If you're teaching hunting in school then you have bigger problems than standardized tests.
The courses offered, which is more important later in education, still doesn't impact on how they are taught. If you offer Spanish then it's going to be taught the same whether the class is in New York or Texas.
Every state has a standard curriculum to which a school district may add to. There are requirements the federal government may have too which should be reflected in what the state mandates. However there is nothing to say that two states will have the same requirements for the same grade. So basically the standardized tests become a lowest common denominator that leave the child's education lacking.
They have been reducing the size of many things for the past decade or so instead of raising the price so your toilet paper is narrower, the block of cheese is 400g instead of 450g, they leave out 7mL out of every small bottle of cola, chocolate bars are smaller, etc. People would notice and complain if the prices went up but not many people notice when the size is reduced.
The 20 hours the tests take per year aren't a problem. The real issue is that funding is tied to the performance of how the school does on the tests which leads the teachers to focus only on material that will appear on the tests. This means that the children are receiving the all of the material. Unfortunately because the tests have to cover such large areas they can't take into account the different curriculum for each state so you get a lowest common denominator.
Teaching to the test means specifically teaching what is needed to pass the standardized tests and ignoring the rest of the curriculum. They don't teach everything that they are supposed to and create exams to show that they students have a working knowledge of it all.
How much is there different between two places that needs to be taught? Maybe some state history. The language, math, science, arts, geography, and other classes should all be the same. I moved around Canada when I was growing up and while the pace at which the content was taught was different between the provinces the actual content was the same. For example when we moved out to BC from Ontario I was ahead in math but when we moved back to Ontario I was ahead again. So in those years I was in BC they really concentrated on the math.
Of course copyrights and patents are used to create a monopoly power for specific individuals. That was what they were designed to do. Why would you spend a couple of years to write a book if the moment you showed it to a bunch of publishers they could copy it and sell it as their own? Or why would you send in a demo "tape" to music label if they could just take the song and have an established group release it? What incentive would you have to create the next great mouse trap if as soon as it hit shelves a large corporation could copy you, sell at a loss until you went out of business, and then raise their price?
There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of copyrights and patents. They are good. What is wrong is in the past hundred or so years large corporations have influenced governments to twist the terms of the system to their favour. The TPP is just a continuation of that and I'm against it. I would like to see a return to some sane values restored to copyright. Something like 20 years would be more than appropriate. The patent process needs to be reformed so that you can't patent stupid things like 1-click buying or rounded corners. I'd actually like to see it so that you actually have to have a working prototype in order to get a patent.
I was thinking more general than just scientific collaboration, though that's important. Just think back a couple of hundred years and the trouble countries had managing their territories when news could take months to get from one place to another. How would a civilization co-ordinate over multiple star systems? For the most part each star system would have to be autonomous. If you had to ask a question of another system then you would be lucky if the same person would receive the answer. (I'm think more because it would be someone near the end of the career to be in the position to be sending questions. We'll probably have added another fair bit onto our life span by then.)
I never said we were intelligent. We could be the equivalent of popcorn chicken to some alien species out there for all I know.
Funny how I comment that intelligent species wouldn't go around conquering each other and every one jumps on me saying that I'm anthropomorphizing but the parent of my original comment said that intelligent species would go around conquering each other and not a peep.
You were talking about Japan's installed generating capacity and how wind couldn't generate enough to match it so you will excuse me for jumping to the conclusion that I did.
As to a stable base load there still is geothermal. They would need a lot of them to make up for the nuclear plants but they are stable.
The existing reactors survived the earthquake but it was the tsunami that caused the real damage. Why not build new reactors with the latest technology, doesn't matter what the size is. Patriotically speaking I have to push for the CANDU reactors. They know how high the highest tsunami has ever reached so add another 25 metres and use that as your minimum elevation to build. They've seen what happens when a plant is built too close to the sea in order to save costs in piping water for cooling.
So just because wind can't supply all of the power then they shouldn't build any? Nobody is saying to base everything on a single source. Wind is very good in a mix of supply. So is solar. Geothermal would be very good for Japan given it's geology and it would be great for base load power since it's available 24/7.
If they were truly intelligent species then they wouldn't be going around trying to conquer each other.
Space is really, really, really large. Right now to even get to Mars we're looking at putting a small crew in a relatively small vehicle for six to nine months. With a lot of advances in technology and a lot of money we could probably get the trip to Mars to be like sailing across the Atlantic is today. Now imagine going to a nearby star. It would be with a colony ship and be on the order of hundreds of years. Even with massive leaps in technology it would still be decades. Sure there would be some communication but once a ship got past a certain distance you might as well consider them a completely separate population. Imagine being 20 light years apart. How could you collaborate on any projects or do any trade? Other than having a backup in case your home world is destroyed or for the sheer sense of exploration there isn't much reason to go. Plus the first few generations are going to be stuck on a ship so it's going to get very boring very quick for them. Of course that's assuming that any alien has a sense of exploration like we do. They may not have even looked up to see the stars.
I live by myself so this wouldn't work for anyone in a family.
I've got a 27" iMac on my coffee table which I use for watching a few shows I download. If there are any movies or TV programs that I really like I buy them. I use iTunes for listening to podcasts and music. I tried Vox and while it sounds great it keeps changing the default application for my MP3s to Vox even though I tell it not to. So I'd love to find another program like that which has great equalizer presets. It puts iTunes to shame for sound quality.
Backups are sent to a Synology NAS which also runs my torrent client, proxy server, and is connected to my VPN so all my Internet traffic is on there instead of having each computer/phone/tablet connecting to the VPN. I just mount a drive on my iMac to access any downloaded media. I also run the BitTorrent Sync server on there and my iMac to act as my own personal cloud. I store my books and magazines on there which I read on my iPad. It loads much faster since it's on the LAN instead of having to go out to Box or Dropbox.
I've been thinking about getting a speaker or two to connect to my iMac if I find a good music player. It'd be nice for shows too.
I've been using something like this for about the past five years now. Before I had a laptop which I was running the torrent client and watching shows. I haven't had cable or satellite since 2003 and don't miss it at all. And I've been using the iPad for reading for the past three years. Before that it was old fashioned paper.
But a company rarely pays all cash to buy another company. It offers it's own stock in exchange for the stock of the other company and sometimes it's stock plus cash. This may cause some problems with dilution of the stock as more stocks are on the market but this is partially offset because the expectations for the larger company are higher (or at least should be).
There are times when you are more than willing to pay above what the market thinks a company is worth. For example if you can lock your competitors out of a technology. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are good at this. Or a company wants to break into a new market. It's often easier to buy your way in so that you have the infrastructure and expertise rather than trying to build it up from nothing.
Of course there are just some times a company is lead by an idiot and blows a few billion buying a dud (cough, HP, cough).
Wall Street still wants to see Apple and Microsoft to have good growth numbers, Apple especially. Analysts are expecting Apple to have an average annual earnings growth rate of 15%. From the same site Microsoft is expected to grow it's earnings at just over 8%.
The problem is that stock markets still expect the large companies to post revenue growth at the same rates as they did when they were smaller companies. Of course as they get larger and larger it becomes harder to keep up such growth. Growing a $10M company 5% is a lot easier than a $10B company. So they resort to buying other companies to get their growth. Or layoffs in order to improve their income statement.
Not that I agree with the methods because they are doing them just to help the stock price.
I have one and used it a lot. The water is hot but not boiling (low 90s Celsius). The problem with them is that there is a small tank under the sink which keeps the water hot so you are paying electricity to keep the water hot even if you aren't using it (over the night) and if you want more than a couple of mugs the temperature starts to drop quickly as the hot water gets diluted with the cooler incoming water.
It has been about 10 years since I've looked into them so maybe they have changed since then. I haven't used it in a couple of years since I've found a better solution for my needs. I've got a dedicated tea maker which can also double as a kettle.
I have a Breville tea maker and absolutely love it. It allows you to control the temperature and steeping time. I don't use the feature but I think you can set the time that it will start. I've had it about two years and I use it every day. It's on the expensive side but if you keep an eye on Amazon you can get it on sale but if mine broke I would replace the next day.
The temperature of the water depends on the type of tea. Black tea requires boiling water. White tea and green tea are different. I forget the numbers because I don't drink them. I only know this because I have a tea maker from Breville (and it's amazing) and it has settings for different types of teas. You put loose leaf tea in the basket and after the water is brought to the proper temperature the basket is lowered into the water for the right amount of time (which is adjustable). I used to drink a fair amount of coffee but since getting the tea maker I drink a lot of tea and a little bit of coffee. There are a lot of options when you go to buy loose leaf tea.
The idea of lowering taxes on the rich so that they will reinvest the money and boost the economy is supply-side economics (or Reaganomics) and was tried in the 1980s. It failed badly. I'm not advocating a return to the 90%+ tax rates that were seen before but I think that there should be a shift of the tax burden from the poorer onto the richer. In Canada during the past 9 years our federal government has cut taxes, mostly toward the upper middle class, the rich, and corporations, so that it brings in $45B less a year. There are programs that are having problems because of this, especially infrastructure investment.
If my wealth is in non-liquid form then I'm not going to be too worried about not fitting in. I won't have the money for the big expensive house, flash car, expensive clothes, and fancy toys. People won't think I'm rich.
As to your example, you are forgetting to account for the actions of my donations. They are going to have impacts on the economy too. Say I give most of my money to Habit for Humanity. They will take that and build a lot of houses. Some materials and work is donated but there is still a lot of purchases on items such as cement, plumbing, and electrical. These people are put to work plus supplies are bought which put other people to work. So there are positive ripples too.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're teaching hunting in school then you have bigger problems than standardized tests.
The courses offered, which is more important later in education, still doesn't impact on how they are taught. If you offer Spanish then it's going to be taught the same whether the class is in New York or Texas.
Every state has a standard curriculum to which a school district may add to. There are requirements the federal government may have too which should be reflected in what the state mandates. However there is nothing to say that two states will have the same requirements for the same grade. So basically the standardized tests become a lowest common denominator that leave the child's education lacking.
Knowing the military the document giving clearance to tell of the sequence of events is probably classified and will remain so for 50 years. /s
They have been reducing the size of many things for the past decade or so instead of raising the price so your toilet paper is narrower, the block of cheese is 400g instead of 450g, they leave out 7mL out of every small bottle of cola, chocolate bars are smaller, etc. People would notice and complain if the prices went up but not many people notice when the size is reduced.
The 20 hours the tests take per year aren't a problem. The real issue is that funding is tied to the performance of how the school does on the tests which leads the teachers to focus only on material that will appear on the tests. This means that the children are receiving the all of the material. Unfortunately because the tests have to cover such large areas they can't take into account the different curriculum for each state so you get a lowest common denominator.
Teaching to the test means specifically teaching what is needed to pass the standardized tests and ignoring the rest of the curriculum. They don't teach everything that they are supposed to and create exams to show that they students have a working knowledge of it all.
How much is there different between two places that needs to be taught? Maybe some state history. The language, math, science, arts, geography, and other classes should all be the same. I moved around Canada when I was growing up and while the pace at which the content was taught was different between the provinces the actual content was the same. For example when we moved out to BC from Ontario I was ahead in math but when we moved back to Ontario I was ahead again. So in those years I was in BC they really concentrated on the math.
They are providing power to Vegas which has the highest power usage in the evening up to midnight according to the article.
Of course copyrights and patents are used to create a monopoly power for specific individuals. That was what they were designed to do. Why would you spend a couple of years to write a book if the moment you showed it to a bunch of publishers they could copy it and sell it as their own? Or why would you send in a demo "tape" to music label if they could just take the song and have an established group release it? What incentive would you have to create the next great mouse trap if as soon as it hit shelves a large corporation could copy you, sell at a loss until you went out of business, and then raise their price?
There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of copyrights and patents. They are good. What is wrong is in the past hundred or so years large corporations have influenced governments to twist the terms of the system to their favour. The TPP is just a continuation of that and I'm against it. I would like to see a return to some sane values restored to copyright. Something like 20 years would be more than appropriate. The patent process needs to be reformed so that you can't patent stupid things like 1-click buying or rounded corners. I'd actually like to see it so that you actually have to have a working prototype in order to get a patent.
I was thinking more general than just scientific collaboration, though that's important. Just think back a couple of hundred years and the trouble countries had managing their territories when news could take months to get from one place to another. How would a civilization co-ordinate over multiple star systems? For the most part each star system would have to be autonomous. If you had to ask a question of another system then you would be lucky if the same person would receive the answer. (I'm think more because it would be someone near the end of the career to be in the position to be sending questions. We'll probably have added another fair bit onto our life span by then.)
I never said we were intelligent. We could be the equivalent of popcorn chicken to some alien species out there for all I know.
Funny how I comment that intelligent species wouldn't go around conquering each other and every one jumps on me saying that I'm anthropomorphizing but the parent of my original comment said that intelligent species would go around conquering each other and not a peep.
You were talking about Japan's installed generating capacity and how wind couldn't generate enough to match it so you will excuse me for jumping to the conclusion that I did.
As to a stable base load there still is geothermal. They would need a lot of them to make up for the nuclear plants but they are stable.
The existing reactors survived the earthquake but it was the tsunami that caused the real damage. Why not build new reactors with the latest technology, doesn't matter what the size is. Patriotically speaking I have to push for the CANDU reactors. They know how high the highest tsunami has ever reached so add another 25 metres and use that as your minimum elevation to build. They've seen what happens when a plant is built too close to the sea in order to save costs in piping water for cooling.
So just because wind can't supply all of the power then they shouldn't build any? Nobody is saying to base everything on a single source. Wind is very good in a mix of supply. So is solar. Geothermal would be very good for Japan given it's geology and it would be great for base load power since it's available 24/7.
If they were truly intelligent species then they wouldn't be going around trying to conquer each other.
Space is really, really, really large. Right now to even get to Mars we're looking at putting a small crew in a relatively small vehicle for six to nine months. With a lot of advances in technology and a lot of money we could probably get the trip to Mars to be like sailing across the Atlantic is today. Now imagine going to a nearby star. It would be with a colony ship and be on the order of hundreds of years. Even with massive leaps in technology it would still be decades. Sure there would be some communication but once a ship got past a certain distance you might as well consider them a completely separate population. Imagine being 20 light years apart. How could you collaborate on any projects or do any trade? Other than having a backup in case your home world is destroyed or for the sheer sense of exploration there isn't much reason to go. Plus the first few generations are going to be stuck on a ship so it's going to get very boring very quick for them. Of course that's assuming that any alien has a sense of exploration like we do. They may not have even looked up to see the stars.
I live by myself so this wouldn't work for anyone in a family.
I've got a 27" iMac on my coffee table which I use for watching a few shows I download. If there are any movies or TV programs that I really like I buy them. I use iTunes for listening to podcasts and music. I tried Vox and while it sounds great it keeps changing the default application for my MP3s to Vox even though I tell it not to. So I'd love to find another program like that which has great equalizer presets. It puts iTunes to shame for sound quality.
Backups are sent to a Synology NAS which also runs my torrent client, proxy server, and is connected to my VPN so all my Internet traffic is on there instead of having each computer/phone/tablet connecting to the VPN. I just mount a drive on my iMac to access any downloaded media. I also run the BitTorrent Sync server on there and my iMac to act as my own personal cloud. I store my books and magazines on there which I read on my iPad. It loads much faster since it's on the LAN instead of having to go out to Box or Dropbox.
I've been thinking about getting a speaker or two to connect to my iMac if I find a good music player. It'd be nice for shows too.
I've been using something like this for about the past five years now. Before I had a laptop which I was running the torrent client and watching shows. I haven't had cable or satellite since 2003 and don't miss it at all. And I've been using the iPad for reading for the past three years. Before that it was old fashioned paper.
But a company rarely pays all cash to buy another company. It offers it's own stock in exchange for the stock of the other company and sometimes it's stock plus cash. This may cause some problems with dilution of the stock as more stocks are on the market but this is partially offset because the expectations for the larger company are higher (or at least should be).
There are times when you are more than willing to pay above what the market thinks a company is worth. For example if you can lock your competitors out of a technology. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are good at this. Or a company wants to break into a new market. It's often easier to buy your way in so that you have the infrastructure and expertise rather than trying to build it up from nothing.
Of course there are just some times a company is lead by an idiot and blows a few billion buying a dud (cough, HP, cough).
Wall Street still wants to see Apple and Microsoft to have good growth numbers, Apple especially. Analysts are expecting Apple to have an average annual earnings growth rate of 15%. From the same site Microsoft is expected to grow it's earnings at just over 8%.
The problem is that stock markets still expect the large companies to post revenue growth at the same rates as they did when they were smaller companies. Of course as they get larger and larger it becomes harder to keep up such growth. Growing a $10M company 5% is a lot easier than a $10B company. So they resort to buying other companies to get their growth. Or layoffs in order to improve their income statement.
Not that I agree with the methods because they are doing them just to help the stock price.
If they're at Starbucks then frying their brain is a bit redundant.
I have one and used it a lot. The water is hot but not boiling (low 90s Celsius). The problem with them is that there is a small tank under the sink which keeps the water hot so you are paying electricity to keep the water hot even if you aren't using it (over the night) and if you want more than a couple of mugs the temperature starts to drop quickly as the hot water gets diluted with the cooler incoming water.
It has been about 10 years since I've looked into them so maybe they have changed since then. I haven't used it in a couple of years since I've found a better solution for my needs. I've got a dedicated tea maker which can also double as a kettle.
I have a Breville tea maker and absolutely love it. It allows you to control the temperature and steeping time. I don't use the feature but I think you can set the time that it will start. I've had it about two years and I use it every day. It's on the expensive side but if you keep an eye on Amazon you can get it on sale but if mine broke I would replace the next day.
The temperature of the water depends on the type of tea. Black tea requires boiling water. White tea and green tea are different. I forget the numbers because I don't drink them. I only know this because I have a tea maker from Breville (and it's amazing) and it has settings for different types of teas. You put loose leaf tea in the basket and after the water is brought to the proper temperature the basket is lowered into the water for the right amount of time (which is adjustable). I used to drink a fair amount of coffee but since getting the tea maker I drink a lot of tea and a little bit of coffee. There are a lot of options when you go to buy loose leaf tea.
The idea of lowering taxes on the rich so that they will reinvest the money and boost the economy is supply-side economics (or Reaganomics) and was tried in the 1980s. It failed badly. I'm not advocating a return to the 90%+ tax rates that were seen before but I think that there should be a shift of the tax burden from the poorer onto the richer. In Canada during the past 9 years our federal government has cut taxes, mostly toward the upper middle class, the rich, and corporations, so that it brings in $45B less a year. There are programs that are having problems because of this, especially infrastructure investment.
If my wealth is in non-liquid form then I'm not going to be too worried about not fitting in. I won't have the money for the big expensive house, flash car, expensive clothes, and fancy toys. People won't think I'm rich.
As to your example, you are forgetting to account for the actions of my donations. They are going to have impacts on the economy too. Say I give most of my money to Habit for Humanity. They will take that and build a lot of houses. Some materials and work is donated but there is still a lot of purchases on items such as cement, plumbing, and electrical. These people are put to work plus supplies are bought which put other people to work. So there are positive ripples too.