Yes, there is tomfoolery going on *outside* the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I don't disagree that the scientist doing the research is making propagandistic statements to the media. Wild claims of the extreme dangers of GMOs are fully unfounded --- as are wild claims of the absolute, unquestionable safety of GMOs pushed by Monsanto PR. The solution of such problems is not to let the politicized, PR-driven agendas intrude on the scientific side of GMO studies. Where scientific research is conducted, and passes peer review and all scrutiny related to scientific integrity, it shouldn't be forcibly retracted because the results might be exploited for nonscientific propaganda.
You're accusing me of being "nonscientific," yet you're allowing PR spin presented in the court of public opinion (editorial pieces and industry lobbying groups' statements) to dictate your evaluation of the scientific content of the research. A scientific response to the marginal statistical significance of such a study would be to carry out more comprehensive experiments to better resolve the factors involved --- this is how science is supposed to work. Suppressing the work because ex-Monsanto-employees high in journal hierarchies are worried that mindless propaganda based on this work will challenge the mindless propaganda that their retirement plan stocks depend on is not how science is supposed to work.
Note, the "Nature report" isn't itself one of Nature's peer-reviewed articles --- it's a news commentary piece, passing along the views of lobbyists and industry-captured governmental bodies (also staffed with former Monsanto officials). The scientists responsible for peer reviewing the article, when it was initially published, and then again under renewed pressure from industry lobbying groups, found nothing scientifically wrong with the study. Statistically weak results do not invalidate science --- they simply require appropriate interpretation (e.g. that this study doesn't definitively prove the GMO products cause large cancer rates, but does lend support to such effects existing), and provide guidance for where to take a deeper look.
Do I think Nature is entirely controlled by Monsanto? Not the parts responsible for selecting, peer reviewing, and publishing scientific research. But, could Monsanto's gigantic PR/lobbying effort (which is way better funded than industry-independent scientific researchers) pressure an editorial fluff hit piece outside regular scientific channels? Pretty sure they could, and just did.
I'm getting my numbers from the article. The total study included 200 rats, divided into smaller subgroups. 20 refers to one of the subgroups, which is common practice for similar studies. Yes, such numbers aren't great for high-statistical-confidence results; but the conclusion should be "more expanded study is needed" rather than "SHUT UP SHUT UP!" whenever an experiment contradicts Monsanto's agenda. Have you read the articles at all, and compared them to similar studies that "prove" GM foods are safe? Or, are you content to make up your own facts because Monsanto PR couldn't be wrong?
And, they generally use sample sizes similar to the numbers used in this study under question --- the 200 rats studied was a moderately "ordinary" number by industry standards. However, only when the results are unfavorable to Monsanto does this number become grossly inadequate to effectively evaluate the safety impacts of the product; otherwise, it's "good enough within the margin of error."
Yes, this study has low statistical impact from marginal statistics; just like most of the studies proving GMO crops are safe.
100ml of glyphosate isn't likely to kill you? Oh, really? Why not ask the Indian farmers who chug the stuff to commit suicide because Monsanto has made the agricultural economy brutally horrible? Oh right, you can't, because they're dead.
Deliberate ingestion of Roundup in quantities ranging from 85 to 200 ml has resulted in death within hours of ingestion, although it has also been ingested in quantities as large as 500 ml with only mild or moderate symptoms.[83] There is a reasonable correlation between the amount of Roundup ingested and the likelihood of serious systemic sequelae or death. Ingestion of >85 ml of the concentrated formulation is likely to cause significant toxicity in adults. Corrosive effects – mouth, throat and epigastric pain and dysphagia – are common. Renal and hepatic impairment are also frequent and usually reflect reduced organ perfusion. Respiratory distress, impaired consciousness, pulmonary edema, infiltration on chest x-ray, shock, arrythmias, renal failure requiring haemodialysis, metabolic acidosis, and hyperkalaemia may occur in severe cases. Bradycardia and ventricular arrhythmias often present prior to death.
Not to downplay the risks of pathogens in shit. However, people have been wallowing around in shit of all kinds for a long time --- there are quite significant associated risks, but it's far from an acute poisoning death sentence.
On what grounds do you base that? Aside from smelling bad, literal shit doesn't seem to cause mass biological devastation. In fact, ecosystems that get a lot of shit tend to be absolutely thriving --- that's why they dump it on plants. Harmful secondary effects of shit are generally due to it being so good for life --- e.g. rapid algal blooms in runoff water, growing so fast that they exhaust other resources (e.g. dissolved oxygen). If I was forced to choose between chugging 100ml of shit or 100ml of glyphosate, I'd choose the shit every time --- hella nasty, but far, far less likely to kill me.
So, where was the pre-existing study in those 600 that tested for the effects claimed in this study, and found contradictory results with a more statistically relevant sample size? Really, for stuff going in to the food supply of billions of people, and saturating Earth's major ecosystems, "600 studies" (largely industry-funded, from an industry with extreme PR manipulation emphasis) isn't all that impressive. There are lots of things to look at --- and, when you find one that (statistically weakly) turns up a problem, shouldn't the response be to do further research with more statistically powerful sample sizes instead of suppressing the research (which already passed peer review, under extremely close scrutiny)?
Recall, in this particular case, the specific genetic modification in question: glyphosate resistance, allowing massive quantities of glyphosate herbicide to be dumped on everything. This isn't engineering to make bigger, sweeter kernels or boost crop density. Glyphosate kills the heck out of weeds because it's highly biologically active, designed to interfere with metabolic processes --- the kind of thing you might have big a-priori safety concerns about, above and beyond genetic modification to speed along selective breeding processes for traits not directly related to dumping massive amounts of toxins onto food products. So, yes, humans have been doing "genetic engineering" for a long time, but less so for capabilities to saturate fields with weird shit that kills all the other plants.
What does working in a profit-focused megacorporate environment have to do with "experience to make one a good editor"? The institutional structures and culture within Monsanto have zilch to do with fostering scientific integrity and objectivity as a first priority; nor with journalistic editorial work.
You seem to be swallowing the PR spin that intentionally confuses "study is not reproducible" with "no one has bothered to try reproducing the study." The paper is not being retracted because some better-run experiment with a larger sample size came along and showed, with improved statistical confidence, that this small-sample study's results were a statistical fluke. You say "there are no known examples of harm" --- but that's because nearly no one has looked; and, when they do (as in this case), they're automatically dismissed by Monsanto's FUD machine. This somewhat weak study is an extremely rare example of someone trying at all --- limited in statistical size because it's really hard to get funding to try studying anything against Big Ag's corporate profit interests.
Right, if your code is relying on the functionality that someone else generously gave you and the whole world to freely use, then you have to play nice and pass along the same freedoms that you're enjoying to link the GPL'd code's functionality into your product.
I see you mentioned RedHat --- for a company with over a billion dollars revenue, RH doesn't seem to be suffering too badly from the inability to make money while building on GPL'd products. They seem to have found plenty of ways to add enough value to convince people to pay them for a product that you can get for free through other channels (CentOS). None of their programmers are going home unpaid because of the "eeeevil profit-killing GPL."
There's nothing incompatible with making money from code and using GPL-licensed products. Apple, or anyone else, is perfectly free to sell products, for cash money, that use GPL products. The only "viral imposition" that the GPL requires is that Apple pass along the same benefits of freedom that they enjoyed in using someone else's GPL'd code to the people buying software from them. GPL doesn't mean you have to give away your code for free to anyone --- just that the people you do give it to, possibly for loads of money, get to see, modify, improve, and redistribute the stuff using GPL'd code.
Or, stuff that matters because you're working on it between now and when you're 54. Designing, building, and running big science projects --- in space! --- mean jobs for nerds, whose central career will consist of getting this stuff done. If you think these things don't matter to nerds until the final answer pops out on Slashdot's front page in two or three decades, then you're missing out on a lot of good nerding.
By giving short-sighted idiots like you an earlier death from stress over the "waste" of effort on aspiring to expand the depth of human knowledge for its own sake rather than simply for some billionaire's profit?
Gravitational waves are still theoretical, but an experiment that solidly and unambiguously fails to find them in regions where general relativity predicts they've got to be would itself be a huge discovery (current experiments are still on the margins of "maybe we won't see anything here anyway."). Gravitational waves are "only theoretical," but part of the same theoretical framework that has powerfully predicted a bunch of other stuff with incredible accuracy. Ruling out gravitational waves would require a major overhaul of how we understand gravity works, discarding big chunks of general relativity. I think not finding gravity waves would be a really exciting result for physics, since it would be the first time in a while now that a deeply-entrenched fundamental theory would be overturned.
Wrong size scale for radar, which would require ~ 1 cm scale features (which might be difficult to combine with reasonable aerodynamic efficiency). Or, you need to specially shape your entire car --- like the crazy angular surfaces of funny-shaped stealth aircraft --- to avoid any surfaces with a direct reflection path back to the transmitter. I suppose a super-black car might confound lidar; even if it didn't, at least it would look pretty cool. Until some truck sideswipes you at night because they didn't see you.
I view this as a zero-sum game because I recognize the players. A negative-sum game, in fact. With the likes of Gates and Zuckerberg at the helm, do you seriously think they're not pushing for absolute centralized corporate control, conveniently packaged as a cost-saving package because you can fire a bunch of those redundant teachers? As you say, "anything can be used badly" --- and Gates and Zuckerberg are the types of folks who will be on the leading edge of maximizing that badness.
Soap also serves as a pretty good soap. I suspect the fine size scale of these structures, on a rigid silicon backing, would't be too good at reaching into very much of the rugged mountainous topography (on a bacteria's scale) of human skin.
Intricacies of computer technologies? In an otherwise perfect world, you could always still gripe and moan about the latest kernel scheduler tweaks or edge-case oddities of compiler optimization --- you know, proper nerdly stuff. Fix education and healthcare; establish just distribution of resources, in an ecologically sustainable manner; bring about world peace and global solidarity of humankind: I'll not stand in the way of such things for fear of running out of things to nerdrage about, because there will always be something suitable to nerdrage about.
When requiring identification proof is absolutely known to disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters, overwhelmingly in minority and disadvantaged groups --- for the benefit of "preventing" approximately zero voter fraud cases --- then such requirements are unequivocally an opposition to the right to vote, for huge numbers of voters. Such "proof" may be required for lots of everyday things in your middle-class life, but it turns out that tens of thousands of of, e.g., elderly and poor people will be disenfranchised in the states that adopt such laws, because they get by in life without the requisite papers (and cannot spend tens to hundreds of dollars, and possibly multiple days off work during business hours, to scramble through the bureaucracy to obtain them).
Stopping tens of thousands of qualified voters from voting is opposing voting rights. Plain and simple. There is no factual justification for such moves --- in terms of documented evidence of voter fraud --- to be found by its most ardent supporters. In the end, there is simply no reason to perpetrate voter fraud (standing in line for hours, risking being thrown in federal prison, to cast one extra vote) on a large scale --- if you want more votes, it's far easier and more effective to do "get-out-the-vote" drives for the large pool of potential legit voters. Or, if you don't like the idea of legit voters having a voice, you disenfranchise them en-mass by every slimy trick in the book.
Fine-grained individual learning evaluation is something that the educators in the classroom should be in charge of. I know all my good teachers were the ones who put effort into learning the character of each student, and adjusting things to work. Centralizing control over analysis of student performance data --- taking the capability away from teachers to evaluate how a program is really working, and placing it in the hands of Gates and Zuckerberg to push whatever megacorporate agenda they want --- is far from ideal. An educational program should be seeking input from teachers --- "hey, this module seems too lecture-heavy for most of my students; the kids who did best in the hands-on lab dropped the thread in sections 4.3 to 4.8". Instead of turning to Zuckerberg to algorithmically decide how the world should run, while reducing teachers to uninvolved lackeys just there to proctor tests, we should be giving teachers greater ability to share their on-the-ground observations, and flexibility to taylor education for their students.
I'm sure I could dig out several peer reviewed studies that show the bigger the class and the more standardised the material the better the education level of the population
It would be interesting to see what those studies showed --- and how, when comparing across societal populations that may vary in other ways than typical class size --- they controlled for external factors.
From what I can find of scientifically controlled studies (rather than uncontrolled observational research), where people from the same population were randomly assigned to smaller or larger class sizes, smaller classes showed benefits. For example, some analysis of the Tennessee STAR experiment.
Isolated personal anecdotes do not make for sound science; however, in my own experience, I certainly got a lot more out of small classes where the teacher was more able to individually accommodate student needs (in my own case, the need of generally being way ahead of the average grade-level material).
You're complaining about education being driven to mediocre "average" levels, yet you support mass standardized big class testing-driven approaches because they show good averaged results? You do realize that, in the mega-for-profit standardized educational industry being pushed by Gates and Zuckerburg, the bottom line for corporate profit will be tied to whatever silly mass-averaged metrics the corporations can foist off on the public as measures of "success," which will have very little to do with the needs and development of individual students as assessed by classroom teachers? Collecting fine-grained personally tracked results isn't about providing fine-grained individual best outcomes (like a conscientious teacher would do); it's a power grab to assure that the methods for reducing individual data to bottom-line averaged metrics are in the hands of megacorporations, rather than teachers --- so that "educational success" can be defined in the most profitable ways. "Privatize the system and hand over education to us, and your students will be 36 zurmuflobs better educated! The competition only provides 31 zurmuflobs!".
The "good and the best," self-motivated learners with the drive and resources to seek out and find the best available resources, don't need Code.org in the first place. Yes, you learned to program and use a broad variety of devices --- without any help from Code.org (who didn't exist).
The Code.org project is primarily about reaching out to a broader selection of students who haven't already learned to program on their own resources. It's mass-educational-material for ordinary classroom students. As such, it should be held to a high standard of being educational in a broader sense than churning out factory-ready robots. Students who would discover the broad world of Free software on their own probably don't need Code.org. For everyone else, learning whether to think "outside the box" of proprietary products, or --- on the opposite side --- being brainwashed into being ignorant and terrified of everything outside that box --- is a matter of education. You can expand students' minds beyond what many would discover on their own; or, you can actively work to chain and constrict those minds. We should be extremely wary about turning the future of computer education over to Microsoft and Facebook's corporate interests. The "best and the brightest" will still escape; but they'll be sentenced to live in a world overwhelmingly populated by the mentally crippled products of megacorporate education.
You can determine this from anonymous aggregated data. You don't have to be completely stupid and average every grade in every class into a single district-wide mean. But, you can report "here's the distribution of grades on the Module 4.3b semester-end test" without Code.org needing to read each student's report card.
The approach taken by Code.org of centralizing data to create silly metrics is part of the whole process of industrializing education to a horrible "one size fits none," teach-to-the-test approach. The opposite of this is giving classroom teachers the ability to evaluate and address each student's individual learning needs. This happens in small classrooms with experienced teachers; the opposite of "cram everyone into a mega video lecture, and turn teachers into minimum-wage test proctors doling out pre-packaged material according to the Central Computer's instructions."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there is tomfoolery going on *outside* the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I don't disagree that the scientist doing the research is making propagandistic statements to the media. Wild claims of the extreme dangers of GMOs are fully unfounded --- as are wild claims of the absolute, unquestionable safety of GMOs pushed by Monsanto PR. The solution of such problems is not to let the politicized, PR-driven agendas intrude on the scientific side of GMO studies. Where scientific research is conducted, and passes peer review and all scrutiny related to scientific integrity, it shouldn't be forcibly retracted because the results might be exploited for nonscientific propaganda.
You're accusing me of being "nonscientific," yet you're allowing PR spin presented in the court of public opinion (editorial pieces and industry lobbying groups' statements) to dictate your evaluation of the scientific content of the research. A scientific response to the marginal statistical significance of such a study would be to carry out more comprehensive experiments to better resolve the factors involved --- this is how science is supposed to work. Suppressing the work because ex-Monsanto-employees high in journal hierarchies are worried that mindless propaganda based on this work will challenge the mindless propaganda that their retirement plan stocks depend on is not how science is supposed to work.
Note, the "Nature report" isn't itself one of Nature's peer-reviewed articles --- it's a news commentary piece, passing along the views of lobbyists and industry-captured governmental bodies (also staffed with former Monsanto officials). The scientists responsible for peer reviewing the article, when it was initially published, and then again under renewed pressure from industry lobbying groups, found nothing scientifically wrong with the study. Statistically weak results do not invalidate science --- they simply require appropriate interpretation (e.g. that this study doesn't definitively prove the GMO products cause large cancer rates, but does lend support to such effects existing), and provide guidance for where to take a deeper look.
Do I think Nature is entirely controlled by Monsanto? Not the parts responsible for selecting, peer reviewing, and publishing scientific research. But, could Monsanto's gigantic PR/lobbying effort (which is way better funded than industry-independent scientific researchers) pressure an editorial fluff hit piece outside regular scientific channels? Pretty sure they could, and just did.
I'm getting my numbers from the article. The total study included 200 rats, divided into smaller subgroups. 20 refers to one of the subgroups, which is common practice for similar studies. Yes, such numbers aren't great for high-statistical-confidence results; but the conclusion should be "more expanded study is needed" rather than "SHUT UP SHUT UP!" whenever an experiment contradicts Monsanto's agenda. Have you read the articles at all, and compared them to similar studies that "prove" GM foods are safe? Or, are you content to make up your own facts because Monsanto PR couldn't be wrong?
And, they generally use sample sizes similar to the numbers used in this study under question --- the 200 rats studied was a moderately "ordinary" number by industry standards. However, only when the results are unfavorable to Monsanto does this number become grossly inadequate to effectively evaluate the safety impacts of the product; otherwise, it's "good enough within the margin of error."
Yes, this study has low statistical impact from marginal statistics; just like most of the studies proving GMO crops are safe.
100ml of glyphosate isn't likely to kill you? Oh, really? Why not ask the Indian farmers who chug the stuff to commit suicide because Monsanto has made the agricultural economy brutally horrible? Oh right, you can't, because they're dead.
A little info for you (from Wikipedia on glyphosate):
Deliberate ingestion of Roundup in quantities ranging from 85 to 200 ml has resulted in death within hours of ingestion, although it has also been ingested in quantities as large as 500 ml with only mild or moderate symptoms.[83] There is a reasonable correlation between the amount of Roundup ingested and the likelihood of serious systemic sequelae or death. Ingestion of >85 ml of the concentrated formulation is likely to cause significant toxicity in adults. Corrosive effects – mouth, throat and epigastric pain and dysphagia – are common. Renal and hepatic impairment are also frequent and usually reflect reduced organ perfusion. Respiratory distress, impaired consciousness, pulmonary edema, infiltration on chest x-ray, shock, arrythmias, renal failure requiring haemodialysis, metabolic acidosis, and hyperkalaemia may occur in severe cases. Bradycardia and ventricular arrhythmias often present prior to death.
Not to downplay the risks of pathogens in shit. However, people have been wallowing around in shit of all kinds for a long time --- there are quite significant associated risks, but it's far from an acute poisoning death sentence.
On what grounds do you base that? Aside from smelling bad, literal shit doesn't seem to cause mass biological devastation. In fact, ecosystems that get a lot of shit tend to be absolutely thriving --- that's why they dump it on plants. Harmful secondary effects of shit are generally due to it being so good for life --- e.g. rapid algal blooms in runoff water, growing so fast that they exhaust other resources (e.g. dissolved oxygen). If I was forced to choose between chugging 100ml of shit or 100ml of glyphosate, I'd choose the shit every time --- hella nasty, but far, far less likely to kill me.
So, where was the pre-existing study in those 600 that tested for the effects claimed in this study, and found contradictory results with a more statistically relevant sample size? Really, for stuff going in to the food supply of billions of people, and saturating Earth's major ecosystems, "600 studies" (largely industry-funded, from an industry with extreme PR manipulation emphasis) isn't all that impressive. There are lots of things to look at --- and, when you find one that (statistically weakly) turns up a problem, shouldn't the response be to do further research with more statistically powerful sample sizes instead of suppressing the research (which already passed peer review, under extremely close scrutiny)?
Recall, in this particular case, the specific genetic modification in question: glyphosate resistance, allowing massive quantities of glyphosate herbicide to be dumped on everything. This isn't engineering to make bigger, sweeter kernels or boost crop density. Glyphosate kills the heck out of weeds because it's highly biologically active, designed to interfere with metabolic processes --- the kind of thing you might have big a-priori safety concerns about, above and beyond genetic modification to speed along selective breeding processes for traits not directly related to dumping massive amounts of toxins onto food products. So, yes, humans have been doing "genetic engineering" for a long time, but less so for capabilities to saturate fields with weird shit that kills all the other plants.
What does working in a profit-focused megacorporate environment have to do with "experience to make one a good editor"? The institutional structures and culture within Monsanto have zilch to do with fostering scientific integrity and objectivity as a first priority; nor with journalistic editorial work.
You seem to be swallowing the PR spin that intentionally confuses "study is not reproducible" with "no one has bothered to try reproducing the study." The paper is not being retracted because some better-run experiment with a larger sample size came along and showed, with improved statistical confidence, that this small-sample study's results were a statistical fluke. You say "there are no known examples of harm" --- but that's because nearly no one has looked; and, when they do (as in this case), they're automatically dismissed by Monsanto's FUD machine. This somewhat weak study is an extremely rare example of someone trying at all --- limited in statistical size because it's really hard to get funding to try studying anything against Big Ag's corporate profit interests.
Right, if your code is relying on the functionality that someone else generously gave you and the whole world to freely use, then you have to play nice and pass along the same freedoms that you're enjoying to link the GPL'd code's functionality into your product.
I see you mentioned RedHat --- for a company with over a billion dollars revenue, RH doesn't seem to be suffering too badly from the inability to make money while building on GPL'd products. They seem to have found plenty of ways to add enough value to convince people to pay them for a product that you can get for free through other channels (CentOS). None of their programmers are going home unpaid because of the "eeeevil profit-killing GPL."
There's nothing incompatible with making money from code and using GPL-licensed products. Apple, or anyone else, is perfectly free to sell products, for cash money, that use GPL products. The only "viral imposition" that the GPL requires is that Apple pass along the same benefits of freedom that they enjoyed in using someone else's GPL'd code to the people buying software from them. GPL doesn't mean you have to give away your code for free to anyone --- just that the people you do give it to, possibly for loads of money, get to see, modify, improve, and redistribute the stuff using GPL'd code.
A long waterslide flowing with an abrasive grit slurry, however, might not be the most fun kind of waterslide.
Or, stuff that matters because you're working on it between now and when you're 54. Designing, building, and running big science projects --- in space! --- mean jobs for nerds, whose central career will consist of getting this stuff done. If you think these things don't matter to nerds until the final answer pops out on Slashdot's front page in two or three decades, then you're missing out on a lot of good nerding.
By giving short-sighted idiots like you an earlier death from stress over the "waste" of effort on aspiring to expand the depth of human knowledge for its own sake rather than simply for some billionaire's profit?
Gravitational waves are still theoretical, but an experiment that solidly and unambiguously fails to find them in regions where general relativity predicts they've got to be would itself be a huge discovery (current experiments are still on the margins of "maybe we won't see anything here anyway."). Gravitational waves are "only theoretical," but part of the same theoretical framework that has powerfully predicted a bunch of other stuff with incredible accuracy. Ruling out gravitational waves would require a major overhaul of how we understand gravity works, discarding big chunks of general relativity. I think not finding gravity waves would be a really exciting result for physics, since it would be the first time in a while now that a deeply-entrenched fundamental theory would be overturned.
Wrong size scale for radar, which would require ~ 1 cm scale features (which might be difficult to combine with reasonable aerodynamic efficiency). Or, you need to specially shape your entire car --- like the crazy angular surfaces of funny-shaped stealth aircraft --- to avoid any surfaces with a direct reflection path back to the transmitter. I suppose a super-black car might confound lidar; even if it didn't, at least it would look pretty cool. Until some truck sideswipes you at night because they didn't see you.
I view this as a zero-sum game because I recognize the players. A negative-sum game, in fact. With the likes of Gates and Zuckerberg at the helm, do you seriously think they're not pushing for absolute centralized corporate control, conveniently packaged as a cost-saving package because you can fire a bunch of those redundant teachers? As you say, "anything can be used badly" --- and Gates and Zuckerberg are the types of folks who will be on the leading edge of maximizing that badness.
Soap also serves as a pretty good soap. I suspect the fine size scale of these structures, on a rigid silicon backing, would't be too good at reaching into very much of the rugged mountainous topography (on a bacteria's scale) of human skin.
Intricacies of computer technologies? In an otherwise perfect world, you could always still gripe and moan about the latest kernel scheduler tweaks or edge-case oddities of compiler optimization --- you know, proper nerdly stuff. Fix education and healthcare; establish just distribution of resources, in an ecologically sustainable manner; bring about world peace and global solidarity of humankind: I'll not stand in the way of such things for fear of running out of things to nerdrage about, because there will always be something suitable to nerdrage about.
When requiring identification proof is absolutely known to disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters, overwhelmingly in minority and disadvantaged groups --- for the benefit of "preventing" approximately zero voter fraud cases --- then such requirements are unequivocally an opposition to the right to vote, for huge numbers of voters. Such "proof" may be required for lots of everyday things in your middle-class life, but it turns out that tens of thousands of of, e.g., elderly and poor people will be disenfranchised in the states that adopt such laws, because they get by in life without the requisite papers (and cannot spend tens to hundreds of dollars, and possibly multiple days off work during business hours, to scramble through the bureaucracy to obtain them).
Stopping tens of thousands of qualified voters from voting is opposing voting rights. Plain and simple. There is no factual justification for such moves --- in terms of documented evidence of voter fraud --- to be found by its most ardent supporters. In the end, there is simply no reason to perpetrate voter fraud (standing in line for hours, risking being thrown in federal prison, to cast one extra vote) on a large scale --- if you want more votes, it's far easier and more effective to do "get-out-the-vote" drives for the large pool of potential legit voters. Or, if you don't like the idea of legit voters having a voice, you disenfranchise them en-mass by every slimy trick in the book.
Fine-grained individual learning evaluation is something that the educators in the classroom should be in charge of. I know all my good teachers were the ones who put effort into learning the character of each student, and adjusting things to work. Centralizing control over analysis of student performance data --- taking the capability away from teachers to evaluate how a program is really working, and placing it in the hands of Gates and Zuckerberg to push whatever megacorporate agenda they want --- is far from ideal. An educational program should be seeking input from teachers --- "hey, this module seems too lecture-heavy for most of my students; the kids who did best in the hands-on lab dropped the thread in sections 4.3 to 4.8". Instead of turning to Zuckerberg to algorithmically decide how the world should run, while reducing teachers to uninvolved lackeys just there to proctor tests, we should be giving teachers greater ability to share their on-the-ground observations, and flexibility to taylor education for their students.
I'm sure I could dig out several peer reviewed studies that show the bigger the class and the more standardised the material the better the education level of the population
It would be interesting to see what those studies showed --- and how, when comparing across societal populations that may vary in other ways than typical class size --- they controlled for external factors.
From what I can find of scientifically controlled studies (rather than uncontrolled observational research), where people from the same population were randomly assigned to smaller or larger class sizes, smaller classes showed benefits. For example, some analysis of the Tennessee STAR experiment.
Isolated personal anecdotes do not make for sound science; however, in my own experience, I certainly got a lot more out of small classes where the teacher was more able to individually accommodate student needs (in my own case, the need of generally being way ahead of the average grade-level material).
You're complaining about education being driven to mediocre "average" levels, yet you support mass standardized big class testing-driven approaches because they show good averaged results? You do realize that, in the mega-for-profit standardized educational industry being pushed by Gates and Zuckerburg, the bottom line for corporate profit will be tied to whatever silly mass-averaged metrics the corporations can foist off on the public as measures of "success," which will have very little to do with the needs and development of individual students as assessed by classroom teachers? Collecting fine-grained personally tracked results isn't about providing fine-grained individual best outcomes (like a conscientious teacher would do); it's a power grab to assure that the methods for reducing individual data to bottom-line averaged metrics are in the hands of megacorporations, rather than teachers --- so that "educational success" can be defined in the most profitable ways. "Privatize the system and hand over education to us, and your students will be 36 zurmuflobs better educated! The competition only provides 31 zurmuflobs!".
The "good and the best," self-motivated learners with the drive and resources to seek out and find the best available resources, don't need Code.org in the first place. Yes, you learned to program and use a broad variety of devices --- without any help from Code.org (who didn't exist).
The Code.org project is primarily about reaching out to a broader selection of students who haven't already learned to program on their own resources. It's mass-educational-material for ordinary classroom students. As such, it should be held to a high standard of being educational in a broader sense than churning out factory-ready robots. Students who would discover the broad world of Free software on their own probably don't need Code.org. For everyone else, learning whether to think "outside the box" of proprietary products, or --- on the opposite side --- being brainwashed into being ignorant and terrified of everything outside that box --- is a matter of education. You can expand students' minds beyond what many would discover on their own; or, you can actively work to chain and constrict those minds. We should be extremely wary about turning the future of computer education over to Microsoft and Facebook's corporate interests. The "best and the brightest" will still escape; but they'll be sentenced to live in a world overwhelmingly populated by the mentally crippled products of megacorporate education.
You can determine this from anonymous aggregated data. You don't have to be completely stupid and average every grade in every class into a single district-wide mean. But, you can report "here's the distribution of grades on the Module 4.3b semester-end test" without Code.org needing to read each student's report card.
The approach taken by Code.org of centralizing data to create silly metrics is part of the whole process of industrializing education to a horrible "one size fits none," teach-to-the-test approach. The opposite of this is giving classroom teachers the ability to evaluate and address each student's individual learning needs. This happens in small classrooms with experienced teachers; the opposite of "cram everyone into a mega video lecture, and turn teachers into minimum-wage test proctors doling out pre-packaged material according to the Central Computer's instructions."