I was going to recommend that. Each chapter is a chatty essay, setting up a social context that shows the importance of mathematics in war, health care, or biology,...
However, each chapter also involves some real mathematics. For example the reader is invited to solve a simple differential equation to follow the story.
I use it every day just because it is so convenient.
More seriously, think about development. You can have the program running on one X server and the development environment on another, letting you debug without interactions via the servers.
In the 1970's we had Alan Kay pioneering object oriented programming with SmallTalk. The message passing model was an annoying limitation; the 80's saw the development of the CLOS with its generic-function model of OOP. The Art of the Meta-object Protocol pointed the way forward, a way not taken.
The 90's saw the death of ambition. Java went back to the old message passing model, and shunned Lisp style macros in favour of typing in copious boiler plate by hand. No meta-object protocol, not even define-method-combination. Academic language research went into a type-system feature-creep death spiral. The Futamura projections were forgotten.
The clever young people now go into genetics not computing. Perhaps in 30 years time a new generation will revive computer science, but we are not advancing at all in AI.
The article talks a lot about risk, but I don't think there is any risk.
The GPL is clear. It may be that the terms of the license are unacceptable, and that a business cannot use GPL, but that
can be determined ahead of time by reading the license. While the terms of the license may seem onerous to a business, it is straight forward to comply with them. Since the requirements are straight forward, if a business attempts to comply with the terms of the license it will succeed in doing so. Thus using GPL software does not expose the business to litigation risk.
I guess some-one needs to tell Americans that the EU is already a cesspool of corruption. You have only to check the audited accounts to see this for yourselft. No, wait, there are no audited accounts, the EU's court of auditors always refuses to sign off the accounts because too much money is leaking out unaccounted for.
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
It has a fairly complex mechanism, so it will be expensive to build and maintain. Worse, it is slow. You get paid per delivery; slow means fewer deliveries between interest payments and repair bills.
I remember sitting my final examinations at University. Maths exams. The kind where you cannot understand the questions.
After one particularly distressing humilation I went to the cash machine to get some money to buy beer and drown my sorrows. Zilch, nil, zero: not my account total, my memory of my PIN. My mind was a blank. I guessed three times and the ATM ate my card.
Would the threat of imprisonment for contemp of court have helped me remember?
Grandparent post says "My personal experience is that people tend to suck up all the free content and when that is cut off, they move on to the next free content somewhere else." I was going to say yes, but...
Sure, I suck up the free stuff and when that is cut off I move on, except for my subscription to the Economist. In May 2006 I paid £ 224 for another three year subscription. That is £ 74 = $154 dollars a year with the best discount available.
I've gradually realised that the main stream media are in the business of selling eye-balls to advertisers. So they pimp up the stories to get you to read them and hope that you don't find out that it has all been hyped up. Worse, main stream media reports are written to stir the emotions more than to inform. So long as you remain in the headspace of Oh my God! and Isn't it awful! it is intoxicating entertainment with a modest basis in fact. Drop out of that headspace for a while and the pressure to have the emotions that the media thrust upon you starts to feel abusive.
I've ended up that I pay real money for sober reporting, but that is not on offer from mainstream media. I'm not going to pay for what they serve up. Cut me off and I'll find another free source. If all the free sources dry up, that will grant me a liberation from crap that I have not been able to achieve by will power alone, and I will be grateful.
Running in parallel with the issue of paying for content that you value, that is paying money for goods, there is the issue of content that one despises, where one is consuming bads because it has an addictive pull. You cannot just assume that if CNN runs out of money and gives up, that this is a bad outcome.
Don't go to a local college and merely buy the textbooks there, you will get through the first chapter then realize you wasted $100 on a book you have no idea how to read.
This struck a chord with me. I'm reading Pearl's book on Causality and I've got stuck on the graphoid axioms at the bottom of page 11. I found an hour to work on it on Saturday morning and covered three sheets of paper with notes. I'm not even a single line further forward. I constructed a simple example to help me become comfortable with the notation (X _||_ Y | Z) and the idea of X and Y being conditionally independent given Z and worked through my example.
I'm a mathematician. So I'm used to getting stuck and I know what to do. I stop and make up my own examples. I keep making up my own examples and playing with the ideas until they are clear to me. This is like stock piling ammunition close to my artillery. When I'm ready I will launch a new assault on the tricky passage.
Reading a mathematics book is more like playing a video game than reading a novel. It is interactive, except that the book itself is passive, you have to supply the interaction yourself. Some posters are suggesting hiring a tutor. I think that is right. Otherwise it will take you too much time to work out how to get to the next level and the game will be unplayable.
When I read "Good scientific journalism is completely outmoded.", my instinct was to dismiss it as trolling, but then I realised that this is basically my position.
When a science story in the mainstream media intrigues me I start wondering what the real story is. I use the the names and affiliation of the researchers to track down the University press release from which the journalist wrote his story. I go to the academics' own homepages to see if they have tried their hand at writing a popular account of their own work. Typically they haven't done so, but there are links to other researchers in the field, and one or two of those have links to a competent popularisation.
I go to the source, cutting out the journalist/middleman. You can call my approach disintermediation because it cuts out the intermediary. You might equally say that science journalism is outmoded, readers are actually after a link to a webpage written by a participant, not a journalist.
It is the economics of web publishing that is driving this. Once upon a time newspapers only covered half their costs from their cover price. Journalists tried to sell eye balls to advertisers by writing catch penny copy. If you were not happy with this: tough. What was your alternative? Write to the Unversity and ask for a copy of the press release? Too much fetching and carrying of dead trees. Now the transfer of textual information is too cheap to meter. Universities run websites out of general funds and anyone can read the press release, instantly and for free. We don't need science journalists to re-write the press release for us, because we are not limited to reading the newspaper.
The traditional challenge is to get the melting point of solder low enough. The worry about moving to lead-free solder is "how will we keep the melting point down." It is the silicon chip that is the delicate component that is damaged by heat.
Ofcourse the low heat tolerance of silicon chips, by limiting permitted temperatures during manufacturing, also limits required temperatures. No-one requires circuit boards to withstand more heat than the components can take. So some materials that sheltered behind the poor temperature resistance of silicon chips are out, but there is no fundamental problem.
I've already said that copyright is not a pension plan. If your music goes out of fashion the royalty cheques stop coming. Suggesting to musicians that they don't have to put part of todays royalties into a pension plan because copyright lasts a long time is a cruel deception. The musician faces not just the ignominy of falling from public regard when musical tastes change and his music is no longer played, his pretend pension gets cancelled.
Is this idea viable? My guess is no, you only get hurricanes because thousands of square miles of surrounding atmosphere are rotating, and have angular momentum to carry in towards the centre. On the other hand I know nothing about atmospheric physics: my objection might be silly
At my school we had examinations at the end of every year. When we came to sit public examinations aged 16 it was not too big a shock. The head master gets to track progress. Progress of students obviously, but also of teachers. Did the class come on as well as expected? as well as they did in other subjects.
It seems very natural to test the pupils of a student teacher, before and after, and see it she has been successful during her school placement. Conestoga Valley have defamed Snyder by saying that she is a bad teacher. Presumably they intend to defend any resulting legal action by claiming that their defamatory comments are true, but there is no mention of any tests results. I wonder if the courts will allow teachers to be called good or bad without regard to whether their pupils learn?
I have html disabled in my mail reader, so I see the source of phishing spam. Often the disguise is no deeper than putting a valid URL in the descriptive text. Non-technical readers will assume
that when the blue underlined text looks like a URL, the browser sends them to that URL. Non-technical readers simply will not realise that the browser actually follows the href and feel that they have made the appropriate check.
IANAL but it strikes me that no responsible adult takes a child's tales about his teachers at face value. So a teacher's reputation is immune to damage from the facial content of children's posting and children are therefore incapable of defamation.
For example, an adult reading a child's comments on their English teacher is likely to attend to the spelling and grammar of the child's post to the exclusion of the content, and judge the English teacher on his pupils facility with the English language. The child's comment is a raw fact from which the adult draws inferences but from which he does not receive instruction. "Excellent. Marking might seem harsh, but it's generally the standard for a VCAA assessment." The child views the teacher's job as helping him prepare for examinations. On this page we learn that children tend to make criticisms using little anecdotes.
In order to be defamatory Rate My Teachers would have to draw adult inferences from the children's comments itself. Another way in which it could be defamatory would be for adults to post fake comments contrived to induce other adults to draw adverse inferences about the teacher concerned. I don't see this second concern as realistic, but think about the logic of the point: you cannot hope to damage a teacher's reputation merely by posing as a child and posting childish derogatory comments. It encapsulates why I believe children are incapable of defamation.
---
(LET ((X 1712932117217129021) (Y 7738940005121702779) (Z 251802448144455281))
(FORMAT NIL "~16,32,'0r" (+ (* X Y) Z):BASE 16))
... I want to monitor what the police and government get up to in my name.
I'm told that we need to spend lots of money and pass new laws to combat child pornography. Do we?
Children are not sexy. "child pornography" is an oxymoron. The concept lacks credibility.
Suppose I visit a few sites to check. Perhaps I find that I'm being lied to and that busty 18 year olds in school uniforms are "children". Or perhaps I find that the phenomenon is real, and this persuades me that we
do indeed need to spend lots of money and pass new laws. It is rather troubling if one is not allowed to carry out basic checks.
My objection is to "managerism". Lots of people want to compile statistics, discover the objective truth about the interaction of the variables, and then optimise society. There is an idealism here, of striving for evidence based social policy, that I find commendable.
When I see what actually goes on under this banner, I am disappointed. Which interactions get discovered depends on political choices about which variables are endogenous and which are exogenous. If changing drugs policy is politically impossible, then drugs policy is modelled as an endogenous variable, and we get a strong link between guns and crimes. If drugs policy is an input to the optimisation process, we model it as an exogenous variable, and repealing prohibition becomes an alternative policy option, in competition with gun control as a means of reducing inner city violent deaths.
Up thread, posters were quoting "scientific research" on gun deaths without appreciating that they were actually quoting "political research" that ignores selected causal connections in order to marginalise the policy options that are mediated by them.
To rephrase that in English. If your research divides up national gun deaths into "normal" and "prohibition related" libertarians will pick up your research as proving that "we don't need to change the second amendment, just stopping the war on drugs will get America close enough to international norms for gun deaths.". Obviously one blocks this by aggregating the figures. However this is "the continuation of politics by other means" not science.
We've seen this all before. Think about the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
Americans decided that the cause was the prohibition of alcohol to adults, not the availability of fire-arms,
and in 1933 prohibition was repealed not the second amendment.
So understand that the statistics you read on "gun crime" in America are not objective facts but political choices. The compilers of the statistics decide that the situation with cannabis is not analogous to the situation with alcohol and chose to count crimes carried out in turf wars over the control of the illegal drugs trade not as "prohibition deaths" but as "gun deaths".
They're not being taught basic responsibilities. They're not being taught a work ethic. And they're not being taught to respect anyone or anything.
They are getting one positive lesson: get a strong union. Then you can insist that a pay rise to counter a skills shortage has to be extended to include you, even if you don't have the relevant skill:-)
Whoops, this started as a "Smart Aleck" comment, but it occurs to me that children do notice the hypocrisy of the adult world and the way it really works. Schools are supposed to provide education for children. Children become teenagers, adopt a fashionable cynicism as a pose, and toy with the idea that schools exist to provide jobs for teachers. What happens next?
I guess quite a few teenagers notice that adults do not value education as much as they say they do, and are willing to tolerate producer capture in education. Where do teenagers get their underlying attitude to education? Does the cynicism of the teachers' unions show up in the attitudes of teenagers, or does it go right over their heads?
Seriously you want the education system in a country to be as uniform as possible and be of high quality,...
You cannot optimise two criteria simultaneously, not without deciding on a tradeoff between them. For example, if Kentucky develops an innovative new maths program, and (a big if) if it actually helps, that will damage uniformity for decades until the innovations reach the most backward school districts. The complications don't stop there. If the new program is a success, are those teaching it permitted to make further improvements, or must they wait for other teachers to catch up? Are you for such innovation (pursuit of high quality), or are you against (serious pusuit of uniformity).
Realise also that chosing one particular goal does not uniformly promote all policies that tend towards the attainment of that goal. The choice of a particular goal tends to push society towards the policies that most easily achive the chosen goal, with forseeable and sometimes unfortunate implications for lesser objectives.
If we chose uniformity as our goal, we must expect to see uniformity being produced in the easiest way. It is hard to improve a poor education system and easy to degrade a good one, so the pursuit of uniformity is likely to result in leveling down.
Meanwhile, similar reasoning applies to chosing excellence as our goal. It is hard to see how to improve good schools, one imagines that they are good exactly because they already employ the best techniques. On the other hand one may hope to improve poor schools simply by copying what the better schools do. An explicit goal of excellence is unlikely in itself to cause an improvement in every school: there is a huge gap between chosing your goal and knowing how to achieve it. Nevertheless an explicit goal of excellence is likely to lead to a levelling up because that way of raising the average need not wait on the creation of new knowledge about how to teach.
Since we must chose between uniformity and excellence, let us chose excellence: the pursuit of excellence has a built-in bias to uniformity. And let us reject uniformity: the pursuit of uniformity has a built-in biase towards failure.
If I recall correctly Rodney King didn't testify in the first trial. That put the jury in a very awkward position. Usually some-one who has been beaten up testifies against their assailents. So the jurors knew that they were not getting the whole story. I wasn't surprised that they bottled out of declaring the case proven beyond reasonable doubt.
He lost weight and cleaned up his act for the second trial. He testified and got a different outcome. I found it unsurprising that the testimony of the victim affects the outcome of a trial.
If the temperature rise is due to the sun and not due to CO2 emissions, cutting back on CO2 emissions isn't going to help. We will need to spend our money on doing something else that is going to help. If we spend all our money on reducing CO2 and it doesn't work, we are screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to recommend that. Each chapter is a chatty essay, setting up a social context that shows the importance of mathematics in war, health care, or biology,...
However, each chapter also involves some real mathematics. For example the reader is invited to solve a simple differential equation to follow the story.
I use it every day just because it is so convenient.
More seriously, think about development. You can have the program running on one X server and the development environment on another, letting you debug without interactions via the servers.
In the 1970's we had Alan Kay pioneering object oriented programming with SmallTalk. The message passing model was an annoying limitation; the 80's saw the development of the CLOS with its generic-function model of OOP. The Art of the Meta-object Protocol pointed the way forward, a way not taken.
The 90's saw the death of ambition. Java went back to the old message passing model, and shunned Lisp style macros in favour of typing in copious boiler plate by hand. No meta-object protocol, not even define-method-combination. Academic language research went into a type-system feature-creep death spiral. The Futamura projections were forgotten.
The clever young people now go into genetics not computing. Perhaps in 30 years time a new generation will revive computer science, but we are not advancing at all in AI.
The article talks a lot about risk, but I don't think there is any risk.
The GPL is clear. It may be that the terms of the license are unacceptable, and that a business cannot use GPL, but that can be determined ahead of time by reading the license. While the terms of the license may seem onerous to a business, it is straight forward to comply with them. Since the requirements are straight forward, if a business attempts to comply with the terms of the license it will succeed in doing so. Thus using GPL software does not expose the business to litigation risk.
I guess some-one needs to tell Americans that the EU is already a cesspool of corruption. You have only to check the audited accounts to see this for yourselft. No, wait, there are no audited accounts, the EU's court of auditors always refuses to sign off the accounts because too much money is leaking out unaccounted for.
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
It has a fairly complex mechanism, so it will be expensive to build and maintain. Worse, it is slow. You get paid per delivery; slow means fewer deliveries between interest payments and repair bills.
I remember sitting my final examinations at University. Maths exams. The kind where you cannot understand the questions.
After one particularly distressing humilation I went to the cash machine to get some money to buy beer and drown my sorrows. Zilch, nil, zero: not my account total, my memory of my PIN. My mind was a blank. I guessed three times and the ATM ate my card.
Would the threat of imprisonment for contemp of court have helped me remember?
Grandparent post says "My personal experience is that people tend to suck up all the free content and when that is cut off, they move on to the next free content somewhere else." I was going to say yes, but...
Sure, I suck up the free stuff and when that is cut off I move on, except for my subscription to the Economist. In May 2006 I paid £ 224 for another three year subscription. That is £ 74 = $154 dollars a year with the best discount available.
I've gradually realised that the main stream media are in the business of selling eye-balls to advertisers. So they pimp up the stories to get you to read them and hope that you don't find out that it has all been hyped up. Worse, main stream media reports are written to stir the emotions more than to inform. So long as you remain in the headspace of Oh my God! and Isn't it awful! it is intoxicating entertainment with a modest basis in fact. Drop out of that headspace for a while and the pressure to have the emotions that the media thrust upon you starts to feel abusive.
I've ended up that I pay real money for sober reporting, but that is not on offer from mainstream media. I'm not going to pay for what they serve up. Cut me off and I'll find another free source. If all the free sources dry up, that will grant me a liberation from crap that I have not been able to achieve by will power alone, and I will be grateful.
Running in parallel with the issue of paying for content that you value, that is paying money for goods, there is the issue of content that one despises, where one is consuming bads because it has an addictive pull. You cannot just assume that if CNN runs out of money and gives up, that this is a bad outcome.
This struck a chord with me. I'm reading Pearl's book on Causality and I've got stuck on the graphoid axioms at the bottom of page 11. I found an hour to work on it on Saturday morning and covered three sheets of paper with notes. I'm not even a single line further forward. I constructed a simple example to help me become comfortable with the notation (X _||_ Y | Z) and the idea of X and Y being conditionally independent given Z and worked through my example.
I'm a mathematician. So I'm used to getting stuck and I know what to do. I stop and make up my own examples. I keep making up my own examples and playing with the ideas until they are clear to me. This is like stock piling ammunition close to my artillery. When I'm ready I will launch a new assault on the tricky passage.
Reading a mathematics book is more like playing a video game than reading a novel. It is interactive, except that the book itself is passive, you have to supply the interaction yourself. Some posters are suggesting hiring a tutor. I think that is right. Otherwise it will take you too much time to work out how to get to the next level and the game will be unplayable.
When I read "Good scientific journalism is completely outmoded.", my instinct was to dismiss it as trolling, but then I realised that this is basically my position.
When a science story in the mainstream media intrigues me I start wondering what the real story is. I use the the names and affiliation of the researchers to track down the University press release from which the journalist wrote his story. I go to the academics' own homepages to see if they have tried their hand at writing a popular account of their own work. Typically they haven't done so, but there are links to other researchers in the field, and one or two of those have links to a competent popularisation.
I go to the source, cutting out the journalist/middleman. You can call my approach disintermediation because it cuts out the intermediary. You might equally say that science journalism is outmoded, readers are actually after a link to a webpage written by a participant, not a journalist.
It is the economics of web publishing that is driving this. Once upon a time newspapers only covered half their costs from their cover price. Journalists tried to sell eye balls to advertisers by writing catch penny copy. If you were not happy with this: tough. What was your alternative? Write to the Unversity and ask for a copy of the press release? Too much fetching and carrying of dead trees. Now the transfer of textual information is too cheap to meter. Universities run websites out of general funds and anyone can read the press release, instantly and for free. We don't need science journalists to re-write the press release for us, because we are not limited to reading the newspaper.
The traditional challenge is to get the melting point of solder low enough. The worry about moving to lead-free solder is "how will we keep the melting point down." It is the silicon chip that is the delicate component
that is damaged by heat.
Ofcourse the low heat tolerance of silicon chips, by limiting permitted temperatures during manufacturing, also limits required temperatures. No-one requires circuit boards to withstand more heat than the components can take. So some materials that sheltered behind the poor temperature resistance of silicon chips are out, but there is no fundamental problem.
I've already said that copyright is not a pension plan. If your music goes out of fashion the royalty cheques stop coming. Suggesting to musicians that they don't have to put part of todays royalties into a pension plan because copyright lasts a long time is a cruel deception. The musician faces not just the ignominy of falling from public regard when musical tastes change and his music is no longer played, his pretend pension gets cancelled.
Is this idea viable? My guess is no, you only get hurricanes because thousands of square miles of surrounding atmosphere are rotating, and have angular momentum to carry in towards the centre. On the other hand I know nothing about atmospheric physics: my objection might be silly
At my school we had examinations at the end of every year. When we came to sit public examinations aged 16 it was not too big a shock. The head master gets to track progress. Progress of students obviously, but also of teachers. Did the class come on as well as expected? as well as they did in other subjects.
It seems very natural to test the pupils of a student teacher, before and after, and see it she has been successful during her school placement. Conestoga Valley have defamed Snyder by saying that she is a bad teacher. Presumably they intend to defend any resulting legal action by claiming that their defamatory comments are true, but there is no mention of any tests results. I wonder if the courts will allow teachers to be called good or bad without regard to whether their pupils learn?
I have html disabled in my mail reader, so I see the source of phishing spam. Often the disguise is no deeper than putting a valid URL in the descriptive text. Non-technical readers will assume that when the blue underlined text looks like a URL, the browser sends them to that URL. Non-technical readers simply will not realise that the browser actually follows the href and feel that they have made the appropriate check.
IANAL but it strikes me that no responsible adult takes a child's tales about his teachers at face value. So a teacher's reputation is immune to damage from the facial content of children's posting and children are therefore incapable of defamation.
For example, an adult reading a child's comments on their English teacher is likely to attend to the spelling and grammar of the child's post to the exclusion of the content, and judge the English teacher on his pupils facility with the English language. The child's comment is a raw fact from which the adult draws inferences but from which he does not receive instruction. "Excellent. Marking might seem harsh, but it's generally the standard for a VCAA assessment." The child views the teacher's job as helping him prepare for examinations. On this page we learn that children tend to make criticisms using little anecdotes.
In order to be defamatory Rate My Teachers would have to draw adult inferences from the children's comments itself. Another way in which it could be defamatory would be for adults to post fake comments contrived to induce other adults to draw adverse inferences about the teacher concerned. I don't see this second concern as realistic, but think about the logic of the point: you cannot hope to damage a teacher's reputation merely by posing as a child and posting childish derogatory comments. It encapsulates why I believe children are incapable of defamation.
--- :BASE 16))
(LET ((X 1712932117217129021) (Y 7738940005121702779) (Z 251802448144455281))
(FORMAT NIL "~16,32,'0r" (+ (* X Y) Z)
Scotlands high rate of cancer is usually attributed to bad diet, smoking, etc. Maybe we are just too far north?
... I want to monitor what the police and government get up to in my name.
I'm told that we need to spend lots of money and pass new laws to combat child pornography. Do we? Children are not sexy. "child pornography" is an oxymoron. The concept lacks credibility.
Suppose I visit a few sites to check. Perhaps I find that I'm being lied to and that busty 18 year olds in school uniforms are "children". Or perhaps I find that the phenomenon is real, and this persuades me that we do indeed need to spend lots of money and pass new laws. It is rather troubling if one is not allowed to carry out basic checks.
My objection is to "managerism". Lots of people want to compile statistics, discover the objective truth about the interaction of the variables, and then optimise society. There is an idealism here, of striving for evidence based social policy, that I find commendable.
When I see what actually goes on under this banner, I am disappointed. Which interactions get discovered depends on political choices about which variables are endogenous and which are exogenous. If changing drugs policy is politically impossible, then drugs policy is modelled as an endogenous variable, and we get a strong link between guns and crimes. If drugs policy is an input to the optimisation process, we model it as an exogenous variable, and repealing prohibition becomes an alternative policy option, in competition with gun control as a means of reducing inner city violent deaths.
Up thread, posters were quoting "scientific research" on gun deaths without appreciating that they were actually quoting "political research" that ignores selected causal connections in order to marginalise the policy options that are mediated by them.
To rephrase that in English. If your research divides up national gun deaths into "normal" and "prohibition related" libertarians will pick up your research as proving that "we don't need to change the second amendment, just stopping the war on drugs will get America close enough to international norms for gun deaths.". Obviously one blocks this by aggregating the figures. However this is "the continuation of politics by other means" not science.
We've seen this all before. Think about the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. Americans decided that the cause was the prohibition of alcohol to adults, not the availability of fire-arms, and in 1933 prohibition was repealed not the second amendment.
So understand that the statistics you read on "gun crime" in America are not objective facts but political choices. The compilers of the statistics decide that the situation with cannabis is not analogous to the situation with alcohol and chose to count crimes carried out in turf wars over the control of the illegal drugs trade not as "prohibition deaths" but as "gun deaths".
They are getting one positive lesson: get a strong union. Then you can insist that a pay rise to counter a skills shortage has to be extended to include you, even if you don't have the relevant skill :-)
Whoops, this started as a "Smart Aleck" comment, but it occurs to me that children do notice the hypocrisy of the adult world and the way it really works. Schools are supposed to provide education for children. Children become teenagers, adopt a fashionable cynicism as a pose, and toy with the idea that schools exist to provide jobs for teachers. What happens next?
I guess quite a few teenagers notice that adults do not value education as much as they say they do, and are willing to tolerate producer capture in education. Where do teenagers get their underlying attitude to education? Does the cynicism of the teachers' unions show up in the attitudes of teenagers, or does it go right over their heads?
You cannot optimise two criteria simultaneously, not without deciding on a tradeoff between them. For example, if Kentucky develops an innovative new maths program, and (a big if) if it actually helps, that will damage uniformity for decades until the innovations reach the most backward school districts. The complications don't stop there. If the new program is a success, are those teaching it permitted to make further improvements, or must they wait for other teachers to catch up? Are you for such innovation (pursuit of high quality), or are you against (serious pusuit of uniformity).
Realise also that chosing one particular goal does not uniformly promote all policies that tend towards the attainment of that goal. The choice of a particular goal tends to push society towards the policies that most easily achive the chosen goal, with forseeable and sometimes unfortunate implications for lesser objectives.
If we chose uniformity as our goal, we must expect to see uniformity being produced in the easiest way. It is hard to improve a poor education system and easy to degrade a good one, so the pursuit of uniformity is likely to result in leveling down.
Meanwhile, similar reasoning applies to chosing excellence as our goal. It is hard to see how to improve good schools, one imagines that they are good exactly because they already employ the best techniques. On the other hand one may hope to improve poor schools simply by copying what the better schools do. An explicit goal of excellence is unlikely in itself to cause an improvement in every school: there is a huge gap between chosing your goal and knowing how to achieve it. Nevertheless an explicit goal of excellence is likely to lead to a levelling up because that way of raising the average need not wait on the creation of new knowledge about how to teach.
Since we must chose between uniformity and excellence, let us chose excellence: the pursuit of excellence has a built-in bias to uniformity. And let us reject uniformity: the pursuit of uniformity has a built-in biase towards failure.
If I recall correctly Rodney King didn't testify in the first trial. That put the jury in a very awkward position. Usually some-one who has been beaten up testifies against their assailents. So the jurors knew that they were not getting the whole story. I wasn't surprised that they bottled out of declaring the case proven beyond reasonable doubt.
He lost weight and cleaned up his act for the second trial. He testified and got a different outcome. I found it unsurprising that the testimony of the victim affects the outcome of a trial.
If the temperature rise is due to the sun and not due to CO2 emissions, cutting back on CO2 emissions isn't going to help. We will need to spend our money on doing something else that is going to help. If we spend all our money on reducing CO2 and it doesn't work, we are screwed.