Whether your business is formed as an LLC or you are a sole proprietor shouldn't make a difference as to the issuance of a 1099 vs W2. Obviously, an LLC would receive a 1099, but unless your only client is the firm you are contracting with, then so should a bona-fide sole proprietor.
Precisely. It's a sham of a legal system the way it works but I've seen people get tons of loans for their "business" to pay themselves their salary/pay their bills/etc and then file bankruptcy under the business to disavow all of these loans without it ever harming their personal credit one bit. Limited liability, read: No liability. If you're making money in a position where you can legitimately claim a business, do it.
If other creditors of the corporation discover the fraud that was perpetrated, and they will, it won't bode well for the person who attempts to do what you describe.
The issue at hand is not about minors having sex, but adults having sex with minors. Are you saying that it should be okay, as long as the adult does it in a fenced in area away from public view?
What is asked to be banned is the explicit description of adults have sex with under-aged children, not Romeo and Juliet. It is not banning writing that it happened, whether actual or fictional. It is not banning the subject matter. It is attempting to ban the explicit description and details about the act itself. Most societies already ban the possession of pictures and videos of sex crimes against children, how is that different than the explicit written account of those acts? (And yes, a picture of child rape is a picture of an actual crime, but most places ban the simulation of it too -- ie using an older actor portraying a younger child).
I am not advocating the position of the MP. I am just raising the question of why is it acceptable to ban one form of expression but not another?
Pumped up Kicks is not the same thing as explicit descriptions of child rape (which is what child sexual abuse is). I do agree that most child porn is the filming of a criminal act, but even if the people involved are over the legal age and made to portray a younger person, it is still illegal.
Again, the question should be whether or not a society should be allowed to regulate what is morally offensive or not and if so, to what level. I am not advocating censorship, but just raising the question of where one draws the line. In the US, for instance, many locales outlaw strip clubs. If it is okay to censor live performances, why not written versions? If it is not okay for an adult to have sex with a young child, why is it okay to have an explicit written account of an adult having sex with a young child?
We have numerous examples of people acting out what they have seen or heard. Do the vast majority of people witnessing these things act out, no of course not. But what is the proper balance between the right of people to read/write child rape accounts versus the risk to protecting children from those who may act out?
Or phrased a little more generically, how does society balance the freedoms of people against the risk those freedoms may cause to others?
And I also thought about, what if a child wrote about what happened to them in a diary or something. Could you count want the Nazi's did to Anne Frank as child abuse?
Exactly. Outlawing even references to pedophile activities is a clear first step of implementing a true thought police. Also, it will of course make both the prevention and post-abuse treatment close to impossible, thus having the opposite effect of making it significantly easier for pedophiles to do their evil stuff.
Impressive - This is stupidity squared!
Not that I am in favor of what the MP is proposing, but your argument seems to imply that society has no right to determine what is decent or not. Put differently, if instead of wanting to outlaw written descriptions of child sexual abuse, the MP wanted to outlaw videos and pictures portraying it (which is already outlawed), would your argument be different?
Also, the world trade center collapsed because it was built poorly, not from the tons of paper cranked out in a day when tablets didn't exist. Check out star trek. Not a lot of paper kicking around in the future;)
Actually, the post 911 engineering studies show that the WTC should have withstood the crashes, just as it initially did. However, the prolonged and excessive heat from the burning paper reduced the structural integrety of the steel beams and they collapsed. Once the collaps started, the building was not able to sustain the force of the pancaking and it came down. But the critical element in the collaps, short of the plane crashes, was the extra heat from the burning paper. The WTC is well understood engineering study now.
As for Star Trek, I prefer to live in the present reality instead of fiction. But, when they get that transporter thing working, then maybe I'll reconsider (or even transparent alluminum).
All the apps in the world won't matter if Microsoft Office and Adobe Pagemaker aren't included in the list. While there are good open source alternatives available, nobody is going to risk their company's future without access to what is considered industry standard applications.
Want Linux to be more acceptable on the desktop, first I would work on Libre/Open Office. User's don't care whose fault it is that documents don't convert perfectly, they want the documents to convert perfectly (nor does it matter that there are imperfections between various versions of MS Office). While it is nice that Ubuntu provided some development time to get a patch into LibreOffice that will use the unified Unity menu, that time would have been better spent making powerpoint transitions function the same way as under Windows.
Pagemaker is another must have for businesses. Yes Gimp does wonderful things as does Inkscape, but neither help Pagemaker users transition to Linux. How many Windows only companies allow Macs in for the marketing department? They do it because they few the Mac as the specific tool needed. Likewise, even if there are alternatives, Pagemaker is the tool needed and if it isn't supported under Linux, it is a show stopper.
Finally, there needs to be good general ledger accounting software. Businesses aren't going to install linux everywhere but in the finance office and the finance office isn't going to offer a go-ahead opinion if their stuff won't work.
If all of this sounds business-centric, well, it is. As much as home users may adopt or want to use linux, it is business users that will drive the desktop. It is also business users that will be able to pay support fees, etc. that would keep open source companies in business. That is why companies like Redhat focus on the data center and not the desktop. The data center already has the model of paying for support and therefore Redhat can build a sustainable business model.
It isn't that desktop linux is dying. It hasn't been born yet. For linux to be successful on the desktop, the first thing to realize is that it has nothing to do with window manager or desktop environment. It has everything to do with applications. If you don't have the applications that people need to do their work, it won't be adopted.
It's not just safety that is taking a back seat, but evidently fuel efficiency must not be too important, either. People may argue at what speed point fuel efficiency drops off, but it is definitely well below 85mph. Then also, just as money must not be an issue for Texans, neither is it for the state. Road repairs are significantly higher the higher the speed limit.
So, let's see, pay to use the road, pay higher insurance because higher speeds lead to more accidents, pay more at the pump because you are burning more gas and pay more in taxes because the pavement wears out sooner. Yeah, that sounds like a really good decision. Then again, Texas is a red state.
Almost Everyone already goes that fast if not faster anyway. And the whole tollroad is 90 miles. This is just a southward expansion of the existing road.
So, then it saves 8 minutes. Plus if the speed limit is 75 and people drive 85, then how fast will they drive when the limit is 85?
All very interesting. However, the studies I am referencing are all being conducted in the neuro-sciences departments at universities and medical facilities, not the education departments. Their purpose is to study learning in general, not the best way to teach something. From that research, though, they discovered that the human brain operates very differently depending on how information is presented to it and the ability to recall that information is related to the method of delivery.
From this, other studies are being conducted with models of education. However, I doubt the experiment in California is a true research project and is statistically valid. For one, you need special permissions and conditions to experiment on human beings and it doesn't sound like what you describe would qualify. More likely, it is a poorly constructed pilot project with no true statistical value and therefore invalid.
As for reading in business, even back in 2002, there is more reading than books. They are now saying that the World Trade Center collapsed from the extra heat generated from all of the burning paper in the offices. That paper included reports and forms and letters and all sorts of business related information, but was probably not in the form of books. The ability to read, analyze and retain information is a vital skill in business, particularly the higher up the ranks one moves. Most of that information, especially externally generated, is still in paper format. U.S. businesses generate more paper reports today than ever before. It is doubtful that will change in the near future, anyway, but maybe by the time your kids are grown it will have.
While it might be hard to fake whether different parts of the brain light up, the methodology to determine if the learning process was deficient or improved I'm guessing is pretty much up for grabs.
When you can influence peoples answers to questions by changing the font or how you word the question...
My kid also doesn't watch a lot of television, preferring interactive stuff like video gaming and general computer usage. Half his time is spent looking up cheats, easter eggs, and then running to the xbox to try them out.
And it still remains a fact that my kid has read practically no books, but works at a 6th grade level instead of a 1st grade level. So apparently one can learn and will learn well without paper books or paper media. Perhaps we'll find out in 20 years that learning while utilizing the different portions of the brain works BETTER if you stick with it for years (retraining the brain) rather than a one-off study done in a couple of weeks?
But your seven year old is not a normal seven year old since he/she is reading at a 6th grade level (of course, that would mean that he/she is reading something). Gifted children do learn differently, so it may not be a detriment to their learning ability. Ask any teacher and they will tell you the gifted students are as much of a challenge, if not more, than the below average students. They have very different needs. If your kid is in second grade, reading and doing work at a 6th grade level, I am sure that is a challenge for both the teacher and the student.
Given that, I would not use the anecdotal evidence from your experience to extrapolate across a general population as your child's abilities are not part of that general population. That said, it may very well be that given 20 years from now, it is shown that utilizing the different portions of the brain do work better for learning. On the other hand, since these are real people we are talking about, if it is shown not to be the case, we have then educated (or not) a whole generation with a flawed system.
By the way, the studies aren't just a couple of weeks. The latest one I have heard of was conducted on children from kindergarten through sixth grade (seven years), specifically looking at schools that have implemented electronic learning and using standard education models as the base comparison (in other words, multiple children in multiple schools that use one or the other methods). Granted, the selection process was much more complicated than that, but the results are consistent that at each level, students who were electronically educated had lower retention levels than the traditional students.
As a side study, it has also been shown that electronically educated students fare much worse, when having to deal with traditional methods found in the workplace or higher education. That last part was from a British study.
It's kind of a generational thing, too... unless you're a geek, like many of us here. I think the current crop of educators are largely not "computer people", so they reject the idea of using an electronic book. There just has to be something wrong with it.
I think thats half of it. I think that there are two other facets at work...a romantic love of a paper book by people who end up in the education business, and that funny thing about books being a long term store of written material. Its a lot easier to remote wipe a bunch of tablets than burn a library of books, and that last piece may have some aspect of protection built in...if you recall some e-books being 'recalled' by amazon a while back.
Actually, a more likely explanation is millions of years of evolution instead of anything else. The research was about how the brain processes and stores information and from that it led to which method is better for learning. The education field or business had nothing to do with it. It was all started in the medical research field.
As I posted above, FMRI shows there is a vast difference on how the brain processes information gleened from an electronic device versus hard sources (like books). That does not mean it doesn't have it's place and might not even be more enjoyable, but it isn't as complete.
As for the study being rigged, well, actually it has been repeated multiple times at most major universities in the US and abroad. It also relies heavily on using functional mri to see how the brain is processing the information. The issue was first noticed in neuro-science fields and had nothing to do with education methods. The early studies had nothing to do with which method was better, but were about determining how the brain learns and stores information. Then one of the universities had widely opposing results and upon further investigation, they happened to use laptops to present the information, whereas the others used regular paper methods. These results have been repeated numerous times which led the researches to look into why there was a difference and what was the impact of the difference. It was from that research came the correlation with learning and retention.
So, no, the research was rigged. Like most things in neuro science, it came out of exploring the anomalies which then led to better understanding. If anything, there has been much funding from certain large tech companies that have a lot to lose if the they don't sell certain devices. One major west coast university was told they would lose funding from this company in other areas if they continued the research project (which wasn't even funded by the company). So, if anything a lot of money is being thrown about to not publicize it.
SInce the research uses functional mri, it is kind of hard to fake that. FMRI shows that reading from a tablet or even a laptop lights up the same parts of the brain when watching TV, which is different than the areas lit from reading a paper source. Physiologically, the brain is not differentiating between using an electronic device for reading than it is for watching TV. That does not mean one cannot learn, but the learning pathways are different and the neurological pathways to store and retrieve that information is vastly different.
That does not mean that it isn't useful or ins't enjoyable, just that the brain is not as efficient. So, for your gifted child, it could very well be an enhancement to his/her learning. For most kids, whose brain is not wired as your child's brain is, perform worse.
As for your child and your friend's children not being interested in reading, that has been a national trend since the 1960s and correlates with rise of televisions in the home.
"But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online..."
Yeah, just like you can get your "enhanced" DRM-crippled DVDs or e-books with "bonus" content. Throw in a little extra crap to take peoples' attention away from the fact that they're paying more for a crippled version of the same old product.
Back in the day, when I was in school, there were no textbook enhancements. Textbooks were there to facilitate what professors were teaching. The professor was the bonus material, so to speak. Nowadays, though, most professors don't teach from the knowledge they have accumulated. Instead, they teach the book. Of course, that's assuming you actually get a professor to teach a class instead of a TA.
Why every kid in america isnt carrying some inexpensive tabet full of all of their textbooks, school work and tests is a mystery to me. If we wanted to stimulate the economy, when HP was crapping out of the tablet business why didn't someone ask them to donate their touchpads (and make more!) along with developing educational systems and curriculum that would be usable tools nationwide, and make a permanent investment in our future, along with dropping education costs through the floor? Give HP a nice fat tax cut for their troubles.
Could be because research shows that different parts of the brain are activated when reading from an electronic device and reading from paper. Research also shows that retention is less when reading from an electronic device. Research shows that reading actual books, making notes in them, taking written notes in class and listening to lectures results in the most transfer of knowledge and the ability to recall it. Why? Because those processes engage more than one part of the brain, something tablets, don't. Electronic Devices are excellent sources for reference materials, but they don't actually facilitate learning.
Tablets do make sense in that it is easier to carry a single tablet instead of a stack of text books, but then, at least when I was in college, the text books usually stayed in the dorm and were used for out of class assignments. We carried notebooks (the paper kind) with us to class.
Most schools that have gone to electronic devices such as tablets have done so, not because it increases learning, but because it saves them money.
We keep hearing about how expensive it is to publish a book for print and yet Lulu.com does a 100 page book for $6 ($4 to the printer, $2 for their service). The author in that example gets $8 and the book sells for $14. Using those same ratios, a 300 page text book should cost the printer $12 to print and the publisher would get $6, the author would get $24 and the book would sell for $42.
Then why do textbooks cost five times that amount? You would think a textbook publisher is going to have greater economies of scale than somebody self-publishing, so the costs should be even less.
Maybe the Justice Department should quit looking at kids downloading songs and focus on price fixing and collusion among text book publishers and universities. Sure seems fishy.
I always tell my students to NEVER buy from the bookstore. Always go to Amazon or an online textbook reseller. You will save a TON of money. It's my experience that you can generally save 50% or better by shopping anywhere else. That $120 code you bought at the bookstore goes for about $80 at Amazon.
Whether $120 or $80 isn't the point. Why is there an access code at all?
The real irony is that you can make Kubuntu (or any KDE distro) look and act pretty darn close to Unity, sans lenses (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHqRRP9fVHQ). Maybe Ubuntu didn't want to keep Kubuntu around to remind them that you really could have different interfaces tailored to different platforms but one core underlying system.
I really don't understand why the Kubuntu people even bother. If they're not getting any more help from Canonical, why even bother keeping the distro going at all? They should just throw in the towel, and join the Linux Mint KDE team. Linux Mint is little more than Ubuntu with some modifications, and LM even has their own KDE version which is featured prominently, unlike Kubuntu which has always been treated like a red-haired stepchild. They should join forces, move to the Linux Mint camp, and make all their contributions there. I'm sure the LM team would be happy to have the extra help. Why bother maintaining two separate distros which are almost identical?
Using that reasoning, then why did Linux Mint even release a KDE version instead of just working with Kubuntu? Mint KDE is not just Kubuntu fixed up. They have different goals. The real questions are how and why is Blue Systems supporting Mint KDE, Kubuntu and Netrunner? I'm glad they are, but you would think that putting all of those resources into one KDE distro sponsorship would be more efficient.
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Whether your business is formed as an LLC or you are a sole proprietor shouldn't make a difference as to the issuance of a 1099 vs W2. Obviously, an LLC would receive a 1099, but unless your only client is the firm you are contracting with, then so should a bona-fide sole proprietor.
Precisely. It's a sham of a legal system the way it works but I've seen people get tons of loans for their "business" to pay themselves their salary/pay their bills/etc and then file bankruptcy under the business to disavow all of these loans without it ever harming their personal credit one bit. Limited liability, read: No liability. If you're making money in a position where you can legitimately claim a business, do it.
If other creditors of the corporation discover the fraud that was perpetrated, and they will, it won't bode well for the person who attempts to do what you describe.
The issue at hand is not about minors having sex, but adults having sex with minors. Are you saying that it should be okay, as long as the adult does it in a fenced in area away from public view?
What is asked to be banned is the explicit description of adults have sex with under-aged children, not Romeo and Juliet. It is not banning writing that it happened, whether actual or fictional. It is not banning the subject matter. It is attempting to ban the explicit description and details about the act itself. Most societies already ban the possession of pictures and videos of sex crimes against children, how is that different than the explicit written account of those acts? (And yes, a picture of child rape is a picture of an actual crime, but most places ban the simulation of it too -- ie using an older actor portraying a younger child).
I am not advocating the position of the MP. I am just raising the question of why is it acceptable to ban one form of expression but not another?
Pumped up Kicks is not the same thing as explicit descriptions of child rape (which is what child sexual abuse is). I do agree that most child porn is the filming of a criminal act, but even if the people involved are over the legal age and made to portray a younger person, it is still illegal.
Again, the question should be whether or not a society should be allowed to regulate what is morally offensive or not and if so, to what level. I am not advocating censorship, but just raising the question of where one draws the line. In the US, for instance, many locales outlaw strip clubs. If it is okay to censor live performances, why not written versions? If it is not okay for an adult to have sex with a young child, why is it okay to have an explicit written account of an adult having sex with a young child?
We have numerous examples of people acting out what they have seen or heard. Do the vast majority of people witnessing these things act out, no of course not. But what is the proper balance between the right of people to read/write child rape accounts versus the risk to protecting children from those who may act out?
Or phrased a little more generically, how does society balance the freedoms of people against the risk those freedoms may cause to others?
And I also thought about, what if a child wrote about what happened to them in a diary or something. Could you count want the Nazi's did to Anne Frank as child abuse?
Yes
Only "absolutely vile" material would be targeted, he said
Wouldn't this be covered by existing obscenity laws that most countries already have?
Also; is it close to campaign time already in the UK?
Most obscenity laws deal with possession of pictures or videos, not written works.
The best thing about democracy is it should protect the minority from the will of the majority.
Democracy does no such thing. However, a representative demacracy does. Plain old democracy is nothing more than the will of the majority.
Whereas a representative democracy is the will of the biggest donors (at least in the US).
Exactly. Outlawing even references to pedophile activities is a clear first step of implementing a true thought police. Also, it will of course make both the prevention and post-abuse treatment close to impossible, thus having the opposite effect of making it significantly easier for pedophiles to do their evil stuff.
Impressive - This is stupidity squared!
Not that I am in favor of what the MP is proposing, but your argument seems to imply that society has no right to determine what is decent or not. Put differently, if instead of wanting to outlaw written descriptions of child sexual abuse, the MP wanted to outlaw videos and pictures portraying it (which is already outlawed), would your argument be different?
Also, the world trade center collapsed because it was built poorly, not from the tons of paper cranked out in a day when tablets didn't exist. Check out star trek. Not a lot of paper kicking around in the future ;)
Actually, the post 911 engineering studies show that the WTC should have withstood the crashes, just as it initially did. However, the prolonged and excessive heat from the burning paper reduced the structural integrety of the steel beams and they collapsed. Once the collaps started, the building was not able to sustain the force of the pancaking and it came down. But the critical element in the collaps, short of the plane crashes, was the extra heat from the burning paper. The WTC is well understood engineering study now.
As for Star Trek, I prefer to live in the present reality instead of fiction. But, when they get that transporter thing working, then maybe I'll reconsider (or even transparent alluminum).
They'll drive as fast as their cars will go! That'll save more than 8 minutes.
Could be true, but then the costs will rise significantly and the safety will plummet even further.
Maybe I live in TX.
All the apps in the world won't matter if Microsoft Office and Adobe Pagemaker aren't included in the list. While there are good open source alternatives available, nobody is going to risk their company's future without access to what is considered industry standard applications.
Want Linux to be more acceptable on the desktop, first I would work on Libre/Open Office. User's don't care whose fault it is that documents don't convert perfectly, they want the documents to convert perfectly (nor does it matter that there are imperfections between various versions of MS Office). While it is nice that Ubuntu provided some development time to get a patch into LibreOffice that will use the unified Unity menu, that time would have been better spent making powerpoint transitions function the same way as under Windows.
Pagemaker is another must have for businesses. Yes Gimp does wonderful things as does Inkscape, but neither help Pagemaker users transition to Linux. How many Windows only companies allow Macs in for the marketing department? They do it because they few the Mac as the specific tool needed. Likewise, even if there are alternatives, Pagemaker is the tool needed and if it isn't supported under Linux, it is a show stopper.
Finally, there needs to be good general ledger accounting software. Businesses aren't going to install linux everywhere but in the finance office and the finance office isn't going to offer a go-ahead opinion if their stuff won't work.
If all of this sounds business-centric, well, it is. As much as home users may adopt or want to use linux, it is business users that will drive the desktop. It is also business users that will be able to pay support fees, etc. that would keep open source companies in business. That is why companies like Redhat focus on the data center and not the desktop. The data center already has the model of paying for support and therefore Redhat can build a sustainable business model.
It isn't that desktop linux is dying. It hasn't been born yet. For linux to be successful on the desktop, the first thing to realize is that it has nothing to do with window manager or desktop environment. It has everything to do with applications. If you don't have the applications that people need to do their work, it won't be adopted.
It's not just safety that is taking a back seat, but evidently fuel efficiency must not be too important, either. People may argue at what speed point fuel efficiency drops off, but it is definitely well below 85mph. Then also, just as money must not be an issue for Texans, neither is it for the state. Road repairs are significantly higher the higher the speed limit.
So, let's see, pay to use the road, pay higher insurance because higher speeds lead to more accidents, pay more at the pump because you are burning more gas and pay more in taxes because the pavement wears out sooner. Yeah, that sounds like a really good decision. Then again, Texas is a red state.
Almost Everyone already goes that fast if not faster anyway. And the whole tollroad is 90 miles. This is just a southward expansion of the existing road.
So, then it saves 8 minutes. Plus if the speed limit is 75 and people drive 85, then how fast will they drive when the limit is 85?
All very interesting. However, the studies I am referencing are all being conducted in the neuro-sciences departments at universities and medical facilities, not the education departments. Their purpose is to study learning in general, not the best way to teach something. From that research, though, they discovered that the human brain operates very differently depending on how information is presented to it and the ability to recall that information is related to the method of delivery.
From this, other studies are being conducted with models of education. However, I doubt the experiment in California is a true research project and is statistically valid. For one, you need special permissions and conditions to experiment on human beings and it doesn't sound like what you describe would qualify. More likely, it is a poorly constructed pilot project with no true statistical value and therefore invalid.
As for reading in business, even back in 2002, there is more reading than books. They are now saying that the World Trade Center collapsed from the extra heat generated from all of the burning paper in the offices. That paper included reports and forms and letters and all sorts of business related information, but was probably not in the form of books. The ability to read, analyze and retain information is a vital skill in business, particularly the higher up the ranks one moves. Most of that information, especially externally generated, is still in paper format. U.S. businesses generate more paper reports today than ever before. It is doubtful that will change in the near future, anyway, but maybe by the time your kids are grown it will have.
While it might be hard to fake whether different parts of the brain light up, the methodology to determine if the learning process was deficient or improved I'm guessing is pretty much up for grabs.
When you can influence peoples answers to questions by changing the font or how you word the question...
My kid also doesn't watch a lot of television, preferring interactive stuff like video gaming and general computer usage. Half his time is spent looking up cheats, easter eggs, and then running to the xbox to try them out.
And it still remains a fact that my kid has read practically no books, but works at a 6th grade level instead of a 1st grade level. So apparently one can learn and will learn well without paper books or paper media. Perhaps we'll find out in 20 years that learning while utilizing the different portions of the brain works BETTER if you stick with it for years (retraining the brain) rather than a one-off study done in a couple of weeks?
But your seven year old is not a normal seven year old since he/she is reading at a 6th grade level (of course, that would mean that he/she is reading something). Gifted children do learn differently, so it may not be a detriment to their learning ability. Ask any teacher and they will tell you the gifted students are as much of a challenge, if not more, than the below average students. They have very different needs. If your kid is in second grade, reading and doing work at a 6th grade level, I am sure that is a challenge for both the teacher and the student.
Given that, I would not use the anecdotal evidence from your experience to extrapolate across a general population as your child's abilities are not part of that general population. That said, it may very well be that given 20 years from now, it is shown that utilizing the different portions of the brain do work better for learning. On the other hand, since these are real people we are talking about, if it is shown not to be the case, we have then educated (or not) a whole generation with a flawed system.
By the way, the studies aren't just a couple of weeks. The latest one I have heard of was conducted on children from kindergarten through sixth grade (seven years), specifically looking at schools that have implemented electronic learning and using standard education models as the base comparison (in other words, multiple children in multiple schools that use one or the other methods). Granted, the selection process was much more complicated than that, but the results are consistent that at each level, students who were electronically educated had lower retention levels than the traditional students.
As a side study, it has also been shown that electronically educated students fare much worse, when having to deal with traditional methods found in the workplace or higher education. That last part was from a British study.
It's kind of a generational thing, too... unless you're a geek, like many of us here. I think the current crop of educators are largely not "computer people", so they reject the idea of using an electronic book. There just has to be something wrong with it.
I think thats half of it. I think that there are two other facets at work...a romantic love of a paper book by people who end up in the education business, and that funny thing about books being a long term store of written material. Its a lot easier to remote wipe a bunch of tablets than burn a library of books, and that last piece may have some aspect of protection built in...if you recall some e-books being 'recalled' by amazon a while back.
Actually, a more likely explanation is millions of years of evolution instead of anything else. The research was about how the brain processes and stores information and from that it led to which method is better for learning. The education field or business had nothing to do with it. It was all started in the medical research field.
As I posted above, FMRI shows there is a vast difference on how the brain processes information gleened from an electronic device versus hard sources (like books). That does not mean it doesn't have it's place and might not even be more enjoyable, but it isn't as complete.
As for the study being rigged, well, actually it has been repeated multiple times at most major universities in the US and abroad. It also relies heavily on using functional mri to see how the brain is processing the information. The issue was first noticed in neuro-science fields and had nothing to do with education methods. The early studies had nothing to do with which method was better, but were about determining how the brain learns and stores information. Then one of the universities had widely opposing results and upon further investigation, they happened to use laptops to present the information, whereas the others used regular paper methods. These results have been repeated numerous times which led the researches to look into why there was a difference and what was the impact of the difference. It was from that research came the correlation with learning and retention.
So, no, the research was rigged. Like most things in neuro science, it came out of exploring the anomalies which then led to better understanding. If anything, there has been much funding from certain large tech companies that have a lot to lose if the they don't sell certain devices. One major west coast university was told they would lose funding from this company in other areas if they continued the research project (which wasn't even funded by the company). So, if anything a lot of money is being thrown about to not publicize it.
SInce the research uses functional mri, it is kind of hard to fake that. FMRI shows that reading from a tablet or even a laptop lights up the same parts of the brain when watching TV, which is different than the areas lit from reading a paper source. Physiologically, the brain is not differentiating between using an electronic device for reading than it is for watching TV. That does not mean one cannot learn, but the learning pathways are different and the neurological pathways to store and retrieve that information is vastly different.
That does not mean that it isn't useful or ins't enjoyable, just that the brain is not as efficient. So, for your gifted child, it could very well be an enhancement to his/her learning. For most kids, whose brain is not wired as your child's brain is, perform worse.
As for your child and your friend's children not being interested in reading, that has been a national trend since the 1960s and correlates with rise of televisions in the home.
"But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online..."
Yeah, just like you can get your "enhanced" DRM-crippled DVDs or e-books with "bonus" content. Throw in a little extra crap to take peoples' attention away from the fact that they're paying more for a crippled version of the same old product.
Back in the day, when I was in school, there were no textbook enhancements. Textbooks were there to facilitate what professors were teaching. The professor was the bonus material, so to speak. Nowadays, though, most professors don't teach from the knowledge they have accumulated. Instead, they teach the book. Of course, that's assuming you actually get a professor to teach a class instead of a TA.
Why every kid in america isnt carrying some inexpensive tabet full of all of their textbooks, school work and tests is a mystery to me. If we wanted to stimulate the economy, when HP was crapping out of the tablet business why didn't someone ask them to donate their touchpads (and make more!) along with developing educational systems and curriculum that would be usable tools nationwide, and make a permanent investment in our future, along with dropping education costs through the floor? Give HP a nice fat tax cut for their troubles.
Could be because research shows that different parts of the brain are activated when reading from an electronic device and reading from paper. Research also shows that retention is less when reading from an electronic device. Research shows that reading actual books, making notes in them, taking written notes in class and listening to lectures results in the most transfer of knowledge and the ability to recall it. Why? Because those processes engage more than one part of the brain, something tablets, don't. Electronic Devices are excellent sources for reference materials, but they don't actually facilitate learning.
Tablets do make sense in that it is easier to carry a single tablet instead of a stack of text books, but then, at least when I was in college, the text books usually stayed in the dorm and were used for out of class assignments. We carried notebooks (the paper kind) with us to class.
Most schools that have gone to electronic devices such as tablets have done so, not because it increases learning, but because it saves them money.
We keep hearing about how expensive it is to publish a book for print and yet Lulu.com does a 100 page book for $6 ($4 to the printer, $2 for their service). The author in that example gets $8 and the book sells for $14. Using those same ratios, a 300 page text book should cost the printer $12 to print and the publisher would get $6, the author would get $24 and the book would sell for $42.
Then why do textbooks cost five times that amount? You would think a textbook publisher is going to have greater economies of scale than somebody self-publishing, so the costs should be even less.
Maybe the Justice Department should quit looking at kids downloading songs and focus on price fixing and collusion among text book publishers and universities. Sure seems fishy.
I always tell my students to NEVER buy from the bookstore. Always go to Amazon or an online textbook reseller. You will save a TON of money. It's my experience that you can generally save 50% or better by shopping anywhere else. That $120 code you bought at the bookstore goes for about $80 at Amazon.
Whether $120 or $80 isn't the point. Why is there an access code at all?
The real irony is that you can make Kubuntu (or any KDE distro) look and act pretty darn close to Unity, sans lenses (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHqRRP9fVHQ). Maybe Ubuntu didn't want to keep Kubuntu around to remind them that you really could have different interfaces tailored to different platforms but one core underlying system.
I really don't understand why the Kubuntu people even bother. If they're not getting any more help from Canonical, why even bother keeping the distro going at all? They should just throw in the towel, and join the Linux Mint KDE team. Linux Mint is little more than Ubuntu with some modifications, and LM even has their own KDE version which is featured prominently, unlike Kubuntu which has always been treated like a red-haired stepchild. They should join forces, move to the Linux Mint camp, and make all their contributions there. I'm sure the LM team would be happy to have the extra help. Why bother maintaining two separate distros which are almost identical?
Using that reasoning, then why did Linux Mint even release a KDE version instead of just working with Kubuntu? Mint KDE is not just Kubuntu fixed up. They have different goals. The real questions are how and why is Blue Systems supporting Mint KDE, Kubuntu and Netrunner? I'm glad they are, but you would think that putting all of those resources into one KDE distro sponsorship would be more efficient.