And you are missing out on the people who need some time to come up with a brilliant solution. Or who work best when you give them the problem and leave them alone instead of keeping them standing in the spotlight.
Throughout my career, I've met a couple people that I personally would have never hired based on my impression of them - but who were easily my better in the skills that actually mattered for their jobs.
I'm with you on the examples you mention - simply asking you the answer is a great example of lateral thinking. Unless, of course, it was canned because puzzles have become a standard job interview trick and there are tons of researches on how to beat them leaving the best impression (and everyone who hasn't lived under a rock for the past decade nows that blurting out the correct answer isn't it).
If I can make you value the positives, but discard the negatives, I think I've done you a service. Because if you filter out people based on puzzles, you're hurting your company.
Puzzles test one thing: Your ability to solve puzzles. The assumption that this will translate into or is representative of any real-world skills is just that - an assumption. It may turn out to be true or not, but AFAIK there is no conclusive evidence pointing either way so far.
But - the dark secret is that this is how the business world works. Almost the entire "wisdom" of business is this kind of anecdotal evidence, cute ideas, mantras spoken by authority figures and crap written in long-discredited books. It's a miracle the whole thing works at all.
And yes, I am speaking from personal experience. I have seen companies being reorganized because the CEO (and those around him) believe that there can only be x viable companies in this market, so they need to enlarge market share because only the first x will survive. No evidence whatsoever, it's an "everyone knows that..." point. I've seen a company dead-set on cutting costs not because they weren't profitable, but because someone somewhere said that their cost-per-employee ratio was worse than that of their competitors. I've seen downsizings because the employee-to-customer ratio was higher than some "benchmark" value.
In this, like in many cases, someone somewhere made up a number that may or may not have made sense in his or her specific context. Then someone else who didn't quite get it took it and ran with it. Same for puzzles and assessment centers - they serve a specific purpose in a specific context, and if you know how to use them, they can be great tools. Like with all tools, just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you need to hit everyone who comes through the door with it.
It's not any more unbelievable than ruining your smart phone business by picking the worst available OS option and publicly announcing you are running with it no matter what.
MS was never in the phone business. They had a version of their OS that could run on phones, but it was obvious to anyone without massive brain damage that it had never been designed for a phone. Have you ever seen anyone struggle with windows on a phone and wondered why the heck they put up with and interface that was built for a 17", 4:3 screen and keyboard/mouse input? It was clearly the MS equivalent of something we geeks know very well: The proof-of-concept that yes, you can install Linux on your fridge. It's not good for anything because it lacks both the input and the ouput facilities to do anything useful, and nobody bothers writing those because the cool part was making it run at all.
Most of the things happening in the big business world are amazing for the fact that they're not life sentence offences. The media only reports on a fraction of them.
That really was the next logical step. They've already ruined any hopes of Nokia ever getting back into the game with their mole who turned them on windows mobile as the OS of choice, now taking official control of the mobile arm of Nokia really is nothing new, it's just going the whole nine yards.
Most likely future: MS will pour a couple billions into it, like they did with the xbox, bleeding money quarter after quarter. They will be waiting (and bleeding money) until their competitors make a blunder (like Sony did with the PS3) and then stand ready to take over market share with their 2nd rate product simply because it's there and it has marketing muscle. They will probably buy up a couple App providers along the way and make them windows-mobile-exclusive (hello, Bungie).
Why? Because Balmer has no vision and isn't the guy to come up with anything resembling a new strategy. We will see what we've seen them do virtually everywhere else.
Because economy 101 is by and large a purely theoretical science with little to no relation to the real world, which at times resembles what you learn there, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
No, I am serious. You are being taught all these nice things about free market and how prices set at the equillibrium point between supply and demand, yadda, yadda. Don't forget to read the fine print. The "free market" and "equillibrium price" model assumes such highly realistic things as full transparency for everyone and a non-limited number of sellers and buyers. Nowhere in the real world has anything like that ever been seen.
The real world is full of price-fixing, limited supply or demand, cooperation deals, loss-leader sales, externalities, scale effects, psychological price-setting (the reason everything costs *.99 or *.95) and so on and so forth.
China is huge - four to five times the population of the USA. Any attempt to clean up existing problems while at the same time realising record growth year-after-year is a mean task. So concentrating on making new things future-proof is the best approach. If you are good there, it may turn out that replacing the old, dirty stuff is better than modernizing it.
And the chinese government, for all the faults it has, is certainly one of the best governments in regards to long-term planning right now. Other than most of the career politicians in the west, they regularily look beyond the next election.
No, you don't have to become a nanny state to address family problems. Parents have to address their children, and society has to address the family unit on a much larger level. The state cannot function as surrogate normalized family.
You are missing the point. I am not talking about what you call the "nanny state" (which, quite frankly, americans tend to call any government that gives even the smallest bit of damn about its population).
If the purpose of school is to teach, then things that interfere with that purpose need to be addressed. If pupils fail because of family problems, the school needs to take those into account. If the issues make teaching in general impossible because, say, the kids don't have the discipline required to attend a class, then that needs to be taught in school, because otherwise the rest of it is just a waste of time.
It can't for very long without giving rise to despotism. You might recall some failures on your side of the pond.
Anectodes do not make a proof. The scandinavian countries are counter examples for extremely "socialst" states by US standards, and a very strong school system - which has collected world-wide praise for decades. And no despotism in sight.
At what point was the ineffectiveness of the talking-head model not obviously deficient?
Hinsight is always 20/20. Obviously, there was a point where this was not obvious, else it would never have become a method.
It was *already* obvious that if you spend time in as small groups as possible, educational achievement directly increases.
Almost, but not entirely true. There is an optimum size and it is not one. "as small as possible" is not 100% true. Yes, most classes are too large. But for most cases, a small group is better than working alone. Also, social skills (part of the hidden curriculum) need a certain group size.
It's clear at this point you don't understand homeschooling.
Not as well as someone who's actually doing it, for obvious reasons. But like most things, understanding is not binary. That I don't understand 100% does not mean I don't understand at all.
specifically the 10 Commandments, upon which the understanding of Western law resides
Err... no. Western law resides largely on roman law. The 10 commandments are not laws in even the most forgiving definition of the word. They are commandments.
And even with the extended explanation, I still disagree completely. Lawless people don't need laws, and we don't need laws to deal with them. All we need is police. All the "righteous" (however you define it, let's just assume that's not the issue) people already agree that murder, stealing, etc. are bad. The purpose of law is to guard the good people - but not against the bad, because the bad will ignore the law anyways. To guard against mistakes, temptation and itself - a large part of the law is defining violations clearly so innocents aren't punished.
Hopefully, reason will prevail and German law will change for the better, as it has in the past.
Unlikely. Even the European Court of Human Rights has upheld the german law on this question. Politically, there is almost no support. Most homeschoolers or those who'd like it are religious extremists who don't want to have their kids get basic sex education. In the US that may have enough public support to change laws, in Germany people like that are ridiculed and considered idiots, fanatics, dangerous or all
One measure of the security of a password is the amount of time it would take to compromise it as compared to its useful lifetime. Assuming the password database is stolen today, would someone be able to compromise your password before you changed it?
Yes, because the chances are about 99% that it is stored in either a) plaintext b) a cryptographic one-way hash
in case a) time to compromise is zero, in case b) time to compromise is so troublesome that nobody will bother, they'll just hack the next website until a == true.
Well, if they are really determined, and the hashes are not salted, they may throw up the most common 100 or so passwords using a rainbow table, but that's it.
If my password was good so far, it is good in the future. I don't change passwords unless I have a reason to. And yes, I am a security professional with credits and all.
Most people go with security "wisdoms". The problem with those is that they are usually outdated, often backed by no or little evidence, based on hearsay and soundbites and - most importantly - not necessarily adequate to your threat model.
In order to have a good defense, you need to know what you defend against. What is are threats? Regular changes of passwords are basically (I simplify) good if: a) an intrusion could remain undetected b) continuous access is of value to the attacker c) you share it with someone else on a regular basis
Where c), btw., is the secret reason that most companies have a policy of regular password changes. Because we security officers know that no matter how much we tell the average office worker not to, those passwords are getting shared.
For most private uses, neither of these is true. If someone is interested in your PayPal or/. account, chances are very high that whatever he intends to do with it, he will do it soon. Meaning that a) you will notice and b) the damage is done.
Changing passwords has one main effect: Over time, passwords get weaker. Because remembering meaningless digit-number combinations is already hard as it is, constantly re-remembering new ones is something a normal human simply can't cope with. So even if he was initially motivated to pick a good password, over time it will degrade.
For every other security aspect, changing your password does nothing. If I can crack the old one today, I can crack the new one tomorrow. If the website stores the old one unencrypted today, it will store the new one unencrypted tomorrow. If I fetch it from memory with a trojan today, I can do so again tomorrow. etc.
You also live in same country that arrests homeschoolers. That is political, not scientific.
All countries strife to arrest people who break the law. And yes, that is political, in fact it is a key part of what we consider the "rule of law", one of the most valuable achievements of civilisation going back to the roman empire.
Not all laws are perfect, and everyone has his or her pet law that he dislikes, though for most people that is just the taxes.
You may also have noticed in your link - which btw. is also pure propaganda - that the legal system is heavily involved. Getting sentenced in a proper court of law sounds quite different than "being arrested", as you allege.
Regardless, the disruptive environment due to the family unit breakdown (kids with no life skills as you put it) is way beyond the ability of the school system to address.
Yes, it is. However, the school system still has to deal with it. It tried to ignore the problem for a few decades, until things got so bad that kids literally couldn't learn anymore because they were so troubled. I also know about people who spend a huge part of their time sorting out kids and their parents instead of teaching. And no, the system didn't "take" this responsibility. As I said, for a long time it was ignored. But when it reaches the point where you can't get kids to learn anything, and the troubles at home cause them to fail in droves, you have to address the problem if you want to do your job at all.
Again: I am speaking from the situation here in Germany, the US certainly differs in many aspects, like:
That is why kids can't be left alone in a classroom.
unfamiliar to me. Now it's been a while, but when I was in school we spent entire hours on our own in group assignements, with the teacher circling between the various rooms we had gone to (including the cafeteria for some groups).
And the point of the article is that with access to books, which only the rich had, is now cheap and ubiquitous,
I'm not sure you even read what I wrote. The word "book" doesn't appear once in my last reply. I was talking about the rich hiring teachers, not buying books. And this whole discussion has been about books not being a substitute for a trained teacher.
directing and guiding instead of being a front-of-the-room talking head that reads the instructions to the kids
How fortunate that for the past ten or so years, the vision of frontal teaching has been thoroughly analyzed, found to be lacking for most elements of education, and replaced with other concepts, which have also been tested and verified to work better. We call this the science of education, the thing you call glorified babysitting. It takes a while to penetrate actual schools, because old teachers often refuse to change their ways, but there is progress.
That is what homeschool is about.
Frankly, what homeschooling is about is one bad and arrogant assumption and one good and badly needed idea.
The bad is the assumption that you can do a better job than someone who actually learnt all about it. That's the problem I pointed out in the last post, a problem common with jobs with hidden complexities. We'd scoff at the idea for pilots, programmers, doctors and many other jobs, and yet we readily assume that the jobs of teachers, nurses, policemen, journalists and many other professions aren't all that difficult and we could easily do what they do.
The good is taking care of your kids and establishing an actual relationship to them. That absolutely is a major problem in the west and I applaud anyone who treats their kids as more than intelligent pets.
The law is for the lawless
I could not disagree more. I am a big fan of the law (which, incidentally, is why I have a deep hatred for our current law makers and thei
When my vice-principal friend says babysitting, he means it.
No, he doesn't. He is not spoon-feeding the kids and he is not changing diapers and he is not bringing them to bed and making sure they sleep.
He literally spends his time dealing with behavior problems, and makes dozens and dozens of parent calls and meetings a week.
Babysitters don't do any of that, you know?
We've not evolved into smarter, more complex humans in the last 2000 years. People were pretty damn smart in Europe and Asia back then.
Humans haven't changed all that much, but the world has. Have you even tried the little thought-experiment with your room that I've proposed?
They had full days of learning back then, and learning is learning
One of the reasons is that they taught less in more time, partially thanks to - oh wait - the science of education. Learning is not learning and teaching is not teaching. Everyone who has ever been through any kind of education knows that there are good teachers and bad teachers, and also good learners and bad learners. Unless you believe in a fanatical form of fate, The fact that teaching can be done good and bad means there's justification for a science of education - namely to find out what works and what doesn't and make teachers use more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn't.
That is precisely what they should be learning in school, during the school day.
Basics, yes. But it does take practice. Anything takes practice. Sure you can have all the pupils practice on their own while the teacher watches - but then you would be right about complaining that all they're doing is babysitting. So what is it? Homework or babysitting?
But since it's the "best we can do",
But it isn't. Proof: Education in other parts of the world. While the problem itself remains, there are various solutions that make many countries educational systems a lot more able to cope with it.
I'm talking about state-mandated compulsory school attendance, like in New England in the mid-19th century.
I happen to live in the country (Germany) where the first state-mandated compulsory school attendance happened. That was 1592.
Really, claiming that this was invented to allow two people to work full-time, which was largely unheard of until somewhat after WW2 is just ridiculous. There's extensive historic evidence on the argument for compulsory schooling, some of it going back to Martin Luther, whom you may have heard of. And you even quote some evidence yourself that points out that there were other motivations at work here.
You can't even get rid of bad teachers without a lawyer and $$$ to go with the effort.
One of the reasons is that teachers need protection from people like you who have no idea about what education is and yet claim they can do a better job and they can judge the job the teacher does. Being a teacher is one of the jobs with the "everyone thinks he can do it" problem. It seems that you could just go and teach a class yourself, there's nothing special about it. If you ever try, I pity the pupils, but I'll be ready to accept your apology.
No, really. It pisses me off that everyone thinks that teachers are lazy assholes and that everyone thinks they could do their jobs. I have seen really good teachers and am very glad I had them. And I have seen what teachers have to go through before they ever see a class. And what they have to go through to become a teacher. And what they go through when they are in school, teaching. I have seen people crack under the pressure, and part of it is all the parents who think they know better when they really know shit and the teachers could do a lot more actual teaching if the fucking parents did their parts and put some basic life skills into the
If you think that humans, with a breeding time of 9 months + 15 or so years until fertility can outbreed tiny little organisms that multiply on the order of minutes, you need to get back to math 102 and learn about exponential growth again.
the majority of their work is babysitting in one form or another.
Yes, that much is somewhat true.
Why not skip the required "science" and just go babysit?
Because there are also these other parts, and because the term "babysitting" is metaphorical, not literal. It feels like babysitting if you have a degree, but it doesn't compare at all to actual babysitting. You know, the one that involves babies.
You don't need science to tell you how to teach a kid. You need a little wisdom. We've been doing it without science for thousands of years.
For almost all of history, the skillset required to make a living in the world was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Almost nobody needed math beyond the four basic operations as little as 200 years ago. Kids leave middle school today with more knowledge (except for languages) than most well-educated men of history.
What we did for thousands of years doesn't count. We didn't have cars, electrical power, international corporations, Internet and lots of other things for the past thousand years. Look around the room you are in right now. Mentally substract everything that did not exist 500 years ago. That would include your window glass (19th century) and most likely the chair you sit on (first chairs resembling our office chairs are also from the 19th century). There will be very little left in your room or your house aside from basic furniture, the walls and the carpet. Now tell me again that living today is the same as living for the past thousands of years.
Public school kids have hours of homework per day because they can't learn in class or don't learn (much) from their teachers.
Nonsense. Homework serves two purposes: One, it teaches kids to work on their own, at their own speed instead of in class where they are part of a group. Two, people learn differently and homework allows those who learn mostly by repetition and by doing things themselves to catch up with those who learn mostly by listening and following.
Homeschool kides don't have homework because the "homework" part is integrated into the routine, as there is no group to wait for or catch up to.
Public schools are in many ways just babysitting farms so both parents can work.
Which is why they were invented long, long before mothers would go out to work, yeah, right.
I don't know any of the math he does, nor does my wife.
I sincerely hope he has ample opportunity to talk to people who do. I am one of those "gifted children", members card and all, who were bored to death in school. I know how incredibly frustrating it can be to have nobody above your level, who gives you impulses and those ideas that you didn't have yourself.
Does this sound scientific, or does it sound like propaganda?
Hard to say. Does it give sources for these suggestions? Does it base its opinion on studies and references those? That's what makes it scientific or not.
What's being described is a greenhouse. More plants, more jungles, more life, more food.
Unfortunately, most of that life is hostile to us. Bacteria, viruses, etc. of all kinds just love warm and moist, and we have multi-trillion dollar industries dedicated to fighting them, they're called "medicine", "health care", etc.
Thanks for the link. I think I'll pass, that's a little beyond what the lolz is worth to me. But interesting to see that there are 9 interested parties already.
I wonder how many of them are shills for the RightHaven trolls.
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
I don't think anyone is seriously afraid for life on earth as a whole. But the changing environment may well be very, very unfriendly to some current species. Such as Homo Sapiens. And that is worth worrying about.
Do read some material on the russian point-of-view during the Cold War. It is utterly fascinating, really.
For all we know, the Kreml viewed the US as at least partially insane, and highly dangerous. Instead of the aggressive monsters they are painted at, the upper levels of the communist party were very much afraid of western aggression. If I recall correctly, when Reagan was elected, the Kreml believed the west had gone entirely insane, and actually braced for nuclear war. They could not estimate how much of Reagan's big talking was just politics and propaganda and how much he really meant.
There's a lot more. It is worth reading.
In the light of that, one could argue just as well that the NATOs consistent gamble with MAD delayed peace talks and the end of the whole madness for at least a decade if not more.
We will never know for sure, but it certainly isn't that simple.
Who are not at all programmers, because you can only ever be one thing in your life, yes?
I'm not talking "programmer" as a job title. I'm talking "programmer" the same way you would say "artist" or "writer". People with the interest and skills to do it, whether or not they earn a living doing it.
I know enough people who have studied educational science and/or are teachers to know that they don't sit around all day laughing about how everyone falls for their racket.
If you want to discredit a science, you need to do a little better than namecalling.
They were an exception because apple were coming directly from a position of strength - [...] and demonstrated apple were capable of making desirable consumer products.
If that is the answer, then that is what MS ought to do.
Microsoft has none of these advantages. They have a negative rep after windows mobile 6 and 6.5, the zune was a failure, and nobody trusts Microsoft not to pull a fast one.
Exactly. And if you don't have trust in the market place, then no amount of force will establish it. Since they don't have the OEM-lock-in they have with PCs, strong-arming won't work.
The question isn't why windows phone is failing, its what moron thought it stood a chance in the first place.
It has been done, it's even been discussed on slashdot before. And it is far more effective than filters can ever hope to be.
Then why do I keep getting spam?
Many anti-spam solutions were extremely effective the first time around - until the spammers adapted. I remember when greylisting cut your spam to almost nothing. It seems to have almost no effect these days.
Slashdot Mirror
And you are missing out on the people who need some time to come up with a brilliant solution. Or who work best when you give them the problem and leave them alone instead of keeping them standing in the spotlight.
Throughout my career, I've met a couple people that I personally would have never hired based on my impression of them - but who were easily my better in the skills that actually mattered for their jobs.
I'm with you on the examples you mention - simply asking you the answer is a great example of lateral thinking. Unless, of course, it was canned because puzzles have become a standard job interview trick and there are tons of researches on how to beat them leaving the best impression (and everyone who hasn't lived under a rock for the past decade nows that blurting out the correct answer isn't it).
If I can make you value the positives, but discard the negatives, I think I've done you a service. Because if you filter out people based on puzzles, you're hurting your company.
I'm entirely with them on that.
Puzzles test one thing: Your ability to solve puzzles. The assumption that this will translate into or is representative of any real-world skills is just that - an assumption. It may turn out to be true or not, but AFAIK there is no conclusive evidence pointing either way so far.
But - the dark secret is that this is how the business world works. Almost the entire "wisdom" of business is this kind of anecdotal evidence, cute ideas, mantras spoken by authority figures and crap written in long-discredited books. It's a miracle the whole thing works at all.
And yes, I am speaking from personal experience. I have seen companies being reorganized because the CEO (and those around him) believe that there can only be x viable companies in this market, so they need to enlarge market share because only the first x will survive. No evidence whatsoever, it's an "everyone knows that..." point. I've seen a company dead-set on cutting costs not because they weren't profitable, but because someone somewhere said that their cost-per-employee ratio was worse than that of their competitors. I've seen downsizings because the employee-to-customer ratio was higher than some "benchmark" value.
In this, like in many cases, someone somewhere made up a number that may or may not have made sense in his or her specific context. Then someone else who didn't quite get it took it and ran with it.
Same for puzzles and assessment centers - they serve a specific purpose in a specific context, and if you know how to use them, they can be great tools. Like with all tools, just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you need to hit everyone who comes through the door with it.
It's not any more unbelievable than ruining your smart phone business by picking the worst available OS option and publicly announcing you are running with it no matter what.
Uh, not true.
MS was never in the phone business. They had a version of their OS that could run on phones, but it was obvious to anyone without massive brain damage that it had never been designed for a phone. Have you ever seen anyone struggle with windows on a phone and wondered why the heck they put up with and interface that was built for a 17", 4:3 screen and keyboard/mouse input? It was clearly the MS equivalent of something we geeks know very well: The proof-of-concept that yes, you can install Linux on your fridge. It's not good for anything because it lacks both the input and the ouput facilities to do anything useful, and nobody bothers writing those because the cool part was making it run at all.
Most of the things happening in the big business world are amazing for the fact that they're not life sentence offences. The media only reports on a fraction of them.
That really was the next logical step. They've already ruined any hopes of Nokia ever getting back into the game with their mole who turned them on windows mobile as the OS of choice, now taking official control of the mobile arm of Nokia really is nothing new, it's just going the whole nine yards.
Most likely future: MS will pour a couple billions into it, like they did with the xbox, bleeding money quarter after quarter. They will be waiting (and bleeding money) until their competitors make a blunder (like Sony did with the PS3) and then stand ready to take over market share with their 2nd rate product simply because it's there and it has marketing muscle. They will probably buy up a couple App providers along the way and make them windows-mobile-exclusive (hello, Bungie).
Why? Because Balmer has no vision and isn't the guy to come up with anything resembling a new strategy. We will see what we've seen them do virtually everywhere else.
Because economy 101 is by and large a purely theoretical science with little to no relation to the real world, which at times resembles what you learn there, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
No, I am serious. You are being taught all these nice things about free market and how prices set at the equillibrium point between supply and demand, yadda, yadda.
Don't forget to read the fine print. The "free market" and "equillibrium price" model assumes such highly realistic things as full transparency for everyone and a non-limited number of sellers and buyers. Nowhere in the real world has anything like that ever been seen.
The real world is full of price-fixing, limited supply or demand, cooperation deals, loss-leader sales, externalities, scale effects, psychological price-setting (the reason everything costs *.99 or *.95) and so on and so forth.
and yet it's more productive than C or even Python because it fits a problem domain.
Exactly.
I have no issues with special-purpose programming languages. In fact, for many problems they are the superior approach.
But BASIC isn't one. So I fail to see how what you're even getting at.
For whom is that surprising?
China is huge - four to five times the population of the USA. Any attempt to clean up existing problems while at the same time realising record growth year-after-year is a mean task. So concentrating on making new things future-proof is the best approach. If you are good there, it may turn out that replacing the old, dirty stuff is better than modernizing it.
And the chinese government, for all the faults it has, is certainly one of the best governments in regards to long-term planning right now. Other than most of the career politicians in the west, they regularily look beyond the next election.
You must not know what HSLDA is.
Not when we started this discussion, no. But they do have a clear agenda, which by definition makes anything they put out propaganda:
"ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause".
No, you don't have to become a nanny state to address family problems. Parents have to address their children, and society has to address the family unit on a much larger level. The state cannot function as surrogate normalized family.
You are missing the point. I am not talking about what you call the "nanny state" (which, quite frankly, americans tend to call any government that gives even the smallest bit of damn about its population).
If the purpose of school is to teach, then things that interfere with that purpose need to be addressed. If pupils fail because of family problems, the school needs to take those into account. If the issues make teaching in general impossible because, say, the kids don't have the discipline required to attend a class, then that needs to be taught in school, because otherwise the rest of it is just a waste of time.
It can't for very long without giving rise to despotism. You might recall some failures on your side of the pond.
Anectodes do not make a proof. The scandinavian countries are counter examples for extremely "socialst" states by US standards, and a very strong school system - which has collected world-wide praise for decades. And no despotism in sight.
At what point was the ineffectiveness of the talking-head model not obviously deficient?
Hinsight is always 20/20. Obviously, there was a point where this was not obvious, else it would never have become a method.
It was *already* obvious that if you spend time in as small groups as possible, educational achievement directly increases.
Almost, but not entirely true. There is an optimum size and it is not one. "as small as possible" is not 100% true. Yes, most classes are too large. But for most cases, a small group is better than working alone. Also, social skills (part of the hidden curriculum) need a certain group size.
It's clear at this point you don't understand homeschooling.
Not as well as someone who's actually doing it, for obvious reasons. But like most things, understanding is not binary. That I don't understand 100% does not mean I don't understand at all.
specifically the 10 Commandments, upon which the understanding of Western law resides
Err... no. Western law resides largely on roman law. The 10 commandments are not laws in even the most forgiving definition of the word. They are commandments.
And even with the extended explanation, I still disagree completely. Lawless people don't need laws, and we don't need laws to deal with them. All we need is police. All the "righteous" (however you define it, let's just assume that's not the issue) people already agree that murder, stealing, etc. are bad. The purpose of law is to guard the good people - but not against the bad, because the bad will ignore the law anyways. To guard against mistakes, temptation and itself - a large part of the law is defining violations clearly so innocents aren't punished.
Hopefully, reason will prevail and German law will change for the better, as it has in the past.
Unlikely. Even the European Court of Human Rights has upheld the german law on this question. Politically, there is almost no support. Most homeschoolers or those who'd like it are religious extremists who don't want to have their kids get basic sex education. In the US that may have enough public support to change laws, in Germany people like that are ridiculed and considered idiots, fanatics, dangerous or all
One measure of the security of a password is the amount of time it would take to compromise it as compared to its useful lifetime. Assuming the password database is stolen today, would someone be able to compromise your password before you changed it?
Yes, because the chances are about 99% that it is stored in either
a) plaintext
b) a cryptographic one-way hash
in case a) time to compromise is zero, in case b) time to compromise is so troublesome that nobody will bother, they'll just hack the next website until a == true.
Well, if they are really determined, and the hashes are not salted, they may throw up the most common 100 or so passwords using a rainbow table, but that's it.
If my password was good so far, it is good in the future. I don't change passwords unless I have a reason to. And yes, I am a security professional with credits and all.
Most people go with security "wisdoms". The problem with those is that they are usually outdated, often backed by no or little evidence, based on hearsay and soundbites and - most importantly - not necessarily adequate to your threat model.
In order to have a good defense, you need to know what you defend against. What is are threats? Regular changes of passwords are basically (I simplify) good if:
a) an intrusion could remain undetected
b) continuous access is of value to the attacker
c) you share it with someone else on a regular basis
Where c), btw., is the secret reason that most companies have a policy of regular password changes. Because we security officers know that no matter how much we tell the average office worker not to, those passwords are getting shared.
For most private uses, neither of these is true. If someone is interested in your PayPal or /. account, chances are very high that whatever he intends to do with it, he will do it soon. Meaning that a) you will notice and b) the damage is done.
Changing passwords has one main effect: Over time, passwords get weaker. Because remembering meaningless digit-number combinations is already hard as it is, constantly re-remembering new ones is something a normal human simply can't cope with. So even if he was initially motivated to pick a good password, over time it will degrade.
For every other security aspect, changing your password does nothing. If I can crack the old one today, I can crack the new one tomorrow. If the website stores the old one unencrypted today, it will store the new one unencrypted tomorrow. If I fetch it from memory with a trojan today, I can do so again tomorrow. etc.
You also live in same country that arrests homeschoolers. That is political, not scientific.
All countries strife to arrest people who break the law. And yes, that is political, in fact it is a key part of what we consider the "rule of law", one of the most valuable achievements of civilisation going back to the roman empire.
Not all laws are perfect, and everyone has his or her pet law that he dislikes, though for most people that is just the taxes.
You may also have noticed in your link - which btw. is also pure propaganda - that the legal system is heavily involved. Getting sentenced in a proper court of law sounds quite different than "being arrested", as you allege.
Regardless, the disruptive environment due to the family unit breakdown (kids with no life skills as you put it) is way beyond the ability of the school system to address.
Yes, it is. However, the school system still has to deal with it. It tried to ignore the problem for a few decades, until things got so bad that kids literally couldn't learn anymore because they were so troubled. I also know about people who spend a huge part of their time sorting out kids and their parents instead of teaching. And no, the system didn't "take" this responsibility. As I said, for a long time it was ignored. But when it reaches the point where you can't get kids to learn anything, and the troubles at home cause them to fail in droves, you have to address the problem if you want to do your job at all.
Again: I am speaking from the situation here in Germany, the US certainly differs in many aspects, like:
That is why kids can't be left alone in a classroom.
unfamiliar to me. Now it's been a while, but when I was in school we spent entire hours on our own in group assignements, with the teacher circling between the various rooms we had gone to (including the cafeteria for some groups).
And the point of the article is that with access to books, which only the rich had, is now cheap and ubiquitous,
I'm not sure you even read what I wrote. The word "book" doesn't appear once in my last reply. I was talking about the rich hiring teachers, not buying books. And this whole discussion has been about books not being a substitute for a trained teacher.
directing and guiding instead of being a front-of-the-room talking head that reads the instructions to the kids
How fortunate that for the past ten or so years, the vision of frontal teaching has been thoroughly analyzed, found to be lacking for most elements of education, and replaced with other concepts, which have also been tested and verified to work better. We call this the science of education, the thing you call glorified babysitting. It takes a while to penetrate actual schools, because old teachers often refuse to change their ways, but there is progress.
That is what homeschool is about.
Frankly, what homeschooling is about is one bad and arrogant assumption and one good and badly needed idea.
The bad is the assumption that you can do a better job than someone who actually learnt all about it. That's the problem I pointed out in the last post, a problem common with jobs with hidden complexities. We'd scoff at the idea for pilots, programmers, doctors and many other jobs, and yet we readily assume that the jobs of teachers, nurses, policemen, journalists and many other professions aren't all that difficult and we could easily do what they do.
The good is taking care of your kids and establishing an actual relationship to them. That absolutely is a major problem in the west and I applaud anyone who treats their kids as more than intelligent pets.
The law is for the lawless
I could not disagree more. I am a big fan of the law (which, incidentally, is why I have a deep hatred for our current law makers and thei
When my vice-principal friend says babysitting, he means it.
No, he doesn't. He is not spoon-feeding the kids and he is not changing diapers and he is not bringing them to bed and making sure they sleep.
He literally spends his time dealing with behavior problems, and makes dozens and dozens of parent calls and meetings a week.
Babysitters don't do any of that, you know?
We've not evolved into smarter, more complex humans in the last 2000 years. People were pretty damn smart in Europe and Asia back then.
Humans haven't changed all that much, but the world has. Have you even tried the little thought-experiment with your room that I've proposed?
They had full days of learning back then, and learning is learning
One of the reasons is that they taught less in more time, partially thanks to - oh wait - the science of education. Learning is not learning and teaching is not teaching. Everyone who has ever been through any kind of education knows that there are good teachers and bad teachers, and also good learners and bad learners. Unless you believe in a fanatical form of fate, The fact that teaching can be done good and bad means there's justification for a science of education - namely to find out what works and what doesn't and make teachers use more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn't.
That is precisely what they should be learning in school, during the school day.
Basics, yes. But it does take practice. Anything takes practice. Sure you can have all the pupils practice on their own while the teacher watches - but then you would be right about complaining that all they're doing is babysitting. So what is it? Homework or babysitting?
But since it's the "best we can do",
But it isn't. Proof: Education in other parts of the world. While the problem itself remains, there are various solutions that make many countries educational systems a lot more able to cope with it.
I'm talking about state-mandated compulsory school attendance, like in New England in the mid-19th century.
I happen to live in the country (Germany) where the first state-mandated compulsory school attendance happened. That was 1592.
Really, claiming that this was invented to allow two people to work full-time, which was largely unheard of until somewhat after WW2 is just ridiculous. There's extensive historic evidence on the argument for compulsory schooling, some of it going back to Martin Luther, whom you may have heard of. And you even quote some evidence yourself that points out that there were other motivations at work here.
You can't even get rid of bad teachers without a lawyer and $$$ to go with the effort.
One of the reasons is that teachers need protection from people like you who have no idea about what education is and yet claim they can do a better job and they can judge the job the teacher does. Being a teacher is one of the jobs with the "everyone thinks he can do it" problem. It seems that you could just go and teach a class yourself, there's nothing special about it. If you ever try, I pity the pupils, but I'll be ready to accept your apology.
No, really. It pisses me off that everyone thinks that teachers are lazy assholes and that everyone thinks they could do their jobs. I have seen really good teachers and am very glad I had them. And I have seen what teachers have to go through before they ever see a class. And what they have to go through to become a teacher. And what they go through when they are in school, teaching. I have seen people crack under the pressure, and part of it is all the parents who think they know better when they really know shit and the teachers could do a lot more actual teaching if the fucking parents did their parts and put some basic life skills into the
If you think that humans, with a breeding time of 9 months + 15 or so years until fertility can outbreed tiny little organisms that multiply on the order of minutes, you need to get back to math 102 and learn about exponential growth again.
the majority of their work is babysitting in one form or another.
Yes, that much is somewhat true.
Why not skip the required "science" and just go babysit?
Because there are also these other parts, and because the term "babysitting" is metaphorical, not literal. It feels like babysitting if you have a degree, but it doesn't compare at all to actual babysitting. You know, the one that involves babies.
You don't need science to tell you how to teach a kid. You need a little wisdom. We've been doing it without science for thousands of years.
For almost all of history, the skillset required to make a living in the world was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Almost nobody needed math beyond the four basic operations as little as 200 years ago. Kids leave middle school today with more knowledge (except for languages) than most well-educated men of history.
What we did for thousands of years doesn't count. We didn't have cars, electrical power, international corporations, Internet and lots of other things for the past thousand years. Look around the room you are in right now. Mentally substract everything that did not exist 500 years ago. That would include your window glass (19th century) and most likely the chair you sit on (first chairs resembling our office chairs are also from the 19th century). There will be very little left in your room or your house aside from basic furniture, the walls and the carpet. Now tell me again that living today is the same as living for the past thousands of years.
Public school kids have hours of homework per day because they can't learn in class or don't learn (much) from their teachers.
Nonsense. Homework serves two purposes: One, it teaches kids to work on their own, at their own speed instead of in class where they are part of a group. Two, people learn differently and homework allows those who learn mostly by repetition and by doing things themselves to catch up with those who learn mostly by listening and following.
Homeschool kides don't have homework because the "homework" part is integrated into the routine, as there is no group to wait for or catch up to.
Public schools are in many ways just babysitting farms so both parents can work.
Which is why they were invented long, long before mothers would go out to work, yeah, right.
I don't know any of the math he does, nor does my wife.
I sincerely hope he has ample opportunity to talk to people who do. I am one of those "gifted children", members card and all, who were bored to death in school. I know how incredibly frustrating it can be to have nobody above your level, who gives you impulses and those ideas that you didn't have yourself.
Does this sound scientific, or does it sound like propaganda?
Hard to say. Does it give sources for these suggestions? Does it base its opinion on studies and references those? That's what makes it scientific or not.
What's being described is a greenhouse. More plants, more jungles, more life, more food.
Unfortunately, most of that life is hostile to us. Bacteria, viruses, etc. of all kinds just love warm and moist, and we have multi-trillion dollar industries dedicated to fighting them, they're called "medicine", "health care", etc.
Thanks for the link. I think I'll pass, that's a little beyond what the lolz is worth to me. But interesting to see that there are 9 interested parties already.
I wonder how many of them are shills for the RightHaven trolls.
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
I don't think anyone is seriously afraid for life on earth as a whole. But the changing environment may well be very, very unfriendly to some current species. Such as Homo Sapiens. And that is worth worrying about.
Do read some material on the russian point-of-view during the Cold War. It is utterly fascinating, really.
For all we know, the Kreml viewed the US as at least partially insane, and highly dangerous. Instead of the aggressive monsters they are painted at, the upper levels of the communist party were very much afraid of western aggression.
If I recall correctly, when Reagan was elected, the Kreml believed the west had gone entirely insane, and actually braced for nuclear war. They could not estimate how much of Reagan's big talking was just politics and propaganda and how much he really meant.
There's a lot more. It is worth reading.
In the light of that, one could argue just as well that the NATOs consistent gamble with MAD delayed peace talks and the end of the whole madness for at least a decade if not more.
We will never know for sure, but it certainly isn't that simple.
Who are not at all programmers, because you can only ever be one thing in your life, yes?
I'm not talking "programmer" as a job title. I'm talking "programmer" the same way you would say "artist" or "writer". People with the interest and skills to do it, whether or not they earn a living doing it.
I know enough people who have studied educational science and/or are teachers to know that they don't sit around all day laughing about how everyone falls for their racket.
If you want to discredit a science, you need to do a little better than namecalling.
They were an exception because apple were coming directly from a position of strength - [...] and demonstrated apple were capable of making desirable consumer products.
If that is the answer, then that is what MS ought to do.
Microsoft has none of these advantages. They have a negative rep after windows mobile 6 and 6.5, the zune was a failure, and nobody trusts Microsoft not to pull a fast one.
Exactly. And if you don't have trust in the market place, then no amount of force will establish it. Since they don't have the OEM-lock-in they have with PCs, strong-arming won't work.
The question isn't why windows phone is failing, its what moron thought it stood a chance in the first place.
Agreed.
It has been done, it's even been discussed on slashdot before. And it is far more effective than filters can ever hope to be.
Then why do I keep getting spam?
Many anti-spam solutions were extremely effective the first time around - until the spammers adapted. I remember when greylisting cut your spam to almost nothing. It seems to have almost no effect these days.
I'd buy it just for the lolz, if I could find the damn link where you can actually post an offer.