The schools with the large lecture halls just want your money.
Well, yes and no. You're describing virtually every large land-grant institution, all of which are supported, at least in part, by the state in which they exist. State funding as a percentage of an institution's budget and adjusted for inflation on a per-student basis has been falling for at least thirty years. Consequently, universities have two fundamental choices in the face of budget shortfalls: large tuition or inferior services (or some combination thereof). The former story is probably better known to the general public but neither is particularly secretive. Large public schools that take a large amount of money from you do so in part because voters in whatever state you're living in, through the choices of their elected representatives, have decided to make higher education a lower priority.
One trade-off universities consequently make is large lecture classes that are, in effect, a reduction in services. But such schools also charge substantially less than "good schools" like MIT or Harvey Mudd or a large number of small liberal arts colleges scattered through the nation. Unfortunately, higher education seems to be becoming less egalitarian and more like the rest of commercial society in the sense that you get what you pay for, and the citizens of many states don't seem to want to pay for much.
Actually, the Oxford English Dictionary lists "Gantlet" as a subset of Gauntlet under sense 7. I would link to the entry, but it's behind a firewall.
Furthermore, Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage says:
Some confusion exists about the status of these spelling variants. The argument is sometimes heard that they represent etymologically distinct words, and that gantlet is the only correct choice--or at least the preferable one--in the common phrase run the ga(u)ntlet. This argument is mistaken.
Then it goes on to describe why.
Given that the OED hasn't found a distinct difference between the two and that MW's linguists agree with the OED, I think you're wrong and being an incorrect prescriptivist.
Re:I "dispose" of my stuff on Ebay. (Recycle)
on
The Scope of US E-Waste
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Virtually no one is using the millions of 386 and 486s out there. At some point, the items sold on eBay will end up being effectively worthless, and the question is, what then?
This is the last Xmas I use Amazon. They botched every order, and when subcontractors ran out of stock on toys, they all waited until Xmas Eve to let me know they wouldn't be filling my order. One went ahead and charged my credit card anyhow.
Sorry to hear that: like another child poster, I've had extraordinarily good look with buying physical books from Amazon and don't think I've bought anything else from them. I'm not opposed to the company in general, as they usually have the lowest prices on new books and an easy interface for buying used books.
But I am opposed to lies and disappointed that media organizations are propagating them, although I'm not terribly surprised. The Kindle's DRM issue, of course, practically speaks for itself. But for books and DVDs, they've been excellent. Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It in the New York Times describes my book habits well.
Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.
The same reasoning or lack thereof applies to the Kindle (which I don't like for its DRM and other problems), since Amazon won't release sales numbers for it.
So, did Amazon have their best ever holiday season? Maybe: but we're unlikely to know enough about the metrics used to make this claim to know.
The workforce in Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama are also of such poor quality there (low education level) that they have had to stoop to pictogram instructions at work stations. And Canada? High literacy rate, great quality workforce.
On the fiction side of things, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon depicts nerd/geek culture and minds better than anything else I've read. And it's hilarious.
On the non-fiction side, Joel Spolsky's Best Software Writing Volume 1 is a winner, and not just for programmers, either; in that respect, it's similar to Frederick Brooks' The Mythical Man Month.
... I realize that it's gauche to reply to your own post, but I will note that I hadn't realized that the original poster might be referring to time outside of school. If that's the case, I'd recommend that you leave the computer essentially unmolested. Outside of class time, it's not your responsibility to oversee the students' activities. That would be an example of paternalism gone too far; inside schools, however, you should allow laptop usage to be restricted to the extent instructors think it wise.
I beg to differ, at least in terms of being inside the classroom itself. Outside the classroom, they should have none, but I argue about what should be done within here.
They gave all the kids Thinkpads (OK, sold them Thinkpads - private school) and then left them unlocked. The step-son and all his friends installed every pirated game you can imagine and sat around in class all day playing. Not a lot of education happening as far as I could tell.
So my advice is this: Lock them down. Forget about "essentially own the computers;" if the laptop is school property, the laptop is school property.
Maybe: but draconian lockdowns a) impart the wrong message about who's in charge and b) don't give enough autonomy to teachers, as I argue here. At home, leave the computers up to the students, but at school, it shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all policy.
Another 20%, myself included, will think that he's just referring to inside the classroom itself, rather than overall, because an overall lockdown seems so dumb as to defy this person's imagination.
I beg to differ and explain why I great detail here There's a difference between minor, benevolent paternalism is a classroom with the goal of teaching and curtailing civil rights and opening death camps.
(I know I'm literalizing a comment you don't mean literally, but I do so for a purpose.)
Secondly, I've read some of the pro-laptop comments, and while I sympathize with their points, paternalism is not *always* a bad thing. Sometimes it's a necessary component of developing discipline and other positive traits. Banning laptops might be one, as it could help one develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material.
I went to law school for a year by accident, where virtually everyone had laptops in every classroom. They were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out bar happy hours, and IM, and IMing about the incompetence of the person speaking, and checking the score, and a variety of other things. I know, the jokes are coming: you must've been a dumb law student, gone to a bad school, had bad professor, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one's attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake sitting on the counter in your living room. Sure, you'd never lie on that mortgage application about your income--but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little... The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make continuous partial attention more likely than deep engagement.
Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops because they're likely to be used for Facebook, and IM, and everything else but taking notes. I know: if you're not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can't get their attention in the first place? What if you're trying to impart something important but that doesn't have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. You, the Slashdot commenter, would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that you could get by: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can't.
All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. But they aren't necessarily a burden: I could see wanting them for programming classes, for math classes that could use advanced visualizations, for blogging, for exchanging immediate responses among a group, for editing papers on the fly, the moment you get feedback on them. But not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them. "Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students?" you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards "let them do whatever they want." Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them.
I'd love to see a nationwide 4G mobile network, but let's be clear about some of the challenges facing Clearwire, including cost, device and competitive ones.
portrays some of my thinking, but the bigger problem I have with Clearwire is its terrible service. They have (or, at least a year ago, had) silent bandwidth caps and usage policies so draconian that they make cable companies look friendly by comparison. I wrote about my experience here.
Part of the impetus for buying Clearwire's service was helping to create more competition for the cable and telephone companies while simultaneously saving money. Little did I realize that what money I saved was quickly gobbled up in the form of time spent dealing with the company.
Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features?
Because consumers pay for features, and if you have nothing to sell, you'll eventually not be a company anymore. Regarding consumers and features, see Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth.
Microsoft is being attacked from two sides: on the low end by netbooks and on the high end by Apple. The former is presumably capturing a large share of those who would otherwise buy $600 - $1,000 laptops, while the latter has been gaining marketshare almost exclusively in the $1,000+ market, where the cost of Windows is less noticeable relative to the cost of the computer itself. People who care about computing use OS X or Linux, as Paul Graham said: "So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway."
Combine the netbook and OS X trends with the Linux becoming increasingly easy to use for novices and a worldwide recession, and one has problems brewing for Microsoft. Not fatal problems, to be sure, but problems nonetheless, and problems whose solution is not obvious.
Although the price for the Kindle will presumably fall over time, the bigger problem is still the DRM'ed content -- and Oprah is unlikely to change that. I write a book/lit blog and discussed the implications of the Kindle here and here. It's an impressive technical achievement that lacks--and might lack for a long time--the unrestricted books needed to make it a success.
A few months back, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how many American educators are looking to Finland for teaching models, because Finland has remarkably high student achievement across the board. Yet, Finland and its fellow Nordic countries are marked by some of the strongest unions on the planet.
And if you actually read the article, you'll discover that it has a number of cautions about translating what works in one country and culture to another. Unions appear to be part, but by no means all, of the current education problem in the U.S.
As a teacher (of mathematics) I noticed long ago that most of the dislike of mathematics is related to promoting a culture of stupidity. The seeds of this idea comes from the "popular" cultural ideas that if your smart or educated, then your not "one of us". The idea is further promoted by using derogatory terms for smart people like nerd or geek.
If it makes you feel any better, the attitude you're describing isn't limited to math or science. I already posted most of this comment here, but thought it worth repeating.
I'm in the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Arizona, and as a result I teach 50 freshmen divided into two classes in English 101 each semester. They're great for learning about society's views and prejudices, since they come pre-equipped with so many and so few tools for self-analysis. This time, I created a unit on science and assigned an Asimov story and various other things, including Peter Wood's How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, which the author of the New York Times article should have referenced, as well as Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out. Students' responses to and associations with science in particular have been fascinating for how negative they are.
Many draw a distinction between "us" ("normal people") and "them" ("scientists and mathematicians," as well as others who focus on intellectual achievement), defining the two as utterly opposed to one another. Few if any perceived science or learning as a process, rather than a thing. Just like much of the fiction and many of the essays we read, many saw science as being not applicable to their lives. Actually, it's hard for me to discern what they do find applicable to their lives.
Anyhow, you're right -- they "just don't see the connection," and I'm not sure if my efforts, like pointing out the us vs. them tendencies, actually helped. I drew explicit comparisons between work and tenacity needed for significant achievement in virtually any field, including scholastic ones like English, but I'm not sure whether some of these subtler points were actually understood. For most of them, I'm guessing the answer was no, but maybe a few were genuinely affected.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 2) Make search engine accessible on the Internet.
Step 3) There is no step three.
If you manage Step 1, you'll "kill" Google in the same way Google killed Yahoo!.
Well, yes and no. You're describing virtually every large land-grant institution, all of which are supported, at least in part, by the state in which they exist. State funding as a percentage of an institution's budget and adjusted for inflation on a per-student basis has been falling for at least thirty years. Consequently, universities have two fundamental choices in the face of budget shortfalls: large tuition or inferior services (or some combination thereof). The former story is probably better known to the general public but neither is particularly secretive. Large public schools that take a large amount of money from you do so in part because voters in whatever state you're living in, through the choices of their elected representatives, have decided to make higher education a lower priority.
One trade-off universities consequently make is large lecture classes that are, in effect, a reduction in services. But such schools also charge substantially less than "good schools" like MIT or Harvey Mudd or a large number of small liberal arts colleges scattered through the nation. Unfortunately, higher education seems to be becoming less egalitarian and more like the rest of commercial society in the sense that you get what you pay for, and the citizens of many states don't seem to want to pay for much.
(If you want to read more about this phenomenon, see Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education .)
As ballast to the parent's argument, I'll observe that major language authorities agree, as I describe in this comment.
Then it goes on to describe why.
Given that the OED hasn't found a distinct difference between the two and that MW's linguists agree with the OED, I think you're wrong and being an incorrect prescriptivist.
Virtually no one is using the millions of 386 and 486s out there. At some point, the items sold on eBay will end up being effectively worthless, and the question is, what then?
Don't worry, no one wants your ideas.
Fortunately, the updated Model M called a Customizer is very Mac friendly, as I describe at the link.
Indeed: I wrote a review of the Unicomp Customizer here, which is a modern version of the Model M and highly recommended.
Sorry to hear that: like another child poster, I've had extraordinarily good look with buying physical books from Amazon and don't think I've bought anything else from them. I'm not opposed to the company in general, as they usually have the lowest prices on new books and an easy interface for buying used books.
But I am opposed to lies and disappointed that media organizations are propagating them, although I'm not terribly surprised. The Kindle's DRM issue, of course, practically speaks for itself. But for books and DVDs, they've been excellent. Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It in the New York Times describes my book habits well.
See Slate's Amazon.con: How the online retail giant hoodwinks the press for details on why this story is idiotic:
Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.
The same reasoning or lack thereof applies to the Kindle (which I don't like for its DRM and other problems), since Amazon won't release sales numbers for it.
So, did Amazon have their best ever holiday season? Maybe: but we're unlikely to know enough about the metrics used to make this claim to know.
Do you have a citation for this?
On the non-fiction side, Joel Spolsky's Best Software Writing Volume 1 is a winner, and not just for programmers, either; in that respect, it's similar to Frederick Brooks' The Mythical Man Month.
... I realize that it's gauche to reply to your own post, but I will note that I hadn't realized that the original poster might be referring to time outside of school. If that's the case, I'd recommend that you leave the computer essentially unmolested. Outside of class time, it's not your responsibility to oversee the students' activities. That would be an example of paternalism gone too far; inside schools, however, you should allow laptop usage to be restricted to the extent instructors think it wise.
I beg to differ, at least in terms of being inside the classroom itself. Outside the classroom, they should have none, but I argue about what should be done within here.
So my advice is this: Lock them down. Forget about "essentially own the computers;" if the laptop is school property, the laptop is school property.
Maybe: but draconian lockdowns a) impart the wrong message about who's in charge and b) don't give enough autonomy to teachers, as I argue here. At home, leave the computers up to the students, but at school, it shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all policy.
Another 20%, myself included, will think that he's just referring to inside the classroom itself, rather than overall, because an overall lockdown seems so dumb as to defy this person's imagination.
(I know I'm literalizing a comment you don't mean literally, but I do so for a purpose.)
First off, you should read Why I ban laptops in my classroom and the professor vs laptop article that recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and then Paul Graham's Disconnecting Distraction and then Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic. If Paul Graham finds the Internet ceaselessly distracting, what hope do ninth graders have?
Secondly, I've read some of the pro-laptop comments, and while I sympathize with their points, paternalism is not *always* a bad thing. Sometimes it's a necessary component of developing discipline and other positive traits. Banning laptops might be one, as it could help one develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material.
I went to law school for a year by accident, where virtually everyone had laptops in every classroom. They were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out bar happy hours, and IM, and IMing about the incompetence of the person speaking, and checking the score, and a variety of other things. I know, the jokes are coming: you must've been a dumb law student, gone to a bad school, had bad professor, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one's attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake sitting on the counter in your living room. Sure, you'd never lie on that mortgage application about your income--but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little... The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make continuous partial attention more likely than deep engagement.
Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops because they're likely to be used for Facebook, and IM, and everything else but taking notes. I know: if you're not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can't get their attention in the first place? What if you're trying to impart something important but that doesn't have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. You, the Slashdot commenter, would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that you could get by: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can't.
All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. But they aren't necessarily a burden: I could see wanting them for programming classes, for math classes that could use advanced visualizations, for blogging, for exchanging immediate responses among a group, for editing papers on the fly, the moment you get feedback on them. But not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them. "Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students?" you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards "let them do whatever they want." Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them.
I'd love to see a nationwide 4G mobile network, but let's be clear about some of the challenges facing Clearwire, including cost, device and competitive ones.
portrays some of my thinking, but the bigger problem I have with Clearwire is its terrible service. They have (or, at least a year ago, had) silent bandwidth caps and usage policies so draconian that they make cable companies look friendly by comparison. I wrote about my experience here.
Part of the impetus for buying Clearwire's service was helping to create more competition for the cable and telephone companies while simultaneously saving money. Little did I realize that what money I saved was quickly gobbled up in the form of time spent dealing with the company.
Because consumers pay for features, and if you have nothing to sell, you'll eventually not be a company anymore. Regarding consumers and features, see Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth.
Combine the netbook and OS X trends with the Linux becoming increasingly easy to use for novices and a worldwide recession, and one has problems brewing for Microsoft. Not fatal problems, to be sure, but problems nonetheless, and problems whose solution is not obvious.
So, she's suffering the same problem as /.?
Although the price for the Kindle will presumably fall over time, the bigger problem is still the DRM'ed content -- and Oprah is unlikely to change that. I write a book/lit blog and discussed the implications of the Kindle here and here. It's an impressive technical achievement that lacks--and might lack for a long time--the unrestricted books needed to make it a success.
And if you actually read the article, you'll discover that it has a number of cautions about translating what works in one country and culture to another. Unions appear to be part, but by no means all, of the current education problem in the U.S.
We discuss the article here.
If it makes you feel any better, the attitude you're describing isn't limited to math or science. I already posted most of this comment here, but thought it worth repeating.
I'm in the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Arizona, and as a result I teach 50 freshmen divided into two classes in English 101 each semester. They're great for learning about society's views and prejudices, since they come pre-equipped with so many and so few tools for self-analysis. This time, I created a unit on science and assigned an Asimov story and various other things, including Peter Wood's How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, which the author of the New York Times article should have referenced, as well as Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out. Students' responses to and associations with science in particular have been fascinating for how negative they are.
Many draw a distinction between "us" ("normal people") and "them" ("scientists and mathematicians," as well as others who focus on intellectual achievement), defining the two as utterly opposed to one another. Few if any perceived science or learning as a process, rather than a thing. Just like much of the fiction and many of the essays we read, many saw science as being not applicable to their lives. Actually, it's hard for me to discern what they do find applicable to their lives.
Anyhow, you're right -- they "just don't see the connection," and I'm not sure if my efforts, like pointing out the us vs. them tendencies, actually helped. I drew explicit comparisons between work and tenacity needed for significant achievement in virtually any field, including scholastic ones like English, but I'm not sure whether some of these subtler points were actually understood. For most of them, I'm guessing the answer was no, but maybe a few were genuinely affected.