the ones that are easy to educate.
Another consideration is the type of teacher. Many extended day schools use temporary teachers that are in the profession to pay of college debt or earn scholarships for graduate school. While there is nothing wrong with such teachers, and these teachers can be effectively used to educate the more motivated student of fill critical vacancies, they are not going to be the highly effective teachers that are created from 3-5 years of experience. These are the teachers that can subconciosly create customized content for each student, who understands how to deliver content to a student who is not quite getting the point, who has seen enough failures to understand how to succeed. These are teachers who can work at a comprehensive school, where teaching is a high art. One may be able to teach 10 hours a day, six days a week, for a few years, but doing it for 10 is another matter
The reality is that implementing these types of programs at comprehensive schools are not working well. What is working well is giving experienced teachers and administrators flexibility. One flexibility I see on the horizon is a system of three independent section per year. Students can choose to take an academic load in any two of those sections. In the third the student can choose to take a "summer", do elective work, or perhaps there will be other options. It will be expensive, but a conclusion that is valid is that kid that does nothing for three months is going to fall behind his or her peers. In the past this was not an issue because doing farm work was far from doing nothing. Now city kids just sit in from a screen and watch videos and play video games. If they were to read a book or build something it would not be an issue.Therefore it becomes necessary for schools to be more active, though focusing on academics full year is certainly a huge mistake.
Point proven. If a house were a priority, one could afford it. It a computer were a priority, one could buy a mac. For most, who want to write memos, play video games, surf the web, a computer is not a priority, so paying for a mac is may not be good use of money.
As far as the specific house example is concerned, the numbers don't quite work as cleanly as you might think. After all expenses are factored, a $200,000 would be $1000 a month over thirty years with at least a 25% down payment. It is true that someone who did not have to rent or bills could save up for a house in about 5 years. This was summarized by the richest women in the world. Stop buying drugs and you won't be poor.
I spend a few weeks a year in less developed areas, i.e. areas with less than full coverage. The thing to remember is that there are areas, even those near highways, that have no significant data coverage. I have been a half mile off a US Route and my phone dropped to 2G.
One way that I solve this is to have one device on ATT and one device on Verizon. As bad a rap as ATT gets, there are areas where Verizon is not going to have a good signal.
Not everyone can afford a 52" LCD TV. Not everyone can afford a Mercedes GLK. Not everyone can afford a french door stainless steel refrigerator.
The median family in the US make around $50K or less a year, while the median house is more in the range of $200K. This means the median family cannot afford the median house.
Perhaps a quarter of homes do not have a computer, so is it elitist for those of who can own a computer to so do?
What one has depends on two variables: what one can earn and how one allocated the resources. When I was a kid i did not have a nice pair of jeans or a pair of Jordans but I did have an Apple computer. The only reason this sounds elitist is that so many people think these highly popular consumer products are an entitlement. It is like parents clamoring that a toy has been sold out for christmas. I know kids are very demanding but really. We should have some perspective here. There are all sorts of thing we cannot afford or cannot have. Life goes on.
What is elitist is thinking not being able to afford a Mac is the most critical problem one has.
I am not sure what protection the stock market gives. The people who invested in facebook during the IPO has lost half their money. The people who capitalized facebook has made money. You could have invested in Microsoft back in 2008 and have lost money due to the stock decline or inflation. People invested in Enron, Worldcom, all under the so-called stock protection, and lost everything. Sure there are now more regulations, but that seem more there to protect CEOs then investors. The reality is that the stock market is not a magic money machine, and there are real risks. The elites has created this myth for the middle class, in the same way the lottery myth was created for the for those with only a dollar to invest, so that we can believe it is possible to live the american dream without working for it.
Kickstarter is a service that connects people with ideas with people who are willing to risk a little money. 50 dollars is a lottery ticket a week. The rewards are less than a lotter ticket, but so are the risks. If you give $20 and an album is made by your favorite artists, then you get an album. If not you lost twenty dollars, which is about the markup on a concert t-shirt and few seem to have problem throwing money away on that.
In this case some are choosing to spend $50 to buy a product as opposed to selling themselves to advertisers. I don't know why this makes people so upset? Because it disrupts the current corporate model of monetizing people? Because some people are so cheap that they value $50 more than themselves? Because some people are so risk adverse that all they can do is hide in their parents basements or living rooms? What gives?
I am reminded of Hank William's, jr., The fact is that some people have nothing better to do than control what others do. They are elitist religious fanatics who lose sleep over a concern that someone, somewhere, might be having fun. These people are no better than terrorists. I mean if I am an adult and I want to go to a bar after the late shift, why should I not be allowed to? If I want to see naked people dance, why not? The most arbitrary restriction of my right to chose as an adult was no being able to order a Guinness and Scotch at the same time when I was in New England. Cretans.
The fact is that in 1979 Jimmy Carter lowered taxes by removing levies on adults who wanted to brew their own beer. Can you imagine if we had a tax on people who wanted to make their own macaroni and cheeses in a effort of social engineering to force families to buy the product from the store? Conservatives would go madd. But somehow the government forcing us to buy a commercial product was ok. Go figure. On result partially attributed to this change was a rise in local entrepreneurship in small breweries. Yes, people who once were unemployed due to the religious laws enforced by those who hated capitalism now had a job. Thanks to Jimmy Carter.
Now, not to get chauvinistic, but I am fortunate enough to live in an area with two local breweries. Why is this important? Because the two major brands of beer, Coors and Bud, are not US brands. They are controlled from Belgium and Canada, respectively. I am sure conservatives would argue that foreign ownership of our biggest beers is not big deal, but I would argue that having local expertise and control in all industries is critical. We have seen the damage that losing manufacturing expertise has cost the US. Once it is lost, it is very hard to get back. It is dangerous to pick and choose what is and is not important based on personal superstition.
I can attest that the shape of the glass causes over drinking. When I was using my half yard, I could go though a six pack of Guinness in minutes. Switch back to a pint glass and it was a leisurely half hour per.
Video on demand is Netflix and Amazon. Both are hardware agnostic. Apple and Google cannot match what these players are doing because they are pushing a platform instead of serving users.
Apple is going succeed and MS is going to succeed and Amazon is going to succeed and Google is going to succeed in different way. The thing of interest is who is leading and who is following and who is panicing. Google has not had a successful hardware consumer product and is so desperate for one that it is contaminating it's home page. MS is copying the iPad full screen UI. Google is trying to sell content, but no one is interested.
The other thing about google is that they are not really willing to play hardball, the kind of hardball that Amazon is playing with the Kindle. Google is looking for profits.
Maybe. An interesting piece of history is that when refrigeration became economical, if become possible to buy pork belly's from the framer and keep them frozen until the price was at a point where selling was profitable. The was the futures market, I guess. Of course we clearly do not have a bacon reserve because last year everyone was evidently in a tizzy because prices of bacon were going to price it out of the means of the average family.
I agree that this should not have turned into a big case and waste of, I guess, the rate payers money. However, the tale here is not that police are overbearing, but that average people really have no common sense of decency in communicating in public. Sure, it should be perfectly legal for me to, when a baby is crying at the next table in a restaurant, to turn to the parent and tell them that if the baby does not quit crying I will drown the baby, blow up their house, then fly planes into their in laws houses, but I think most of us would agree that that would not be civil. In most cases we take the crying baby and if we complain we make mild comments about the lack of parenting, usually out of earshot.
Now, I know that a horny boy behind a keyboard has trouble differentiating between civilized and uncivilized comments, and I think many of us who have been there would agree, but that is why we have private tweets. Of course for some of u narcissism, horniness, voyeurism, and bravado intersect and we end up in trouble. Like when we try to impress a girl while drunk at a bar and end up hitting a police officer. Not our fault, just bad luck.
The lesson is that tweets that are not semi-private are very public and can be misconstrued. Also, cooperating with the police is often not the best course when one is innocent, while the best way to be proven guilty is to not have a highly competent solicitor/lawyer/abogado.
If someone threatened to blow up my house if I did not fix it I would take that as a serious, though non credible, threat. I do not go through airports threatening to blow them up, even when it was in fashion. I do make fun of the police even though of my friends did. It is not that I did know I the write to do so, it was simply that I had other means of venting and expressing my frustrations.
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the idea is that charging a fee for use would also incurr costs like increased customer expectations and service levels. realistically only about 1% would upgrade to a paid service, and that would be for active users. If one bills yearly, $10-$15, most of that would be used for adminstrative costs. web based serices on the order of FB charge on the order of $50-$75 dollars a year.
In either of those cases, the seller is the sucker. If the seller has to sell, then they cannot afford to wait for a good price and you get the deal. It is cynical, but also reality. one can say that both parties are recieving benifits, but that does not mean that one party is not getting greater benifits.
i believe, this as much if not more than skills, is critical to freelance work. One must learn the maturity and ability to work through requirements, develop a solution that respects client wishes but is practicle to implement in reasonable time and moeny, and then not panic when all that changes after what you think is delivery.
In the end build something that shows that you know what you are doing Do not accept nothing from a for profit concern . When I was 19 I was billing over US$15 per hour with little experience. Of course not everyone who thought they knew MS Office was presenting themselves as compentant computer analysts and billing minimum wage.
it is not about the war on sex. the fact that young people don't have fun with sex, and think that pentration and conquest is the purpose of sex is a result on the war on sex, really a result of some peoples idea that sex is a means to an end or a weapon. The reason for child porn laws is to protect the privacy of the child, just like the reason for rape laws is to discourage men from spreading thier genetic material through force. The people resist laws to discourage this indicates they do not see women or children as equals.
Here is the thing with child p0rn, and I am not just talking about parent filming thier kids playing, If I were wearing google glasses and I did see a rape of some small child, first I presume that I would not be in posession of child porn, but in posession of evidence. Second I would hope that any google device would automatically strem all content to the world, but wouldhave some timel delay. Third I would hope that there would be a way to at least delete content ffom the google servers. From that point on possesion would indicate intent. I know these last two are antithetical to googles modus operandi, they want to keep and know everything, just look at the WiFI snooping which required at least two governemt requests to delete, data that they said the did not even want.
In any case the issue here is not the adult that might get caught up in an unfortunate sitation. We are adults, we can and do make decisions, and we know how to deal or not deal with the fallout. We know that we may see things we don't want to see and those of us who are mature and sane simply deal with it. We may choose to put explicity content online, and we deal with it. But a child is not in control and if we allow possesion then we implicitely allow distribution and this is a problem. Imagine a child is raped at 10. The footage is caught and not actively destroyed. 10 years later it reemerges and the adult has to deal with graphic images of his or her violation as a child. this is the violation of privacy to which I previously refered. Posesion of child porn promotes a double crime. It not only promotes the violation of the child, but also promotes the violation of the privacy of the adult.
BTW, one oif the most annoying features of the Fire is no obvious way to cusotmize the home screen. This is celarly a feature contemplated for a while now.
I still use google but that is just because I udepend on google docs. Otherwise I would use bing. Too many of google results are link farms and the like. Due to Google dependence on ads, and it's focus on fighting 'poiracy' basically most useful thigs are gone.
Seriously, I never thought the that Galileo mad this. I have read ome stuff, and never came across this claim. I don't know if he made anything. My understanding is that he came up with some idea, had a very skilled craftsperson model it and over time created a product or apparatus. The military compass is one example, though in that case he may not have the first to create it.
MS is just doing what it always does. Nickeling a diming consumers, pitting developers against each other, and making a killing in the proces.
Also, how long is this deal going to available. Is it going to avalable for a second year, or it only with purchase. How are upgrades going to be handled? Do I lose my $50 is I upgrade to a larger plan. There are many ways to hide costs in this situation,
So in the first approximation, I have no idea if 4G is going to make the ping time any shorter. If ping time is 250ms, and there are 20 different sites that have to be polled for ads, then that is 5 seconds right there. Then of course is the data limits. Double the speed means double the amount of bloat that a web page can use. Just look at what happened when most people had broadband. Web developers decided it was ok to put twice as many ads with twice as much data each.
This will certainly be a good selling point. I have 250MB limit on some of my devices. Given that most of my time is spent in WiFi vicinity, I don't really go over. For most people who are not going to watch movies on the road that will be enough. I do wonder if streaming from amazon is going to be including in the limit, or if they want to push the cloud enough to make it not count against the limit. If Amazon did allow you to stream movies that you bought without penalty, that would be a good reason to buy the kindle.
It is also interesting to compare this strategy against the Google strategy. Amazon has well priced good products with a customized Android interface backed by a cheap data plan and lots of content. The OEMs working with Google to put out chrome books and tablets tend to not have the content, are not leveraging data plans that Google certainly has the power to acquire, and in the end are not selling product. Look at the chromebook lease deals. $30 a month for a computer that will not work without an internet connection, and often does not include mobile connectivity options.
What I always found amusing is that a well regulated militia is limited to personal firearms. What battle in the late 18th century was won with personal side arms, though reading through gun nuts blogs shows a lack of knowledge of this. I mean one could even hardly storm a castle with just a automatic rifle. You would be taken down by the well protected archers on the walls, not to mention the hot oil. My issue with the organizations like the NRA is that they tend to promote the toys, but not the well regulated malitia that would stand between the populous and foreign or domestic raiding force. Where is the support of rocketry clubs that could actually provide a real defense against helicopters that would place boots on the ground? Clustering a few E engines in a simple shell could deliver enough reactant to be seriously annoying. But all they talk about is how a few pop guns are going to fend off the tanks and hummers.
Much in "Educational Research" is nor valid research. Many terms are undefined, measuring student growth is nearly impossible, and controlling for SES is often not done in a statistically valid manner. Teacher performance can be as simple as an administrator seeing completed worksheets every day. Improved student performance may simply be a school that cheats on tests. It has been known to happen. The research too often is funded by interested parties looking for an outcome. Right now what the interested parties want is validation that generic recent college graduates are the best teachers, so hiring them for a few years, knowing they will leave before vesting, is the best thing to do. Teacher performance not correlating to student performance is key to this finding. OTOH, a teacher that is only going to stay in a couple years, is paid bonuses bassed on student performance, is not going to worry about losing a teaching license if she is caught letting her student cheat in the way that a career teacher who needs her job is.
We have to be brutally honest about poverty. Our society is based on the idea that some people are going to basically be consumers. There is not meaningful work for them. If they can raise a family to consumer product that manufacturers need to have consumed, that is enough. Have you been to Walmart when the government checks come in? That is what I mean. There is nothing wrong with this. OTOH we don't have to have every generation be simply a consumer. We can teach kids to be innovators. This is where a public education can help. This is where Gates Foundation can help, but I think they are trying to be cut rate about it.
This is especially a problem in the city. In a given suburbs or rural area everyone is basically at the same level of dispair. The houses are generally the same, the people are the same. You don't know that you are culturally retarded if there are no example of better cultures. But in the city the kids see the inequity, they see that life can be better, they just don't know how to get there. So if the school is not well funded, if the teachers are not creative, then the children are not going to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities around them. We will have lost the productivity that we could have gained from moving a child from a consumer to an innovator. This is what one must believe in if one is going to value education and create a culture where it is valued. That any child is a potential contributing member of society, no matter if that child is benignly neglected in a mansion, or actively loved in a shack, or neglected and living on who ever has a spare couch. We must believe that funding a child's basic needs is not charity, not something that we can fight about for political gain, but the right thing to do from moral and practical standpoints. This is what the US stands for. We are not an aristocratic society where the son of a rich man automatically is entitled to all he wants. We are a place where given the basic opportunity of food, shelter, education, anyone can grow up to add to the GDP, which is really all that should matter.
In this blended case the content is delivered offline, the students work problem sets online, and the data from these problem sets are delivered to the teacher so customized review sets can be developed. This is really useful, but Khan is far from unique. Without really analyzing the problem sets and seeing them in action, it is difficult to know if they provide long term useful information. The advantage is that the service is free. That said, IMHO, an integrated solution in which review and assessment is integrated is the better model.
In term of longer school days and longer school years, many of the schools that do this are unique. Most of the schools are not compulsory or comprehensive. This means that parents have to go through some proces greater than simple registration to gain entry, and students are much easier to expel. This implies that parent are going to be more involved and rules are going to be easier to implement. For instance, one major high school program implements a uniform binder that allows teachers and parents to monitor progress. Such a program is harder to implement in a comprehensive high school where one is required to educate all children, not just the ones that are easy to educate.
Another consideration is the type of teacher. Many extended day schools use temporary teachers that are in the profession to pay of college debt or earn scholarships for graduate school. While there is nothing wrong with such teachers, and these teachers can be effectively used to educate the more motivated student of fill critical vacancies, they are not going to be the highly effective teachers that are created from 3-5 years of experience. These are the teachers that can subconciosly create customized content for each student, who understands how to deliver content to a student who is not quite getting the point, who has seen enough failures to understand how to succeed. These are teachers who can work at a comprehensive school, where teaching is a high art. One may be able to teach 10 hours a day, six days a week, for a few years, but doing it for 10 is another matter
The reality is that implementing these types of programs at comprehensive schools are not working well. What is working well is giving experienced teachers and administrators flexibility. One flexibility I see on the horizon is a system of three independent section per year. Students can choose to take an academic load in any two of those sections. In the third the student can choose to take a "summer", do elective work, or perhaps there will be other options. It will be expensive, but a conclusion that is valid is that kid that does nothing for three months is going to fall behind his or her peers. In the past this was not an issue because doing farm work was far from doing nothing. Now city kids just sit in from a screen and watch videos and play video games. If they were to read a book or build something it would not be an issue.Therefore it becomes necessary for schools to be more active, though focusing on academics full year is certainly a huge mistake.
As far as the specific house example is concerned, the numbers don't quite work as cleanly as you might think. After all expenses are factored, a $200,000 would be $1000 a month over thirty years with at least a 25% down payment. It is true that someone who did not have to rent or bills could save up for a house in about 5 years. This was summarized by the richest women in the world. Stop buying drugs and you won't be poor.
One way that I solve this is to have one device on ATT and one device on Verizon. As bad a rap as ATT gets, there are areas where Verizon is not going to have a good signal.
The median family in the US make around $50K or less a year, while the median house is more in the range of $200K. This means the median family cannot afford the median house.
Perhaps a quarter of homes do not have a computer, so is it elitist for those of who can own a computer to so do?
What one has depends on two variables: what one can earn and how one allocated the resources. When I was a kid i did not have a nice pair of jeans or a pair of Jordans but I did have an Apple computer. The only reason this sounds elitist is that so many people think these highly popular consumer products are an entitlement. It is like parents clamoring that a toy has been sold out for christmas. I know kids are very demanding but really. We should have some perspective here. There are all sorts of thing we cannot afford or cannot have. Life goes on.
What is elitist is thinking not being able to afford a Mac is the most critical problem one has.
Kickstarter is a service that connects people with ideas with people who are willing to risk a little money. 50 dollars is a lottery ticket a week. The rewards are less than a lotter ticket, but so are the risks. If you give $20 and an album is made by your favorite artists, then you get an album. If not you lost twenty dollars, which is about the markup on a concert t-shirt and few seem to have problem throwing money away on that.
In this case some are choosing to spend $50 to buy a product as opposed to selling themselves to advertisers. I don't know why this makes people so upset? Because it disrupts the current corporate model of monetizing people? Because some people are so cheap that they value $50 more than themselves? Because some people are so risk adverse that all they can do is hide in their parents basements or living rooms? What gives?
The fact is that in 1979 Jimmy Carter lowered taxes by removing levies on adults who wanted to brew their own beer. Can you imagine if we had a tax on people who wanted to make their own macaroni and cheeses in a effort of social engineering to force families to buy the product from the store? Conservatives would go madd. But somehow the government forcing us to buy a commercial product was ok. Go figure. On result partially attributed to this change was a rise in local entrepreneurship in small breweries. Yes, people who once were unemployed due to the religious laws enforced by those who hated capitalism now had a job. Thanks to Jimmy Carter.
Now, not to get chauvinistic, but I am fortunate enough to live in an area with two local breweries. Why is this important? Because the two major brands of beer, Coors and Bud, are not US brands. They are controlled from Belgium and Canada, respectively. I am sure conservatives would argue that foreign ownership of our biggest beers is not big deal, but I would argue that having local expertise and control in all industries is critical. We have seen the damage that losing manufacturing expertise has cost the US. Once it is lost, it is very hard to get back. It is dangerous to pick and choose what is and is not important based on personal superstition.
I can attest that the shape of the glass causes over drinking. When I was using my half yard, I could go though a six pack of Guinness in minutes. Switch back to a pint glass and it was a leisurely half hour per.
Apple is going succeed and MS is going to succeed and Amazon is going to succeed and Google is going to succeed in different way. The thing of interest is who is leading and who is following and who is panicing. Google has not had a successful hardware consumer product and is so desperate for one that it is contaminating it's home page. MS is copying the iPad full screen UI. Google is trying to sell content, but no one is interested.
The other thing about google is that they are not really willing to play hardball, the kind of hardball that Amazon is playing with the Kindle. Google is looking for profits.
Maybe. An interesting piece of history is that when refrigeration became economical, if become possible to buy pork belly's from the framer and keep them frozen until the price was at a point where selling was profitable. The was the futures market, I guess. Of course we clearly do not have a bacon reserve because last year everyone was evidently in a tizzy because prices of bacon were going to price it out of the means of the average family.
Now, I know that a horny boy behind a keyboard has trouble differentiating between civilized and uncivilized comments, and I think many of us who have been there would agree, but that is why we have private tweets. Of course for some of u narcissism, horniness, voyeurism, and bravado intersect and we end up in trouble. Like when we try to impress a girl while drunk at a bar and end up hitting a police officer. Not our fault, just bad luck.
The lesson is that tweets that are not semi-private are very public and can be misconstrued. Also, cooperating with the police is often not the best course when one is innocent, while the best way to be proven guilty is to not have a highly competent solicitor/lawyer/abogado.
If someone threatened to blow up my house if I did not fix it I would take that as a serious, though non credible, threat. I do not go through airports threatening to blow them up, even when it was in fashion. I do make fun of the police even though of my friends did. It is not that I did know I the write to do so, it was simply that I had other means of venting and expressing my frustrations.