One of the big problems is that anti-psychotic drugs have severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects. (Many of them cause severe weight gain, often enough to lead to diabetes.)
It's actually difficult or impossible to find out whether a drug causes, say, fatal heart attacks, if they didn't show up with 1% frequency in 500 patients in 6 months in the original FDA approval trials.
World Psychiatry is an open access journal, but that issue isn't on its web site yet. http://www.wpanet.org/detail.p... So I can't read the article and find out whether they deal with this.
I had a friend who was schizophrenic. He had finished a couple of years at Columbia before the schizophrenia hit. Fortunately his parents were relatively wealthy, and they could put him up in an apartment with a relatively normal lifestyle. He had a girlfriend. They smoked a lot of marijuana.
One day he died suddenly, for no apparent reason. I think the final diagnosis was a heart attack. His psychiatrist insisted that it wasn't the drugs that did it, but I later found out that his drugs were associated with some fatalities.
Four years for causing a million dollars worth of damage isn't that harsh a sentence.
Not by the standards of our over-inflated prison sentences in the U.S.
But rationally it does seem like more than necessary.
If the purpose of a prison sentence is to deter somebody, then I think 1 year, or even 6 months, would deter others just as much.
People do these things because they don't think they'll get caught. I don't think anybody says, "Well, I'll do it if I have to serve 1 year in jail, but I won't do it if I have to serve 4 years in jail."
If the purpose of a prison sentence is revenge -- well, do you believe in revenge? If somebody fires me unfairly, am I justified in getting revenge?
Statistically speaking, no student will ever be in a class with a professor like Tomasko. I assume there is a backup plan for the teachers who manage to make the student hate something they liked?
You have to teach those teachers how to be like Tomasko.
Something like film strips or video spreads over the country, promoted by the companies that sell it, and all the teachers use it.
A year or two later, they realize that it's not improving education significantly, they get bored, and move on to something else.
Innovation is great, as long as you realize that most innovations don't pan out.
If you really want to improve education, you should try these programs out in small pilot programs, then controlled trials where one group gets the standard procedure and the other groups get the new procedure, to see how it works.
Can you really teach kids to code this way or is it just the computer equivalent of multiple choice questions and memorization?
Is this the best way to spend $10 million on education?
I don't know. But how do you decide?
I don't think a couple of billionaires should be the ones to decide.
Yeah, so? Is it your contention that adding programming to the curriculum will lower the quality of instruction for some reason?
No, it's my contention that good teachers know how to teach and can introduce programming (or not) into the curriculum in ways that will contribute to the educational process.
It is my contention that when programming (or anything else) is introduced to the curriculum by billionaires who are handing out money for the latest untested fad, it will lower the quality of instruction.
It is my contention that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg don't know much about education, aren't qualified to decide what belongs in the curriculum, and shouldn't set priorities like this.
having educators and scientists leading our education system using what has been proven to work
Where is the "proof" that what we are doing works? I live in California, and the three big things the "educators" are pushing are 1) Common Core, 2) Credentialed Teachers, and 3) Smaller classes. Here is the number of controlled studies that I have seen that show that that "Common Core" is effective: 0. Teachers with education credentials have been found to be LESS effective than teachers with degrees in other subjects. Teachers with advanced degrees in education, have found to have NO improvement over teachers with bachelors degrees in education (both are inferior). Lastly, there is astonishingly little evidence to show that smaller classes improve student performance, considering the billions spent on implementing them. Smaller class sizes have been shown to be beneficial in only narrow circumstances, specifically poorly performing students in lower grades. And in even then, there is some evidence that the real benefit is quieter classrooms rather than smaller classes. For brighter kids, the smaller classes often reduce performance, because they are more likely to be compelled to follow along with the class, rather than read ahead. So please tell us, where is the evidence that educators are using what has been "proven to work"?
I didn't say all educators and scientists were using what was proven to work, I said they should lead with what was proven to work. Some educators and scientists are doing that.
My major sources of information that has proven reliable over the years are:
(1) Science magazine. They regularly publish evidence-based reviews of what works in science education and education generally. I subscribe and most of it is paywalled, unfortunately.
One of the things that works in science is organizing students into study groups. That may seem obvious but most teachers don't do that and a lot of students aren't in study groups. Science had two special issues on minorities in education and they published the research on what works and doesn't work in science education.
They also reported on the studies of preschool, which does seem to work, although it has to be done carefully. One thing that doesn't work is teaching kids to read (which George W Bush thought was the purpose of preschool). The benefit of preschool seems to be teaching kids how to socialize, so that when they do learn to read they won't be discipline problems. By the time kids are in Kindergarten and first grade, most of the damage has already been done.
Science also examined high-stakes testing, and everyone agreed that the tests in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were not validated and so they're not showing student progress the way they're supposed to. For one thing, they're only valid for large populations, not for individual teachers. It's like firing teachers by throwing dice.
(2) Diane Ravitch, who used to be assistant secretary of education in both the GHW Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration. She used to write op-eds on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the WSJ loved her, because she was a conservative and came out for high standards, high-stakes testing, against unions, etc.
Then she said that after she reviewed the data, the evidence didn't support NCLB and RTTT. She said the one factor that was most strongly associated with academic achievement was family income. So if you want to judge teachers by their results, you should bring everybody up to the starting line and increase their income.
Second, she said, high-stakes testing didn't work. It didn't reflect the teacher's teaching ability. It merely reflected the student's family income.
Third, she said, charter schools didn't work. When the data came in, they were doing worse, on the whole, than the matched public schools and unionized schools they were intended to replace.
And they reject the peer-reviewed journals that publish articles on climate change, every one of which has published editorials that warn us that human-caused global warming is real and dangerous.
Glen Beck didn't invent the term 'useful idiot', it dates back to the Soviet era and was used to describe communist sympathisers who did the work of the KGB without directly interacting with them.
It's a term used by American anti-Communists to describe everyone they disagreed with including Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as you can see from the standard reference They Never Said It http://books.google.com/books?... or from a Google search.
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.
You're getting your misattributions wrong. The phrase "useful idiots" wasn't misattributed to Stalin, it was misattributed to Lenin. That is easily verified now that the reference book, They Never Said It, is on Google books. http://books.google.com/books?... Of course there's always Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Once again, another ignoramus has the false idea that coding is all there is to computer science. I don't expect the actual 'education' to be all that great, as usual.
The problem is that we have billionaires leading our education system into the latest fads rather than having educators and scientists leading our education system using what has been proven to work (and avoiding what has been proven to fail).
Stoll re-emphasizes his belief that the most comprehensive educational programming and technology systems could never replace a quality teacher. He recalls his own experience in a graduate physics class. The professor is discussing radiative transfer as Stoll is daydreaming in the back of the classroom. The professor realizes that Stoll isn't quite following the lecture and pauses to ask Stoll a few questions. Caught off-guard, Stoll has to think quickly and come up with a valid response. Fumbling through his first few questions, Stoll is skillfully led to the answer by a talented professor, using the only educational tool available; the Socratic method. Stoll states that there are plenty of computer programs that calculate radiative transfer, and even admits to writing some of them. However he believes that there are no software programs which could have taught him "as effectively as goofing off in Professor Marty Tomasko's class did" (p. 120).
I thought I could go to Google satellite and find yellow cabs along Kings Highway, but I tried it and I couldn't find any. Maybe the neighborhood just went to pot when Dubrow's closed.
Uber has been approved in several cities and we'll see how it goes. The cabs of the future may well be smartphone-guided. But the NYT wrote a story about Uber in NYC, and were twice as expensive and took twice as long to show up in Queens. They also have demand pricing, where they raised their prices tenfold during a storm.
I wonder what Uber's relationship to its drivers is. They seem to have some features of employees and some features of independent contractors that vary among cities, not always in accordance with local regulations.
In California, an Uber contractor killed a child and injured two adults in an accident, but Uber said that since he wasn't carrying an Uber passenger at the time, they weren't legally responsible. The contractor was apparently a licensed, insured commercial driver, but in some arrangements the driver is supposed to be like AirBnB.
I dunno. I used to live in Brooklyn, and it was easy for me to get a cab on main streets, like Kings Highway or Ocean Avenue, any subway stop, or any cluster of stores and restaurants.
OTOH, when I called a car service to get to the airport from Manhattan, they wouldn't show up on time, and sometimes I'd have to drop them for a yellow cab. The car services book their cars solid when they can, and if you cancel because they didn't show up on time, oh well, that's a ride they wouldn't have gotten anyway.
I often get cabs on Long Island, and one of my pet peeves is that they don't usually have working seat belts. That tells me the rest of the car isn't kept up with too well either.
I have noticed when I go out of town that when I pay a $50 fare between the airport and downtown, I usually get better service and a better car than I do when I get a low-priced car and they're competing on price.
When every ride is the lowest bidder, they're not making enough to maintain their cabs, and an experienced driver is going to quit the business when he can.
In those cases that the Institute of Justice is suing over, they have immigrants from Jordan and India who want to compete with Americans by working cheaper.
If I live in a town like Milwaukee, I would welcome immigrants, as I would welcome anybody else, if they want to contribute to the community.
But it's reasonable for a town to decide that there are a lot of residents driving a cab, they make a reasonable income from it, and we don't want to introduce so much competition that nobody can afford to run their cab safely, and nobody can make a living any more (and we have to give them food stamps and Medicaid).
The Institute of Justice says that Ghaleb and Jatinder have a "right to earn a living".
I'm sorry, America has a free market economy. You don't have a "right" to earn a living. If you want a right to earn a living, go to the Soviet Union (oops, sorry, that's not around any more) or Israel where the government will find a job for you.
In the wonderful American free market economy, if you can't earn a living somehow, people like the Institute for Justice will tell you that you can sleep under bridges and starve to death, because the government doesn't have any obligation to give you a handout.
So when they suddenly worry about poor Galeb and Jatinder, they're not really trying to enforce their right to earn a living. They're just using them as foils to attack government regulations. They're also using them as foils to drive the incomes of working people down further and further, to help the Koch brothers and the others who fund the Institute for Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... destroy unions and pick up desperate workers at increasingly lower wages.
There is some substance behind the charge that the current system favors the cartels. The Institute for Justice, https://ij.org/milwaukee-taxis... has some interesting background on this.
In New York City, there were good reasons to limit the number of taxis. If we had twice the number of taxis, we would have bumper-to-bumper traffic jams during the rush hours, and nobody could use the streets. Taxi drivers are using a government resource -- the streets. The owner of those streets has a right to regulate the use of those streets in a way that maximizes their use. The owner of a private gated village has a regulate the use of cars on its streets.
Free markets don't always work, particularly when they use a common resource. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
Tell me some stories of people you know who had a bad experience hitch hiking.
I know MANY people who hitchhike all the time. Students, young women, people who you would expect would be the victims of these types of "bad things" that the people who accept hitch hikers would do.
When I was in college, my housemate's girlfriend was raped, shot in the head, and left for dead, although she did survive. It does happen.
And do you understand the difference between chemistry and biology?
DNA, the human genome, evolution, etc. are taught in Biology.
Chemistry, not so much.
If you don't want your kid's science teacher to lack knowledge then I would suggest reducing their work load in other areas. Implementing cutting edge discoveries into the curriculum isn't exactly a priority to administrators or a requirement of the standards.
You just don't know much about chemistry.
When I go to the American Chemical Society meetings, one of the largest sections is the Division of Biological Chemistry.
What do you think chemists do all day? Add hydrochloric acid to zinc?
(Actually, if you wanted to find out what chemists do all day, you can read an issue of Chemical & Engineering News.)
There are high schools in places like Cold Spring Harbor, where the parents and the school board include many scientists, who understand science. They hire the best science teachers they can get, and they create a curriculum that will teach their kids what science is actually about.
They don't care about state and national tests because they know short-answer questions are bullshit. They want their kids to understand science, to become scientists or whatever else they want.
As I said, the Rockefeller University has a yearly seminar for high school students where they give presentations by Nobel laureates on the current developments of the field. That's what you teach high school students who are actually going to become scientists.
I suspect you're trolling me. Or else you know nothing about science. Or both.
I don't buy that my children and I are simply genetically superior to nearly the entire human population. You can try to convince me otherwise, but it seems more likely an industry group with an interest in making a false claim is spreading a myth than it is that my children and I are really that far about the rest of the human race on the evolutionary scale.
I haven't met your children and I don't know if they could read at the age of three, or merely recognize words on flash cards. It certainly would be very impressive if they could read a book at the first grade level. But I'd need more than your own self-report.
Teachers say that all childhood skills have developmental stages, and if you try to teach a kid to learn something before he's at the stage, it won't work, and if you force him, you'll just make things worse. I've seen that developmental process when I tried to teach children drawing (without forcing them).
John Stuart Mill's father brought him up speaking Hebrew and Greek. John wound up in a mental hospital. Fortunately he got out and wrote a few good books.
And it must of been a very long time since you have had any schooling in high school or university.
The curriculum is tight, and specific. Not only is that new discovery not at all going to help you pass a chem exam, but there is no time to teach it.
Even in university chemistry/physics, they only teach the basics, the stuff that was all carved in stone centuries ago by long dead guys. And they do not even have half a day free time to get into current science news.
It depends on the school (and the teacher). If your goal is to pass the test, you have a problem.
If the students will go on to science and medicine, they already know enough to pass the exam. It's the current stuff that helps them understand what they will need to know in life.
For example, in New York City, Rockefeller University has a Christmas break lecture series in which Nobel laureates give high school students briefings on the current research in their field.
You talk about how easy it is to be a high school science teacher? The best high school science teacher is a Nobel laureate.
I admit that if you have schools whose goal is to get students to pass standardized tests, rather than to understand science, then you don't need a science teacher who is current in the field, or even a science teacher. All you need is a proctor who can teach students to memorize textbooks and short answers, from workbooks published by Pearson or McGraw-Hill, based on 10-year-old material.
Of course, if you do that, you'll have another Sputnik moment, when the U.S. is overtaken by the Europeans and Asians, who (in their best schools) do have a good science education. We've had a few Sputnik moments already. Look at the Nobel prize winners.
Take a look at the table of contents of Science magazine and count the Chinese names. Even the ads for reagents have pictures of Chinese girls.
We understood molecules and atoms in elementary school. Perhaps it's because our teachers weren't 'taught' that we couldn't understand atoms and molecules in elementary school.
I don't know what you could teach elementary school students about molecules and atoms. You could tell them that there are these little particles that look like Tinker Toys (do they still have Tinker Toys?) that hook together and make up matter. You can't see them so you'll just have to take it on our authority that they exist.
That's not much of a science lesson. In fact, it's an anti-science lesson. You're teaching kids to accept things on authority. Why shouldn't they take the Bible on authority? Why shouldn't they take the story about Xenu on L. Ron Hubbard's authority?
The ins and outs of DNA are a bit much for 6 year olds, but they mostly do understand inherited traits to a degree and might as well know it;' because of this thing called DNA that they can learn more about later.
Most kids don't grow up on farms any more, so where would a 6-year-old get an understanding of inherited traits? How much do 6-year-olds understand about reproduction?
How would the fact that they can parrot the term "DNA" help them understand anything?
It's like Richard Feynman's review of science textbooks:
"Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it. There's no point to it.
A 1st grade teacher doesn't need the same qualifications but they do need qualifications in teaching science.
Science magazine has had lots of articles about the new ways to teach 1st graders about science.
For example, teachers gave out stones and seeds. They asked the kids what the difference was between the stones and seeds. Then they planted them and waited for the seeds to sprout while the stones did nothing.
The point was that 1st graders don't distinguish clearly between animate and inanimate objects. This is a surprisingly important concept. This lesson taught them the difference between animate and inanimate objects.
Science teaching looks easy but it's actually quite difficult to do well.
A lot of this these comments sound like the joke about the efficiency engineer who went to a performance of a symphony orchestra. http://www.mpoweruk.com/harmon...
There may be some rare 2- and 3-year-olds who can read. I'd like to see a report of those kids that isn't self-reported by parents.
I'm talking about teachers who go into a classroom and teach a group of children. It's impossible to teach normal 2-year-olds to read in any meaningful way. Teachers know this.
Same with chemistry. This is what the science teachers say. You can get kids to parrot answers, but they won't understand what they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the big problems is that anti-psychotic drugs have severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects. (Many of them cause severe weight gain, often enough to lead to diabetes.)
It's actually difficult or impossible to find out whether a drug causes, say, fatal heart attacks, if they didn't show up with 1% frequency in 500 patients in 6 months in the original FDA approval trials.
World Psychiatry is an open access journal, but that issue isn't on its web site yet. http://www.wpanet.org/detail.p... So I can't read the article and find out whether they deal with this.
I had a friend who was schizophrenic. He had finished a couple of years at Columbia before the schizophrenia hit. Fortunately his parents were relatively wealthy, and they could put him up in an apartment with a relatively normal lifestyle. He had a girlfriend. They smoked a lot of marijuana.
One day he died suddenly, for no apparent reason. I think the final diagnosis was a heart attack. His psychiatrist insisted that it wasn't the drugs that did it, but I later found out that his drugs were associated with some fatalities.
Four years for causing a million dollars worth of damage isn't that harsh a sentence.
Not by the standards of our over-inflated prison sentences in the U.S.
But rationally it does seem like more than necessary.
If the purpose of a prison sentence is to deter somebody, then I think 1 year, or even 6 months, would deter others just as much.
People do these things because they don't think they'll get caught. I don't think anybody says, "Well, I'll do it if I have to serve 1 year in jail, but I won't do it if I have to serve 4 years in jail."
If the purpose of a prison sentence is revenge -- well, do you believe in revenge? If somebody fires me unfairly, am I justified in getting revenge?
Statistically speaking, no student will ever be in a class with a professor like Tomasko. I assume there is a backup plan for the teachers who manage to make the student hate something they liked?
You have to teach those teachers how to be like Tomasko.
Education is subject to fads.
Something like film strips or video spreads over the country, promoted by the companies that sell it, and all the teachers use it.
A year or two later, they realize that it's not improving education significantly, they get bored, and move on to something else.
Innovation is great, as long as you realize that most innovations don't pan out.
If you really want to improve education, you should try these programs out in small pilot programs, then controlled trials where one group gets the standard procedure and the other groups get the new procedure, to see how it works.
Can you really teach kids to code this way or is it just the computer equivalent of multiple choice questions and memorization?
Is this the best way to spend $10 million on education?
I don't know. But how do you decide?
I don't think a couple of billionaires should be the ones to decide.
OK, but what is the snake oil?
Clifford Stoll used that title for his book which argued that computers in education were being hyped beyond the evidence.
Yeah, so? Is it your contention that adding programming to the curriculum will lower the quality of instruction for some reason?
No, it's my contention that good teachers know how to teach and can introduce programming (or not) into the curriculum in ways that will contribute to the educational process.
It is my contention that when programming (or anything else) is introduced to the curriculum by billionaires who are handing out money for the latest untested fad, it will lower the quality of instruction.
It is my contention that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg don't know much about education, aren't qualified to decide what belongs in the curriculum, and shouldn't set priorities like this.
having educators and scientists leading our education system using what has been proven to work
Where is the "proof" that what we are doing works? I live in California, and the three big things the "educators" are pushing are 1) Common Core, 2) Credentialed Teachers, and 3) Smaller classes. Here is the number of controlled studies that I have seen that show that that "Common Core" is effective: 0. Teachers with education credentials have been found to be LESS effective than teachers with degrees in other subjects. Teachers with advanced degrees in education, have found to have NO improvement over teachers with bachelors degrees in education (both are inferior). Lastly, there is astonishingly little evidence to show that smaller classes improve student performance, considering the billions spent on implementing them. Smaller class sizes have been shown to be beneficial in only narrow circumstances, specifically poorly performing students in lower grades. And in even then, there is some evidence that the real benefit is quieter classrooms rather than smaller classes. For brighter kids, the smaller classes often reduce performance, because they are more likely to be compelled to follow along with the class, rather than read ahead. So please tell us, where is the evidence that educators are using what has been "proven to work"?
I didn't say all educators and scientists were using what was proven to work, I said they should lead with what was proven to work. Some educators and scientists are doing that.
My major sources of information that has proven reliable over the years are:
(1) Science magazine. They regularly publish evidence-based reviews of what works in science education and education generally. I subscribe and most of it is paywalled, unfortunately.
One of the things that works in science is organizing students into study groups. That may seem obvious but most teachers don't do that and a lot of students aren't in study groups. Science had two special issues on minorities in education and they published the research on what works and doesn't work in science education.
They also reported on the studies of preschool, which does seem to work, although it has to be done carefully. One thing that doesn't work is teaching kids to read (which George W Bush thought was the purpose of preschool). The benefit of preschool seems to be teaching kids how to socialize, so that when they do learn to read they won't be discipline problems. By the time kids are in Kindergarten and first grade, most of the damage has already been done.
Science also examined high-stakes testing, and everyone agreed that the tests in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were not validated and so they're not showing student progress the way they're supposed to. For one thing, they're only valid for large populations, not for individual teachers. It's like firing teachers by throwing dice.
(2) Diane Ravitch, who used to be assistant secretary of education in both the GHW Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration. She used to write op-eds on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the WSJ loved her, because she was a conservative and came out for high standards, high-stakes testing, against unions, etc.
Then she said that after she reviewed the data, the evidence didn't support NCLB and RTTT. She said the one factor that was most strongly associated with academic achievement was family income. So if you want to judge teachers by their results, you should bring everybody up to the starting line and increase their income.
Second, she said, high-stakes testing didn't work. It didn't reflect the teacher's teaching ability. It merely reflected the student's family income.
Third, she said, charter schools didn't work. When the data came in, they were doing worse, on the whole, than the matched public schools and unionized schools they were intended to replace.
Fourth, she said, community scho
And they reject the peer-reviewed journals that publish articles on climate change, every one of which has published editorials that warn us that human-caused global warming is real and dangerous.
Glen Beck didn't invent the term 'useful idiot', it dates back to the Soviet era and was used to describe communist sympathisers who did the work of the KGB without directly interacting with them.
It's a term used by American anti-Communists to describe everyone they disagreed with including Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as you can see from the standard reference They Never Said It http://books.google.com/books?... or from a Google search.
You fucking idiot. You 'useful idiot', more like.
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.
You're getting your misattributions wrong. The phrase "useful idiots" wasn't misattributed to Stalin, it was misattributed to Lenin. That is easily verified now that the reference book, They Never Said It, is on Google books. http://books.google.com/books?... Of course there's always Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Once again, another ignoramus has the false idea that coding is all there is to computer science. I don't expect the actual 'education' to be all that great, as usual.
The problem is that we have billionaires leading our education system into the latest fads rather than having educators and scientists leading our education system using what has been proven to work (and avoiding what has been proven to fail).
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejou...
Stoll re-emphasizes his belief that the most comprehensive educational programming and technology systems could never replace a quality teacher. He recalls his own experience in a graduate physics class. The professor is discussing radiative transfer as Stoll is daydreaming in the back of the classroom. The professor realizes that Stoll isn't quite following the lecture and pauses to ask Stoll a few questions. Caught off-guard, Stoll has to think quickly and come up with a valid response. Fumbling through his first few questions, Stoll is skillfully led to the answer by a talented professor, using the only educational tool available; the Socratic method. Stoll states that there are plenty of computer programs that calculate radiative transfer, and even admits to writing some of them. However he believes that there are no software programs which could have taught him "as effectively as goofing off in Professor Marty Tomasko's class did" (p. 120).
Curricula should be designed by science teachers and scientists. They shouldn't be designed by billionaires pushing their latest fad.
FTA: "swapped a two-month earth sciences lesson she was going to teach on land masses for the Code.org curriculum."
Coding is nice (although it's only a part of computer science). But what are you going to take out of the curriculum to make room for "coding"?
I thought I could go to Google satellite and find yellow cabs along Kings Highway, but I tried it and I couldn't find any. Maybe the neighborhood just went to pot when Dubrow's closed.
Uber has been approved in several cities and we'll see how it goes. The cabs of the future may well be smartphone-guided. But the NYT wrote a story about Uber in NYC, and were twice as expensive and took twice as long to show up in Queens. They also have demand pricing, where they raised their prices tenfold during a storm.
I wonder what Uber's relationship to its drivers is. They seem to have some features of employees and some features of independent contractors that vary among cities, not always in accordance with local regulations.
In California, an Uber contractor killed a child and injured two adults in an accident, but Uber said that since he wasn't carrying an Uber passenger at the time, they weren't legally responsible. The contractor was apparently a licensed, insured commercial driver, but in some arrangements the driver is supposed to be like AirBnB.
I dunno. I used to live in Brooklyn, and it was easy for me to get a cab on main streets, like Kings Highway or Ocean Avenue, any subway stop, or any cluster of stores and restaurants.
OTOH, when I called a car service to get to the airport from Manhattan, they wouldn't show up on time, and sometimes I'd have to drop them for a yellow cab. The car services book their cars solid when they can, and if you cancel because they didn't show up on time, oh well, that's a ride they wouldn't have gotten anyway.
I often get cabs on Long Island, and one of my pet peeves is that they don't usually have working seat belts. That tells me the rest of the car isn't kept up with too well either.
I have noticed when I go out of town that when I pay a $50 fare between the airport and downtown, I usually get better service and a better car than I do when I get a low-priced car and they're competing on price.
When every ride is the lowest bidder, they're not making enough to maintain their cabs, and an experienced driver is going to quit the business when he can.
In those cases that the Institute of Justice is suing over, they have immigrants from Jordan and India who want to compete with Americans by working cheaper.
If I live in a town like Milwaukee, I would welcome immigrants, as I would welcome anybody else, if they want to contribute to the community.
But it's reasonable for a town to decide that there are a lot of residents driving a cab, they make a reasonable income from it, and we don't want to introduce so much competition that nobody can afford to run their cab safely, and nobody can make a living any more (and we have to give them food stamps and Medicaid).
The Institute of Justice says that Ghaleb and Jatinder have a "right to earn a living".
I'm sorry, America has a free market economy. You don't have a "right" to earn a living. If you want a right to earn a living, go to the Soviet Union (oops, sorry, that's not around any more) or Israel where the government will find a job for you.
In the wonderful American free market economy, if you can't earn a living somehow, people like the Institute for Justice will tell you that you can sleep under bridges and starve to death, because the government doesn't have any obligation to give you a handout.
So when they suddenly worry about poor Galeb and Jatinder, they're not really trying to enforce their right to earn a living. They're just using them as foils to attack government regulations. They're also using them as foils to drive the incomes of working people down further and further, to help the Koch brothers and the others who fund the Institute for Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... destroy unions and pick up desperate workers at increasingly lower wages.
There is some substance behind the charge that the current system favors the cartels. The Institute for Justice, https://ij.org/milwaukee-taxis... has some interesting background on this.
In New York City, there were good reasons to limit the number of taxis. If we had twice the number of taxis, we would have bumper-to-bumper traffic jams during the rush hours, and nobody could use the streets. Taxi drivers are using a government resource -- the streets. The owner of those streets has a right to regulate the use of those streets in a way that maximizes their use. The owner of a private gated village has a regulate the use of cars on its streets.
Free markets don't always work, particularly when they use a common resource. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
Check your axioms, namely:
"Hitchhiking is bad"
Tell me some stories of people you know who had a bad experience hitch hiking.
I know MANY people who hitchhike all the time. Students, young women, people who you would expect would be the victims of these types of "bad things" that the people who accept hitch hikers would do.
When I was in college, my housemate's girlfriend was raped, shot in the head, and left for dead, although she did survive. It does happen.
Incidentally about half of the recent Nobel prizes in chemistry
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobe...
are for cellular biology.
Your advice is very good for teaching students how to go through life filling out tests.
It's not very good for teaching students how to accomplish something useful in science.
Title of TFA = "Bacteria from Earth can easily colonize Mars"
And article makes no such claim.
Article title is fun proof of what happens when someone with to no interest/education in science tries to interpret information and draw a conclusion.
You obviously know nothing about writing headlines.
https://www.arcamax.com/thefun...
And do you understand the difference between chemistry and biology?
DNA, the human genome, evolution, etc. are taught in Biology.
Chemistry, not so much.
If you don't want your kid's science teacher to lack knowledge then I would suggest reducing their work load in other areas. Implementing cutting edge discoveries into the curriculum isn't exactly a priority to administrators or a requirement of the standards.
You just don't know much about chemistry.
When I go to the American Chemical Society meetings, one of the largest sections is the Division of Biological Chemistry.
http://abstracts.acs.org/chem/...
What do you think chemists do all day? Add hydrochloric acid to zinc?
(Actually, if you wanted to find out what chemists do all day, you can read an issue of Chemical & Engineering News.)
There are high schools in places like Cold Spring Harbor, where the parents and the school board include many scientists, who understand science. They hire the best science teachers they can get, and they create a curriculum that will teach their kids what science is actually about.
They don't care about state and national tests because they know short-answer questions are bullshit. They want their kids to understand science, to become scientists or whatever else they want.
As I said, the Rockefeller University has a yearly seminar for high school students where they give presentations by Nobel laureates on the current developments of the field. That's what you teach high school students who are actually going to become scientists.
I suspect you're trolling me. Or else you know nothing about science. Or both.
I don't buy that my children and I are simply genetically superior to nearly the entire human population. You can try to convince me otherwise, but it seems more likely an industry group with an interest in making a false claim is spreading a myth than it is that my children and I are really that far about the rest of the human race on the evolutionary scale.
You sound awfully conspiratorial.
I guess this is an example of the articles you don't like. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
I haven't met your children and I don't know if they could read at the age of three, or merely recognize words on flash cards. It certainly would be very impressive if they could read a book at the first grade level. But I'd need more than your own self-report.
Teachers say that all childhood skills have developmental stages, and if you try to teach a kid to learn something before he's at the stage, it won't work, and if you force him, you'll just make things worse. I've seen that developmental process when I tried to teach children drawing (without forcing them).
John Stuart Mill's father brought him up speaking Hebrew and Greek. John wound up in a mental hospital. Fortunately he got out and wrote a few good books.
And it must of been a very long time since you have had any schooling in high school or university.
The curriculum is tight, and specific. Not only is that new discovery not at all going to help you pass a chem exam, but there is no time to teach it.
Even in university chemistry/physics, they only teach the basics, the stuff that was all carved in stone centuries ago by long dead guys. And they do not even have half a day free time to get into current science news.
It depends on the school (and the teacher). If your goal is to pass the test, you have a problem.
If the students will go on to science and medicine, they already know enough to pass the exam. It's the current stuff that helps them understand what they will need to know in life.
For example, in New York City, Rockefeller University has a Christmas break lecture series in which Nobel laureates give high school students briefings on the current research in their field.
You talk about how easy it is to be a high school science teacher? The best high school science teacher is a Nobel laureate.
I admit that if you have schools whose goal is to get students to pass standardized tests, rather than to understand science, then you don't need a science teacher who is current in the field, or even a science teacher. All you need is a proctor who can teach students to memorize textbooks and short answers, from workbooks published by Pearson or McGraw-Hill, based on 10-year-old material.
Of course, if you do that, you'll have another Sputnik moment, when the U.S. is overtaken by the Europeans and Asians, who (in their best schools) do have a good science education. We've had a few Sputnik moments already. Look at the Nobel prize winners.
Take a look at the table of contents of Science magazine and count the Chinese names. Even the ads for reagents have pictures of Chinese girls.
We understood molecules and atoms in elementary school. Perhaps it's because our teachers weren't 'taught' that we couldn't understand atoms and molecules in elementary school.
I don't know what you could teach elementary school students about molecules and atoms. You could tell them that there are these little particles that look like Tinker Toys (do they still have Tinker Toys?) that hook together and make up matter. You can't see them so you'll just have to take it on our authority that they exist.
That's not much of a science lesson. In fact, it's an anti-science lesson. You're teaching kids to accept things on authority. Why shouldn't they take the Bible on authority? Why shouldn't they take the story about Xenu on L. Ron Hubbard's authority?
The ins and outs of DNA are a bit much for 6 year olds, but they mostly do understand inherited traits to a degree and might as well know it;' because of this thing called DNA that they can learn more about later.
Most kids don't grow up on farms any more, so where would a 6-year-old get an understanding of inherited traits? How much do 6-year-olds understand about reproduction?
How would the fact that they can parrot the term "DNA" help them understand anything?
It's like Richard Feynman's review of science textbooks:
A 1st grade teacher doesn't need the same qualifications but they do need qualifications in teaching science.
Science magazine has had lots of articles about the new ways to teach 1st graders about science.
For example, teachers gave out stones and seeds. They asked the kids what the difference was between the stones and seeds. Then they planted them and waited for the seeds to sprout while the stones did nothing.
The point was that 1st graders don't distinguish clearly between animate and inanimate objects. This is a surprisingly important concept. This lesson taught them the difference between animate and inanimate objects.
Science teaching looks easy but it's actually quite difficult to do well.
A lot of this these comments sound like the joke about the efficiency engineer who went to a performance of a symphony orchestra. http://www.mpoweruk.com/harmon...
There may be some rare 2- and 3-year-olds who can read. I'd like to see a report of those kids that isn't self-reported by parents.
I'm talking about teachers who go into a classroom and teach a group of children. It's impossible to teach normal 2-year-olds to read in any meaningful way. Teachers know this.
Same with chemistry. This is what the science teachers say. You can get kids to parrot answers, but they won't understand what they're talking about.