Just buy a decent PC/HMDI monitor & plug in a media box, e.g. Android, Raspberry Pi, or Roku. Or you could try *never* giving a smart TV access to the internet & just put up with the stupid menus that get in the way of watching TV. As far as I can tell in the consumer electronics industry, "smart" = "optimised for surveillance." Do you really want to let advertising scumbags into your living room?
I use Safari on Macbook. When using private mode, each tab is a separate session. I also use vpn. I don't log into google services. I recycle my tabs about every 30 min. How does google track me?
The track you with browser fingerprinting. Even in "private mode," your browser sends an awful lot of information about your computer & its settings, which can make up a unique identity of it, with every request so it's relatively easy to track most people in most cases.
The internet was originally conceived of by the US military as a surveillance network & this aspect of it hasn't changed at all. If you think it's only about selling targeted advertising, you misunderstand the scale & scope of the problem.
This. It's a shame that what passes for "AI" is doing useless shit like... opening the blinds, turning on the lights, showing you traffic and your calendar and turning on NPR. Or turning on a freakin' disco ball and firing up the "Glitter and Glowsticks" playlist.... good lord. instead of, say, monitoring crops for ripeness, searching for weeds (and even removing them) or correctly identifying crows and aiming microwave emitters at them if they get too close to the plants.
Yeah, but if you want a computer to do anything smart like that, you're gonna have to work really hard at inventing one that can: https://xkcd.com/1425/
A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself.
Speak for yourself. If you're not willing to shell out for your own gear to "roll your own" vinyl, you're a cheapskate. I lovingly hand-press my vinyl records & hand screen-print the sleeves for that authentic artisanal effect & personal satisfaction of owning a well-crafted album/single work of art. This means I don't actually have any time to listen to them but that doesn't matter -- At least I know they'll sound authentic.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Even if you're used to listening to low-fi Youtube bootleg recordings on a cheap phone via $5 drugstore earbuds, cassette's gotta sound really bad. Why? Why would anyone wanna pay money for that?
In a free society, at some point you have to accept that some people will make stupid decisions.
Go. Ahead. Blame. The. Victims.
Fraud is fraud, no matter how they dress it up. Alternative medicine needs to be publicly & prominently exposed for what it is. The alternative medicine industry tends to be aggressively litigious when scientists, the press, or anyone else tries to do this. When it's a problem affecting a significant number of citizens, it's the government's job to do something about it, not sitting on their hands or blaming the victims.
Or do we count freedom to deceive, manipulate, exploit, & cause harm in with a free society?
In contrast, the "alternative medicine" and dietary supplement industries have almost no restrictions on them. They can claim whatever they like. They're worse than the cosmetics industry.
Should it be a criminal offence to mislead somebody into taking actions that will lead to their certain death, e.g. telling someone not to seek professional medical attention & to take sugar pills instead when they have cancer? "Alternative medicine" vendors should have to provide valid, reliable evidence that their claims are correct, just like the pharma companies are supposed to. Not a perfect system but at least you can sue a pharma company when they lie about their drugs.
American towns & roads weren't designed with cyclists or pedestrians in mind, they were designed for the exclusive use of cars. It's an interesting exercise to attempt to retrofit US towns & cities to try to make them safer & more pleasant for cyclists but the fact remains, the distances, roads, etc., are mostly unsuitable. Also, most American towns are butt ugly, dirty, dangerous places to be without the protection of being inside a car. Yes, there are exceptions & congratulations to those lucky people who live in those areas.
The most advanced AI systems are no match for the stupidity and greed of poachers. I can see a new job emerging, paying kids to go around finding & smashing AI cameras.
If by affirmative action, you mean putting science-denying, religiously-bigoted, morally-bankrupted low-brows on the congressional science funding committees, then yes, affirmative action is more than likely responsible for the USA sliding into decline.
And, under the current administration, funding for scientific research is now being withdrawn from environmental science & concentrated on the more important issues of the day, such as preventing hair loss & prolonging erections.
I always thought that Apple Inc. was more of a fashion retailer than a tech company, i.e. over-priced electronic jewellery, accessories, & tabletop furnishings. Probably, the only thing holding them back from going "full fashion" is the fact that copyright & patents are meaningless in the world of fashion design; The only thing it protects is trademarks. Can anyone name an actually manufactured & retailed Apple "innovation" that wasn't bought or copied from somewhere else? e.g. https://images.mentalfloss.com...
That's $170,000 USD & what that's worth depends on where you live. Also, bear in mind that the drivers/engineers spend a lot of time on trains travelling through the Australian outback. I bet it's a boring, lonely, & highly-skilled job. At least if you work on an oil-rig at sea, you have a large-ish crew, entertainment, cafeteria, etc.. I can't imagine the trains are very well equipped.
Famously, Amazon does the same to their warehouse employees. I've also read several articles where creepily detailed RFID tracking has been used on secondary school pupils in the US. Hell, China probably subcontracted or copied the school systems in the US.
The infamous I. F. Stone quote, "All governments lie" should get an update.
"All corporations lie." -- The next time we hear a press release or a public statement by a CEO, spokesperson, or PR firm, we should all repeat, "All corporations lie."
That way we won't be tempted into believing that they mean what they say, no matter how well acted & presented it may be. Although they can mimic all the affectations of sincerity & empathy, they are incapable of human feelings. That's how they can make $billions by exploiting millions of people & creating miserable working conditions for the vast majority of their employees & contractors, & still claim that they're "philanthropists."
...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.
The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires, so called "education reform gurus," & most of the general public assume.
While it's quite feasible that computers can be used to aid learning, according to cognitive science, that isn't what's happening in classrooms. Additionally, learning management systems, digital documents, online testing, etc., all come with increases in cognitive load, which in turn reduces children's learning in measurable ways. In order for an EdTech intervention to produce positive results, it has to be so effective & efficient that it overcomes this increase in cognitive load. There are strategies & techniques for doing this, e.g. see the work of cognitive psychologist Dr Richard E. Mayer, but what I've seen from Silicon Valley seems oblivious to them.
Another thing the article gets right is that classes without a qualified, experienced teacher don't help children to learn very well, e.g. Sugata Mitra's bold claims about self-teaching children in India & elsewhere weren't borne out by independently gathered evidence & review.
Let's face it, the current "factory model" of education that we have is the least bad system that anyone's come up with for educating tens of millions of children at a time. It takes the hubris of billionaires to believe that they can do better with no background in education, epistemology, or cognitive science.
Then again, I don't think their actual intentions are about improving education.
If you'd like to learn more about learning, here's a good evidence-informed blog written by experts (Dr Paul Kirschner is a veteran education & training researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands & Mirjam Neelen is a highly qualified & experienced educational consultant & learning developer): https://3starlearningexperienc...
Stanford University didn't invent MOOCs or even Open Educational Resources (OER).
AFAIK, the first time a course was offered as a MOOC was at the University of Manitoba in Canada, in 2008, called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It lasted 32 weeks & was a loosely organised network of students kept informed of the course materials & each others' contributions via an RSS aggregator. As they stand, currently popular MOOCs are no better than buying a well-written book on a given subject. I've reviewed a few courses on the aforementioned MOOC platforms from the article & have found many inaccuracies & out of date information, as well as incoherent theory & practices being presented, i.e. although these courses are presented under the names of prestigious universities, they aren't quality controlled very well.
By their own admission, MOOCs have incredibly high dropout rates, which many have tried to excuse due them being free. 95% failure rate of anything, whether it's free or not is an unacceptable model for any education or training provision.
A major failing of MOOCs is in assessment, both formative & summative. While presenting information in multiple formats & multimedia scales cheaply & easily, assessment does not. It still takes the same numbers per student of expert human hours to give feedback on & grade students' work.
OER were first released to the public by the University of Tubingen, Germany. The major difference between a MOOC & OER is that OER courses can be freely copied, adapted, reused, & redistributed by anyone without requiring permission, i.e. permission is automatically granted to everyone. The OECD claims that OER are likely to make significant & substantial changes to how educational materials are funded, designed, & published over the next few decades, which has commercial academic publishers very worried. If you want to revolutionise education, OER is currently the way to go.
Academic writing is the most cognitively challenging thing any human being ever has to do. Learning to write it difficult because it not only requires us to learning a long list of component/constituent skills, but also to coordinate those skills simultaneously in specific ways in order to write well.
In the same way that we don't run full marathons every training session in order to become marathon runners, we shouldn't write whole essays every time we learn to write. Although it should be done in the context of full, meaningful compositions, students should practice specific aspects of writing, whether it be focusing on form, e.g. the component paragraphs of 5-paragraph essays, or on meaning, e.g. why proposition X is good or bad, how you support your arguments, & how to introduce & summarise your claims. Continuing with the marathon analogy, it's like strength training, breathing exercises, stretching, etc., as well as shorter distance practice runs.
Regarding the headline argument to ditch the 5-paragraph essay, I argue that it's essential to use template essay formats, i.e. 5-paragraph essay or some other, in order to scaffold novice writers' attempts while they learn & master the component skills that they must eventually coordinate unaided in order to write coherent, cohesive, effective essays in whichever genre of writing is required of them. Additionally, more advanced writers require different types of practice & to focus on more complex, coordinated aspects of writing. There's no one-size-fits-all technique to learning & teaching writing.
Learning to write isn't simple, simple advice isn't helpful, & may, in some cases, be a hindrance.
This isn't even news. It's recycling some old claims made by Andreas Scheicher, et al. at the OECD's education department. The 65% figure or anything similar to it has yet to be supported by any evidence whatsoever -- I know several experts in education who have tried & failed to even find a citation of the figure. Re:
"...there is a need for skills such as judgement, decision-making, and analysis and evaluation of systems."
This doesn't make sense unless we teach people sufficient knowledge to support these skills, i.e. What do you want them to judge, make-decisions, analyse, & evaluate? What kinds of foundational knowledge do we need in order to be able to make use of these skills? Currently, our primary, secondary, & post-secondary educational institutions are doing a great job of providing students with a broad range of useful foundational knowledge as well as analytical & critical thinking skills.
Not mentioned in the article but implicit is the need for "21st century skills." They're often not actually listed or defined when these claims are made but when they are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century BCE skills. (See: http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...)
Another fallacy is that we need to teach school children to write code, e.g. code.org. So far, research shows that learning to code requires that students already have problem solving & logical reasoning skills that are sufficiently well-developed for them to transfer to the abstract concepts involved in writing code. Additionally, there's no evidence of any benefits to other areas of study or thinking that learning to code can provide. In other words, coding requires knowledge & skills learned from elsewhere & doesn't provide any benefits to elsewhere, i.e. it's a specialist cul-de-sac and end result of learning that's a waste of time in primary & secondary education. There are more useful & important things to be learned.
Re: so called "soft skills" like being able to communicate your ideas to others clearly & to participate in & manage teams, it turns out that the best communicators, participators, & managers are those who have a great deal of expertise & experience in their specific professional domain, & those skills don't necessarily transfer from one domain to another, e.g. a great sports coach doesn't necessarily make a great software team leader.
You know that Florida is mostly low-lying and already suffering as a result of sea-level rise? Well, it now looks like you can look forward to hoards of Floridian climate refugees seeking shelter across the USA sooner than you expected. You know Florida? Where the bat-shit crazy people tend to be? They'll soon be among you. May you live in "interesting" times.
"Data miners are protesting the GDPR rules on gathering users' data by annoying the hell out of their users." -- There I fixed the headline for you.
I wonder how long they'll keep this up before websites start losing traffic, dropping the data mining, & going with content-based targeted advertising, i.e. People who read articles about Star Trek might want to buy Star Trek & other SciFi paraphernalia. Google & Facebook probably wouldn't like it though.
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy a decent PC/HMDI monitor & plug in a media box, e.g. Android, Raspberry Pi, or Roku. Or you could try *never* giving a smart TV access to the internet & just put up with the stupid menus that get in the way of watching TV. As far as I can tell in the consumer electronics industry, "smart" = "optimised for surveillance." Do you really want to let advertising scumbags into your living room?
I use Safari on Macbook. When using private mode, each tab is a separate session. I also use vpn. I don't log into google services. I recycle my tabs about every 30 min. How does google track me?
The track you with browser fingerprinting. Even in "private mode," your browser sends an awful lot of information about your computer & its settings, which can make up a unique identity of it, with every request so it's relatively easy to track most people in most cases.
The internet was originally conceived of by the US military as a surveillance network & this aspect of it hasn't changed at all. If you think it's only about selling targeted advertising, you misunderstand the scale & scope of the problem.
This. It's a shame that what passes for "AI" is doing useless shit like... opening the blinds, turning on the lights, showing you traffic and your calendar and turning on NPR. Or turning on a freakin' disco ball and firing up the "Glitter and Glowsticks" playlist.... good lord. instead of, say, monitoring crops for ripeness, searching for weeds (and even removing them) or correctly identifying crows and aiming microwave emitters at them if they get too close to the plants.
Yeah, but if you want a computer to do anything smart like that, you're gonna have to work really hard at inventing one that can: https://xkcd.com/1425/
A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself.
Speak for yourself. If you're not willing to shell out for your own gear to "roll your own" vinyl, you're a cheapskate. I lovingly hand-press my vinyl records & hand screen-print the sleeves for that authentic artisanal effect & personal satisfaction of owning a well-crafted album/single work of art. This means I don't actually have any time to listen to them but that doesn't matter -- At least I know they'll sound authentic.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Even if you're used to listening to low-fi Youtube bootleg recordings on a cheap phone via $5 drugstore earbuds, cassette's gotta sound really bad. Why? Why would anyone wanna pay money for that?
In a free society, at some point you have to accept that some people will make stupid decisions.
Go. Ahead. Blame. The. Victims.
Fraud is fraud, no matter how they dress it up. Alternative medicine needs to be publicly & prominently exposed for what it is. The alternative medicine industry tends to be aggressively litigious when scientists, the press, or anyone else tries to do this. When it's a problem affecting a significant number of citizens, it's the government's job to do something about it, not sitting on their hands or blaming the victims.
Or do we count freedom to deceive, manipulate, exploit, & cause harm in with a free society?
In contrast, the "alternative medicine" and dietary supplement industries have almost no restrictions on them. They can claim whatever they like. They're worse than the cosmetics industry.
Not something that the USA can compete with; they don't even have high-speed rail yet, i.e. any passenger trains that go faster than 250kmph (160mph).
Should it be a criminal offence to mislead somebody into taking actions that will lead to their certain death, e.g. telling someone not to seek professional medical attention & to take sugar pills instead when they have cancer? "Alternative medicine" vendors should have to provide valid, reliable evidence that their claims are correct, just like the pharma companies are supposed to. Not a perfect system but at least you can sue a pharma company when they lie about their drugs.
American towns & roads weren't designed with cyclists or pedestrians in mind, they were designed for the exclusive use of cars. It's an interesting exercise to attempt to retrofit US towns & cities to try to make them safer & more pleasant for cyclists but the fact remains, the distances, roads, etc., are mostly unsuitable. Also, most American towns are butt ugly, dirty, dangerous places to be without the protection of being inside a car. Yes, there are exceptions & congratulations to those lucky people who live in those areas.
The most advanced AI systems are no match for the stupidity and greed of poachers. I can see a new job emerging, paying kids to go around finding & smashing AI cameras.
Someone please mod this up :)
If by affirmative action, you mean putting science-denying, religiously-bigoted, morally-bankrupted low-brows on the congressional science funding committees, then yes, affirmative action is more than likely responsible for the USA sliding into decline.
And, under the current administration, funding for scientific research is now being withdrawn from environmental science & concentrated on the more important issues of the day, such as preventing hair loss & prolonging erections.
I always thought that Apple Inc. was more of a fashion retailer than a tech company, i.e. over-priced electronic jewellery, accessories, & tabletop furnishings. Probably, the only thing holding them back from going "full fashion" is the fact that copyright & patents are meaningless in the world of fashion design; The only thing it protects is trademarks. Can anyone name an actually manufactured & retailed Apple "innovation" that wasn't bought or copied from somewhere else? e.g. https://images.mentalfloss.com...
That's $170,000 USD & what that's worth depends on where you live. Also, bear in mind that the drivers/engineers spend a lot of time on trains travelling through the Australian outback. I bet it's a boring, lonely, & highly-skilled job. At least if you work on an oil-rig at sea, you have a large-ish crew, entertainment, cafeteria, etc.. I can't imagine the trains are very well equipped.
Famously, Amazon does the same to their warehouse employees. I've also read several articles where creepily detailed RFID tracking has been used on secondary school pupils in the US. Hell, China probably subcontracted or copied the school systems in the US.
The infamous I. F. Stone quote, "All governments lie" should get an update.
"All corporations lie." -- The next time we hear a press release or a public statement by a CEO, spokesperson, or PR firm, we should all repeat, "All corporations lie."
That way we won't be tempted into believing that they mean what they say, no matter how well acted & presented it may be. Although they can mimic all the affectations of sincerity & empathy, they are incapable of human feelings. That's how they can make $billions by exploiting millions of people & creating miserable working conditions for the vast majority of their employees & contractors, & still claim that they're "philanthropists."
Grrrrrrrr.
...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.
The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires, so called "education reform gurus," & most of the general public assume.
While it's quite feasible that computers can be used to aid learning, according to cognitive science, that isn't what's happening in classrooms. Additionally, learning management systems, digital documents, online testing, etc., all come with increases in cognitive load, which in turn reduces children's learning in measurable ways. In order for an EdTech intervention to produce positive results, it has to be so effective & efficient that it overcomes this increase in cognitive load. There are strategies & techniques for doing this, e.g. see the work of cognitive psychologist Dr Richard E. Mayer, but what I've seen from Silicon Valley seems oblivious to them.
Another thing the article gets right is that classes without a qualified, experienced teacher don't help children to learn very well, e.g. Sugata Mitra's bold claims about self-teaching children in India & elsewhere weren't borne out by independently gathered evidence & review.
Let's face it, the current "factory model" of education that we have is the least bad system that anyone's come up with for educating tens of millions of children at a time. It takes the hubris of billionaires to believe that they can do better with no background in education, epistemology, or cognitive science.
Then again, I don't think their actual intentions are about improving education.
If you'd like to learn more about learning, here's a good evidence-informed blog written by experts (Dr Paul Kirschner is a veteran education & training researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands & Mirjam Neelen is a highly qualified & experienced educational consultant & learning developer): https://3starlearningexperienc...
Stanford University didn't invent MOOCs or even Open Educational Resources (OER).
AFAIK, the first time a course was offered as a MOOC was at the University of Manitoba in Canada, in 2008, called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It lasted 32 weeks & was a loosely organised network of students kept informed of the course materials & each others' contributions via an RSS aggregator. As they stand, currently popular MOOCs are no better than buying a well-written book on a given subject. I've reviewed a few courses on the aforementioned MOOC platforms from the article & have found many inaccuracies & out of date information, as well as incoherent theory & practices being presented, i.e. although these courses are presented under the names of prestigious universities, they aren't quality controlled very well.
By their own admission, MOOCs have incredibly high dropout rates, which many have tried to excuse due them being free. 95% failure rate of anything, whether it's free or not is an unacceptable model for any education or training provision.
A major failing of MOOCs is in assessment, both formative & summative. While presenting information in multiple formats & multimedia scales cheaply & easily, assessment does not. It still takes the same numbers per student of expert human hours to give feedback on & grade students' work.
OER were first released to the public by the University of Tubingen, Germany. The major difference between a MOOC & OER is that OER courses can be freely copied, adapted, reused, & redistributed by anyone without requiring permission, i.e. permission is automatically granted to everyone. The OECD claims that OER are likely to make significant & substantial changes to how educational materials are funded, designed, & published over the next few decades, which has commercial academic publishers very worried. If you want to revolutionise education, OER is currently the way to go.
Academic writing is the most cognitively challenging thing any human being ever has to do. Learning to write it difficult because it not only requires us to learning a long list of component/constituent skills, but also to coordinate those skills simultaneously in specific ways in order to write well.
In the same way that we don't run full marathons every training session in order to become marathon runners, we shouldn't write whole essays every time we learn to write. Although it should be done in the context of full, meaningful compositions, students should practice specific aspects of writing, whether it be focusing on form, e.g. the component paragraphs of 5-paragraph essays, or on meaning, e.g. why proposition X is good or bad, how you support your arguments, & how to introduce & summarise your claims. Continuing with the marathon analogy, it's like strength training, breathing exercises, stretching, etc., as well as shorter distance practice runs.
Regarding the headline argument to ditch the 5-paragraph essay, I argue that it's essential to use template essay formats, i.e. 5-paragraph essay or some other, in order to scaffold novice writers' attempts while they learn & master the component skills that they must eventually coordinate unaided in order to write coherent, cohesive, effective essays in whichever genre of writing is required of them. Additionally, more advanced writers require different types of practice & to focus on more complex, coordinated aspects of writing. There's no one-size-fits-all technique to learning & teaching writing.
Learning to write isn't simple, simple advice isn't helpful, & may, in some cases, be a hindrance.
So there! :P
This isn't even news. It's recycling some old claims made by Andreas Scheicher, et al. at the OECD's education department. The 65% figure or anything similar to it has yet to be supported by any evidence whatsoever -- I know several experts in education who have tried & failed to even find a citation of the figure. Re:
"...there is a need for skills such as judgement, decision-making, and analysis and evaluation of systems."
This doesn't make sense unless we teach people sufficient knowledge to support these skills, i.e. What do you want them to judge, make-decisions, analyse, & evaluate? What kinds of foundational knowledge do we need in order to be able to make use of these skills? Currently, our primary, secondary, & post-secondary educational institutions are doing a great job of providing students with a broad range of useful foundational knowledge as well as analytical & critical thinking skills.
Not mentioned in the article but implicit is the need for "21st century skills." They're often not actually listed or defined when these claims are made but when they are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century BCE skills. (See: http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...)
Another fallacy is that we need to teach school children to write code, e.g. code.org. So far, research shows that learning to code requires that students already have problem solving & logical reasoning skills that are sufficiently well-developed for them to transfer to the abstract concepts involved in writing code. Additionally, there's no evidence of any benefits to other areas of study or thinking that learning to code can provide. In other words, coding requires knowledge & skills learned from elsewhere & doesn't provide any benefits to elsewhere, i.e. it's a specialist cul-de-sac and end result of learning that's a waste of time in primary & secondary education. There are more useful & important things to be learned.
Re: so called "soft skills" like being able to communicate your ideas to others clearly & to participate in & manage teams, it turns out that the best communicators, participators, & managers are those who have a great deal of expertise & experience in their specific professional domain, & those skills don't necessarily transfer from one domain to another, e.g. a great sports coach doesn't necessarily make a great software team leader.
...will be aggressively denying any liability for endangering their employees & will deduct any loss of profits from their wages.
You know that Florida is mostly low-lying and already suffering as a result of sea-level rise? Well, it now looks like you can look forward to hoards of Floridian climate refugees seeking shelter across the USA sooner than you expected. You know Florida? Where the bat-shit crazy people tend to be? They'll soon be among you. May you live in "interesting" times.
"Data miners are protesting the GDPR rules on gathering users' data by annoying the hell out of their users." -- There I fixed the headline for you.
I wonder how long they'll keep this up before websites start losing traffic, dropping the data mining, & going with content-based targeted advertising, i.e. People who read articles about Star Trek might want to buy Star Trek & other SciFi paraphernalia. Google & Facebook probably wouldn't like it though.