The reason is that people with exceptionally good memories often have difficulty seing even simple patterns within the strings of numbers (etc.) they are looking at.
I read once of an amazing story from the 20's or 30's about an extreme case of this, a guy who could remember whole books full of numbers or recite entire transcripts of old business meetings... but he was unable to perceive even the simplest of patterns as such, e.g.
12345
23456
34567
I'm having trouble tracking down a link because the guy's name is so obscure... I think he is referred to as 'Mr.S' in the physch literature on memory.
While I'm all for parental involvement, this really does not explain why many cultures that our kicking our collective butts in education have less parental involvement.
For example, this study of Chinese math scores found: "It was found that the parental involvement was not a major predictor for children's mathematics achievement, which again did not support the hypothesis that students from families with high parental involvement would have higher mathematics achievements." There are several studies like this.
Most of the correlational analyses I can find on the net cite a significant, but relatively low (less than 0.4) correlation between parental involvement and they are not filtering out socioeconomic status, so they mainly tell us that rich folks spend more time with their kids and not how important parental invovlement is.
If we are going to have professional educators, it would make sense to place most, but not all, of the burden on them to do the educating.
I see it like this: the management of a company is responsible, at the end of the day, for the profitability of the company. They can "blame" their employees or the family situation of their employees if they like, but at the end of the day it is obvious where the responsibility lies. In education, it's similar. We can blame students and their families all you like, but the primary responsibility lies with teachers and administrators. If at the end of the day the schools are failing (and they are), it is they who have failed to perform their primary job function by overcoming these barriers. In my experience, good teachers produce results even in bad situations. Unfortunately, my observation is that a minority of teachers are good -- perhaps 10%.
Hmmm... I think that "educators" who argue by using profanity and name-calling speak for themselves.
As far as your point about "expert doctors," you are correct but you completely miss my point. The basic thrust of your arguments is that outsiders are not qualified to criticize, and that's ridiculous.
Furthermore, perhaps this would be a good place to point out that before public education the literacy rate in American adults was well over 90% (documented by de Tocqueville and several others)... way to go America! Public education has obviously made a vast improvement. [NOTE: I'm not basing my argument on that point, so please don't whine about apples and oranges]
The major problem with education today in America is that it's failing miserably by world standards. While there are MANY administrative reasons for this, it's rather obvious that the primary responsibility for the failure to teach is with the teachers... not all of them of course, but clearly most of them.
I guess that all those lawyers who keep suing surgeons for killing patients should take a lesson from you and just shut up. After all, they're not surgeons! What do they know?
If the medical system worked the way the American education system works, then surgeons, not patients, would decide whether or not the operation was a success. And while our lifespan continued to DECREASE we would be told by the indigant surgeons that we are unqualified to reform the system.
Using XP's built-in keyboard switching feature I have been easing into the Dvorak for about 6 months. I made it the default, so that using my old comfortable QWERTY would require extra effort -- and to tell the truth, it was annoying as hell for a while since I almost always felt the need to switch back to QWERTY every time I launched an app (in my profession, it's embarrassing to be typing slowly while bosses are tapping their fingers)
Over time, I have reduced the amount that I feel the need to switch keyboards as my Dvorak has steadily improved. While I did not see the dramatic speed increases promised by Dvorakophiles, my speed is getting better and better. I think the fact I've been typing fast on QWERTY since the age of 6 is a major handicap. But I will say that Dvorak is much easier on the fingers and my hands hurt less after a session. I am looking forward to the day when my Dvorak speed will overtake my QWERTY speed.
The hardest thing to learn in Dvorak (without a properly labeled keyboard) is punctuation and control keys, so I rarely program in Dvorak. But I am finally getting the control keys. It was really fun for a while invoking random commands!
The thing you are most worried about -- that working with 2 keyboards would be counterproductive -- is not a huge concern for me, it just means a longer process. Hilariously, when I was first adapting to 2 keyboards there would be times I would sit down and start typing and some weird gobbledy-gook that was NEITHER Dvorak NOR QWERTY would come out! But this stopped happening after a month or so.
Bingo. I recall reading an article a few years ago regarding why amazon.com was pulling out of a number of foreign markets. The reason was credit card fraud. If memory serves, the fraud rate out of Brazil, for example, was 80%!!!
trying to type this despite paroxysms of laughter
on
.Net:... 3 Years Later
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I understand that slashdot users generally have an axe to grind against MS, but after reading this most laughable article, which was almost completely devoid of fact, I could not resist replying to this most ridiculous comment. Understand I am not trying to start a big platform flame war, just to point out that this article and comment are devoid of anything remotely resemebling an argument.
The "evidence" that Microsoft's.NET initiative is so flimsy I don't know where to begin. Let's see, something like 200 of the Fortune 500 companies have mission critical apps in.NET. There has been example after example of.NET beating the pants of J2EE in terms of performance (if you don't believe me, download MS's free VB command line compiler and start with a prime number algorithm, then move on from there). And speaking from personal experience I have not yet met a developer who has any depth of experience with.NET who would NOT agree that it is their all time favorite development platform.
The argument that.NET "has almost disappeared from MS marketing" seems like an intentional misstatement of the truth - the fact that some bad marketing people at MS got reigned in, and that they now only call things.NET if they actually involve... you guessed it,.NET. What a straw man argument, pretending as if MS is somehow hiding in shame from some imagined defeat. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The statement that.NET is a rebranded Visual Basic is simly fabricated... even VB.NET was a complete rewrite from the ground up and breaks compatibility with previous VB's, but that is only scratching the surface.
The allegation that PHP4 blows.NET out of the water is ridiculous. With PHP, we are talking about a language where "objects" (and I use the term loosely) are copied by value - that's right, assigning an object causes the entire object to be copied. A language that lacks any kind of modern exception handling. A language that does not include a debugger, and for which the for-pay debugger's remind my of 1987. And IMO, scalability and PHP don't even belong in the same sentence.
Folks, all I am getting at here is that MS is no straw man. If you want to crap all over them, please make sure you're qualified to actually COMPARE the products. And let's all try not to make stuff up.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason is that people with exceptionally good memories often have difficulty seing even simple patterns within the strings of numbers (etc.) they are looking at.
I read once of an amazing story from the 20's or 30's about an extreme case of this, a guy who could remember whole books full of numbers or recite entire transcripts of old business meetings... but he was unable to perceive even the simplest of patterns as such, e.g.
12345
23456
34567
I'm having trouble tracking down a link because the guy's name is so obscure... I think he is referred to as 'Mr.S' in the physch literature on memory.
For example, this study of Chinese math scores found: "It was found that the parental involvement was not a major predictor for children's mathematics achievement, which again did not support the hypothesis that students from families with high parental involvement would have higher mathematics achievements." There are several studies like this.
Most of the correlational analyses I can find on the net cite a significant, but relatively low (less than 0.4) correlation between parental involvement and they are not filtering out socioeconomic status, so they mainly tell us that rich folks spend more time with their kids and not how important parental invovlement is.
If we are going to have professional educators, it would make sense to place most, but not all, of the burden on them to do the educating.
I see it like this: the management of a company is responsible, at the end of the day, for the profitability of the company. They can "blame" their employees or the family situation of their employees if they like, but at the end of the day it is obvious where the responsibility lies. In education, it's similar. We can blame students and their families all you like, but the primary responsibility lies with teachers and administrators. If at the end of the day the schools are failing (and they are), it is they who have failed to perform their primary job function by overcoming these barriers. In my experience, good teachers produce results even in bad situations. Unfortunately, my observation is that a minority of teachers are good -- perhaps 10%.
As far as your point about "expert doctors," you are correct but you completely miss my point. The basic thrust of your arguments is that outsiders are not qualified to criticize, and that's ridiculous.
Furthermore, perhaps this would be a good place to point out that before public education the literacy rate in American adults was well over 90% (documented by de Tocqueville and several others)... way to go America! Public education has obviously made a vast improvement. [NOTE: I'm not basing my argument on that point, so please don't whine about apples and oranges]
I guess that all those lawyers who keep suing surgeons for killing patients should take a lesson from you and just shut up. After all, they're not surgeons! What do they know?
If the medical system worked the way the American education system works, then surgeons, not patients, would decide whether or not the operation was a success. And while our lifespan continued to DECREASE we would be told by the indigant surgeons that we are unqualified to reform the system.
Using XP's built-in keyboard switching feature I have been easing into the Dvorak for about 6 months. I made it the default, so that using my old comfortable QWERTY would require extra effort -- and to tell the truth, it was annoying as hell for a while since I almost always felt the need to switch back to QWERTY every time I launched an app (in my profession, it's embarrassing to be typing slowly while bosses are tapping their fingers)
Over time, I have reduced the amount that I feel the need to switch keyboards as my Dvorak has steadily improved. While I did not see the dramatic speed increases promised by Dvorakophiles, my speed is getting better and better. I think the fact I've been typing fast on QWERTY since the age of 6 is a major handicap. But I will say that Dvorak is much easier on the fingers and my hands hurt less after a session. I am looking forward to the day when my Dvorak speed will overtake my QWERTY speed.
The hardest thing to learn in Dvorak (without a properly labeled keyboard) is punctuation and control keys, so I rarely program in Dvorak. But I am finally getting the control keys. It was really fun for a while invoking random commands!
The thing you are most worried about -- that working with 2 keyboards would be counterproductive -- is not a huge concern for me, it just means a longer process. Hilariously, when I was first adapting to 2 keyboards there would be times I would sit down and start typing and some weird gobbledy-gook that was NEITHER Dvorak NOR QWERTY would come out! But this stopped happening after a month or so.
Bingo. I recall reading an article a few years ago regarding why amazon.com was pulling out of a number of foreign markets. The reason was credit card fraud. If memory serves, the fraud rate out of Brazil, for example, was 80%!!!
I understand that slashdot users generally have an axe to grind against MS, but after reading this most laughable article, which was almost completely devoid of fact, I could not resist replying to this most ridiculous comment. Understand I am not trying to start a big platform flame war, just to point out that this article and comment are devoid of anything remotely resemebling an argument. The "evidence" that Microsoft's .NET initiative is so flimsy I don't know where to begin. Let's see, something like 200 of the Fortune 500 companies have mission critical apps in .NET. There has been example after example of .NET beating the pants of J2EE in terms of performance (if you don't believe me, download MS's free VB command line compiler and start with a prime number algorithm, then move on from there). And speaking from personal experience I have not yet met a developer who has any depth of experience with .NET who would NOT agree that it is their all time favorite development platform.
The argument that .NET "has almost disappeared from MS marketing" seems like an intentional misstatement of the truth - the fact that some bad marketing people at MS got reigned in, and that they now only call things .NET if they actually involve... you guessed it, .NET. What a straw man argument, pretending as if MS is somehow hiding in shame from some imagined defeat. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The statement that .NET is a rebranded Visual Basic is simly fabricated... even VB.NET was a complete rewrite from the ground up and breaks compatibility with previous VB's, but that is only scratching the surface.
The allegation that PHP4 blows .NET out of the water is ridiculous. With PHP, we are talking about a language where "objects" (and I use the term loosely) are copied by value - that's right, assigning an object causes the entire object to be copied. A language that lacks any kind of modern exception handling. A language that does not include a debugger, and for which the for-pay debugger's remind my of 1987. And IMO, scalability and PHP don't even belong in the same sentence.
Folks, all I am getting at here is that MS is no straw man. If you want to crap all over them, please make sure you're qualified to actually COMPARE the products. And let's all try not to make stuff up.