This reminds me of the current fuss over "flipped classrooms". Yes, it seems like an interesting idea, and it might provide better outcomes, but it requires several outstanding teaching assistants who understand the concepts well enough to provide one-on-one instruction during class time.
What? If you require TAs for a flipped classroom (unless you are talking a massive class) you are doing something wrong. It is totally manageable with one teacher. The only thing that makes it difficult is the amount of prep time that goes into creating each instructional video, which can be prohibitive.
I really don't have any objections to this, it sounds very reasonable to me, it just leans a bit towards the idealistic end of the spectrum from what I can tell. One of the things I've really enjoyed about Love and Logic is that it is extremely focused on the practical realities that parents have to deal with, because we are constrained by time, and circumstances, and our own patience occasionally.
That said, I am a big fan of research-based parenting, and the spanking/stick-and-carrot approach can certainly be improved upon. The problem I have is with parents that seem to think that their purpose is primarily to satisfy their child's every whim, and in particular, the parents who don't know how to intervene when their child is running amok and hurting other kids. This has happened more than once with other kids, whether on the playground or with friends of ours that don't discipline their children.
Either way, I do find the approach you've described intriguing, so I'll be checking out this book at some point.
Regardless, I think that parental modeling is a hugely significant tool for developing behaviors in children. Doing something that I don't want my kids to do seems problematic to me. If I can avoid it, I will.
The thing you haven't addressed, though, is that spanking is inherently confrontational and leads easily to escalation of emotions. I don't trust myself to consistently be an objective arbiter of justice, and establishing that hitting my child is a line I will never cross means that I won't ever worry about slipping over the edge in a moment of anger to something that becomes abuse. I also know that there are people much less controlled than I am that undoubtedly use the umbrella of spanking as a justification for discipline that absolutely crosses the line into physical abuse.
The biggest argument against spanking that I've seen is that there are alternatives that work just as well, without the potential drawbacks I've noted. Why spank, when timeouts work just as well? Maybe they don't for some, but my daughter has responded satisfactorily to a timeout in her bedroom, so I see no reason to resort to spanking.
Absolutely, sometimes modeling the behavior for kids that you should have, or otherwise overtly demonstrating it/explaining it, is really key. Outside of learning empirically, watching how parents do things is major driver of childhood learning, from what I've seen.
I'm also curious about why timeouts aren't working. Sitting in a certain spot for timeouts has always seemed like a recipe for disaster to me, which is why we just go straight to the bedroom. One of the other things that love and logic emphasizes (and that I really like) is that those timeouts (what we call bedroom time) are immediate, connected to a certain cue that let's the kid know they have gone over the line (we say "that's a bummer") and delivered with empathy, never with anger. For instance, with hitting, you'd say something like "It's so sad that you decided to hit the kitty! Only people who are nice to kitties get to be around them!"
Each kid learns their own way though, and it does take time and consistent repetition before anything really becomes solidified. Picking a highly regarded book and following it to the letter might really be helpful, whichever one it is - winging it might work for some people, but I really like having a set method to refer to when I don't know how to deal with something my kid is doing.
Your boss can choose to end the working relationship, as can you. So there's balance there. It also wouldn't be "wrong" for you to fire your boss - it's just that you can't do it because no one will listen to you. Spanking teaches kids that it is wrong to hit, except when parents do it as discipline. That distinction is small enough that I think it might be lost on my two year old.
A better example would be if it was a fire-able offense for you to go to youtube at work, but your boss watched cat videos online all day. Sure, that could be defended as a privilege of position, but anybody working under such a regime would probably get resentful pretty fast. I aspire to always hold myself to the same standard I hold my kids to.
How do you deal with this: two year old needs to get into the carseat, but doesn't want to? Screams, hits, cries. Sometimes talking can work, other times she runs away if you try to talk to her.
I do appreciate the book recommendation, though - I'll check it out. I think you put it well to say that "focusing on behaviors is insufficient", but I'd also say that talking is insufficient. I think some things can be explained and discussed, and some things require immediate and consistent consequences. It's also easy for "talking about" a problem to become a behavior-based consequence by another name, if it turns into lecturing, or what is essentially a forced break from an activity. There's also the significant challenge that sometimes the vocabulary simply isn't available to discuss some things.
Your approach sounds interesting, I'm just genuinely curious about these potential drawbacks.
Citation needed. You are claiming that male suicide rates and single motherhood can be blamed on these new discipline trends. I suppose that the decrease in crime rates are also an effect, since that has been declining for decades too? Or is it just that anything bad that happens is the fault of liberals, and anything good that happens is thanks to conservatives?
For the record, I also think these people are idiots, but your painfully transparent partisan bias destroys your credibility.
I am only on my second kid, but we've never had to do "cry-it-out", unless you count car trips. The Baby Whisperer books are pretty good - the basic idea is have a consistent schedule and cues that help the kid go to sleep (think Pavlovian conditioning + circadian rhythms) and it seems to work well. We have had lots of people comment on how well and quickly our kids go to sleep.
This is true, but I think you can have an easy child and a successful adult all in one (most of the time).
Really, discipline should be about helping kids to develop behaviors that will enable them to be successful adults. The big ones here being the ability to think critically through decisions and make good choices. "Should I hit the cat?" and "should I steal this car?" both require impulse control to answer correctly. That's the entire premise behind the Love and Logic discipline books, which I have found extremely helpful.
You are full of shit. Sure, there's some pretty poor stuff out there, and MRI, etc can be (and are) used sometimes to generate exactly the result the researcher is looking for, but any science in its infancy has plenty of crud in the mix.
Really, psychology is just a hell of a lot harder than any of the more basic sciences. Biology used to be in the same boat - it pretty much started and ended with categorizing species (and a bit of anatomy as well). It wasn't until things like evolution and powerful microscopy came about, providing theoretical frameworks for understanding and the ability to understand things at a more fundamental level, that the real power of the science became apparent.
My background is in physics, btw. Being familiar with the incredibly nuanced experiments that were developed for many of our big breakthroughs in physics helps you realize how many orders of magnitude of complexity are added for understanding something like a human mind.
Kids can be perfectly fine with spanking. However, spanking has its problems. Take a willful two-year old throwing a tantrum (screaming, hitting, yelling) and a parent that has already committed to causing physical pain as a discipline technique, lock them in an enclosed room together, and who knows what could happen?
Spanking can work, but it is inherently hypocritical (I can hit you, but you can't hit me) and has some really nasty failure modes. You don't have to cause physical pain to children to get them to behave - you just have to deliver consistent consequences of some form or another. And let kids experience natural consequences when it is safe to do so (touching a hot pan once or twice would have learned this kid to heed his parent's warnings pretty quickly).
Carrying an instrument around for 10 hours a day, marching according to strict order, developing a skill that requires technique, creativity, and discipline? I don't remember being coddled or understood at band camp, whereas every other summer camp I know of (or attended) is mostly about singing kumbaya around campfires and getting entertained.
This shit is absolutely retarded, and doubt that any of these goddamn hippies has raised a child of their own.
The fundamental job of parents is to help little humans develop the skills and behaviors they will need to become successful and happy adults. How do people learn? Experimentally - try some stuff, see what happens. If you get something you like, repeat, if you get something you don't like, stop trying that thing.
What parents need to do is make sure that consequences happen that accurately reinforce for children that some behaviors will lead to happy and good outcomes, and some behaviors will lead to bad outcomes. This is about finding a happy balance between neglect and being an immovable force of nature to the perspective of your child (while being willing to compromise either of these things for safety's sake). What I mean is, sometimes you need to let your child try some stupid things and deal with the consequences - all the way from building a tower and learning that if they don't do it right it will fall down, up to things like touching a hot surface and seeing that it hurts. Some things (like playing in a busy street, or on the edge of a cliff, or with a stranger's Rottweiler) are obviously dangerous enough that you intervene and don't allow the child to experience the natural consequences.
For things that are too dangerous, or things that are abstract enough that the connection between action and consequence isn't immediate/obvious enough, the parent has to create those consequences, consistently and reliably, so that the child learns the connection. It isn't a kid's fault if they dump their food on the ground (once). They are trying random things to see what happens. If the only thing that happens though is that parents run around in a panic and talk angrily, though, the kid has basically learned that dumping food on the ground is the key to making parents run around and talk angrily. If, instead, it is immediately followed by time out, or being removed from the table (no more food), or spanking, or I don't care what (as long as it is consistent), the child can start to learn that they want to avoid that outcome so they'll avoid the behavior that produces it.
One thing I and these no-discipline hippies can probably agree on is that discipline isn't about making something so bad that the child will NEVER consider such an activity because the consequences are so severe. That doesn't work. You don't need something really painful to make a point - humans learn things just as well (or better) with small, consistent annoyances or rewards as if they have big consequences or rewards. We've found that a timeout in the bedroom works perfectly well. My kid doesn't usually like it, but it also isn't some terrible thing that makes her afraid of us or dread being alone. If she's not being enjoyable to be around, she gets put in her bedroom until she can be nice again. If she's throwing a tantrum, it has the added benefit of removing her from the situation that originally made her angry, and it also gives my wife or I the chance to cool down and not be screamed at. The thing I never liked about spanking is how easily it can escalate (screaming angry child, angry parent who has already committed to causing physical pain as a discipline technique). Putting a kid in a bedroom is pretty benign, and if people object that there's some harsh subtext (we only spend time with you if you behave???) I think that's actually a benefit - if you act like a self-centered shit all the time, good people WON'T hang out with you, so from my perspective it mirrors reality well enough to be a good lesson.
The whole Love and Logic series of books is highly recommended here. It is all about getting kids to think through their decisions and develop the ability to make good choices. Consequences and discipline, but no bullying, yelling, or hitting involved.
Well, the velocities and accelerations involved are higher by an order of magnitude or two. The consequences for failure are more immediate and severe. And while the first cars and planes were essentially hacked together in garages, the first space capsules required the resources of entire nations to build, and even then failure was frequent.
Again, go play some goddamn Kerbal Space Program and then tell me that spaceflight is no harder than anything else. There's a good chance that you won't be able to reach a stable orbit without tutorials, because most people don't understand shit about how and why spacecraft actually stay up there in the sky. First hint: it involves going at least 17000 mph - so fast that you fall towards the ground and miss.
You can't really appreciate what NASA does until you build your own rocket, load it up with little green men, and crash it dozens of times while you try to learn how to orbit. Kerbal Space Program taught me how impressive this achievement really is.
As a followup, playing tabletop games will get any sufficiently motivated youth to start designing tabletop games. There are very few barriers to entry here - using existing boards, figures, dice, cards, etc can make it very quick and easy to play around with some inventive game concepts.
If you want a really pure and direct interaction with the mechanics that govern gameplay, D&D and related game systems are hard to beat. Humans are literally interpreting and implementing the rules of gameplay, and anybody who is literate can impose structure on an imaginary universe by understanding (and eventually writing their own) rulesets.
There are lots of different systems out there. Just getting him thinking about the rules of Risk vs Settlers of Catan (both arguably about conquest of a region, military or economic, respectively) would be a good way to start. D&D is obviously a standard (and 5th edition, which just came out, is excellent), but there are free and open source games out there (D&D 3.5 edition has all the rules available on the web, open-source style, and there are interesting derivatives like Legend from Rule of Cool) and they expose how games really work, and would help establish the kind of thinking that would be invaluable to someone looking to program game mechanics.
If you want something simple in that vein to start with, Settlers of Catan (as previously mentioned) is a great study for RTS-type game mechanics, and Mouse Guard is supposedly a simplified, kid-focused tabletop RPG.
Of course, but you can't design for infinite lifespan. You design for the mission, add margin as required, and if it lasts longer, great. Almost always, it does, but this is a probability thing - there's every chance that you could get a 1 in a million, mission ending event on day one - there's no such thing as zero chance of failure. If you design for longer than required, you are spending more money/mass/time than you have to.
The real question is up to the principal investigator and his/her science team in a mission like this. I would expect that the scientific return over time of most missions trends towards zero - not to say that it is useless to keep a long-lived system limping along, but just to say that many of the biggest questions are answered in the first days, and there's an inherent balance with increasing longevity - what's better, a 10 yr design with meager instrumentation, or a 1 yr mission with more sensing/data collection? These are the trades you have to make, since budgets, schedules, and basic physical laws mean you can't always have everything you want, when you want it, for the price you are willing to pay.
For the record, I work in the industry and these questions directly impact the work that I do - designing towards a 2 year lifespan vs a 10 year lifespan can easily change the cost of a mission by orders of magnitude, and it is ignorant to act as though a failure AFTER the design life is a fault of engineering. That would be like criticizing a car rated for 20mpg for only getting 30mpg - it isn't a faulty design, it is faulty expectations.
I also highly recommend reading something like Roving Mars, by Steven Squyres - he was the PI on Spirit and Opportunity, and you get a look at the tough choices and gambles they had to make as part of that mission. It turns out that they made some pretty good choices, and the dice rolled their way in a lot of cases. It is easy to figure out where you would have put more resources once the mission has flown and you know what failed - it's another matter entirely to figure out where to invest your time and risk management up front. Hindsight and all that.
Here's the thing. Imagine that you are a mechanical engineer, told to build a reaction wheel system that will have something like a 99% chance of lasting 3.5 years, and do it as cheaply, quickly, and lightly as possible. Are you going to pick an unproven, brand new bearing design that introduces lots of extra complexity, would probably involve a lot of new ($$$) and custom design work, and which require all the testing and validation that is involved to qualify a new technology for spaceflight? For starters - prove that any EM fields wouldn't impact the rest of the system, show it can tolerate any failure without having a detrimental impact on the rest of the system, characterize its failure signatures for diagnostics, figure out precisely how far it can be driven, for how long. While you are at it make sure that it can do all of this in any temperature and pressure. And cycle it through several lifetimes of use to make sure you understand how it will fatigue.
This is essentially the scenario the engineer on this project faced. 3.5 years isn't an atrocious design life, there are certainly tried and proven reaction wheel designs that have met that requirement in other spacecraft. Kepler wasn't a technology demonstrator - it was a science mission with a specified design life (that it satisfied) and using a simple reaction wheel was the right choice here.
If you think it should have been more reliable, blame the principal investigator or NASA administration or Congress, who all played their own parts in determining the design life (and hence budget) for this program. If you think it should use something newfangled for its own sake, well, it wasn't that kind of mission to begin with. If you think new, fancy technologies should be used to improve reliability, well, you don't understand reliability very well - you don't build a reliable system by using unproven designs, you use things that are tested and understood and try to minimize the big, risky unknowns.
For the record, the space industry IS working on replacements for reaction wheels, but it is doing it first on inexpensive satellites and technology demonstrators, so that it can later become commonplace. Reaction wheels themselves are probably going to become obsolete for many LEO and MEO applications before magnetic bearings even come into wide use, because electromagnetic torqueing tech can react against the Earth's magnetic field for orientation, and uses no moving parts, and never has to bleed built-up velocity off the reaction wheels (which costs propellant).
It wasn't 4 years, it is closer to 6. Launched in March '09. Secondly, there was a 3.5 year mission life, which Kepler satisfied. Now, even after sustaining some part failures, it continues to do valuable science. So, in fact, it looks like we've got a system that met all objectives and is working far past its design life - if that is pathetic, what would qualify as a success in your eyes?
Kepler was designed with a 3.5 yr mission life. It is now going on its 6th year in space. So it met what it needed to do and is STILL producing science. If they had blown time/money/mass on a fancier reaction wheel system, they might've had to sacrifice science payload, or power margin, or had the project go over schedule and over budget and get cancelled altogether. Not to mention that some other, more critical part could've failed because they would have had to sacrifice margin elsewhere.
Perfect is the enemy of good. I swear, if NASA shoots for all the capabilities and tries to make sure nothing can go wrong, ever, we get things like the JWST which is years behind schedule and severely over budget. If they do a sensible, focused mission that makes sure to be Good Enough while staying on time and affordable, people complain that it doesn't last forever (even though it has already almost doubled its design life).
Do you really think that in the 30 seconds it took you to read that summary and write your comment, you managed to come up with something that entire teams of NASA engineers who do this for a living didn't think of? Or maybe your job is easy enough that random slashdotters who scarcely understand it can offer you meaningful advice on how to do it.
Interesting to know. I'm on the beginning end of such a career, it was a hard adaptation at first because of some of the reasons you and the parent poster mentioned, but thankfully I work for an aerospace company that is small, new (relatively speaking), and not yet crippled by risk aversion. I'm even in product assurance of all places, but we get interesting problems flowed down from time to time, and we get to do some pretty fun testing. I have noticed, though, that some of my favorite days are the ones I get to spend writing scripts to automate different analysis tasks, which has made me wonder whether I'd enjoy a position in software development.
On the other hand, programmers as a whole don't seem terribly pleased with their careers either, at least judging by the slashdot crowd.
If you think you can reason your way out of primal urges, inclinations, and desires--well, good luck with that.
That's not at all the point I'm making. There are lots of good reasons to let men go do dangerous things and keep women at home in a tribal environment, regardless of any sort of primal urge. Men are more disposable and more physically capable, and women are biologically equipped for child rearing in some important ways. Those reasons are complete garbage in the environment that you and I live in, though, but many stereotypes are still based on them.
I get that the urge to have sex/kids/social status are all primal and we'll never be done with that, but that's a fundamentally different thing than the urge to have a career outside the house or not. It takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics to see how a male instinct to hunt and protect translates to sitting in a cubicle staring at spreadsheets all day, just as it is far-fetched to imagine that a female instinct to care for children translates to wanting to sit around and watch daytime TV. These stereotypes are weird translations of our old gender roles to a modern landscape, and I see little reason to defend them other than tradition.
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This reminds me of the current fuss over "flipped classrooms". Yes, it seems like an interesting idea, and it might provide better outcomes, but it requires several outstanding teaching assistants who understand the concepts well enough to provide one-on-one instruction during class time.
What? If you require TAs for a flipped classroom (unless you are talking a massive class) you are doing something wrong. It is totally manageable with one teacher. The only thing that makes it difficult is the amount of prep time that goes into creating each instructional video, which can be prohibitive.
Hey, I'm not the one who unilaterally disparaged the work of millions of PHds.
I really don't have any objections to this, it sounds very reasonable to me, it just leans a bit towards the idealistic end of the spectrum from what I can tell. One of the things I've really enjoyed about Love and Logic is that it is extremely focused on the practical realities that parents have to deal with, because we are constrained by time, and circumstances, and our own patience occasionally.
That said, I am a big fan of research-based parenting, and the spanking/stick-and-carrot approach can certainly be improved upon. The problem I have is with parents that seem to think that their purpose is primarily to satisfy their child's every whim, and in particular, the parents who don't know how to intervene when their child is running amok and hurting other kids. This has happened more than once with other kids, whether on the playground or with friends of ours that don't discipline their children.
Either way, I do find the approach you've described intriguing, so I'll be checking out this book at some point.
Regardless, I think that parental modeling is a hugely significant tool for developing behaviors in children. Doing something that I don't want my kids to do seems problematic to me. If I can avoid it, I will.
The thing you haven't addressed, though, is that spanking is inherently confrontational and leads easily to escalation of emotions. I don't trust myself to consistently be an objective arbiter of justice, and establishing that hitting my child is a line I will never cross means that I won't ever worry about slipping over the edge in a moment of anger to something that becomes abuse. I also know that there are people much less controlled than I am that undoubtedly use the umbrella of spanking as a justification for discipline that absolutely crosses the line into physical abuse.
The biggest argument against spanking that I've seen is that there are alternatives that work just as well, without the potential drawbacks I've noted. Why spank, when timeouts work just as well? Maybe they don't for some, but my daughter has responded satisfactorily to a timeout in her bedroom, so I see no reason to resort to spanking.
Absolutely, sometimes modeling the behavior for kids that you should have, or otherwise overtly demonstrating it/explaining it, is really key. Outside of learning empirically, watching how parents do things is major driver of childhood learning, from what I've seen.
I'm also curious about why timeouts aren't working. Sitting in a certain spot for timeouts has always seemed like a recipe for disaster to me, which is why we just go straight to the bedroom. One of the other things that love and logic emphasizes (and that I really like) is that those timeouts (what we call bedroom time) are immediate, connected to a certain cue that let's the kid know they have gone over the line (we say "that's a bummer") and delivered with empathy, never with anger. For instance, with hitting, you'd say something like "It's so sad that you decided to hit the kitty! Only people who are nice to kitties get to be around them!"
Each kid learns their own way though, and it does take time and consistent repetition before anything really becomes solidified. Picking a highly regarded book and following it to the letter might really be helpful, whichever one it is - winging it might work for some people, but I really like having a set method to refer to when I don't know how to deal with something my kid is doing.
Your boss can choose to end the working relationship, as can you. So there's balance there. It also wouldn't be "wrong" for you to fire your boss - it's just that you can't do it because no one will listen to you. Spanking teaches kids that it is wrong to hit, except when parents do it as discipline. That distinction is small enough that I think it might be lost on my two year old.
A better example would be if it was a fire-able offense for you to go to youtube at work, but your boss watched cat videos online all day. Sure, that could be defended as a privilege of position, but anybody working under such a regime would probably get resentful pretty fast. I aspire to always hold myself to the same standard I hold my kids to.
How do you deal with this: two year old needs to get into the carseat, but doesn't want to? Screams, hits, cries. Sometimes talking can work, other times she runs away if you try to talk to her.
I do appreciate the book recommendation, though - I'll check it out. I think you put it well to say that "focusing on behaviors is insufficient", but I'd also say that talking is insufficient. I think some things can be explained and discussed, and some things require immediate and consistent consequences. It's also easy for "talking about" a problem to become a behavior-based consequence by another name, if it turns into lecturing, or what is essentially a forced break from an activity. There's also the significant challenge that sometimes the vocabulary simply isn't available to discuss some things.
Your approach sounds interesting, I'm just genuinely curious about these potential drawbacks.
Citation needed. You are claiming that male suicide rates and single motherhood can be blamed on these new discipline trends. I suppose that the decrease in crime rates are also an effect, since that has been declining for decades too? Or is it just that anything bad that happens is the fault of liberals, and anything good that happens is thanks to conservatives?
For the record, I also think these people are idiots, but your painfully transparent partisan bias destroys your credibility.
I am only on my second kid, but we've never had to do "cry-it-out", unless you count car trips. The Baby Whisperer books are pretty good - the basic idea is have a consistent schedule and cues that help the kid go to sleep (think Pavlovian conditioning + circadian rhythms) and it seems to work well. We have had lots of people comment on how well and quickly our kids go to sleep.
This is true, but I think you can have an easy child and a successful adult all in one (most of the time).
Really, discipline should be about helping kids to develop behaviors that will enable them to be successful adults. The big ones here being the ability to think critically through decisions and make good choices. "Should I hit the cat?" and "should I steal this car?" both require impulse control to answer correctly. That's the entire premise behind the Love and Logic discipline books, which I have found extremely helpful.
You are full of shit. Sure, there's some pretty poor stuff out there, and MRI, etc can be (and are) used sometimes to generate exactly the result the researcher is looking for, but any science in its infancy has plenty of crud in the mix.
Really, psychology is just a hell of a lot harder than any of the more basic sciences. Biology used to be in the same boat - it pretty much started and ended with categorizing species (and a bit of anatomy as well). It wasn't until things like evolution and powerful microscopy came about, providing theoretical frameworks for understanding and the ability to understand things at a more fundamental level, that the real power of the science became apparent.
My background is in physics, btw. Being familiar with the incredibly nuanced experiments that were developed for many of our big breakthroughs in physics helps you realize how many orders of magnitude of complexity are added for understanding something like a human mind.
Kids can be perfectly fine with spanking. However, spanking has its problems. Take a willful two-year old throwing a tantrum (screaming, hitting, yelling) and a parent that has already committed to causing physical pain as a discipline technique, lock them in an enclosed room together, and who knows what could happen?
Spanking can work, but it is inherently hypocritical (I can hit you, but you can't hit me) and has some really nasty failure modes. You don't have to cause physical pain to children to get them to behave - you just have to deliver consistent consequences of some form or another. And let kids experience natural consequences when it is safe to do so (touching a hot pan once or twice would have learned this kid to heed his parent's warnings pretty quickly).
Carrying an instrument around for 10 hours a day, marching according to strict order, developing a skill that requires technique, creativity, and discipline? I don't remember being coddled or understood at band camp, whereas every other summer camp I know of (or attended) is mostly about singing kumbaya around campfires and getting entertained.
This shit is absolutely retarded, and doubt that any of these goddamn hippies has raised a child of their own.
The fundamental job of parents is to help little humans develop the skills and behaviors they will need to become successful and happy adults. How do people learn? Experimentally - try some stuff, see what happens. If you get something you like, repeat, if you get something you don't like, stop trying that thing.
What parents need to do is make sure that consequences happen that accurately reinforce for children that some behaviors will lead to happy and good outcomes, and some behaviors will lead to bad outcomes. This is about finding a happy balance between neglect and being an immovable force of nature to the perspective of your child (while being willing to compromise either of these things for safety's sake). What I mean is, sometimes you need to let your child try some stupid things and deal with the consequences - all the way from building a tower and learning that if they don't do it right it will fall down, up to things like touching a hot surface and seeing that it hurts. Some things (like playing in a busy street, or on the edge of a cliff, or with a stranger's Rottweiler) are obviously dangerous enough that you intervene and don't allow the child to experience the natural consequences.
For things that are too dangerous, or things that are abstract enough that the connection between action and consequence isn't immediate/obvious enough, the parent has to create those consequences, consistently and reliably, so that the child learns the connection. It isn't a kid's fault if they dump their food on the ground (once). They are trying random things to see what happens. If the only thing that happens though is that parents run around in a panic and talk angrily, though, the kid has basically learned that dumping food on the ground is the key to making parents run around and talk angrily. If, instead, it is immediately followed by time out, or being removed from the table (no more food), or spanking, or I don't care what (as long as it is consistent), the child can start to learn that they want to avoid that outcome so they'll avoid the behavior that produces it.
One thing I and these no-discipline hippies can probably agree on is that discipline isn't about making something so bad that the child will NEVER consider such an activity because the consequences are so severe. That doesn't work. You don't need something really painful to make a point - humans learn things just as well (or better) with small, consistent annoyances or rewards as if they have big consequences or rewards. We've found that a timeout in the bedroom works perfectly well. My kid doesn't usually like it, but it also isn't some terrible thing that makes her afraid of us or dread being alone. If she's not being enjoyable to be around, she gets put in her bedroom until she can be nice again. If she's throwing a tantrum, it has the added benefit of removing her from the situation that originally made her angry, and it also gives my wife or I the chance to cool down and not be screamed at. The thing I never liked about spanking is how easily it can escalate (screaming angry child, angry parent who has already committed to causing physical pain as a discipline technique). Putting a kid in a bedroom is pretty benign, and if people object that there's some harsh subtext (we only spend time with you if you behave???) I think that's actually a benefit - if you act like a self-centered shit all the time, good people WON'T hang out with you, so from my perspective it mirrors reality well enough to be a good lesson.
The whole Love and Logic series of books is highly recommended here. It is all about getting kids to think through their decisions and develop the ability to make good choices. Consequences and discipline, but no bullying, yelling, or hitting involved.
Right, because all tasks are of equivalent difficulty. No achievement is harder than any other. The differences are just marketing.
Well, the velocities and accelerations involved are higher by an order of magnitude or two. The consequences for failure are more immediate and severe. And while the first cars and planes were essentially hacked together in garages, the first space capsules required the resources of entire nations to build, and even then failure was frequent.
Again, go play some goddamn Kerbal Space Program and then tell me that spaceflight is no harder than anything else. There's a good chance that you won't be able to reach a stable orbit without tutorials, because most people don't understand shit about how and why spacecraft actually stay up there in the sky. First hint: it involves going at least 17000 mph - so fast that you fall towards the ground and miss.
You can't really appreciate what NASA does until you build your own rocket, load it up with little green men, and crash it dozens of times while you try to learn how to orbit. Kerbal Space Program taught me how impressive this achievement really is.
As a followup, playing tabletop games will get any sufficiently motivated youth to start designing tabletop games. There are very few barriers to entry here - using existing boards, figures, dice, cards, etc can make it very quick and easy to play around with some inventive game concepts.
If you want a really pure and direct interaction with the mechanics that govern gameplay, D&D and related game systems are hard to beat. Humans are literally interpreting and implementing the rules of gameplay, and anybody who is literate can impose structure on an imaginary universe by understanding (and eventually writing their own) rulesets.
There are lots of different systems out there. Just getting him thinking about the rules of Risk vs Settlers of Catan (both arguably about conquest of a region, military or economic, respectively) would be a good way to start. D&D is obviously a standard (and 5th edition, which just came out, is excellent), but there are free and open source games out there (D&D 3.5 edition has all the rules available on the web, open-source style, and there are interesting derivatives like Legend from Rule of Cool) and they expose how games really work, and would help establish the kind of thinking that would be invaluable to someone looking to program game mechanics.
If you want something simple in that vein to start with, Settlers of Catan (as previously mentioned) is a great study for RTS-type game mechanics, and Mouse Guard is supposedly a simplified, kid-focused tabletop RPG.
Of course, but you can't design for infinite lifespan. You design for the mission, add margin as required, and if it lasts longer, great. Almost always, it does, but this is a probability thing - there's every chance that you could get a 1 in a million, mission ending event on day one - there's no such thing as zero chance of failure. If you design for longer than required, you are spending more money/mass/time than you have to.
The real question is up to the principal investigator and his/her science team in a mission like this. I would expect that the scientific return over time of most missions trends towards zero - not to say that it is useless to keep a long-lived system limping along, but just to say that many of the biggest questions are answered in the first days, and there's an inherent balance with increasing longevity - what's better, a 10 yr design with meager instrumentation, or a 1 yr mission with more sensing/data collection? These are the trades you have to make, since budgets, schedules, and basic physical laws mean you can't always have everything you want, when you want it, for the price you are willing to pay.
For the record, I work in the industry and these questions directly impact the work that I do - designing towards a 2 year lifespan vs a 10 year lifespan can easily change the cost of a mission by orders of magnitude, and it is ignorant to act as though a failure AFTER the design life is a fault of engineering. That would be like criticizing a car rated for 20mpg for only getting 30mpg - it isn't a faulty design, it is faulty expectations.
I also highly recommend reading something like Roving Mars, by Steven Squyres - he was the PI on Spirit and Opportunity, and you get a look at the tough choices and gambles they had to make as part of that mission. It turns out that they made some pretty good choices, and the dice rolled their way in a lot of cases. It is easy to figure out where you would have put more resources once the mission has flown and you know what failed - it's another matter entirely to figure out where to invest your time and risk management up front. Hindsight and all that.
Here's the thing. Imagine that you are a mechanical engineer, told to build a reaction wheel system that will have something like a 99% chance of lasting 3.5 years, and do it as cheaply, quickly, and lightly as possible. Are you going to pick an unproven, brand new bearing design that introduces lots of extra complexity, would probably involve a lot of new ($$$) and custom design work, and which require all the testing and validation that is involved to qualify a new technology for spaceflight? For starters - prove that any EM fields wouldn't impact the rest of the system, show it can tolerate any failure without having a detrimental impact on the rest of the system, characterize its failure signatures for diagnostics, figure out precisely how far it can be driven, for how long. While you are at it make sure that it can do all of this in any temperature and pressure. And cycle it through several lifetimes of use to make sure you understand how it will fatigue.
This is essentially the scenario the engineer on this project faced. 3.5 years isn't an atrocious design life, there are certainly tried and proven reaction wheel designs that have met that requirement in other spacecraft. Kepler wasn't a technology demonstrator - it was a science mission with a specified design life (that it satisfied) and using a simple reaction wheel was the right choice here.
If you think it should have been more reliable, blame the principal investigator or NASA administration or Congress, who all played their own parts in determining the design life (and hence budget) for this program. If you think it should use something newfangled for its own sake, well, it wasn't that kind of mission to begin with. If you think new, fancy technologies should be used to improve reliability, well, you don't understand reliability very well - you don't build a reliable system by using unproven designs, you use things that are tested and understood and try to minimize the big, risky unknowns.
For the record, the space industry IS working on replacements for reaction wheels, but it is doing it first on inexpensive satellites and technology demonstrators, so that it can later become commonplace. Reaction wheels themselves are probably going to become obsolete for many LEO and MEO applications before magnetic bearings even come into wide use, because electromagnetic torqueing tech can react against the Earth's magnetic field for orientation, and uses no moving parts, and never has to bleed built-up velocity off the reaction wheels (which costs propellant).
It wasn't 4 years, it is closer to 6. Launched in March '09. Secondly, there was a 3.5 year mission life, which Kepler satisfied. Now, even after sustaining some part failures, it continues to do valuable science. So, in fact, it looks like we've got a system that met all objectives and is working far past its design life - if that is pathetic, what would qualify as a success in your eyes?
Kepler was designed with a 3.5 yr mission life. It is now going on its 6th year in space. So it met what it needed to do and is STILL producing science. If they had blown time/money/mass on a fancier reaction wheel system, they might've had to sacrifice science payload, or power margin, or had the project go over schedule and over budget and get cancelled altogether. Not to mention that some other, more critical part could've failed because they would have had to sacrifice margin elsewhere.
Perfect is the enemy of good. I swear, if NASA shoots for all the capabilities and tries to make sure nothing can go wrong, ever, we get things like the JWST which is years behind schedule and severely over budget. If they do a sensible, focused mission that makes sure to be Good Enough while staying on time and affordable, people complain that it doesn't last forever (even though it has already almost doubled its design life).
Do you really think that in the 30 seconds it took you to read that summary and write your comment, you managed to come up with something that entire teams of NASA engineers who do this for a living didn't think of? Or maybe your job is easy enough that random slashdotters who scarcely understand it can offer you meaningful advice on how to do it.
Interesting to know. I'm on the beginning end of such a career, it was a hard adaptation at first because of some of the reasons you and the parent poster mentioned, but thankfully I work for an aerospace company that is small, new (relatively speaking), and not yet crippled by risk aversion. I'm even in product assurance of all places, but we get interesting problems flowed down from time to time, and we get to do some pretty fun testing. I have noticed, though, that some of my favorite days are the ones I get to spend writing scripts to automate different analysis tasks, which has made me wonder whether I'd enjoy a position in software development.
On the other hand, programmers as a whole don't seem terribly pleased with their careers either, at least judging by the slashdot crowd.
If you think you can reason your way out of primal urges, inclinations, and desires--well, good luck with that.
That's not at all the point I'm making. There are lots of good reasons to let men go do dangerous things and keep women at home in a tribal environment, regardless of any sort of primal urge. Men are more disposable and more physically capable, and women are biologically equipped for child rearing in some important ways. Those reasons are complete garbage in the environment that you and I live in, though, but many stereotypes are still based on them.
I get that the urge to have sex/kids/social status are all primal and we'll never be done with that, but that's a fundamentally different thing than the urge to have a career outside the house or not. It takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics to see how a male instinct to hunt and protect translates to sitting in a cubicle staring at spreadsheets all day, just as it is far-fetched to imagine that a female instinct to care for children translates to wanting to sit around and watch daytime TV. These stereotypes are weird translations of our old gender roles to a modern landscape, and I see little reason to defend them other than tradition.