I don't think he ruled out the elimination of Public Schools as incapable of solving the problem, I think he ruled it out as being incapable of being accomplished. He's pretty well on-target about this.
I will agree that the introduction of competition between educational systems is an absolute requirement to the improvement of schools in general, I think that this can be done via a system similar to the enforced darwinism caused by the "no child left behind" thingie. Good idea, really fucking stupid implementation.
There are more ways to go about this than to just burn down the establishment and start over.
Teach people HOW to think instead of WHAT to think
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
I've been studying this problem for years, and it really comes down to teaching good thinking habits. Most schools today just focus on more efficient ways to pack information into children's heads, and learning skills are left for the children to figure out on their own or learn from their parents. Specifically, given some input into an educational curriculum, I would insert teaching of the following skills at a very early age:
1. Meta-skills. It's been demonstrated again and again that the people who are most likely to be bad at something are the ones who don't know that they're bad at it. In order for people to learn anything of even meager complexity, they first have to realize that they don't already know it.
2. Cognitive Dissonance training. I probably lost half of my audience with those words so, for the rest of you, I'll define them. When we get new information that doesn't quite jive with what we already know, many people are in the habit of reacting to it by discarding the new information, killing the messenger, or going into denial. This is obviously counter-productive to the creation of a realistic world-view. I suggest training people at a young age how to effectively and objectively compare new and old information to determine which is more valid. This goes along with my next point...
3. Critical Analysis. Most of us are incapable of identifying which pieces of information we receive are good and which ones are bad. We usually fall back to just believing anything that X authority figure says, and don't really think about what they said too much. Learning critical analysis is like brushing your teeth. If you learn how to do it at a young age, it comes naturally when your older. If you don't learn it when you're young then learning good "information hygene" is very difficult at an older age.
There ya go. Probably not what you were looking for, but I don't believe that packing one form of information into kid's heads over another form of information is going to make as significant an improvement in that person's quality of life as these three would.
Television isn't what I would call an educational medium, and it is barely a news medium. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, those who get their news from only television know less than those who get no news at all. What news is there is closer to infotainment than any other media.
This leaves TV to be a source of entertainment and little more. I'm not going to shed a tear because those poor unfortunates who can't afford cable would no longer have the opportunity to become couch potatoes.
I apologize for not having a convenient nihilistic form letter to reply to your post with. Your commentary suggests that:
(a) everyone would have to adopt it all at once for it to be useful. If this were the case, then VNC's would never have come into existence
(b) that an individual can only have email via one account system, and
(c) a perfect system exists.
I'll accept your commentary that nobody has implemented it in a practical manner, and raise you a "nothing has ever gotten done by saying that it's impossible."
Let's take SecondLife as an example. They have a monetary system in the game that allows you to convert dollars into their units of trade and transfer those units for goods. The sellers of the virtual goods can then transfer the units back to real-world cash. They aren't a bank, they're a game, and you're paying for extra "credit" in the game, not transferring money into a different unit.
If Google were to take advantage of that, we should consider what this would mean if we could hook it into email systems. Let's say you have to have an "account" with them in order to send email to me. I can set up accounts and give them to my friends. You have to transfer $.25 from your account to my account in order to send mail to me. If you aren't sending junk mail to me then I immediately refund the money. If you are, then I keep the money and eventually cash out the spare for my personal use.
White lists could be created for your friends to auto-refund their money. Blacklists would delete the spam before you see it, money staying in your account.
Voila, spam-proof email system. I'm liking this idea. Maybe I'll go write it myself...
This would explain why the Nasdaq continued to rise until November of 2000, and then started its downward spiral. It took that long for those without an ounce of sense to stop investing in vaporware...
Well, ok, never is too strong a word. Some religion has changed over the ages, some religion has not. Mostly, religions only change when people threaten to leave them if they don't, and some times not even then.
A good example of religions that don't change is Orthodox Judaism, where they still follow the rules set down for surviving life in the desert in the dawn of history. In some cases, religion truly is incapable of change.
You may notice that most of the changes you're mentioning happened at Vatican Council II in 1962-65. Do you know when Vatican Council I was? 1545-63 (see Council of Trent). Change can, and sometimes does, happen in religion, but not generally within any particular person's lifetime, and it often takes a major brick to the head in order to make it happen.
You obviously live in an area with no crime. If doors swing outward, that means that their hinges are accessible to removal. This makes locks on doors absolutely pointless because you can just remove the pins on the hinges and the door will just fall down.
Not that Microsoft wouldn't design doors that way...
Since when does failing to back up your hard drive make your system easier to hack into? If you're talking about them having poor data integrity that's one thing, but this doesn't seem to point to poor computer security.
It's obviously true that Apple will want to put out their hardware on Mac-standardized hardware so they don't have to deal with the many-splendored array of hardware options that face Windows users. Let's think this through.
It doesn't seem impossible that various vendors will start to create "Apple compatible" hardware replacement options, built specifically to work with Apple's designs. That is the world of competition.
With this level of standardization, it isn't much of a jump that someone will produce another OS that can be installed onto a system assembled from these standardized components. Imagine how much that would simplify system configuration. I think that the Open Source community would find that target to be irresistable.
If the use of such a Linux were to proliferate, it would increase the demand for these parts, thus significantly increasing the market for them, making them more competitive and cheaper. Eventually this would result in a major subclass of highly compatible, low-maintenance hardware and software systems.
The downside to this is that it would lock vendors into being largely copycats, with Apple doing all of the meaningful innovation. I'm sure Apple would love that. For everyone else, there will still be Microsoft.
It always amazes me how the Slashdot readers tend to think that Dvorak is the great anti-sage - the guy with all the wrong answers. I can understand not taking what he says as gospel, but his only real sin is the willingness to make guesses.
I appreciate reading his stuff, but I take his predictions with a grain of salt. He's very well informed and quite willing to disseminate his information. He's also usually pretty insightful, even if he isn't generally dead-on.
How to remove the lettering?
on
Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Does anyone happen to know what is used to put lettering on keyboards these days and, more importantly, what it would take to remove it? Turpentine? Acetone? Xylene? Preferably something that doesn't also dissolve the keys....
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support. The OS itself was a surprsingly strong and reliable system, but their ad campaigns were mind-bogglingly pathetic.
I'm not sure what the Linux community could gain by it being open source, except maybe some more efficient/reliable algorythms. As such, it would be enough for the IBM written chunks to be open sourced - they don't need a complete, functional code base.
I've always envisioned the ultimate end of personally portable computing to have a device about the size of a deck of cards which I can plug into any office or public terminal and have that terminal immediately bring up my desktop and run all of my programs. When designing this kind of system, you have to decide which of the pieces you want to replicate vs. which of the pieces you want to lug around.
At one end of the spectrum is the laptop, where you lug around darn near everything. You have to replicate some things, like printers and wall sockets, and often wind up replicating other things like a big monitor and comfortable keyboard, but for the most part it's an entirely integrated unit.
On the other end of the scale is the thumb drive. Nothing more than a highly portable storage device for all of those things you can't replicate. You can jack one of these babies into any full system that has an adequate set of tools and be on your way. It's small enough that you can attach it to your keychain and forget it exists.
This product seems to be somewhere in the limbo between those two. For any concept like this to work, you have to be fairly certain that you can find the components that you don't carry around with you wherever you go. With a laptop, this is easy because you need so little. Portable storage in the form of floppies and CD's have made the other end quite available.
As it stands, there doesn't exist adequate infrastructure to make this device useful. Oh, and did I mention that it's preposterously expensive for what it provides?
Avoid anybody who goes through Joker.com. Several IPS's have been using them as their registrar, and I have had to let a couple of my domains lapse and be re-registered in order to get them out of their clutches. They require a verification code in order to transfer.org domains, but won't tell you how to go about getting such a thing.
I've always wondered what effect it would have when Betelgeuse finally goes supernova. Has anybody calcuated how much energy would hit our solar system and what kind of effect that would have?
For those of you not astronomicaly inclined, Betelgeuse is an immense red giant star rougly 425 light years away. Its radius is estimated to be roughly the size of Mars's orbit.
One of the things that they don't usually explain about living in space is that it teaches humans to live within their resources. Our planet is an entirely closed system that will eventually run out of any resource that isn't iron, sunlight, or fed by sunlight.
Unless we figure out patterns of 100% reuse, we will have to survive on continually dwindling resources. The much smaller closed systems that exist in space continually provide us with research that we will need to achieve higher reuse goals.
People like to fool themselves into thinking that blogging is a form of activism. Newsflash: blogging is about as effective a political tool as backyard gossip. People who disagree with you won't be reading this thread. You're only preaching to the converted, and then patting yourself on the back telling yourself you did some good.
Knowing is half the battle, but it's only half of it. The other half is doing something about it. We spend so much of our time writing obfuscated C, inventing a more clever graphics algorythm, or coming up with the perfect clever reply on a blog when we could be writing open-source voting software, designing maintenance-free water distribution systems, and making information available to the 55% of the country whose bullet-proof point of view never reaches the hallowed pages of Slashdot.
It's a fatal mistake to think that the information has gone far enough once it reaches you. It's even worse to think that it's someone else who should do something about it.
Mod me down if you must, in the real world my karma is clean.
most imagined and fabricated claims like the one you mentioned are just that, imagined and fabricated claims.
Maybe most of them are, but mine's backed up by research. Various studies of human sexuality peg the percent of people who fantasize during sex at between 60 and 90%. You can fantasize about a world where things are different, but it won't help you deal with the world as it really is.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but most people fantisize during sex. Men and women both.
Porn doesn't raise people's expectation of the habits of real women any more than romantic movies raise women's expectations of real men. They do a little, but then again there are a few real men and women who take a clue or two and get ideas from these media in order to help please their spouses, girlfriends, whatever.
As far as 14 year olds seeing porn is concerned (trying to get a little bit on topic), I'm firmly convinced that our country's simultaneous demonization and glorification of sex is one of the things that makes kids curious about it. I really wish that both groups would just stop it and start teaching children about sex as a natural human function that needs to be performed with caution and discression.
That whole idea reminds me of Cobol programming, where 2/3rds of the code that you wrote was mindless respecification of thing, or characters that specified how things were going to be formatted instead of how they would be used.
XML is such an odeous buzzword these days. Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon because it's easy to comprehend. They don't seem to care that the entire language is horribly inefficient for what it does in terms of characters needed and processing time to transfer and interpret it.
I think, though, that programmers will draw the line at using it as a stupid bloody programming language. All really good programmers know that their ability to produce is, in a lot of ways, a factor of their typing speed. Adding extra lines to code for the sole purpose of conforming to an inefficient standard will only appeal to people who have more interest in bureaucracy than productivity.
My first introduction to computing occurred when I was ten years old and my dad (the electrical engineer) was building a robot in our basement out of a car battery, a Z-80 chip, and the usual collection of stepper motors and sensors. He taught me the basics of assembly language, and I was hooked by being able to control the robot. For this reason, I tend to think that Lego Mindstorms were one of the best ways to teach kids how to program.
Another awesome tool that I ran into was called TWIPS - the twelve instruction programming system. It was essentally a tiny model of an assembly language system with only twelve basic instructions. You were given 1000 spaces of memory in which to store all instructions and data and had to write functional programs in it.
This system made it a snap to explain stacks, heaps, registers, endian, binary numbers, and dozens of other basic concepts in computing. Unfortunately, with higher level programming, many of these ideas may be entirely superfluous. Nonetheless, it was quite a bit of fun.
Does anyone out there have a copy of the original TWIPS? I wrote my own for teaching my friends, but I'd love to get a copy of the original.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he ruled out the elimination of Public Schools as incapable of solving the problem, I think he ruled it out as being incapable of being accomplished. He's pretty well on-target about this.
I will agree that the introduction of competition between educational systems is an absolute requirement to the improvement of schools in general, I think that this can be done via a system similar to the enforced darwinism caused by the "no child left behind" thingie. Good idea, really fucking stupid implementation.
There are more ways to go about this than to just burn down the establishment and start over.
I've been studying this problem for years, and it really comes down to teaching good thinking habits. Most schools today just focus on more efficient ways to pack information into children's heads, and learning skills are left for the children to figure out on their own or learn from their parents. Specifically, given some input into an educational curriculum, I would insert teaching of the following skills at a very early age:
1. Meta-skills. It's been demonstrated again and again that the people who are most likely to be bad at something are the ones who don't know that they're bad at it. In order for people to learn anything of even meager complexity, they first have to realize that they don't already know it.
2. Cognitive Dissonance training. I probably lost half of my audience with those words so, for the rest of you, I'll define them. When we get new information that doesn't quite jive with what we already know, many people are in the habit of reacting to it by discarding the new information, killing the messenger, or going into denial. This is obviously counter-productive to the creation of a realistic world-view. I suggest training people at a young age how to effectively and objectively compare new and old information to determine which is more valid. This goes along with my next point...
3. Critical Analysis. Most of us are incapable of identifying which pieces of information we receive are good and which ones are bad. We usually fall back to just believing anything that X authority figure says, and don't really think about what they said too much. Learning critical analysis is like brushing your teeth. If you learn how to do it at a young age, it comes naturally when your older. If you don't learn it when you're young then learning good "information hygene" is very difficult at an older age.
There ya go. Probably not what you were looking for, but I don't believe that packing one form of information into kid's heads over another form of information is going to make as significant an improvement in that person's quality of life as these three would.
Television isn't what I would call an educational medium, and it is barely a news medium. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, those who get their news from only television know less than those who get no news at all. What news is there is closer to infotainment than any other media.
This leaves TV to be a source of entertainment and little more. I'm not going to shed a tear because those poor unfortunates who can't afford cable would no longer have the opportunity to become couch potatoes.
I'll just wait for someone to speak them into an audio track so I can listen to them on my iPod.
I apologize for not having a convenient nihilistic form letter to reply to your post with. Your commentary suggests that:
(a) everyone would have to adopt it all at once for it to be useful. If this were the case, then VNC's would never have come into existence
(b) that an individual can only have email via one account system, and
(c) a perfect system exists.
I'll accept your commentary that nobody has implemented it in a practical manner, and raise you a "nothing has ever gotten done by saying that it's impossible."
Let's take SecondLife as an example. They have a monetary system in the game that allows you to convert dollars into their units of trade and transfer those units for goods. The sellers of the virtual goods can then transfer the units back to real-world cash. They aren't a bank, they're a game, and you're paying for extra "credit" in the game, not transferring money into a different unit.
If Google were to take advantage of that, we should consider what this would mean if we could hook it into email systems. Let's say you have to have an "account" with them in order to send email to me. I can set up accounts and give them to my friends. You have to transfer $.25 from your account to my account in order to send mail to me. If you aren't sending junk mail to me then I immediately refund the money. If you are, then I keep the money and eventually cash out the spare for my personal use.
White lists could be created for your friends to auto-refund their money. Blacklists would delete the spam before you see it, money staying in your account.
Voila, spam-proof email system. I'm liking this idea. Maybe I'll go write it myself...
This would explain why the Nasdaq continued to rise until November of 2000, and then started its downward spiral. It took that long for those without an ounce of sense to stop investing in vaporware...
Well, ok, never is too strong a word. Some religion has changed over the ages, some religion has not. Mostly, religions only change when people threaten to leave them if they don't, and some times not even then.
A good example of religions that don't change is Orthodox Judaism, where they still follow the rules set down for surviving life in the desert in the dawn of history. In some cases, religion truly is incapable of change.
You may notice that most of the changes you're mentioning happened at Vatican Council II in 1962-65. Do you know when Vatican Council I was? 1545-63 (see Council of Trent). Change can, and sometimes does, happen in religion, but not generally within any particular person's lifetime, and it often takes a major brick to the head in order to make it happen.
You obviously live in an area with no crime. If doors swing outward, that means that their hinges are accessible to removal. This makes locks on doors absolutely pointless because you can just remove the pins on the hinges and the door will just fall down.
Not that Microsoft wouldn't design doors that way...
Since when does failing to back up your hard drive make your system easier to hack into? If you're talking about them having poor data integrity that's one thing, but this doesn't seem to point to poor computer security.
It's obviously true that Apple will want to put out their hardware on Mac-standardized hardware so they don't have to deal with the many-splendored array of hardware options that face Windows users. Let's think this through.
It doesn't seem impossible that various vendors will start to create "Apple compatible" hardware replacement options, built specifically to work with Apple's designs. That is the world of competition.
With this level of standardization, it isn't much of a jump that someone will produce another OS that can be installed onto a system assembled from these standardized components. Imagine how much that would simplify system configuration. I think that the Open Source community would find that target to be irresistable.
If the use of such a Linux were to proliferate, it would increase the demand for these parts, thus significantly increasing the market for them, making them more competitive and cheaper. Eventually this would result in a major subclass of highly compatible, low-maintenance hardware and software systems.
The downside to this is that it would lock vendors into being largely copycats, with Apple doing all of the meaningful innovation. I'm sure Apple would love that. For everyone else, there will still be Microsoft.
It always amazes me how the Slashdot readers tend to think that Dvorak is the great anti-sage - the guy with all the wrong answers. I can understand not taking what he says as gospel, but his only real sin is the willingness to make guesses.
I appreciate reading his stuff, but I take his predictions with a grain of salt. He's very well informed and quite willing to disseminate his information. He's also usually pretty insightful, even if he isn't generally dead-on.
Does anyone happen to know what is used to put lettering on keyboards these days and, more importantly, what it would take to remove it? Turpentine? Acetone? Xylene? Preferably something that doesn't also dissolve the keys....
Or maybe just the idea of storing metadata about an email address with that email address. I'm fairly certain we can find prior art for this one.
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support. The OS itself was a surprsingly strong and reliable system, but their ad campaigns were mind-bogglingly pathetic.
I'm not sure what the Linux community could gain by it being open source, except maybe some more efficient/reliable algorythms. As such, it would be enough for the IBM written chunks to be open sourced - they don't need a complete, functional code base.
I've always envisioned the ultimate end of personally portable computing to have a device about the size of a deck of cards which I can plug into any office or public terminal and have that terminal immediately bring up my desktop and run all of my programs. When designing this kind of system, you have to decide which of the pieces you want to replicate vs. which of the pieces you want to lug around.
At one end of the spectrum is the laptop, where you lug around darn near everything. You have to replicate some things, like printers and wall sockets, and often wind up replicating other things like a big monitor and comfortable keyboard, but for the most part it's an entirely integrated unit.
On the other end of the scale is the thumb drive. Nothing more than a highly portable storage device for all of those things you can't replicate. You can jack one of these babies into any full system that has an adequate set of tools and be on your way. It's small enough that you can attach it to your keychain and forget it exists.
This product seems to be somewhere in the limbo between those two. For any concept like this to work, you have to be fairly certain that you can find the components that you don't carry around with you wherever you go. With a laptop, this is easy because you need so little. Portable storage in the form of floppies and CD's have made the other end quite available.
As it stands, there doesn't exist adequate infrastructure to make this device useful. Oh, and did I mention that it's preposterously expensive for what it provides?
Thank you. I'll sleep better at night now. *grin*
Avoid anybody who goes through Joker.com. Several IPS's have been using them as their registrar, and I have had to let a couple of my domains lapse and be re-registered in order to get them out of their clutches. They require a verification code in order to transfer .org domains, but won't tell you how to go about getting such a thing.
I've always wondered what effect it would have when Betelgeuse finally goes supernova. Has anybody calcuated how much energy would hit our solar system and what kind of effect that would have?
For those of you not astronomicaly inclined, Betelgeuse is an immense red giant star rougly 425 light years away. Its radius is estimated to be roughly the size of Mars's orbit.
One of the things that they don't usually explain about living in space is that it teaches humans to live within their resources. Our planet is an entirely closed system that will eventually run out of any resource that isn't iron, sunlight, or fed by sunlight.
Unless we figure out patterns of 100% reuse, we will have to survive on continually dwindling resources. The much smaller closed systems that exist in space continually provide us with research that we will need to achieve higher reuse goals.
People like to fool themselves into thinking that blogging is a form of activism. Newsflash: blogging is about as effective a political tool as backyard gossip. People who disagree with you won't be reading this thread. You're only preaching to the converted, and then patting yourself on the back telling yourself you did some good.
Knowing is half the battle, but it's only half of it. The other half is doing something about it. We spend so much of our time writing obfuscated C, inventing a more clever graphics algorythm, or coming up with the perfect clever reply on a blog when we could be writing open-source voting software, designing maintenance-free water distribution systems, and making information available to the 55% of the country whose bullet-proof point of view never reaches the hallowed pages of Slashdot.
It's a fatal mistake to think that the information has gone far enough once it reaches you. It's even worse to think that it's someone else who should do something about it.
Mod me down if you must, in the real world my karma is clean.
most imagined and fabricated claims like the one you mentioned are just that, imagined and fabricated claims.
Maybe most of them are, but mine's backed up by research. Various studies of human sexuality peg the percent of people who fantasize during sex at between 60 and 90%. You can fantasize about a world where things are different, but it won't help you deal with the world as it really is.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but most people fantisize during sex. Men and women both.
Porn doesn't raise people's expectation of the habits of real women any more than romantic movies raise women's expectations of real men. They do a little, but then again there are a few real men and women who take a clue or two and get ideas from these media in order to help please their spouses, girlfriends, whatever.
As far as 14 year olds seeing porn is concerned (trying to get a little bit on topic), I'm firmly convinced that our country's simultaneous demonization and glorification of sex is one of the things that makes kids curious about it. I really wish that both groups would just stop it and start teaching children about sex as a natural human function that needs to be performed with caution and discression.
That whole idea reminds me of Cobol programming, where 2/3rds of the code that you wrote was mindless respecification of thing, or characters that specified how things were going to be formatted instead of how they would be used.
XML is such an odeous buzzword these days. Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon because it's easy to comprehend. They don't seem to care that the entire language is horribly inefficient for what it does in terms of characters needed and processing time to transfer and interpret it.
I think, though, that programmers will draw the line at using it as a stupid bloody programming language. All really good programmers know that their ability to produce is, in a lot of ways, a factor of their typing speed. Adding extra lines to code for the sole purpose of conforming to an inefficient standard will only appeal to people who have more interest in bureaucracy than productivity.
My first introduction to computing occurred when I was ten years old and my dad (the electrical engineer) was building a robot in our basement out of a car battery, a Z-80 chip, and the usual collection of stepper motors and sensors. He taught me the basics of assembly language, and I was hooked by being able to control the robot. For this reason, I tend to think that Lego Mindstorms were one of the best ways to teach kids how to program.
Another awesome tool that I ran into was called TWIPS - the twelve instruction programming system. It was essentally a tiny model of an assembly language system with only twelve basic instructions. You were given 1000 spaces of memory in which to store all instructions and data and had to write functional programs in it.
This system made it a snap to explain stacks, heaps, registers, endian, binary numbers, and dozens of other basic concepts in computing. Unfortunately, with higher level programming, many of these ideas may be entirely superfluous. Nonetheless, it was quite a bit of fun.
Does anyone out there have a copy of the original TWIPS? I wrote my own for teaching my friends, but I'd love to get a copy of the original.