I would support this approach also. Actually it would be nice to get a bit of both. Have a computer do a lot of the basic teaching along with hands on practical experience.
It is pretty sad how many engineers I meet that think they will use pen and paper their entire lives to solve problems and they don't really like computers. Some practical experience would go a LONG way in correcting that. Many of the problems they are given in class are only simpler to solve on paper because the problems are so simple and many have the viewpoint that is how real problems are also.
The chemistry labs I have had where basically recipes. You are given an exact procedure to follow and you just do that. No learning involved.
For how a computer would grade a complex that does get more difficult. On some online engineering problems I have had problems where broken down into many steps and each step had various answers you needed to put in for numbers. It worked pretty well but could be improved.
Actually I have recently gone back to school. I was tired of programming and am working on getting a degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering so most of this experience is current. What I can say is that over the last 10 years since I was at school before the system has gotten worse.
There is a lot more emphasis on what can be done on a scantron exam except for the engineering department. They seem to have gone the other direction entirely. No memorization, all materials on exams and practical problems. I do like how engineering has changed but arts and sciences has gotten worse.
I have talked to other people in US schools and this seems pretty common.
And yet people still cheat in very high numbers in traditional schools despite the high penalties. The problem is that the systems are designed to encourage cheating and so it happens. No matter what penalties they come up with people will still do it.
I have seen some very draconian anti-cheating policies and they pretty much accomplished nothing. People even use drugs now to focus and do better on tests regardless of the long term consequences because those drugs actually work. Do you propose we drug test every person before every exam at a traditional school? How about as our technology continues to progress and we come up with better ways to cheat?
Face it the education system is at fault for the cheating, the students are just taking the path of least resistance. If you want cheating fixed the industrial education system has got to go.
Very very few people get that. From grade school through undergrad at least most people get a very poor education and multiple choice memorization based exams. We can do better than that with computers and there is no reason not to. If places can survive by doing better than that great for them. I want to improve the education that most people get and we can certainly do that for a tiny fraction of what do spend now on it for better results or at the worse case equally bad results which is still a net win if the cost is lower.
If the results are equally bad at a tiny fraction of the cost at least we can work on making it better with the saved money. Right now I don't see any way to get teachers to actually start teaching so solving it with computers seems far more viable.
Some of the classes I had in chemistry, chemical engineering and fluid mechanics have used online homework systems that used dynamically created problems that did a very good job at least at the undergraduate level.
However the point is that tests or homework like you describe are incredibly rare. Most tests I have encountered are straight multiple choice exams and that is a lot worse than the dynamically created computer problems. The computer problems I am talking about are NOT multiple choice.
I agree that an in person education can be better than anything a computer can do but the problem is that 99% or so of the time it is worse.
I have liked engineering exams since most of them have been open book, notes, calculators etc. Pretty much everything except an internet connection. What they do is give real problems to solve and you have many of the resources you will have in real life. Usually about 2-4 problems that take about 2 hours to solve. The exams are extremely hard but also teach a lot more. These problems would actually work fine on a computer also but a little more complex to program.
The point is that you can make computer learning systems that do require real thinking and real professors would be paid to keep adding new types of questions to the system. Any computer learning system that is just multiple choice is just as big of a waste of time as the in class ones are and I don't propose doing that.
We can't keep building our society around the idea that people might encounter one or two exceptional teachers in a university. Most will encounter none and even one or two does not help you learn all the other subjects. Many professors seem to actually be hostile to teaching and instead just want to do research. They put in minimal time and run memorization based classes that are easy to test with scantron systems. That is what computer systems need to compete against and do better than.
If there are universities that can still survive by doing better enough than that compared to their costs against a computer system then they should survive. What I want to do is raise the bar a lot from where it is now and that is something we can do and it would help our society by giving people a better education than they get now.
So long as you give the same assignment to large groups of students year after year cheating is going to remain since the system is built to encourage it. It is just a natural result of how assignments are given, graded and how much depends on the grades. So long as we stay with this system we will continue to have cheating.
I think we need to move to a more modern system based on our technology and instead of having all students in lock step have each student work one on one with a computer with generated problems. I don't know how that would work for art type stuff but it would work for math,engineering, chemistry and physics type stuff. What I would have is students would learn some material in about a 30 minute chunk and then be given some created questions based on what they have learned. They would go on to the next step of material once they had answered a high enough percentage of questions correctly. If the rate is too low have the computer go back and go over the missed points and try again. Keep doing this basically forever since there is no point in going on until you understand the current material.
Every so often the computer would give you a test. If you do well enough you go on otherwise you go back and work on the material some more. There would be no grades since you can't complete a class without complete understanding so there would be no point. If you can't master the material you are not done with it yet. Everything would proceed at your own speed. In the end this is feasible with our level of technology and would cost a tiny fraction of what our existing education systems cost and should give better results.
There is really no way to avoid cheating so don't worry about it. Since the problems are dynamically created it is hard to do a search for them online. Instead what I would do is employers could have the system give you a test based on the information required for the job and see if you pass. That way the point of enforcement is at the point of usage and the companies would have an interest in proctoring that test to make sure you don't cheat. If you cheated to get there you would never pass. All they would do is check some boxes on the required material and the same system that taught you the material would give questions to answer.
For this it is much simpler and more accurate to time step and do a force balance at each step. It also means you don't have a precalculated path so it can be changed at any time.
The force balance math is also insanely simpler and faster to do. Overall analytical math has too many approximations built into it.
If you get a PC download game those are usually cheaper than the PC box version and you get it pretty much instantly from amazon or steam. I often run into a game is $60 on xbox, $50 on PC, $30 on download from amazon/steam. Also download sales are insane that you never seen on physical items. The steam summer sale is on right now as is a sale on amazon also for games and the deals are up to 90% off that I have seen so far.
After building this stuff for about 12 years now I have found that stuff is more likely to break in IE than other browsers. Firefox and Chrome over the last 2 years or so have rarely broken my sites with an update to any new version however IE7,8 and 9 have all had minor patches that broke completely standard behavior.
I know it seems like it should be breaking more often since they update so often but I have not run into that problem. Chrome updates especially I have never encountered something breaking. It updates all the time but since I don't have to care about the version number and it keeps itself, flash and some other stuff patched I recommend it to all my clients. By silently updating you don't have to worry about users updating their systems and you have far fewer security problems.
My hardest exam so far was open book. Fluid mechanics was open books, open notes, open homework, open previous exams, open other materials you wanted to bring in etc. The only thing you couldn't use was a computer or something with a network connection. The exams where extremely difficult and I feel they where also very realistic.
You where graded on not only solving the problem but on how you solved it. You had to demonstrate real understanding of how to solve these problems.
What I did was install one of those motion detectors in the kitchen and hooked the normal lights to it. It works great. While you are in there the lights come on, stay on and you can do anything you need. You can then take your food out with you and the lights turn off so you never worry about having to go back and turn them off. You can even use LED lights for greater efficiency.
I would leave in a heartbeat. If aliens landed in front of me I would already have run up the ramp by the time they asked for people to come with them and waiting inside.
I hope that as our technology keeps improving that it will be viable to build a ship and leave this planet. Sure a new colony might be worse.... but that would be hard to do.
This does not actually sound much different then what it is like working with larger private sector companies. Where they do a focus group and take months to make simple decisions. From working with both government and large corporations I have not noticed any real difference in the time it takes to get things done or how much money is wasted they just do it in different areas. Small business though are a different matter, they are usually far far faster at making decisions and doing things.
Having worked with large private companies and governments I have not seen any real difference. I know it is popular to say that capitalism encourages efficiency and the government always wastes money but I just don't see it. Capitalism and government are about equally efficient, which is to say not at all.
Companies burn your money just as happily as the government does, especially large ones.
Include an unfoldable solar panel in the car and a small pole to put a mini wind turbine on;) Actually with solar panels getting better that options is actually pretty viable. You could charge up enough in an hour to get to another town most likely.
Or you could just do what everyone else does and call AAA or hit the onstar button for assistance.
Even better lets get rid of the fighting entirely and give people robotic bodies that want them and go explore space. The human body is really not very well designed or built so it is time for upgrades. Evolution may have gotten us this far but I am all for going in another direction.
Batteries for laptops don't have to be expensive. I can get a 9-cell lithium ion laptop battery for most hp laptops on amazon for about $30-$40 which is FAR FAR less then buying a new laptop.
That is one advantage of a trivially user replaceable battery, you end up with a competitive market for those batteries and it drives the prices down including from the original company.
I see no problem with replacing a hand. I want to replace my entire body. Until we know how to digitize the brain it would probably have to be a brain in an enclosure inside a robot body but later the goal would be to replace the brain. Do synapse by synapse replacement while you are awake and by the end you can think thousands to millions of time faster and at no time did you ever die.
Imagine all you could learn and see with a fully robotic body. You could explore space, many places on this planet that humans can't go and you would live long enough to see participate in many things that humans are only beginning to work on now. I would love to live for millions to billions of years and learn everything that I could.
Once you are fully digital you could even make probes to send down to new planets and it would feel just like you where there but if the probe is destroyed you would be fine since you could run it on remote. You could even have your brain be a massively redundant computer with stable memory in case of full power loss. Humans bodies are just not up to what I want to do and I prefer to go the technology route and fix the problem instead of accepting the limitations of what humans can do. We have been at our best trying to strive beyond what we can do, even if we don't reach our goal we learn a lot in the process. Artificial eyes, ears, legs, arms etc will help many people.
It sure seems to me like we need a better system overall not just for taxes. Our technology is fighting against our economic system and eventually it will destroy it due to that conflict. I think we could fix the problem without eliminating the current economic system or limiting technology but it would take pretty major societal changes.
What I would like to see is for us to build arcologies. They would be cheaper then a traditional city, require no carbon fuels to get around, have much healthier air, and represent a much better concentration of resources. You would need less police, fire, medical if you could get anywhere in a city of millions in a few minutes and you also need less funding for them. You don't need a road system of any kind since a public transport system would work in an arcology.
Right now a major problem I see is people want to live away from others but they want all the advantages of modern civilization but also don't want to actually pay to have all the infrastructure provided in their small towns. Cities already subsidize all the areas around them. Arcologies just seem like a much better model to move forward with.
If this conflict keeps up eventually it will destroy the economic system which will cause a lot of problems. No system lasts forever and there is no reason to believe capitalism is in any way exempt from that but it would be nice to have a graceful transition to something else instead of a collapse and rebuild cycle. Humans should be smart enough by now to see the need for change and adapt ahead of time, not after the system has burned to the ground. It won't be long before tens of millions are put out of work by self driving vehicles, fully automated factories, medicine that no longer requires doctors, self repairing roads and many other advances.
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I would support this approach also. Actually it would be nice to get a bit of both. Have a computer do a lot of the basic teaching along with hands on practical experience.
It is pretty sad how many engineers I meet that think they will use pen and paper their entire lives to solve problems and they don't really like computers. Some practical experience would go a LONG way in correcting that. Many of the problems they are given in class are only simpler to solve on paper because the problems are so simple and many have the viewpoint that is how real problems are also.
I tried that but people did not understand. Now I am going for the brick of obvious truth approach. :)
The chemistry labs I have had where basically recipes. You are given an exact procedure to follow and you just do that. No learning involved.
For how a computer would grade a complex that does get more difficult. On some online engineering problems I have had problems where broken down into many steps and each step had various answers you needed to put in for numbers. It worked pretty well but could be improved.
Actually I have recently gone back to school. I was tired of programming and am working on getting a degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering so most of this experience is current. What I can say is that over the last 10 years since I was at school before the system has gotten worse.
There is a lot more emphasis on what can be done on a scantron exam except for the engineering department. They seem to have gone the other direction entirely. No memorization, all materials on exams and practical problems. I do like how engineering has changed but arts and sciences has gotten worse.
I have talked to other people in US schools and this seems pretty common.
And yet people still cheat in very high numbers in traditional schools despite the high penalties. The problem is that the systems are designed to encourage cheating and so it happens. No matter what penalties they come up with people will still do it.
I have seen some very draconian anti-cheating policies and they pretty much accomplished nothing. People even use drugs now to focus and do better on tests regardless of the long term consequences because those drugs actually work. Do you propose we drug test every person before every exam at a traditional school? How about as our technology continues to progress and we come up with better ways to cheat?
Face it the education system is at fault for the cheating, the students are just taking the path of least resistance. If you want cheating fixed the industrial education system has got to go.
Very very few people get that. From grade school through undergrad at least most people get a very poor education and multiple choice memorization based exams. We can do better than that with computers and there is no reason not to. If places can survive by doing better than that great for them. I want to improve the education that most people get and we can certainly do that for a tiny fraction of what do spend now on it for better results or at the worse case equally bad results which is still a net win if the cost is lower.
If the results are equally bad at a tiny fraction of the cost at least we can work on making it better with the saved money. Right now I don't see any way to get teachers to actually start teaching so solving it with computers seems far more viable.
Some of the classes I had in chemistry, chemical engineering and fluid mechanics have used online homework systems that used dynamically created problems that did a very good job at least at the undergraduate level.
However the point is that tests or homework like you describe are incredibly rare. Most tests I have encountered are straight multiple choice exams and that is a lot worse than the dynamically created computer problems. The computer problems I am talking about are NOT multiple choice.
I agree that an in person education can be better than anything a computer can do but the problem is that 99% or so of the time it is worse.
I have liked engineering exams since most of them have been open book, notes, calculators etc. Pretty much everything except an internet connection. What they do is give real problems to solve and you have many of the resources you will have in real life. Usually about 2-4 problems that take about 2 hours to solve. The exams are extremely hard but also teach a lot more. These problems would actually work fine on a computer also but a little more complex to program.
The point is that you can make computer learning systems that do require real thinking and real professors would be paid to keep adding new types of questions to the system. Any computer learning system that is just multiple choice is just as big of a waste of time as the in class ones are and I don't propose doing that.
We can't keep building our society around the idea that people might encounter one or two exceptional teachers in a university. Most will encounter none and even one or two does not help you learn all the other subjects. Many professors seem to actually be hostile to teaching and instead just want to do research. They put in minimal time and run memorization based classes that are easy to test with scantron systems. That is what computer systems need to compete against and do better than.
If there are universities that can still survive by doing better enough than that compared to their costs against a computer system then they should survive. What I want to do is raise the bar a lot from where it is now and that is something we can do and it would help our society by giving people a better education than they get now.
So long as you give the same assignment to large groups of students year after year cheating is going to remain since the system is built to encourage it. It is just a natural result of how assignments are given, graded and how much depends on the grades. So long as we stay with this system we will continue to have cheating.
I think we need to move to a more modern system based on our technology and instead of having all students in lock step have each student work one on one with a computer with generated problems. I don't know how that would work for art type stuff but it would work for math,engineering, chemistry and physics type stuff. What I would have is students would learn some material in about a 30 minute chunk and then be given some created questions based on what they have learned. They would go on to the next step of material once they had answered a high enough percentage of questions correctly. If the rate is too low have the computer go back and go over the missed points and try again. Keep doing this basically forever since there is no point in going on until you understand the current material.
Every so often the computer would give you a test. If you do well enough you go on otherwise you go back and work on the material some more. There would be no grades since you can't complete a class without complete understanding so there would be no point. If you can't master the material you are not done with it yet. Everything would proceed at your own speed. In the end this is feasible with our level of technology and would cost a tiny fraction of what our existing education systems cost and should give better results.
There is really no way to avoid cheating so don't worry about it. Since the problems are dynamically created it is hard to do a search for them online. Instead what I would do is employers could have the system give you a test based on the information required for the job and see if you pass. That way the point of enforcement is at the point of usage and the companies would have an interest in proctoring that test to make sure you don't cheat. If you cheated to get there you would never pass. All they would do is check some boxes on the required material and the same system that taught you the material would give questions to answer.
For this it is much simpler and more accurate to time step and do a force balance at each step. It also means you don't have a precalculated path so it can be changed at any time.
The force balance math is also insanely simpler and faster to do. Overall analytical math has too many approximations built into it.
If you get a PC download game those are usually cheaper than the PC box version and you get it pretty much instantly from amazon or steam. I often run into a game is $60 on xbox, $50 on PC, $30 on download from amazon/steam. Also download sales are insane that you never seen on physical items. The steam summer sale is on right now as is a sale on amazon also for games and the deals are up to 90% off that I have seen so far.
After building this stuff for about 12 years now I have found that stuff is more likely to break in IE than other browsers. Firefox and Chrome over the last 2 years or so have rarely broken my sites with an update to any new version however IE7,8 and 9 have all had minor patches that broke completely standard behavior.
I know it seems like it should be breaking more often since they update so often but I have not run into that problem. Chrome updates especially I have never encountered something breaking. It updates all the time but since I don't have to care about the version number and it keeps itself, flash and some other stuff patched I recommend it to all my clients. By silently updating you don't have to worry about users updating their systems and you have far fewer security problems.
EVE is for those that think that an Everquest raiding guild is not hard core enough.
My hardest exam so far was open book. Fluid mechanics was open books, open notes, open homework, open previous exams, open other materials you wanted to bring in etc. The only thing you couldn't use was a computer or something with a network connection. The exams where extremely difficult and I feel they where also very realistic.
You where graded on not only solving the problem but on how you solved it. You had to demonstrate real understanding of how to solve these problems.
What I did was install one of those motion detectors in the kitchen and hooked the normal lights to it. It works great. While you are in there the lights come on, stay on and you can do anything you need. You can then take your food out with you and the lights turn off so you never worry about having to go back and turn them off. You can even use LED lights for greater efficiency.
I don't think we have any idea of what they would think of us but it is a chance I am willing to take.
I would leave in a heartbeat. If aliens landed in front of me I would already have run up the ramp by the time they asked for people to come with them and waiting inside.
I hope that as our technology keeps improving that it will be viable to build a ship and leave this planet. Sure a new colony might be worse .... but that would be hard to do.
This does not actually sound much different then what it is like working with larger private sector companies. Where they do a focus group and take months to make simple decisions. From working with both government and large corporations I have not noticed any real difference in the time it takes to get things done or how much money is wasted they just do it in different areas. Small business though are a different matter, they are usually far far faster at making decisions and doing things.
Having worked with large private companies and governments I have not seen any real difference. I know it is popular to say that capitalism encourages efficiency and the government always wastes money but I just don't see it. Capitalism and government are about equally efficient, which is to say not at all.
Companies burn your money just as happily as the government does, especially large ones.
Then why didn't it solve the problem when it had a chance and before legislation had to be involved?
If the free market can solve all problems why do so many go unsolved for so long?
Include an unfoldable solar panel in the car and a small pole to put a mini wind turbine on ;)
Actually with solar panels getting better that options is actually pretty viable. You could charge up enough in an hour to get to another town most likely.
Or you could just do what everyone else does and call AAA or hit the onstar button for assistance.
Overall it is easy to get the idea that leviticus was an ahole
Even better lets get rid of the fighting entirely and give people robotic bodies that want them and go explore space. The human body is really not very well designed or built so it is time for upgrades. Evolution may have gotten us this far but I am all for going in another direction.
Batteries for laptops don't have to be expensive. I can get a 9-cell lithium ion laptop battery for most hp laptops on amazon for about $30-$40 which is FAR FAR less then buying a new laptop.
That is one advantage of a trivially user replaceable battery, you end up with a competitive market for those batteries and it drives the prices down including from the original company.
I see no problem with replacing a hand. I want to replace my entire body. Until we know how to digitize the brain it would probably have to be a brain in an enclosure inside a robot body but later the goal would be to replace the brain. Do synapse by synapse replacement while you are awake and by the end you can think thousands to millions of time faster and at no time did you ever die.
Imagine all you could learn and see with a fully robotic body. You could explore space, many places on this planet that humans can't go and you would live long enough to see participate in many things that humans are only beginning to work on now. I would love to live for millions to billions of years and learn everything that I could.
Once you are fully digital you could even make probes to send down to new planets and it would feel just like you where there but if the probe is destroyed you would be fine since you could run it on remote. You could even have your brain be a massively redundant computer with stable memory in case of full power loss. Humans bodies are just not up to what I want to do and I prefer to go the technology route and fix the problem instead of accepting the limitations of what humans can do. We have been at our best trying to strive beyond what we can do, even if we don't reach our goal we learn a lot in the process. Artificial eyes, ears, legs, arms etc will help many people.
It sure seems to me like we need a better system overall not just for taxes. Our technology is fighting against our economic system and eventually it will destroy it due to that conflict. I think we could fix the problem without eliminating the current economic system or limiting technology but it would take pretty major societal changes.
What I would like to see is for us to build arcologies. They would be cheaper then a traditional city, require no carbon fuels to get around, have much healthier air, and represent a much better concentration of resources. You would need less police, fire, medical if you could get anywhere in a city of millions in a few minutes and you also need less funding for them. You don't need a road system of any kind since a public transport system would work in an arcology.
Right now a major problem I see is people want to live away from others but they want all the advantages of modern civilization but also don't want to actually pay to have all the infrastructure provided in their small towns. Cities already subsidize all the areas around them. Arcologies just seem like a much better model to move forward with.
If this conflict keeps up eventually it will destroy the economic system which will cause a lot of problems. No system lasts forever and there is no reason to believe capitalism is in any way exempt from that but it would be nice to have a graceful transition to something else instead of a collapse and rebuild cycle. Humans should be smart enough by now to see the need for change and adapt ahead of time, not after the system has burned to the ground. It won't be long before tens of millions are put out of work by self driving vehicles, fully automated factories, medicine that no longer requires doctors, self repairing roads and many other advances.