"Learning styles" takes an undeniable truth, that different people find it easiest to learn in different ways, exaggerates it to a falsehood (i.e., that people can only learn the way that's easiest for them), and then converts it to BS (e.g., "I'm a visual thinker, that's why I'm no good at math.")
The underlying mistaken assumption is that education should never require you to try something you find difficult or unnatural. If you are indeed a visual learner, that's something that you and your teachers can and should exploit, but you need to learn how to learn in modes that don't come easily to you. Life doesn't always give you a choice of forms for lessons you need to learn. Sometimes you ought to read the manual; other times there is no manual. You need to be adaptable to either case.
It's important to be sensitive to the fact that some students are introverts -- although that doesn't necessarily mean "shy" or "socially awkward"; that's just a stereotype, it's not what "introverted" means. But it is undeniably true that group work comes less naturally to introverts than extroverts. Nonetheless they still need to learn to work that way, just as extroverts need to learn how to work independently. If you just taught students to be able to do what comes naturally to them, what's the point of education?
Well, that's not a fault of group work per se, but of teacher. And you obviously didn't learn one of the important lessons of group work, which is what to do about colleagues who don't pull their weight.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
I'm following the discussion at the Dallas morning news on this, and one word that comes up over and over is "normal". It's not normal for a kid to build something like this -- so he must be up to something. One popular theory is that he planned this to get arrested and start the whole media circus.
In these peoples' tiny little minds, you have a choice: you can choose to be "normal" or you can choose be some kind of deviant. Well if that's the case, I'll take "deviant" please.
Here's a radical idea. Use some of the homeland security finding that we give to local law enforcement for buying military toys and require them to send a bunch of their officers to a course on recognizing what an actual bomb looks like.
Don't for get the Chamber of Commerce; if you own or manage a business, why not let them know by posting on their Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/irvingchamber) or twitter feed (https://twitter.com/IrvingChamber) how this affects your perception of Irving Texas as a place to do business.
Because it takes balls for a cop to stand up and say, "I screwed up, because even though I'm supposed to protect people from things like bombs I have no friggin' idea what one looks like. I go by what I've seen in the movies." And obviously the cops in Irving don't have any, so they're hemming and hawing and implying that some kind of crime must have been committed, although they can't figure out what that might be.
Tinkerers and inventors used to be a big thing in this country too, but we're no longer a country that makes things; we're a country that lives by managing the assets past generations have left us. No wonder we're afraid of immigrants and smart people -- and smart immigrants are our worst fear.
Well, I don't disagree with you on substance, but I have two issues with what you wrote. First, your usage of "theory" doesn't match the specific definition of the word as it is used in the term "Theory of Evolution". Dictionary.com lists that definition first:
a coherent group of *tested* general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena...
[emphasis mine]
So "Theory" in this sense is the highest level of certainty there is in science. Physicists don't regard Newton's "Theory of Gravitation" as conjectural. That more common colloquial sense of "theory" (as something conjectural) is listed as the second definition.
Also, I feel the whole metaphor of science as a Darwinian struggle between ideas gets the spirit of the enterprise wrong; and I think this view of matters underlies misunderstandings we often see here about what "scientific consensus" means.
Scientific consensus is not about establishing a group agreement about what constitutes eternal, unassailable truth. It's about establishing an agreement about where the burden of proof lay. It could be with those who say an idea is true, with those who say it is false, or with both.
For example I think it's pretty clear that faster than light travel is inconsistent with currently accepted theories (sense 1) in physics like Special Relativity. That doesn't mean that some theoretical physicists don't have some ideas of how it might be accomplished, but at present those ideas fall under the heading of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". However any physicist is free to assert that FTL is twaddle without having to perform a lengthy re-hashing of all the evidence everyone's already familiar with anyway.
Now why not simply say everyone has the same burden of proof no matter what their position is? Wouldn't that be fair? Well, no. It wouldn't be fair to all the people who worked to gather and defend the evidence behind the current scientific consensus to give some random guy's brainstorm equal weight to that evidence. In any case that would be impractical. It makes no sense to demand that people who support the laws of thermodynamics muster the same level of detailed argument that you'd demand of someone who claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine. It'd be a waste of everyone's time.
that's $28,500 for a badly designed prop, except that it's not actually a prop, it's just an ugly and impractically cluttered commemorative watch.
The belt time indicator is an interesting idea, but it's not really impressive. Of course you can make series of mechanical belts tell time, and if you make only a few thousand of them a year by hand of course they'll cost like crazy. If you want to make it *impressive* you've got to make it small -- say 12mm thick by 45mm across at a minimum. 6mm thick would be better.
The humblest Chinese-made mechanical watch movement is a marvel of miniaturization. You can get one from a watch materials company like Esslinger or Otto Frei for under $15; self-winding movements for as little as $22. Typically the movement will be 11.5 ligne wide (that's 25.6 mm; "ligne" is a length unit used to measure watch movements and buttons); and about 5mm thick. If you look though a magnifier at the tiny gears running in their almost microscopic jeweled cups, it's astonishing that you can buy something like that for the price. For about 15x as much you can get a fine Swiss ETA movement that shaves 1.5mm off that thickness.
For less than half the price of this monstrosity you could have a Jaeger LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Jubilee, a watch that is only 4mm thick fully assembled. The movement is 1.85 mm thick, which is exactly halfway between the thickness of a quarter and a nickel.
Of course I understand that the market for *this* watch is not the market for fine watches; I'm not part of that market either, I collect *cheap* watches. But design should be more about separating customers from their money -- which by the way is the dominant design philosophy in the cheap watch market segment. That's what makes it challenging to find well-designed cheap watch. The technology in that price range is more than good enough, in fact on an objective level the technology in cheap watches is *better*. What's hard to find in a cheap watch is good taste.
Consequences can be tricky things. What we didn't want was a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which would be triggered by Israeli testing. So what is the best option, at least in the short run, when evidence of secret Israeli testing falls into your lap?
You consider two options: make the information public, or sweep it under the rug. The consequences of making the information public are immediate: every country in the Middle East that has the capacity to do so starts seeking its own nuclear bomb. The consequences of sweeping the information under the rug are eventual: the credibility and authority of the US on non-proliferation issues is severely damaged.
We are in the eventually stage of the keeping it secret. By now everyone knows Israel has nukes and that the US turned a blind eye to Israel's proliferation activities, even treaty violations. So basically the US has no credibility on proliferation issues whatsoever; our efforts to combat proliferation have to be seen in the region as an attempt to preserve Israel's regional nuclear monopoly. That's verybad, but might still be the lesser of two evils.
Be that as it may, I don't think it's ignorance of science that's the issue. You could be very, very scientifically literate in general and have no ability to figure out what any of the gobbledygook in question means.
The thing is, the investigators and prosecutors ought to have *known* that. Because they deal with so many different kinds of things one of their core competencies should be realizing they have no freaking idea what they're looking at; and another should be finding expert consultants who can tell them what it *is* they're looking at. So at the very least we are looking at stunning incompetence in our federal investigators.
But there's more to this. There's a long history in the US of really fucked-up investigations of Chinese-American physicists, going all the way back to Qian Xuesen, the founder of JPL. That a paranoid witchhunt which addressed the imaginary problem of Chinese rocket spying by exiling one of America's best rocket science minds -- to China.
So scientific ignorance notwithstanding I think we're looking at the confluence of racism and incompetence. And the fact that China actually does technological espionage, although that doesn't mean that Chinese physicists are somehow genetically programmed to serve their ancestral motherland.
I bet a place like MIT just has many times the IT systems of most other places, and they didn't take that into account.
That might have been true fifteen years ago, but really these days computers are ubiquitous everywhere. I think it's more likely to do with two things: an early embrace of computers combined with an almost uniquely dysfunctional administrative culture that makes change even harder than it would be most places. It's what comes from taking a group of people who are used to being right when everyone around them is wrong and make them run a large, complex institution. The results are astounding, sometimes in a good way but by no means always.
People like that with such flawed manipulative characters deserved to be tossed out on their rears for wasting everyone's time. She wasn't even a good worker to boot.
Well, you have to consider the position she had, which IIRC was CEO. You can't exactly hold manipulativeness and an inability to demonstrate real long-term value to the company against her.
Sure, but everything depends on a the timeframe of your project, doesn't it? The atmosphere won't be appreciably eroded in anything like the timeframe in which modern humans have existed. There'll be plenty of time to develop ways of bringing more water to the planet.
The bigger issue is the potential effects of living your lifetime in a continual flux of charged particles dropping down from space. There's reason to believe that spending a lot of time outside of a protective magnetosphere might lead to early onset dementia.
Recognizing that is not necessarily degrading. What's degrading is treating someone as less than a total human being, which includes both the animal behavior and the advanced cognitive stuff.
Most people recognize of course that reducing someone to nothing more than an object of animal behaviors is degrading. But there is something degrading in a lot of high pressure employment too, which is reducing someone to their intellectual capacity to transform information inputs to into product outputs. But we're also animals who evolved to live in medium-sized social groups, and need family and social interactions centered around feeding, grooming and (yes) reproduction to be healthy. We need family, friends, and social novelty. We need to have a personal story that extends beyond our economic outputs.
Now as to whether this particular corporate arrangement is degrading, it could well be. However I doubt that in the current Chinese context that it is. There's a lot to this situation that doesn't necessarily fit into Western assumptions, and one of the biggest factors is the unexpected ways China's one-child policy has altered the status of women. As you'd obviously expect given the Chinese cultural value of extending the male bloodline this has skewed Chinese population male -- 1.18:: 1 at birth. And paradoxically this has actually raised the status of Chinese girls as individuals, upending thousands of years of cultural tradition.
Young, attractive, talented women have immense opportunities in modern China; they don't have to accept any treatment they find degrading. This is a good thing, but the fact that it is ultimately rooted in the messy biological imperative to propagate the species is something that many people will be deeply ambivalent about. I think we'd be a lot better off if we just accepted our animal nature and use it to make everyone's lives better; or at least developed the ability to have a good laugh at ourselves. The kind of earnest, priggish, knee-jerk reaction something like this immediately evokes is rooted in deep discomfort with human nature, as well as cultural parochialism.
Slashdot Mirror
"Learning styles" takes an undeniable truth, that different people find it easiest to learn in different ways, exaggerates it to a falsehood (i.e., that people can only learn the way that's easiest for them), and then converts it to BS (e.g., "I'm a visual thinker, that's why I'm no good at math.")
The underlying mistaken assumption is that education should never require you to try something you find difficult or unnatural. If you are indeed a visual learner, that's something that you and your teachers can and should exploit, but you need to learn how to learn in modes that don't come easily to you. Life doesn't always give you a choice of forms for lessons you need to learn. Sometimes you ought to read the manual; other times there is no manual. You need to be adaptable to either case.
It's important to be sensitive to the fact that some students are introverts -- although that doesn't necessarily mean "shy" or "socially awkward"; that's just a stereotype, it's not what "introverted" means. But it is undeniably true that group work comes less naturally to introverts than extroverts. Nonetheless they still need to learn to work that way, just as extroverts need to learn how to work independently. If you just taught students to be able to do what comes naturally to them, what's the point of education?
Well, that's not a fault of group work per se, but of teacher. And you obviously didn't learn one of the important lessons of group work, which is what to do about colleagues who don't pull their weight.
Sorry. Can hear you over the deafening roar of Internet tutting.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
But like any other commodity experience can be purchased.
The hell with a fine. No jail?
I'm following the discussion at the Dallas morning news on this, and one word that comes up over and over is "normal". It's not normal for a kid to build something like this -- so he must be up to something. One popular theory is that he planned this to get arrested and start the whole media circus.
In these peoples' tiny little minds, you have a choice: you can choose to be "normal" or you can choose be some kind of deviant. Well if that's the case, I'll take "deviant" please.
Here's a radical idea. Use some of the homeland security finding that we give to local law enforcement for buying military toys and require them to send a bunch of their officers to a course on recognizing what an actual bomb looks like.
Don't for get the Chamber of Commerce; if you own or manage a business, why not let them know by posting on their Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/irvingchamber) or twitter feed (https://twitter.com/IrvingChamber) how this affects your perception of Irving Texas as a place to do business.
Because it takes balls for a cop to stand up and say, "I screwed up, because even though I'm supposed to protect people from things like bombs I have no friggin' idea what one looks like. I go by what I've seen in the movies." And obviously the cops in Irving don't have any, so they're hemming and hawing and implying that some kind of crime must have been committed, although they can't figure out what that might be.
Tinkerers and inventors used to be a big thing in this country too, but we're no longer a country that makes things; we're a country that lives by managing the assets past generations have left us. No wonder we're afraid of immigrants and smart people -- and smart immigrants are our worst fear.
Let's see. Rootin'... Tootin'... Uh, nah; can't think of no one.
Well, I don't disagree with you on substance, but I have two issues with what you wrote. First, your usage of "theory" doesn't match the specific definition of the word as it is used in the term "Theory of Evolution". Dictionary.com lists that definition first:
a coherent group of *tested* general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena...
[emphasis mine]
So "Theory" in this sense is the highest level of certainty there is in science. Physicists don't regard Newton's "Theory of Gravitation" as conjectural. That more common colloquial sense of "theory" (as something conjectural) is listed as the second definition.
Also, I feel the whole metaphor of science as a Darwinian struggle between ideas gets the spirit of the enterprise wrong; and I think this view of matters underlies misunderstandings we often see here about what "scientific consensus" means.
Scientific consensus is not about establishing a group agreement about what constitutes eternal, unassailable truth. It's about establishing an agreement about where the burden of proof lay. It could be with those who say an idea is true, with those who say it is false, or with both.
For example I think it's pretty clear that faster than light travel is inconsistent with currently accepted theories (sense 1) in physics like Special Relativity. That doesn't mean that some theoretical physicists don't have some ideas of how it might be accomplished, but at present those ideas fall under the heading of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". However any physicist is free to assert that FTL is twaddle without having to perform a lengthy re-hashing of all the evidence everyone's already familiar with anyway.
Now why not simply say everyone has the same burden of proof no matter what their position is? Wouldn't that be fair? Well, no. It wouldn't be fair to all the people who worked to gather and defend the evidence behind the current scientific consensus to give some random guy's brainstorm equal weight to that evidence. In any case that would be impractical. It makes no sense to demand that people who support the laws of thermodynamics muster the same level of detailed argument that you'd demand of someone who claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine. It'd be a waste of everyone's time.
that's $28,500 for a badly designed prop, except that it's not actually a prop, it's just an ugly and impractically cluttered commemorative watch.
The belt time indicator is an interesting idea, but it's not really impressive. Of course you can make series of mechanical belts tell time, and if you make only a few thousand of them a year by hand of course they'll cost like crazy. If you want to make it *impressive* you've got to make it small -- say 12mm thick by 45mm across at a minimum. 6mm thick would be better.
The humblest Chinese-made mechanical watch movement is a marvel of miniaturization. You can get one from a watch materials company like Esslinger or Otto Frei for under $15; self-winding movements for as little as $22. Typically the movement will be 11.5 ligne wide (that's 25.6 mm; "ligne" is a length unit used to measure watch movements and buttons); and about 5mm thick. If you look though a magnifier at the tiny gears running in their almost microscopic jeweled cups, it's astonishing that you can buy something like that for the price. For about 15x as much you can get a fine Swiss ETA movement that shaves 1.5mm off that thickness.
For less than half the price of this monstrosity you could have a Jaeger LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Jubilee, a watch that is only 4mm thick fully assembled. The movement is 1.85 mm thick, which is exactly halfway between the thickness of a quarter and a nickel.
Of course I understand that the market for *this* watch is not the market for fine watches; I'm not part of that market either, I collect *cheap* watches. But design should be more about separating customers from their money -- which by the way is the dominant design philosophy in the cheap watch market segment. That's what makes it challenging to find well-designed cheap watch. The technology in that price range is more than good enough, in fact on an objective level the technology in cheap watches is *better*. What's hard to find in a cheap watch is good taste.
I knew there was a reason to keep those 8" WordStar floppies.
Consequences can be tricky things. What we didn't want was a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which would be triggered by Israeli testing. So what is the best option, at least in the short run, when evidence of secret Israeli testing falls into your lap?
You consider two options: make the information public, or sweep it under the rug. The consequences of making the information public are immediate: every country in the Middle East that has the capacity to do so starts seeking its own nuclear bomb. The consequences of sweeping the information under the rug are eventual: the credibility and authority of the US on non-proliferation issues is severely damaged.
We are in the eventually stage of the keeping it secret. By now everyone knows Israel has nukes and that the US turned a blind eye to Israel's proliferation activities, even treaty violations. So basically the US has no credibility on proliferation issues whatsoever; our efforts to combat proliferation have to be seen in the region as an attempt to preserve Israel's regional nuclear monopoly. That's verybad, but might still be the lesser of two evils.
Sometimes you've got nothing but bad options.
This was *after* he'd been exiled to China.
You exile one of the smartest men in the world and you expect him to sink into obscurity?
Be that as it may, I don't think it's ignorance of science that's the issue. You could be very, very scientifically literate in general and have no ability to figure out what any of the gobbledygook in question means.
The thing is, the investigators and prosecutors ought to have *known* that. Because they deal with so many different kinds of things one of their core competencies should be realizing they have no freaking idea what they're looking at; and another should be finding expert consultants who can tell them what it *is* they're looking at. So at the very least we are looking at stunning incompetence in our federal investigators.
But there's more to this. There's a long history in the US of really fucked-up investigations of Chinese-American physicists, going all the way back to Qian Xuesen, the founder of JPL. That a paranoid witchhunt which addressed the imaginary problem of Chinese rocket spying by exiling one of America's best rocket science minds -- to China.
So scientific ignorance notwithstanding I think we're looking at the confluence of racism and incompetence. And the fact that China actually does technological espionage, although that doesn't mean that Chinese physicists are somehow genetically programmed to serve their ancestral motherland.
It was a different superconducting device of his own invention.
You seem to be confused about the role of police. In our society they do not make determinations about or carry out punishments.
I bet a place like MIT just has many times the IT systems of most other places, and they didn't take that into account.
That might have been true fifteen years ago, but really these days computers are ubiquitous everywhere. I think it's more likely to do with two things: an early embrace of computers combined with an almost uniquely dysfunctional administrative culture that makes change even harder than it would be most places. It's what comes from taking a group of people who are used to being right when everyone around them is wrong and make them run a large, complex institution. The results are astounding, sometimes in a good way but by no means always.
People like that with such flawed manipulative characters deserved to be tossed out on their rears for wasting everyone's time. She wasn't even a good worker to boot.
Well, you have to consider the position she had, which IIRC was CEO. You can't exactly hold manipulativeness and an inability to demonstrate real long-term value to the company against her.
Sure, but everything depends on a the timeframe of your project, doesn't it? The atmosphere won't be appreciably eroded in anything like the timeframe in which modern humans have existed. There'll be plenty of time to develop ways of bringing more water to the planet.
The bigger issue is the potential effects of living your lifetime in a continual flux of charged particles dropping down from space. There's reason to believe that spending a lot of time outside of a protective magnetosphere might lead to early onset dementia.
Recognizing that is not necessarily degrading. What's degrading is treating someone as less than a total human being, which includes both the animal behavior and the advanced cognitive stuff.
Most people recognize of course that reducing someone to nothing more than an object of animal behaviors is degrading. But there is something degrading in a lot of high pressure employment too, which is reducing someone to their intellectual capacity to transform information inputs to into product outputs. But we're also animals who evolved to live in medium-sized social groups, and need family and social interactions centered around feeding, grooming and (yes) reproduction to be healthy. We need family, friends, and social novelty. We need to have a personal story that extends beyond our economic outputs.
Now as to whether this particular corporate arrangement is degrading, it could well be. However I doubt that in the current Chinese context that it is. There's a lot to this situation that doesn't necessarily fit into Western assumptions, and one of the biggest factors is the unexpected ways China's one-child policy has altered the status of women. As you'd obviously expect given the Chinese cultural value of extending the male bloodline this has skewed Chinese population male -- 1.18 :: 1 at birth. And paradoxically this has actually raised the status of Chinese girls as individuals, upending thousands of years of cultural tradition.
Young, attractive, talented women have immense opportunities in modern China; they don't have to accept any treatment they find degrading. This is a good thing, but the fact that it is ultimately rooted in the messy biological imperative to propagate the species is something that many people will be deeply ambivalent about. I think we'd be a lot better off if we just accepted our animal nature and use it to make everyone's lives better; or at least developed the ability to have a good laugh at ourselves. The kind of earnest, priggish, knee-jerk reaction something like this immediately evokes is rooted in deep discomfort with human nature, as well as cultural parochialism.
when they implement the sarcasm feature.