Ah... bar exams. The "flipped classroom" is mostly buzz in science and engineering where there is a hell of a lot of mathematics and mechanics to be internalised. Independent study is inefficient, because there is a well-defined set of knowledge and skills to acquire, and non-experts (which students are, by definition) will be unable to identify the required steps to consolidate the learning. A problem set designed by a true expert can be used to consolidate and integrate knowledge, and to identify and diagnose problems and misunderstandings (most of which are relatively predictable).
Learner independence is a great goal, but it cannot come at the cost of reducing the quality of education, which is why the truly great programmes promote it through student projects of increasing scale and complexity, with increasing student freedom and a supervisor that assists and advises rather than directing.
Your "argument" had no "facts", it was simply an anonymously posted outpouring of hatred and bile for the less fortunate. It's clear you've never attempted to live on benefits for any length of time.
Turns out that while it's good in theory, it's pretty bad in practice.
One: if you can learn the job by doing the job, there's no point in going to uni.
Two: you're reducing the breadth of knowledge imparted for increased depth, so your programmes become increasingly specific, pigeonholing people even further based on a decision made at 17 years old. My decision at 17 was to be a game programmer... thankfully I did a general "computer science" degree, not "game development"... I knew I didn't want to work in a game studio before I graduated, and applied for 9-to-5 work instead.
Three: expertise is a dangerous thing. A functional expert is a guy who knows his tools well enough that he can do pretty much anything with them fairly quickly... but he has a closed toolset. He may not be using the best tool for the job, but he's using the tool well enough and quickly enough that it doesn't matter. Avoiding theory means building a smaller toolset, making your "experts" increasingly suboptimal.
Besides, I suspect that the improved result is just due to the increased test practice: When the students get to the exam, they're already used to the questions from the lectures turned practice and have a better idea of the expected answers because of the feedback they get from the professor and teaching assistants. That does not prove that they have a better or deeper understanding of the material.
Testing consolidates retention of concepts. Practice consolidates testing of concepts. If your test practice does not improve retention of concepts, then you're a bad teacher, and a bad teacher will remain a bad teacher regardless of techniques employed.
The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices.
Quite. Students have always been told to do pre-lecture reading, but it's very rarely enforced. In fact, all my lecturers seemed to run on the assumption that we wouldn't, so lectures gave the information from the ground up, rather than starting where the reading left off.
Of course, that was on the science and engineering campus. A couple of miles away, the humanities students were in the library reading novels, essays and treatises that were due for discussion that week, and if they were behind on their reading, they'd struggle with the lecture.
My problem with this project is the problem I have with almost all software projects that I've seen on Kickstarter: The biggest cost is programmer time.
So what? you might ask, it is a programming project after all.
Well, I see programmer after programmer eliminating all personal risk by writing themselves a nice middle-class paycheck at the backers' expense, but at the end of the project, the developer's the one that's going to be getting royalties on future sales. This seems like a bit of a cheat to me; having your cake and eating it.
Yes, it's great to have a guaranteed income, and that's why many content creators work for hire -- the trade off is that we're not gambling our time against future profit, but selling it for immediate recompense. Thousands of projects have been cancelled by the likes of EA, but their salaried programmers are safe, because it's not a gamble.
So why should I or anyone else pay you or Zahn for something that you both could do off your own bat? You sound like you're well enough off to survive for a year without starving, and Zahn's got plenty of money coming in in royalties.
Now it may be that you aren't actually taking any money yourself from this, but I see nothing to say that. Like the investors in Dragon's Den/Shark Tank, I don't like putting money up for someone who hasn't already invested a lot in terms of their own time and/or money...
That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
It's often surprisingly how many names for people or places originated as exonyms, ie names given by an outside group. "Wales" and "Wallonia" (the French-speaking part of Belgium) both come from a Low Germanic root meaning "foreigner". Germany calls itself Deutschland, while the French call it Allemagne and although the Italians call it Germania, they call the people tedeschi.
I don't think humanity would have a problem coming up with exonyms for alien races.
Even someone who takes time over their names and languages can still fall into the pronunciation trap, though. The Lord of the Rings films didn't strictly follow Tolkien's own pronunciation guide, because most readers pronounced the names differently from Tolkien's intention. It's commercially more sensible to please the fans than the author....
always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
Imagination is key to all reading, but the text should connect as directly as possible to the reader's imagination -- understanding should be passive with as little effort as possible.
Consider Dai swung his bwyell and chopped the neidr in half. You cannot "hear" that sentence when you read it... unless you speak Welsh, because that's where I nicked all the nouns from. Presumably I'd have described the bwyell as some kind of axe, and the neidr as a serpent-like creature previously... because bwyell is axe, and neidr is snake.
Call a spade a spade, or at worst a Venusian spade.
Did you understand the word despite the typo? I suspect you did... language is resilient that way. It can handle being typed by someone whose right arm is currently immobilised after being in an accident on a level crossing.
Even if all I had to go on was the names of his races, I'd pass. Rule 1 of writing alien words: make sure your readers have some way of guessing at the correct proonunciation. "Modhri"? I read that as an Irish typo. "Kalixiri"? Basque... and how many people speak both Basque and Irish? "Zhirrzh", umm... that's like a hybrid of Chinese pinyin and eithe Italian or Spanish. "Qanska"? No idea. Is the Q a K sound, a KW sound or a glottal click?? I've no idea. "and Pom" Wow... one English speakers would all pronounce uniformly!
Foreign sounds work well on film because we can hear it, even if we don't understand it... foreign writing fails because if we can't understand it, we can't hear it.
Anyhow, I don't only have the names of his races to go on... I also read the Admiral Thrawn trilogy. It was rubbish. And it was full of unpronounceable words, too....
Pharma companies make boatloads of money selling lifelong drugs to HIV sufferers. The last thing they want is a cure that'd kill the cash cow.
OTOH, have you any idea what would happen to the share price of the first company to produce a cure for AIDS? Any individuals in a position to suppress it would also likely stand to profit from a bonanza share options windfall. And suppressing it without shareholder approval would be potentially criminal, and definitely actionable in the civil courts.
actual scenario: the consumer bought a laptop from best buy. he assumed the laptop came with a charger, but it didn't because that's what the manufacturer decided to do, and said so on the box (perhaps it was in small letters). So user sues best buy because the product didn't meet his expectations. Just call Saul!
Except in this case, the box said "everything you need" in big letters and "charger not included" in small letters. No amount of small print can justify the big print being wrong.
Impatience has nothing to do with it... he's not complaining that he's not getting the goods delivered now, but that he's not getting the goods deliveredat all.
I seriously doubt this was apple!s decision. Wrong party to sue.
Very basic principle of consumer law: sale is a contract between retailer and customer. If I buy a phone and the box is missing a vital component (perhaps even the handset), it's the retailer's responsibility to supply me with the missing goods -- he can't just fob me off with "that's what the manufacturer sent us".
Well, very easy to disprove that theory. There are, after all, many unfortunate cases of people, like me, very deficient in these sympathetic mirror neurons that are/were totally unable to learn from others. Yet, i still had language. Granted, i did not understand words where the energetic purpose behind them created a specific subjective kinesthethic 'feeling', e.g., looking down, stand tall, chin up, stiff upper lip,etc...
"Very deficient" is still very different from "totally deficient" -- the amount required for any base function is unclear. Besides, the role of the mirror neuron system in ASDs (which I'm assuming you're referring to) is still very much open to debate.
Nice to see a new generation learning things I studied in school 20 years ago. No, this isn't news, but y'all are children so it's all good.
Oh sorry... I forgot that McGurk had access to brain-activity-detecting electrodes and pinpointed the parts of the brain that experienced his illusion. Oh wait, he didn't, did he. The summary isn't brilliant, but this is news... they've shown that the McGurk effect feeds into the auditory channel, rather than simply overriding the audio signal at one of the later, more specialised language-processing areas.
It's all about ability to take cues from another persons face and be able to replicate them. If you can't put yourself 'inside' another person to learn a physical motion, then this 'illusion' won't work on you.
There is a theory that all language relies on reconstructing the speaker's movements, employing the mirror neurons. The most sophisticated model of this is V S Ramachandran's notion of language being a combination of mirror neuron action and synaesthesia (where stimulus from one sense maifests itself in another sense -- eg seeing colours tied to musical notes). The important thing about synaesthesia in Ramachandran's work is that he considers it a normal state of affairs, and demonstrates this with examples of metaphors embedded into language -- food tasting "sharp" and sounds being "bright". This study starts to support similar conclusions.
The problem is that the marketing is smoke and mirrors: the defect count isn't absolute and objective, it's the number of errors that the software detects. I don't doubt that projects using Coverity during the lifecycle end up with less Coverity-detected defects than projects that don't, but as metrics go, it's pretty hugely biased.
The "wrong order" is any order that fails to get people on the floor. I've been at plenty of parties where the music doesn't "build" properly, and it really kills the atmosphere.
To clarify, if its just a list of songs, it shouldn't be a copyright problem, as in MoS has no copyright claim.
Not true -- UK copyright law has specific provisions to protect anthologies. It's termed "typographical arrangements". The idea is that if I spend a year compiling a book of medieval poetry (all individually out of copyright, obviously), I get a monopoly over the book as a collection, so no low-rent outfit can produce a cheap edition to undercut you and steal your market.
It's a good law, in that it implicitly recognised that an anthology deserves less protection than a truly original work: the term is restricted to 25 years from first publication.
What I don't know is if anyone has established by legal precedent whether a compilation CD is considered a typographical arrangement or not, but that will be the crux of Ministry of Sound's case.
UK copyright law has a specific category for "typographical arrangements" that is a right to a particular anthologisation. The classic example would be the church hymn book. I am allowed to compile as many different hymn books with different selections of hymns, and different selections of verses for each hymn, but I couldn't just copy someone's selection hymn for hymn, verse for verse. This recognises the time and effort expended on making the selection, and guarantees that the person who takes that time and effort isn't going to get undercut by some low-rent publishing outfit who immediately clones his product. (The fact that many of these hymnal publishers also engage in the morally dubious practice of "copyright pollution" by making minor alterations to the hymns themselves is by-the-bye.)
One of the bestbits about this particular provision is that it implicitly recognises that a typographical arrangement is intrinsically less valuable than an original work -- they are protected for 25 years from the year of publication.
I've been asking Python programmers for the last year what an else clause on a for loop meant. Last Friday, one gave the correct answer for the first time. Why do I know what it means? Because a person who wrote some (and shipped) some code using it apparently didn't...
I didn't know that structure... it should be banned... it's totally "un-pythonic" in that it annihilates the principle of readability. Kill it with fire.
If you're using a "dumb" text editor, then don't complain about it.
Your argument is back-to-front. Python has whitespace because of dumb editors. Guido's rationale was simple: when writing C in a dumb editor, there is redundancy of braces (for the computer) and spaces (for the human). There is the danger that the two might not match, and that a human debugging the code would misread the structure by following the indentation levels instead of the braces.
And here lies the problem: Guido's decision was for the sake of "plain text" and dumb editors, but the end result was to force the use of smart editors. Hell, even the "official" Python IDE, IDLE, isn't good enough IDEs that have block hiding have, as a consequence, block highlighting, a side-effect of which is the explicit marking of block start and end... that same redundancy that Guido wanted rid of to begin with.
I bet you're using a code editor with block highlighting...
You could simulate an office move with a couple of banks of desks. Kids race in teams to move their alloted PC to the next desk, cable it up, boot it, and print out a test print (I recommend a "chequered flag" as the print job. Although the risk assessment may go against you. Also, you might not have any working PCs by the end of the day....
Slashdot Mirror
Ah... bar exams. The "flipped classroom" is mostly buzz in science and engineering where there is a hell of a lot of mathematics and mechanics to be internalised. Independent study is inefficient, because there is a well-defined set of knowledge and skills to acquire, and non-experts (which students are, by definition) will be unable to identify the required steps to consolidate the learning. A problem set designed by a true expert can be used to consolidate and integrate knowledge, and to identify and diagnose problems and misunderstandings (most of which are relatively predictable).
Learner independence is a great goal, but it cannot come at the cost of reducing the quality of education, which is why the truly great programmes promote it through student projects of increasing scale and complexity, with increasing student freedom and a supervisor that assists and advises rather than directing.
Your "argument" had no "facts", it was simply an anonymously posted outpouring of hatred and bile for the less fortunate. It's clear you've never attempted to live on benefits for any length of time.
Turns out that while it's good in theory, it's pretty bad in practice.
One: if you can learn the job by doing the job, there's no point in going to uni.
Two: you're reducing the breadth of knowledge imparted for increased depth, so your programmes become increasingly specific, pigeonholing people even further based on a decision made at 17 years old. My decision at 17 was to be a game programmer... thankfully I did a general "computer science" degree, not "game development"... I knew I didn't want to work in a game studio before I graduated, and applied for 9-to-5 work instead.
Three: expertise is a dangerous thing. A functional expert is a guy who knows his tools well enough that he can do pretty much anything with them fairly quickly... but he has a closed toolset. He may not be using the best tool for the job, but he's using the tool well enough and quickly enough that it doesn't matter. Avoiding theory means building a smaller toolset, making your "experts" increasingly suboptimal.
Besides, I suspect that the improved result is just due to the increased test practice: When the students get to the exam, they're already used to the questions from the lectures turned practice and have a better idea of the expected answers because of the feedback they get from the professor and teaching assistants. That does not prove that they have a better or deeper understanding of the material.
Testing consolidates retention of concepts. Practice consolidates testing of concepts. If your test practice does not improve retention of concepts, then you're a bad teacher, and a bad teacher will remain a bad teacher regardless of techniques employed.
The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices.
Quite. Students have always been told to do pre-lecture reading, but it's very rarely enforced. In fact, all my lecturers seemed to run on the assumption that we wouldn't, so lectures gave the information from the ground up, rather than starting where the reading left off.
Of course, that was on the science and engineering campus. A couple of miles away, the humanities students were in the library reading novels, essays and treatises that were due for discussion that week, and if they were behind on their reading, they'd struggle with the lecture.
Nothing new under the sun...
My problem with this project is the problem I have with almost all software projects that I've seen on Kickstarter: The biggest cost is programmer time.
So what? you might ask, it is a programming project after all.
Well, I see programmer after programmer eliminating all personal risk by writing themselves a nice middle-class paycheck at the backers' expense, but at the end of the project, the developer's the one that's going to be getting royalties on future sales. This seems like a bit of a cheat to me; having your cake and eating it.
Yes, it's great to have a guaranteed income, and that's why many content creators work for hire -- the trade off is that we're not gambling our time against future profit, but selling it for immediate recompense. Thousands of projects have been cancelled by the likes of EA, but their salaried programmers are safe, because it's not a gamble.
So why should I or anyone else pay you or Zahn for something that you both could do off your own bat? You sound like you're well enough off to survive for a year without starving, and Zahn's got plenty of money coming in in royalties.
Now it may be that you aren't actually taking any money yourself from this, but I see nothing to say that. Like the investors in Dragon's Den/Shark Tank, I don't like putting money up for someone who hasn't already invested a lot in terms of their own time and/or money...
That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
It's often surprisingly how many names for people or places originated as exonyms, ie names given by an outside group. "Wales" and "Wallonia" (the French-speaking part of Belgium) both come from a Low Germanic root meaning "foreigner". Germany calls itself Deutschland, while the French call it Allemagne and although the Italians call it Germania, they call the people tedeschi.
I don't think humanity would have a problem coming up with exonyms for alien races.
Even someone who takes time over their names and languages can still fall into the pronunciation trap, though. The Lord of the Rings films didn't strictly follow Tolkien's own pronunciation guide, because most readers pronounced the names differently from Tolkien's intention. It's commercially more sensible to please the fans than the author....
As ceresabraciator says further down, this type of word
always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
Imagination is key to all reading, but the text should connect as directly as possible to the reader's imagination -- understanding should be passive with as little effort as possible.
Consider Dai swung his bwyell and chopped the neidr in half. You cannot "hear" that sentence when you read it... unless you speak Welsh, because that's where I nicked all the nouns from. Presumably I'd have described the bwyell as some kind of axe, and the neidr as a serpent-like creature previously... because bwyell is axe, and neidr is snake.
Call a spade a spade, or at worst a Venusian spade.
Did you understand the word despite the typo? I suspect you did... language is resilient that way. It can handle being typed by someone whose right arm is currently immobilised after being in an accident on a level crossing.
Even if all I had to go on was the names of his races, I'd pass. Rule 1 of writing alien words: make sure your readers have some way of guessing at the correct proonunciation. "Modhri"? I read that as an Irish typo. "Kalixiri"? Basque... and how many people speak both Basque and Irish? "Zhirrzh", umm... that's like a hybrid of Chinese pinyin and eithe Italian or Spanish. "Qanska"? No idea. Is the Q a K sound, a KW sound or a glottal click?? I've no idea. "and Pom" Wow... one English speakers would all pronounce uniformly!
Foreign sounds work well on film because we can hear it, even if we don't understand it... foreign writing fails because if we can't understand it, we can't hear it.
Anyhow, I don't only have the names of his races to go on... I also read the Admiral Thrawn trilogy. It was rubbish. And it was full of unpronounceable words, too....
Pharma companies make boatloads of money selling lifelong drugs to HIV sufferers. The last thing they want is a cure that'd kill the cash cow.
OTOH, have you any idea what would happen to the share price of the first company to produce a cure for AIDS? Any individuals in a position to suppress it would also likely stand to profit from a bonanza share options windfall. And suppressing it without shareholder approval would be potentially criminal, and definitely actionable in the civil courts.
actual scenario: the consumer bought a laptop from best buy. he assumed the laptop came with a charger, but it didn't because that's what the manufacturer decided to do, and said so on the box (perhaps it was in small letters). So user sues best buy because the product didn't meet his expectations. Just call Saul!
Except in this case, the box said "everything you need" in big letters and "charger not included" in small letters. No amount of small print can justify the big print being wrong.
Impatience has nothing to do with it... he's not complaining that he's not getting the goods delivered now, but that he's not getting the goods deliveredat all.
I seriously doubt this was apple!s decision. Wrong party to sue.
Very basic principle of consumer law: sale is a contract between retailer and customer. If I buy a phone and the box is missing a vital component (perhaps even the handset), it's the retailer's responsibility to supply me with the missing goods -- he can't just fob me off with "that's what the manufacturer sent us".
Well, very easy to disprove that theory. There are, after all, many unfortunate cases of people, like me, very deficient in these sympathetic mirror neurons that are/were totally unable to learn from others. Yet, i still had language. Granted, i did not understand words where the energetic purpose behind them created a specific subjective kinesthethic 'feeling', e.g., looking down, stand tall, chin up, stiff upper lip,etc...
"Very deficient" is still very different from "totally deficient" -- the amount required for any base function is unclear. Besides, the role of the mirror neuron system in ASDs (which I'm assuming you're referring to) is still very much open to debate.
Nice to see a new generation learning things I studied in school 20 years ago. No, this isn't news, but y'all are children so it's all good.
Oh sorry... I forgot that McGurk had access to brain-activity-detecting electrodes and pinpointed the parts of the brain that experienced his illusion. Oh wait, he didn't, did he. The summary isn't brilliant, but this is news... they've shown that the McGurk effect feeds into the auditory channel, rather than simply overriding the audio signal at one of the later, more specialised language-processing areas.
It's all about ability to take cues from another persons face and be able to replicate them. If you can't put yourself 'inside' another person to learn a physical motion, then this 'illusion' won't work on you.
There is a theory that all language relies on reconstructing the speaker's movements, employing the mirror neurons. The most sophisticated model of this is V S Ramachandran's notion of language being a combination of mirror neuron action and synaesthesia (where stimulus from one sense maifests itself in another sense -- eg seeing colours tied to musical notes). The important thing about synaesthesia in Ramachandran's work is that he considers it a normal state of affairs, and demonstrates this with examples of metaphors embedded into language -- food tasting "sharp" and sounds being "bright". This study starts to support similar conclusions.
The problem is that the marketing is smoke and mirrors: the defect count isn't absolute and objective, it's the number of errors that the software detects. I don't doubt that projects using Coverity during the lifecycle end up with less Coverity-detected defects than projects that don't, but as metrics go, it's pretty hugely biased.
The "wrong order" is any order that fails to get people on the floor. I've been at plenty of parties where the music doesn't "build" properly, and it really kills the atmosphere.
To clarify, if its just a list of songs, it shouldn't be a copyright problem, as in MoS has no copyright claim.
Not true -- UK copyright law has specific provisions to protect anthologies. It's termed "typographical arrangements". The idea is that if I spend a year compiling a book of medieval poetry (all individually out of copyright, obviously), I get a monopoly over the book as a collection, so no low-rent outfit can produce a cheap edition to undercut you and steal your market.
It's a good law, in that it implicitly recognised that an anthology deserves less protection than a truly original work: the term is restricted to 25 years from first publication.
What I don't know is if anyone has established by legal precedent whether a compilation CD is considered a typographical arrangement or not, but that will be the crux of Ministry of Sound's case.
UK copyright law has a specific category for "typographical arrangements" that is a right to a particular anthologisation. The classic example would be the church hymn book. I am allowed to compile as many different hymn books with different selections of hymns, and different selections of verses for each hymn, but I couldn't just copy someone's selection hymn for hymn, verse for verse. This recognises the time and effort expended on making the selection, and guarantees that the person who takes that time and effort isn't going to get undercut by some low-rent publishing outfit who immediately clones his product. (The fact that many of these hymnal publishers also engage in the morally dubious practice of "copyright pollution" by making minor alterations to the hymns themselves is by-the-bye.)
One of the bestbits about this particular provision is that it implicitly recognises that a typographical arrangement is intrinsically less valuable than an original work -- they are protected for 25 years from the year of publication.
I've been asking Python programmers for the last year what an else clause on a for loop meant. Last Friday, one gave the correct answer for the first time. Why do I know what it means? Because a person who wrote some (and shipped) some code using it apparently didn't...
I didn't know that structure... it should be banned... it's totally "un-pythonic" in that it annihilates the principle of readability. Kill it with fire.
If you're using a "dumb" text editor, then don't complain about it.
Your argument is back-to-front. Python has whitespace because of dumb editors. Guido's rationale was simple: when writing C in a dumb editor, there is redundancy of braces (for the computer) and spaces (for the human). There is the danger that the two might not match, and that a human debugging the code would misread the structure by following the indentation levels instead of the braces.
And here lies the problem: Guido's decision was for the sake of "plain text" and dumb editors, but the end result was to force the use of smart editors. Hell, even the "official" Python IDE, IDLE, isn't good enough IDEs that have block hiding have, as a consequence, block highlighting, a side-effect of which is the explicit marking of block start and end... that same redundancy that Guido wanted rid of to begin with.
I bet you're using a code editor with block highlighting...
You could simulate an office move with a couple of banks of desks. Kids race in teams to move their alloted PC to the next desk, cable it up, boot it, and print out a test print (I recommend a "chequered flag" as the print job. Although the risk assessment may go against you. Also, you might not have any working PCs by the end of the day....