a bell curve would necessitate that other students were actually penalized by my extra efforts
Either you don't understand the "bell curve" or you have no idea how one is properly used to determine grades. When you increase your score you don't really affect the grades of others by that much. It's not like if you move from a B to an A someone else has to move down a grade. Suppose you and your friend were in a class of 30 that had an average of ~80 and a standard deviation of ~10. We'll move your grades from a B to 100% to see what happens. Before the you improved your grades, the average was 78.5 with a stddev of 9.8. There was 1 F, 5 Ds, 10 Cs, 9 Bs, 4 As. After changing your grades the average was 79.5 with a stddev of 11. That's a 1 point change of the B-C split and a two point change of the C-D and A-B split The grading curve afterward was: 5 Ds, 12 Cs, 6Bs and 7 As. The differences... 1 person moved from F to D. 1 person moved from D to C, one person moved from B to C, and 3 people moved from B to A (you, your friend, and one other).
In other words "curve wreckers" don't exist.
Now you were explaining how working harder would hurt your classmates in a curved grading system? Shouldn't your classmates grades be their concern anyway?
Why not compare them to a standard of "excels in this skill" "has acquired the skill" and "hasn't acquired the skill"?
What skill is acquired in an American History class. It's not a skill, it's knowledge. Who defines the boundary of "has acquired" and "hasn't acquired". Who writes the test? If it's the state, why should the teacher do anything except teach what is on the test? If, like Texas's curriculum, the test doesn't mention Thomas Jefferson, should the teacher just ignore Jefferson? If it's the teacher that defines the boundary of "has acquired" and "hasn't acquired" then why would we need defined score boundary?
Grades are not assigned based on the normal of the class. They are based on the ability to answer a set amount of questions correctly.
That's pretty stupid. Which questions? Who writes them? Who chooses them? Essay or multiple choice? If both are they equally weighted? Are the grade cutoff scores predefined? Are they good questions? Or are we talking about photocopied example tests from the teachers edition?
Personally I think any test with an average of 85% is too damn easy and typically target tests I make to have a 50% average and a 15% standard deviation. By your logic I'd need to fail 85% of the class if you use a fixed 70% as a cutoff
You're using the pre-crash scales. The post-crash scales are
AAA+: Company selling this bond assures us that it's primo and gave us lots of money
AAA: Company selling this bond didn't give us enough money to say it's primo.
AA: Company selling this bond didn't even give us any money.
A: Company doesn't return our calls.
BBB: CEO of company is sleeping with my wife/daughter/ex-wife's daughter.
BB: What? They're tying to sell bonds?
B: They are holding our CEO ransom. If he's not around to collect his bonus, ours will be larger.
What I'm having trouble wrapping my heads around is that there are schools that use fixed percentages as grade markers. That means if you make a test you need to precisely target the questions to achieve an 85% average. That probably means you need to make 50% of the questions so easy that nobody could get them wrong. It also means you can't make any significant fraction hard enough to test the knowledge of the people in the A range. Maybe teachers aren't allowed to make their own exams anymore?
It also means (and I've seen this and heard reports from friends) that these students will have no idea how to handle grades in college. When I teach I like to target exams at an average of 50 out of 100. College freshmen from these schools will panic when the get a 30% on an exam, even if that turns out to be an A. Then they call their parents and their parents call me explaining why Johnny really needs to get into med school. In my dreams, I explain to them why Johnny should drop the class if he can't understand that an A is a good score.
Hard exams are a good thing. They tell you how everyone in the class is doing, not just the below average people.
I had a multiple-choice/multiple-answer exam when I was in college where the high was 9 out of 100. I got a -6 (which was an A). The average was -28. It was a damn hard exam, and it really tested our knowledge, but 15% of the class still got an A.
If you're getting a D or F in High School, do you really need to worry about its effect on your GPA? When you graduate your 2.3 might turn into a 2.2, but either way your only way to college is a sports scholarship.
Is there a list of colleges that let you pass with a D? I'd like to avoid hiring from them without first seeing a transcript.
Regarding potential GPA deflation... good. Now if we could just get rid of honors classes we might get back to a point where GPA means something again. You know what we used to call honors classes in the old days? Classes!
Seriously, the last I checked the terms for grades in California were supposed to be... "Proficient," "Almost Proficient," and "Progressing" with "Progressing" being what otherwise would be the D-F range. I don't think this choice of words has helped in any way.
The need to learn that winning is better than losing.
Oh, children learn that at a very early age. Around the same age they learn (usually from their parents) that cheating is the easiest, and in some cases the only, way to win. Schools don't make children weak, lazy, or stupid. Parents do.
The questions were probably not asking if people considered themselves to be altruistic. At least not if they wanted any reliable info. They were probably more like "You find a wallet on the street with $20 in it. What would you do?" iPad owners were more likely than non-owners to be in the "pocket the cash and throw away the wallet" crowd. Another question could be "Which is worse: embezzlement, burglary, assault, laziness, or not getting what you want?"
Of course all of these things are stupid comparisons in the report, because rather than reporting actual percentages they are reporting percentages relative to the whole survey pool. Saying that iPad owners are three times as likely as non-owners to be selfish doesn't mean iPad owners are selfish. It may mean that 9% of iPad owners are selfish, compared to 3% of the general population.
Disclaimer: I don't own any Apple products made after the iMac went into production. I don't want an iPad, because I'd rather not be told what I can and can't run on a computer. And don't give me that it's not a computer crap. Of course it's a computer. I'd use a jailbroken one that supported Verizon and WiFi and ran Android if someone gave me one.
In other words, political pressure groups should decide who gets to broadcast what instead of viewers.
If what the viewers want is to watch the destruction of the Republic (as incited by FOX) then the Republic is doomed. Fortunately, even though FOX has the best ratings of any "news" networks, "How I Met Your Mother" has 3 times more viewers. And the old dinosaur network evening news on NBC and ABC still have triple the ratings of the highest rated FOX news show.
Regardless of the title of the article, the question was news channels, not network neutrality. Network neutrality is about not being able to discriminate based upon packet content, source, or destination. I know you have to play the right wing paranoia cards, because that's all you have in your deck. But get a grip on reality.
Then upside-down strata with no evidence of geological disruption is still “odd” even by your explanation.
Depends upon how close you need your evidence to be. Besides, geologic processes do result in upside down strata. There's no indication that a flood could.
The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood.... But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Meanwhile, the top of the tree rots. No, it’s much easier to say that they were buried cataclysmically rather than over millions of years – such as has in fact been observed in action at Mt. St. Helens.
Exactly, the top of the tree rots. You need it to rot quickly so that further sediment can cover the top of the portion that will fossilize. That's why we don't find complete trees in a upright position. We usually only find the root system and a few feet of trunk. Of course they were buried rapidly as in less than a few decades. Sedimentation in river deltas and flood plains isn't very uniform and a few extreme events can deposit sediments rapidly. An earthquake dropping the elevation of the land below the water level would do pretty well for trees right near the fault.
In the case of the trees buried by volcanoes, they tend not to be upright. If the ash is going to be 10 feet thick, chances are that trees will have been knocked over. The Napa valley trees are all laying on their sides. I believe there is one lower trunk with roots. They were knocked over when Mount St. Helena erupted. The current peaks of mount St. Helena are the rim of the crater. The trees are about 3 million years old (not 5000). In 5000 years any trees buried by Mount St. Helens will still be mostly wood. With no oxygen under that ash, it won't be decomposing much. They would have to be in just the right place to get enough water for fossilization to occur. They could have a small amount of silicates in the cells.
Unidentified man, in unidentified car leaps out pointing a gun at you?
You missed the part where the unidentified man in the unidentified car was accompanied by a marked patrol car which had pulled the motorcyclist over.
In that case, there should be video of this from the forward camera in the marked car. Why hasn't it been released? That would also mean that the person wielding the gun knew he was being recorded.
Sigh. No it wouldn’t... just like the scores of oddities that exist in the fossil record that evolution has similarly chosen to explain away. Upside-down strata, trees standing vertically for millions of years waiting for the fossils to be deposited around them...
Oh, you mean the oddities that the creationists have deemed to be "odd." I'm sitting on a mountain of folded strata right now. They are nearly vertical under this building. There's a sharp rift to the east where sharply folded strata have fallen. Near the bottom you get the strata in reverse order. Near the top you get them in the normal order. No identifiable fossils in these, though. They've been through a bit too much. But there's nothing "odd" about inverted strata.
"Trees standing for millions of years?" I assume you're talking about one or more petrified forests. The trees didn't stand for millions of years. Ususally, the petrified trees would have been in a swamp or near water. The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood. Later, the softer stone due to the sediment would wear away due to erosion leaving only the harder silicates in the trees. The process was similar at the petrified forest west of the Napa valley, but in that case the trees were knocked down by a volcanic eruption and covered with ash. Much of the ash has eroded away leaving extremely hard redwood trunks. But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Maybe I should have said a single verified dinosaur bone. One brought to Fox News by an avowed creationist might not be taken seriously.
Apparently you need to reread some of that stuff. The current best measurements for the total energy of the universe is zero. You can get as much energy as you want as long as you create equal parts positive and negative. In empty space, if you wait long enough, a universe is just going to happen on its own. It could happen in non-empty space as well, it's just pretty damn unlikely to happen in a few thousand hubble times.
The properties of that universe might not be like ours, but once again, if you wait long enough, you'll eventually get one like this one.
But in a possible multiverse, with each parent universe having a different direction of the time-like dimension, it's hard to figure out "how long" that might have been.
It's not just potentially illegal because you're "wiretapping" but it's actually illegal to own a radio receiver capable of receiving on the frequencies used by cell phones.
Damn! I carry a radio transceiver capable of transmitting and receiving on those frequencies in my pocket every day!
Geez, I got clobbered. I get it. Really. I'll reply to this one because you're nice about it. My point is that both fall into the same category. Neither one is really testable by science. Micro-evolution can be observed, of course, but not the massive changes put forth by the theory. There is no means to prove "evolution" didn't make all life any more than God.
A single dinosaur bone in Precambrian sandstone would disprove evolution quite nicely, or a bird fossil found in sediments that date from before the evolution of reptiles. As would discovery of any single terrestrial organism that doesn't use DNA or RNA, or that uses DNA with a radically different encoding from triplet codons to amino acids. Seeing a new organism suddenly develop in an isolated place where no related organisms could get to would work to disprove evolution. I've got a locked box under my desk with nothing but insects in it. If tomorrow when I get to work there is a rabbit in there, that would disprove evolution.
Every piece of available evidence supports evolution, and it would be difficult to conceive of another theory that could explain the existing evidence.
Who the f* is going to eliminate religion? Would you recommend the Stalin/Mao approach?
Stalin and Mao were both theists who demanded that their subjects become atheists in order to prevent existing religions from threatening their power. Educating people to the fact that religion is false, stupid and damaging to humanity is an entirely different thing.
Always with the Stalin and Mao. Neither Stalin nor Mao was an atheist. However, they both felt the need to force atheism on the populace because they didn't want the churches to have a power structure that competed with the state.
But you knew that and lied anyway. Because your religion commands you to lie in the service of your God.
Slashdot Mirror
a bell curve would necessitate that other students were actually penalized by my extra efforts
Either you don't understand the "bell curve" or you have no idea how one is properly used to determine grades. When you increase your score you don't really affect the grades of others by that much. It's not like if you move from a B to an A someone else has to move down a grade. Suppose you and your friend were in a class of 30 that had an average of ~80 and a standard deviation of ~10. We'll move your grades from a B to 100% to see what happens. Before the you improved your grades, the average was 78.5 with a stddev of 9.8. There was 1 F, 5 Ds, 10 Cs, 9 Bs, 4 As. After changing your grades the average was 79.5 with a stddev of 11. That's a 1 point change of the B-C split and a two point change of the C-D and A-B split The grading curve afterward was: 5 Ds, 12 Cs, 6Bs and 7 As. The differences... 1 person moved from F to D. 1 person moved from D to C, one person moved from B to C, and 3 people moved from B to A (you, your friend, and one other).
In other words "curve wreckers" don't exist.
Now you were explaining how working harder would hurt your classmates in a curved grading system? Shouldn't your classmates grades be their concern anyway?
Why not compare them to a standard of "excels in this skill" "has acquired the skill" and "hasn't acquired the skill"?
What skill is acquired in an American History class. It's not a skill, it's knowledge. Who defines the boundary of "has acquired" and "hasn't acquired". Who writes the test? If it's the state, why should the teacher do anything except teach what is on the test? If, like Texas's curriculum, the test doesn't mention Thomas Jefferson, should the teacher just ignore Jefferson? If it's the teacher that defines the boundary of "has acquired" and "hasn't acquired" then why would we need defined score boundary?
Grades are not assigned based on the normal of the class. They are based on the ability to answer a set amount of questions correctly.
That's pretty stupid. Which questions? Who writes them? Who chooses them? Essay or multiple choice? If both are they equally weighted? Are the grade cutoff scores predefined? Are they good questions? Or are we talking about photocopied example tests from the teachers edition?
Personally I think any test with an average of 85% is too damn easy and typically target tests I make to have a 50% average and a 15% standard deviation. By your logic I'd need to fail 85% of the class if you use a fixed 70% as a cutoff
You're using the pre-crash scales. The post-crash scales are
AAA+: Company selling this bond assures us that it's primo and gave us lots of money
AAA: Company selling this bond didn't give us enough money to say it's primo.
AA: Company selling this bond didn't even give us any money.
A: Company doesn't return our calls.
BBB: CEO of company is sleeping with my wife/daughter/ex-wife's daughter.
BB: What? They're tying to sell bonds?
B: They are holding our CEO ransom. If he's not around to collect his bonus, ours will be larger.
What I'm having trouble wrapping my heads around is that there are schools that use fixed percentages as grade markers. That means if you make a test you need to precisely target the questions to achieve an 85% average. That probably means you need to make 50% of the questions so easy that nobody could get them wrong. It also means you can't make any significant fraction hard enough to test the knowledge of the people in the A range. Maybe teachers aren't allowed to make their own exams anymore?
It also means (and I've seen this and heard reports from friends) that these students will have no idea how to handle grades in college. When I teach I like to target exams at an average of 50 out of 100. College freshmen from these schools will panic when the get a 30% on an exam, even if that turns out to be an A. Then they call their parents and their parents call me explaining why Johnny really needs to get into med school. In my dreams, I explain to them why Johnny should drop the class if he can't understand that an A is a good score.
Hard exams are a good thing. They tell you how everyone in the class is doing, not just the below average people. I had a multiple-choice/multiple-answer exam when I was in college where the high was 9 out of 100. I got a -6 (which was an A). The average was -28. It was a damn hard exam, and it really tested our knowledge, but 15% of the class still got an A.
If you're getting a D or F in High School, do you really need to worry about its effect on your GPA? When you graduate your 2.3 might turn into a 2.2, but either way your only way to college is a sports scholarship.
Is there a list of colleges that let you pass with a D? I'd like to avoid hiring from them without first seeing a transcript.
Regarding potential GPA deflation... good. Now if we could just get rid of honors classes we might get back to a point where GPA means something again. You know what we used to call honors classes in the old days? Classes!
Seriously, the last I checked the terms for grades in California were supposed to be... "Proficient," "Almost Proficient," and "Progressing" with "Progressing" being what otherwise would be the D-F range. I don't think this choice of words has helped in any way.
What I liked about the now defunct Computer Gaming World, on the other hand, was that for the first 20 or so years no game had earned five stars.
The need to learn that winning is better than losing.
Oh, children learn that at a very early age. Around the same age they learn (usually from their parents) that cheating is the easiest, and in some cases the only, way to win. Schools don't make children weak, lazy, or stupid. Parents do.
The questions were probably not asking if people considered themselves to be altruistic. At least not if they wanted any reliable info. They were probably more like "You find a wallet on the street with $20 in it. What would you do?" iPad owners were more likely than non-owners to be in the "pocket the cash and throw away the wallet" crowd. Another question could be "Which is worse: embezzlement, burglary, assault, laziness, or not getting what you want?"
Of course all of these things are stupid comparisons in the report, because rather than reporting actual percentages they are reporting percentages relative to the whole survey pool. Saying that iPad owners are three times as likely as non-owners to be selfish doesn't mean iPad owners are selfish. It may mean that 9% of iPad owners are selfish, compared to 3% of the general population.
Disclaimer: I don't own any Apple products made after the iMac went into production. I don't want an iPad, because I'd rather not be told what I can and can't run on a computer. And don't give me that it's not a computer crap. Of course it's a computer. I'd use a jailbroken one that supported Verizon and WiFi and ran Android if someone gave me one.
But this iPad is gold plated and keeps away away Tigers.
I was cursed out yesterday on /. because of my religious beliefs,
That's because no matter what you say, Babylon 5 was just a TV show!
In other words, political pressure groups should decide who gets to broadcast what instead of viewers.
If what the viewers want is to watch the destruction of the Republic (as incited by FOX) then the Republic is doomed. Fortunately, even though FOX has the best ratings of any "news" networks, "How I Met Your Mother" has 3 times more viewers. And the old dinosaur network evening news on NBC and ABC still have triple the ratings of the highest rated FOX news show.
Regardless of the title of the article, the question was news channels, not network neutrality. Network neutrality is about not being able to discriminate based upon packet content, source, or destination. I know you have to play the right wing paranoia cards, because that's all you have in your deck. But get a grip on reality.
Not to mention that I've taught him too much about lock picking.
Then upside-down strata with no evidence of geological disruption is still “odd” even by your explanation.
Depends upon how close you need your evidence to be. Besides, geologic processes do result in upside down strata. There's no indication that a flood could.
The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood. ... But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Meanwhile, the top of the tree rots. No, it’s much easier to say that they were buried cataclysmically rather than over millions of years – such as has in fact been observed in action at Mt. St. Helens.
Exactly, the top of the tree rots. You need it to rot quickly so that further sediment can cover the top of the portion that will fossilize. That's why we don't find complete trees in a upright position. We usually only find the root system and a few feet of trunk. Of course they were buried rapidly as in less than a few decades. Sedimentation in river deltas and flood plains isn't very uniform and a few extreme events can deposit sediments rapidly. An earthquake dropping the elevation of the land below the water level would do pretty well for trees right near the fault.
In the case of the trees buried by volcanoes, they tend not to be upright. If the ash is going to be 10 feet thick, chances are that trees will have been knocked over. The Napa valley trees are all laying on their sides. I believe there is one lower trunk with roots. They were knocked over when Mount St. Helena erupted. The current peaks of mount St. Helena are the rim of the crater. The trees are about 3 million years old (not 5000). In 5000 years any trees buried by Mount St. Helens will still be mostly wood. With no oxygen under that ash, it won't be decomposing much. They would have to be in just the right place to get enough water for fossilization to occur. They could have a small amount of silicates in the cells.
Unidentified man, in unidentified car leaps out pointing a gun at you?
You missed the part where the unidentified man in the unidentified car was accompanied by a marked patrol car which had pulled the motorcyclist over.
In that case, there should be video of this from the forward camera in the marked car. Why hasn't it been released? That would also mean that the person wielding the gun knew he was being recorded.
Sigh. No it wouldn’t... just like the scores of oddities that exist in the fossil record that evolution has similarly chosen to explain away. Upside-down strata, trees standing vertically for millions of years waiting for the fossils to be deposited around them...
Oh, you mean the oddities that the creationists have deemed to be "odd." I'm sitting on a mountain of folded strata right now. They are nearly vertical under this building. There's a sharp rift to the east where sharply folded strata have fallen. Near the bottom you get the strata in reverse order. Near the top you get them in the normal order. No identifiable fossils in these, though. They've been through a bit too much. But there's nothing "odd" about inverted strata.
"Trees standing for millions of years?" I assume you're talking about one or more petrified forests. The trees didn't stand for millions of years. Ususally, the petrified trees would have been in a swamp or near water. The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood. Later, the softer stone due to the sediment would wear away due to erosion leaving only the harder silicates in the trees. The process was similar at the petrified forest west of the Napa valley, but in that case the trees were knocked down by a volcanic eruption and covered with ash. Much of the ash has eroded away leaving extremely hard redwood trunks. But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Maybe I should have said a single verified dinosaur bone. One brought to Fox News by an avowed creationist might not be taken seriously.
Apparently you need to reread some of that stuff. The current best measurements for the total energy of the universe is zero. You can get as much energy as you want as long as you create equal parts positive and negative. In empty space, if you wait long enough, a universe is just going to happen on its own. It could happen in non-empty space as well, it's just pretty damn unlikely to happen in a few thousand hubble times.
The properties of that universe might not be like ours, but once again, if you wait long enough, you'll eventually get one like this one.
But in a possible multiverse, with each parent universe having a different direction of the time-like dimension, it's hard to figure out "how long" that might have been.
It's not just potentially illegal because you're "wiretapping" but it's actually illegal to own a radio receiver capable of receiving on the frequencies used by cell phones.
Damn! I carry a radio transceiver capable of transmitting and receiving on those frequencies in my pocket every day!
Geez, I got clobbered. I get it. Really. I'll reply to this one because you're nice about it. My point is that both fall into the same category. Neither one is really testable by science. Micro-evolution can be observed, of course, but not the massive changes put forth by the theory. There is no means to prove "evolution" didn't make all life any more than God.
A single dinosaur bone in Precambrian sandstone would disprove evolution quite nicely, or a bird fossil found in sediments that date from before the evolution of reptiles. As would discovery of any single terrestrial organism that doesn't use DNA or RNA, or that uses DNA with a radically different encoding from triplet codons to amino acids. Seeing a new organism suddenly develop in an isolated place where no related organisms could get to would work to disprove evolution. I've got a locked box under my desk with nothing but insects in it. If tomorrow when I get to work there is a rabbit in there, that would disprove evolution.
Every piece of available evidence supports evolution, and it would be difficult to conceive of another theory that could explain the existing evidence.
Who the f* is going to eliminate religion? Would you recommend the Stalin/Mao approach?
Stalin and Mao were both theists who demanded that their subjects become atheists in order to prevent existing religions from threatening their power. Educating people to the fact that religion is false, stupid and damaging to humanity is an entirely different thing.
The Vikings would have had the Norse gods... (Odin, Thor, Loki, ...)
Always with the Stalin and Mao. Neither Stalin nor Mao was an atheist. However, they both felt the need to force atheism on the populace because they didn't want the churches to have a power structure that competed with the state.
But you knew that and lied anyway. Because your religion commands you to lie in the service of your God.
Are you going for a funny mod with that one?