The creation of information is not reversible. Thought requires the use of energy. So does any process by which data is stored. Then, energy is required to maintain the data and information, and energy is required to remove the information. If the process of information creation were truly reversible, then it would evolve energy in the process.
Consider writing, which is one of the most reliable ways to store information. Composing something meaningful evolves heat because the person writing had to move a utensil across a page. Erasing this information also evolves heat because it requires the destruction of the pattern through some process of motion.
We produce Urea because it's a much safer thing to transport through the bloodstream than the ammonia which is produced by the body's metabolization of proteins.
Why should I learn how to use LaTeX for something that I'm inserting into undergraduate lab reports(what I originally needed equations for) or into handouts for students? Pretend that I don't have a lot of time to learn an entirely new environment and method and philosophy for text editing and then examine your argument for switching to LaTeX.
Suggesting that I learn LaTeX is similar to suggesting that an accountant use Perl to do computations in a spreadsheet.
Menus are an archaic throwback to a time where we had to press keyboard combinations to access anything. They aren't well organized for mouse users, but the fact that they're organized in an "up-down/left-right" fashion makes them perfect for people who use the keyboard to navigate. I find the ribbons make me much faster at formatting documents than the old system of menus. What's really nice is that I don't have to enter 4 sub menus just to insert a math equation or a symbol into my work. And the visual table insertion tool is really useful for those of us who don't want to think about how many, just how it should look.
Seriously, if you keep one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, it's much faster to create equations and documents in Word than in OpenOffice. I used to be a staunch OpenOffice supporter, but it's nice to not have to memorize keywords and keypress combos just to be halfway efficient at writing documents.
Teachers actually are specifically afforded the right to keep video-taped copies of television shows for up to 30 days for educational purposes. And if you do it right, teaching with a television show can be far more insightful and relevant than teaching using a textbook. It requires a teacher to point out the relevance and connection to the curriculum though. So if your teacher just had you guys sit through an hour of recorded film without any sort of processing or output then you probably didn't learn a whole lot from it.
Incidentally, teachers are also allowed to make copies of manuscripts, provided that the copy doesn't significantly reduce the value of the original work, that the copy is for educational purposes, that it would be difficult to obtain original copies of the manuscript, and that the copies made are destroyed within 60 days.
I disagree with your assertion that Youtube videos can't be educationally relevant. Try getting the equipment to actually have students go outside and observe the sun in a high school. Then try checking out these clips:
And I defy you to find a school where their library is as well-stocked with information on diverse subjects as the internet. Most school libraries have vast sections of Juvenille literature, and are so small that the Dewey Decimal system is still relevant and useful to them. The librarian is more likely to point the students to the internet, because the source material one can get from a good google search or series of searches is far more timely, more likely to be relevant, and much quicker to access.
I really think you actually need to do some research about the educational uses of the Internet before spouting off the opinion that video is a pointless time-waster and that books are the only real source of useful information.
I can tell you from first hand experience that if you want to improve the quality of education every child recieves, the first thing you can start with is bringing the teacher to student ratio from 25-30 down to 15-20. Quite honestly, most classrooms I've been in can barely support the 30 -35 students in them. In the school I'm student teaching in, they're looking at a 40:1 or 50:1 ratio next year due to budget cuts. I can't imagine doing anything but lecturing in an environment like that. And it'll be impossible to grade more than a few things a week with 250-300 students.
The biggest issue with the school that I'm teaching in is that ratio, because it means I can't move around my classroom or arrange students in any way other than a block-style. The block-style seating arrangement means I can't circulate to assess my students as effectively. It means that I'm stuck at the front of the room talking at students. It makes it very difficult to group students for effective instruction. In short, it screws me out of a lot of strategies I could use to more effectively teach.
It also means that my students are discouraged from talking with one-another about the material, which means that they can't scaffold for each other as effectively.
How does the author propose we detect whether a 10-digit number is a telephone number, or even that it has been shifted in such a manner? The more sophisticated ciphers seem like they would be easier to detect than 10-coding simply because of the nature of telephone numbers as containing little specific information.
The real question is, how many different permutations of 10-digit telephone numbers in suspect areas exist, and how many of these numbers can be decoded from the simply coded telephone number. We know now that it's ten-coded, but even if we assumed some other numerical shift, or even a digit-dependent shift of some kind, we might still be looking at a huge number of possibilities.
I challenge him or her to answer the following questions about the following ten-digit number: 2213684949
Is it a telephone number? Is it encoded in some way? How is it encoded? How do we know that we have guessed the encoding method correctly? How can we reverse the decoding?
The people who try to trivialize this sort of work are ignorant, and have little to no training in the fields that they lambast.
And on the subject of pay for a different manner of service, why do we try to attract people qualified to teach Mathematics and Science by raising the bar for the qualifications but keeping the pay at the same level for 10 years?
Why don't we just fill a bunch of concrete containers with the stuff and drop them into a subduction zone? That way the waste will just get eaten by the earth. The bonus is that it will be below the water table out of which we drink.
How is this any different than the gamble with our descendants lives from burning oil and coal? We are perpetuating an economy predicated on releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere hoping that someday someone else will figure out how to harness clean energy sources efficiently. How is dropping waste into piles and letting it contaminate our groundwater any different from burning something and releasing waste into the atmosphere? At least we can move the nuclear waste. How do you propose we contain the soot and radioactive materials released in a coal plant?
There was a similar case in which a young girl was accused of posessing illegal drugs, and was forced to submit to a strip search. The search turned up nothing. However a court found that the search was legal because school administrators are only held to a standard of "reasonable suspicion," rather than "just cause." Strip searches are generally considered illegal searches, however they can be upheld in a court of law under four standards in the case of New Jersey v. T.L.O..
In the case of Angela Lee Williams, her property was searched to no avail over a period of a few days, turning up nothing. This search was conducted on the basis of an accusation by another student. The searches finally culminated in a strip search, by a female administrator with a female secretary present, which only required the student to disrobe to the extent that she was still wearing her underwear. The officials found nothing. Williams sued, and lost, based on the standards established in T.L.O..
Williams was accused of posessing a substance the school had previously identified as being problematic. The search was justified based on the accusation and based on the prevalence of substance abuse at the school.
I'm curious as to what case you're referring? Could you link me to it?
Agree. Most people don't do well without at least some kind of direction and a way to get there. In fact, there was a study done a few years back linked on Slashdot which demonstrated that people were more creative when they were faced with some kind of box or challenge to think around. So enter Problem-Based Learning which seeks to provide students with a challenge and test their ability to reason about it and provide a solution. There is no correct solution, so the exercise is divergent rather than convergent.
The reason BOSE sounds so shitty has to do with the way that they utilize the back-blast from the rear end of the speaker. While most cabinets focus on trying to dampen the sound coming off the back of the speaker, a BOSE system actually attempts to channel that sound so that it comes out the front side of the speaker, resulting in more sound volume for the same power. Unfortunately the channel they use has to be tuned to a certain frequency, and they tune it to the middle end. The result is that a BOSE system won't have as good of a high or low end because the back-blast is tuned to the middle end and therefore increasing the volume on that end.
The problem is that the stance you take ignores the whole concept of barter which has been part of human existence since a guy first decided to sell apples. Only with the advent of mass marketing has it been acceptable for a company to entirely dictate the terms of the apple sale. Before, I could walk into a store and ask them if they'll sell me that package of apples for $.80, and it would be totally okay. There are markets in other countries where this is still considered acceptable, and where merchants price items specifically so that they can haggle down to a reasonable price. The fact that we accept without question that companies just sell us service for a flat rate means that they don't have to compete as directly with each other.
Furthermore, we don't believe in our unalienable right to those apples. We believe that we have the right to negotiate the price of those apples or seek apples elsewhere. Reasonable people realise that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to part with anything without a fair exchange. We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness. Maybe you're the one being irrational? Isn't it a bit irrational to expect people not to negotiate for anything at all?
Case in point, I asked a bank teller if one of their fees was reasonable, and she promptly removed it after thinking about it herself. It's okay to want to negotiate.
Definitely the latter. The review is apparently misleading in some aspects. I do enjoy reading the discussion that my post prompted however. It's very interesting.
Well yeah, but the way the book is described, it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all. "Oh, I'm never going to get my 10,000 hours in because I don't have the good fortune of having a good computer terminal and the societal situation where my skills will be needed." The Fundamental Attribution Error is the other side of the fine line that needs walking. On one side we have the idea that everyone can outstrip everyone else through sheer force of will and intelligence. On the other side we have the idea that there is no way to control our lives and that everyone who succeeds in life is simply lucky enough to be in conditions that allow them to succeed. The latter mistaken view would result in people waiting their whole lives for an opportunity instead of seeking one out. Yes, conditions are important, but you have to seek out conditions for your success rather than just standing around waiting for it to happen.
It sounds like the author neglects to mention that Bill Gates put in those 10,000 hours through sheer tenacity. Programming is actually hard work, and so is self-teaching. There was no luck involved in the things that determined his personality, unless you want to go so far as to say that everything we do is through sheer chance and that there is no real cognition. Cognition is a deterministic process, not a wholly unpredictable process. For whatever reason Bill Gates fixated on computer programming. You might even say that he decided to study computer programming.
As a future teacher, I would love for my students to think for themselves. But I'm not sure that I can do that without bursting a lot of bubbles. Many people think that it's okay to coast through life without ever accomplishing anything. I would still be one of those people if it weren't for a Physics instructor that I had who lit a fire under my ass. I plan to light a fire under the collective butts of all my students. All I can hope for is that their parents don't try to light a fire under mine.
*Read on for a mildly confusing rant.*
While we're on the subject, what ever happened to people researching products that they buy and understanding the merits of a particular product? Has anyone ever bought a tool, for example, based on a particular design? It seems to me that if we want to change how people think we need to focus their attention on their buying habits. I've bought some pretty expensive and poorly designed tools. I've also bought cheaper tools and have found that they are constructed much better than the more expensive tools(Irwin versus Stanley).
For example, there are probably 5 or 6 different designs for Cat's Paws depending on what you need. One even comes with a beer bottle opener and a socket for changing saw blades. But the best cats paw I've used is dirt simple and cheap. All it is is a couple of flat V-shaped pieces of metal connected by a steel bar. It doesn't destroy boards like the narrower designs, and it also doesn't break nail heads as easily.
The day that we said it was okay to make decisions on instinct based on marketing was the day that we killed reason and critical thinking. And the beer bottle opener is definitely an instinct feature.
*Rant over.*
The dearth of critical thinking and reflection in our culture will be our downfall. Nobody thinks about what they do anymore, they just do it and expect things to change. Things often do not change if behavior does not change, and behavior doesn't change without conscious effort.
I agree with you. There are these electronic touch-sensitive whiteboards called SmartBoards that can be drawn on with pens. Teachers can even draw basic shapes by tapping the button for the shape and drawing it on the screen. Educationally this is a huge leap forward from drawing on a tablet or controlling a presentation with a mouse, considering that the teacher can remain at the same place in the room as they were before they started using computers for presentations. Being able to stand in front of the whiteboard means being able to move around the room, and also means that one can again use body language to communicate during direct instruction.
Also, imagine how cool it would be for a teacher to be able to pass a sheet of plastic out to groups to reuse instead of butcher paper. Large E-ink displays would be a boon to education.
My doctor put me on Paxil when I was 13 or 14 to treat depression. I'm pretty sure that the Paxil was the sole reason that I got more depressed when I was a teenager. I wish someone had tried something besides just medicating me, because I would have had a better childhood as a result, and there was honestly no emergency with respect to my affect or behavior. One day I just quit taking it.
Oh, okay, well there goes that part of my argument. One could argue that there is no take-backsies if you fuck up and imprison someone for a good part of their natural life either, but that's immaterial, considering that my principal argument is about money. Due process is important to me too, so I can see your point.
I'd rather have them put down because they're expensive to keep and likely to perform similar crimes in the future. Plus, I'd be more inclined to accept your point of view if 87 months weren't a little over 7 years. Considering the life-changing impact that being a ward of the juvenile penal system has, 87 months is a tiny little sliver of their lives. In a perfect world they would have to spend the rest of their lives making restitution. I suppose being in with the adult criminals is as good as being in with the juvenile criminals, though. Either way they get to see what kind of culture they've exposed their "charges" to.
In an ideal world perhaps every judge should spend a night a month observing a jail so that they understand better the environment to which they're sentencing people.
Slashdot Mirror
The creation of information is not reversible. Thought requires the use of energy. So does any process by which data is stored. Then, energy is required to maintain the data and information, and energy is required to remove the information. If the process of information creation were truly reversible, then it would evolve energy in the process.
Consider writing, which is one of the most reliable ways to store information. Composing something meaningful evolves heat because the person writing had to move a utensil across a page. Erasing this information also evolves heat because it requires the destruction of the pattern through some process of motion.
We produce Urea because it's a much safer thing to transport through the bloodstream than the ammonia which is produced by the body's metabolization of proteins.
Good luck getting anything built, assembled, or shipped without us.
We, the undersigned, do hereby agree with this post and would move forward in our support of it.
Why should I learn how to use LaTeX for something that I'm inserting into undergraduate lab reports(what I originally needed equations for) or into handouts for students? Pretend that I don't have a lot of time to learn an entirely new environment and method and philosophy for text editing and then examine your argument for switching to LaTeX.
Suggesting that I learn LaTeX is similar to suggesting that an accountant use Perl to do computations in a spreadsheet.
I think it's amazing that you can call me a shill without looking through my posting history.
Menus are an archaic throwback to a time where we had to press keyboard combinations to access anything. They aren't well organized for mouse users, but the fact that they're organized in an "up-down/left-right" fashion makes them perfect for people who use the keyboard to navigate. I find the ribbons make me much faster at formatting documents than the old system of menus. What's really nice is that I don't have to enter 4 sub menus just to insert a math equation or a symbol into my work. And the visual table insertion tool is really useful for those of us who don't want to think about how many, just how it should look.
Seriously, if you keep one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, it's much faster to create equations and documents in Word than in OpenOffice. I used to be a staunch OpenOffice supporter, but it's nice to not have to memorize keywords and keypress combos just to be halfway efficient at writing documents.
$200.00 is $200 well spent for me.
Teachers actually are specifically afforded the right to keep video-taped copies of television shows for up to 30 days for educational purposes. And if you do it right, teaching with a television show can be far more insightful and relevant than teaching using a textbook. It requires a teacher to point out the relevance and connection to the curriculum though. So if your teacher just had you guys sit through an hour of recorded film without any sort of processing or output then you probably didn't learn a whole lot from it.
Incidentally, teachers are also allowed to make copies of manuscripts, provided that the copy doesn't significantly reduce the value of the original work, that the copy is for educational purposes, that it would be difficult to obtain original copies of the manuscript, and that the copies made are destroyed within 60 days.
I disagree with your assertion that Youtube videos can't be educationally relevant. Try getting the equipment to actually have students go outside and observe the sun in a high school. Then try checking out these clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB7W385a-tM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbGD_9aPTK0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwn_Y3990wQ&feature=related
And I defy you to find a school where their library is as well-stocked with information on diverse subjects as the internet. Most school libraries have vast sections of Juvenille literature, and are so small that the Dewey Decimal system is still relevant and useful to them. The librarian is more likely to point the students to the internet, because the source material one can get from a good google search or series of searches is far more timely, more likely to be relevant, and much quicker to access.
I really think you actually need to do some research about the educational uses of the Internet before spouting off the opinion that video is a pointless time-waster and that books are the only real source of useful information.
I can tell you from first hand experience that if you want to improve the quality of education every child recieves, the first thing you can start with is bringing the teacher to student ratio from 25-30 down to 15-20. Quite honestly, most classrooms I've been in can barely support the 30 -35 students in them. In the school I'm student teaching in, they're looking at a 40:1 or 50:1 ratio next year due to budget cuts. I can't imagine doing anything but lecturing in an environment like that. And it'll be impossible to grade more than a few things a week with 250-300 students.
The biggest issue with the school that I'm teaching in is that ratio, because it means I can't move around my classroom or arrange students in any way other than a block-style. The block-style seating arrangement means I can't circulate to assess my students as effectively. It means that I'm stuck at the front of the room talking at students. It makes it very difficult to group students for effective instruction. In short, it screws me out of a lot of strategies I could use to more effectively teach.
It also means that my students are discouraged from talking with one-another about the material, which means that they can't scaffold for each other as effectively.
Exactly.
How does the author propose we detect whether a 10-digit number is a telephone number, or even that it has been shifted in such a manner? The more sophisticated ciphers seem like they would be easier to detect than 10-coding simply because of the nature of telephone numbers as containing little specific information.
The real question is, how many different permutations of 10-digit telephone numbers in suspect areas exist, and how many of these numbers can be decoded from the simply coded telephone number. We know now that it's ten-coded, but even if we assumed some other numerical shift, or even a digit-dependent shift of some kind, we might still be looking at a huge number of possibilities.
I challenge him or her to answer the following questions about the following ten-digit number:
2213684949
Is it a telephone number?
Is it encoded in some way?
How is it encoded?
How do we know that we have guessed the encoding method correctly?
How can we reverse the decoding?
The people who try to trivialize this sort of work are ignorant, and have little to no training in the fields that they lambast.
And on the subject of pay for a different manner of service, why do we try to attract people qualified to teach Mathematics and Science by raising the bar for the qualifications but keeping the pay at the same level for 10 years?
Because taxpayers want something for nothing.
When your User ID is lower than mine then you're not new here anymore. And in Soviet Russia, Here News You!
Why don't we just fill a bunch of concrete containers with the stuff and drop them into a subduction zone? That way the waste will just get eaten by the earth. The bonus is that it will be below the water table out of which we drink.
How is this any different than the gamble with our descendants lives from burning oil and coal? We are perpetuating an economy predicated on releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere hoping that someday someone else will figure out how to harness clean energy sources efficiently. How is dropping waste into piles and letting it contaminate our groundwater any different from burning something and releasing waste into the atmosphere? At least we can move the nuclear waste. How do you propose we contain the soot and radioactive materials released in a coal plant?
There was a similar case in which a young girl was accused of posessing illegal drugs, and was forced to submit to a strip search. The search turned up nothing. However a court found that the search was legal because school administrators are only held to a standard of "reasonable suspicion," rather than "just cause." Strip searches are generally considered illegal searches, however they can be upheld in a court of law under four standards in the case of New Jersey v. T.L.O..
In the case of Angela Lee Williams, her property was searched to no avail over a period of a few days, turning up nothing. This search was conducted on the basis of an accusation by another student. The searches finally culminated in a strip search, by a female administrator with a female secretary present, which only required the student to disrobe to the extent that she was still wearing her underwear. The officials found nothing. Williams sued, and lost, based on the standards established in T.L.O..
Williams was accused of posessing a substance the school had previously identified as being problematic. The search was justified based on the accusation and based on the prevalence of substance abuse at the school.
I'm curious as to what case you're referring? Could you link me to it?
Agree. Most people don't do well without at least some kind of direction and a way to get there. In fact, there was a study done a few years back linked on Slashdot which demonstrated that people were more creative when they were faced with some kind of box or challenge to think around. So enter Problem-Based Learning which seeks to provide students with a challenge and test their ability to reason about it and provide a solution. There is no correct solution, so the exercise is divergent rather than convergent.
The reason BOSE sounds so shitty has to do with the way that they utilize the back-blast from the rear end of the speaker. While most cabinets focus on trying to dampen the sound coming off the back of the speaker, a BOSE system actually attempts to channel that sound so that it comes out the front side of the speaker, resulting in more sound volume for the same power. Unfortunately the channel they use has to be tuned to a certain frequency, and they tune it to the middle end. The result is that a BOSE system won't have as good of a high or low end because the back-blast is tuned to the middle end and therefore increasing the volume on that end.
The problem is that the stance you take ignores the whole concept of barter which has been part of human existence since a guy first decided to sell apples. Only with the advent of mass marketing has it been acceptable for a company to entirely dictate the terms of the apple sale. Before, I could walk into a store and ask them if they'll sell me that package of apples for $.80, and it would be totally okay. There are markets in other countries where this is still considered acceptable, and where merchants price items specifically so that they can haggle down to a reasonable price. The fact that we accept without question that companies just sell us service for a flat rate means that they don't have to compete as directly with each other.
Furthermore, we don't believe in our unalienable right to those apples. We believe that we have the right to negotiate the price of those apples or seek apples elsewhere. Reasonable people realise that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to part with anything without a fair exchange. We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness. Maybe you're the one being irrational? Isn't it a bit irrational to expect people not to negotiate for anything at all?
Case in point, I asked a bank teller if one of their fees was reasonable, and she promptly removed it after thinking about it herself. It's okay to want to negotiate.
Definitely the latter. The review is apparently misleading in some aspects. I do enjoy reading the discussion that my post prompted however. It's very interesting.
Well yeah, but the way the book is described, it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all. "Oh, I'm never going to get my 10,000 hours in because I don't have the good fortune of having a good computer terminal and the societal situation where my skills will be needed." The Fundamental Attribution Error is the other side of the fine line that needs walking. On one side we have the idea that everyone can outstrip everyone else through sheer force of will and intelligence. On the other side we have the idea that there is no way to control our lives and that everyone who succeeds in life is simply lucky enough to be in conditions that allow them to succeed. The latter mistaken view would result in people waiting their whole lives for an opportunity instead of seeking one out. Yes, conditions are important, but you have to seek out conditions for your success rather than just standing around waiting for it to happen.
It sounds like the author neglects to mention that Bill Gates put in those 10,000 hours through sheer tenacity. Programming is actually hard work, and so is self-teaching. There was no luck involved in the things that determined his personality, unless you want to go so far as to say that everything we do is through sheer chance and that there is no real cognition. Cognition is a deterministic process, not a wholly unpredictable process. For whatever reason Bill Gates fixated on computer programming. You might even say that he decided to study computer programming.
As a future teacher, I would love for my students to think for themselves. But I'm not sure that I can do that without bursting a lot of bubbles. Many people think that it's okay to coast through life without ever accomplishing anything. I would still be one of those people if it weren't for a Physics instructor that I had who lit a fire under my ass. I plan to light a fire under the collective butts of all my students. All I can hope for is that their parents don't try to light a fire under mine.
*Read on for a mildly confusing rant.*
While we're on the subject, what ever happened to people researching products that they buy and understanding the merits of a particular product? Has anyone ever bought a tool, for example, based on a particular design? It seems to me that if we want to change how people think we need to focus their attention on their buying habits. I've bought some pretty expensive and poorly designed tools. I've also bought cheaper tools and have found that they are constructed much better than the more expensive tools(Irwin versus Stanley).
For example, there are probably 5 or 6 different designs for Cat's Paws depending on what you need. One even comes with a beer bottle opener and a socket for changing saw blades. But the best cats paw I've used is dirt simple and cheap. All it is is a couple of flat V-shaped pieces of metal connected by a steel bar. It doesn't destroy boards like the narrower designs, and it also doesn't break nail heads as easily.
The day that we said it was okay to make decisions on instinct based on marketing was the day that we killed reason and critical thinking. And the beer bottle opener is definitely an instinct feature.
*Rant over.*
The dearth of critical thinking and reflection in our culture will be our downfall. Nobody thinks about what they do anymore, they just do it and expect things to change. Things often do not change if behavior does not change, and behavior doesn't change without conscious effort.
Don't you love people who rant?
I agree with you. There are these electronic touch-sensitive whiteboards called SmartBoards that can be drawn on with pens. Teachers can even draw basic shapes by tapping the button for the shape and drawing it on the screen. Educationally this is a huge leap forward from drawing on a tablet or controlling a presentation with a mouse, considering that the teacher can remain at the same place in the room as they were before they started using computers for presentations. Being able to stand in front of the whiteboard means being able to move around the room, and also means that one can again use body language to communicate during direct instruction.
Also, imagine how cool it would be for a teacher to be able to pass a sheet of plastic out to groups to reuse instead of butcher paper. Large E-ink displays would be a boon to education.
My doctor put me on Paxil when I was 13 or 14 to treat depression. I'm pretty sure that the Paxil was the sole reason that I got more depressed when I was a teenager. I wish someone had tried something besides just medicating me, because I would have had a better childhood as a result, and there was honestly no emergency with respect to my affect or behavior. One day I just quit taking it.
Oh, okay, well there goes that part of my argument. One could argue that there is no take-backsies if you fuck up and imprison someone for a good part of their natural life either, but that's immaterial, considering that my principal argument is about money. Due process is important to me too, so I can see your point.
I'd rather have them put down because they're expensive to keep and likely to perform similar crimes in the future. Plus, I'd be more inclined to accept your point of view if 87 months weren't a little over 7 years. Considering the life-changing impact that being a ward of the juvenile penal system has, 87 months is a tiny little sliver of their lives. In a perfect world they would have to spend the rest of their lives making restitution. I suppose being in with the adult criminals is as good as being in with the juvenile criminals, though. Either way they get to see what kind of culture they've exposed their "charges" to.
In an ideal world perhaps every judge should spend a night a month observing a jail so that they understand better the environment to which they're sentencing people.