Not only is religion unnecessary for morality but often religion is often used to justify immoral actions. Think of all the acts of terrorism, crusades, Inquisitions, colonial domination, and genocides committed in the name of one good or another over the last few centuries. To claim that religion is the embodiment of morality is to ignore its history.
when I sold my software company and went from a 60+ hour work week to a variable one with maybe 35 hours. A few of the more rewarding things I've tried are learning a foreign language (in may case Japanese), taking a class on Udacity, coaching middle school debate, and doing gifted and talented math pull outs in an inner city elementary school. I'm starting a chess club in that same school next fall. I know the plural of anecdote is not data but learn about things that interest you and give back by teaching things that interest you.
Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.
neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.
Kids are not computers. We don't have a fixed amount of RAM just as we don't have a fixed amount of muscle. We have a brain that can become more or less efficient at calculating, juggling tasks, memory, recognizing patterns, etc. While my kids won't be poets or professional chess players, learning poetry and chess will help develop their cognitive abilities. Language learning has been demonstrated to help children develop all sorts of important cognitive skills, just like sports help develop coordination, balance, and strength. If there are disadvantages, then some of the research should show it. The biggest disadvantage I can find is that if you start a kid 90% in a foreign language his English vocabulary lags until 5th grade.
There may be disadvantages to viola lessons, chess tournaments, learning languages, soccer practice, and poetry but I'm confident that the advantages of all of those things far outweigh the disadvantages. I do, however, limit the time my kids spend in front of a TV. There is research showing that TV has a detrimental effect on cognitive development.
With a degree in biology, a background in research, great love for and interest in education, I've looked at a lot of the research on this subject. Here are some highlights:
neuroscience researchers are increasingly coming to a consensus that bilingualism has many positive consequences for the brain. Several such researchers traveled to this month's annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., to present their findings. Among them:
Bilingual children are more effective at multi-tasking.
Adults who speak more than one language do a better job prioritizing information in potentially confusing situations.
Being bilingual helps ward off early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly.
I have seen research showing that kids in immersion bilingual programs, though they initially lag, have a larger English vocabulary than their peers by 6th grade. There have also been documented advantages in math.
Anecdotally, my 7 year old reads Rick Riordan for pleasure, knows his nth roots, can solve basic algebraic equations, and speaks some Mandarin Chinese. Maybe it's because he didn't fill the limited space in his brain with the names of 10,000 Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh characters... Oh, wait, he memorized those too.
That's a bit like saying that time spent exercising is using your muscles' limited capacity without really moving anything. Exercising your mind in certain ways has beneficial effects.
Put any 5 year old in China for a year and he'll speak Chinese in a year. The research shows significant cognitive advantages are gained from bilingual education.
As a parent who desperately wants his children to become fluent in at least two languages I am stuck with horrible choices because I live in America. I have cobbled together language training for my two older sons while they were young enough to learn but it was extremely difficult. Now, to get an immersion Chinese program for him, I am using school of choice to send my youngest to an inner city school where they are so poor that they just fired all of the elementary school art, music, and PE teachers to close a budget gap. When will we make education a priority in this country?
As well paying for inefficient policies in the government, which are harder to track down.
Have you worked with humans before? I've worked for and in lots of large companies and I can assure you that we do things inefficiently. I have yet to see a compelling argument that Government (with all its failures and inefficiencies) is any less efficient than the private sector. Think about Worldcom, Countrywide mortgage, Enron, AIG, pets.com... Besides, after decades of Government that has been focused on cutting down on "waste, fraud, and abuse" surely we've got at most of the easy stuff.
Just not a computer language. I use flashcard programs and mp3s from Pimsleur and Japanese Pod 101 to learn Japanese. You can do the mp3s while walking outside as others have suggested. It has worked well for me, though my breaks last about 15 minutes.
I've taken only one Udacity course and not in programming, so I have a n of less than one but I found the course I took less than ideal.
On Udacity I took introductory statistics, as a refresher. I took classes in scientific stats, business stats and forecasting many years ago so I have some basis for comparison. I found that the course sometimes emphasized technique over understanding and broke lessons into small bite size chunks that were often so small that I questioned the utility since if a problem is broken into baby steps I can sometimes complete each step without understanding the approach to the whole.
No, but you can waste their time every time that they call. The reason that they robocall is that it is cheap. Just string them along so that they have to pay a person for the time to talk to you. Ask which cards they will take. Ask if you can roll in your home loan. Ask them to wait while you look up your balances. After a while they get wise and hang up on you. If enough people waste their time eventually they will go broke. Needless to say never actually give them an account number.
You might try SecondLife. It is less like a conventional video game and more of an excuse to socialize with people from all over the world that you would never otherwise meet. One of my best friends is somebody that I met on SL who I never would have gotten to know otherwise. My wife dragged me in 4 years ago and can't get me out.
Government regulations are nearly always outdated and too cautious.
The original article in the Times makes no such claim and the blog post that the/. article links to, which was based on the Times article offers no evidence that this sweeping claim has any validity. In fact, I remember bridges collapsing and financial institutions collapsing, which leads me to believe that there are many cases where regulations are not cautious enough.
without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone.
Give me a break.
What happens is the EPA acts based on scientific evidence like this:
The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion.
EPA estimates that the new safeguards will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year. The standards will also help America’s children grow up healthier – preventing 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year.
Five centuries ago people collected tulip bulbs. They became an investment and a bust followed. A century or two ago people commonly collected birds eggs. They've been around a lot longer than Legos too, but a bird egg collection today is not worth much. The postage stamp collection market is not what it once was because it is a lot cheaper to print stamps then it is to buy them. I'd not bet on Legos enduring because they've existed for 40 years.
One study found that you are less likely to die young if you drink wine instead of beer. It's not because beer causes death or because wine wards death off. It is because at the time the study was done the ratio of wine to beer consumption was strongly correlated with income. Having a higher income was positively correlated with adequate nutrition and health care. Just because drinking coffee correlates with something doesn't mean that it causes it.
In the class war that has been raging for the last couple of decades the wealthy have pocketed the lion's share of the gains in productivity, partly by passing corporate friendly laws. Now, some are arguing that they should have the right to any idea that I have at any time. Why not also give them the right to any vegetables I grow in my garden? After all, I can talk to other employees about gardening around the water cooler and dream up new gardening techniques at my desk. Oh wait, didn't we decide that you can't own a person in the 1860s?
Indeed. I just got one too. I try to waste their time with a live operator occasionally, but they have gotten very good at figuring out that you are stalling.
We learned to program in BASIC first on TRS-80s from Radio Shack, then on a PDP1134 using dumb terminals. I never thought I'd use it professionally, but we learned to write games, steal passwords, spoof e-mails. I moved on and thought no more about it.
Fast forward 8 years; B.S. in biology, 2 years as a lab tech in molecular cardiology, an MBA and I walk into a temp job where they are using Business Basic on a mini-computer. I ended up running the IT department. After 4 years of that I moved on to owning a software and web development company. Aside from picking up a CNE to run our Novell Network no other formal training. I sold the company in 2003 and work part time now, by choice.
Not bad payback for a high school semester. The key, in my opinion, was a good teacher that encouraged us to play and students that loved to fool around with the computers.
Sorry, didn't mean to post as an anonymous coward. Clearly, I did not learn quite enough it that class after all.
Just checking total overhead is not very useful but the overhead is broken out, showing things like which officers got how much in salary, on the form 990 that the charity files with the IRS to maintain its tax exempt status. They also show what the non-overhead money funded (I frown on foundations that spend lots of their program money making grants to other foundations). You can look at the past few years of 990s for free at http://guidestar.org/ We've used it to guide our families charitable giving.
it's not actually shameful to have your donation to the women's shelter go to the salary of their childcare provider or other employees.
but it is shameful if 90% of the money goes to the CEO and board of the shelter. Looking at the 990 lets you know what the money has paid for in the past.
When my wife went to medical school twenty years ago every lecture was transcribed and a copy distributed to each student which obviated the need to take notes. My understanding was that was pretty much universally true in medical schools. I doubt that has changed and now that she is teaching in a medical school I know that all of the lectures are also videotaped and posted online.
It sounds to me like your son, like me, is not going to spend a lot of time designing sites. I've helped with the occasional site done in a WYSIWIG editor. Every time, I have a steep learning curve and when I come back to it 2 years later because the owner needs a hand again I have to learn a new version of the software in which they have inevitably moved something on the menus, changed the layout of the controls, etc. It's a royal PITA. Sure, if your son is going to code a site a month a WYSIWIG package may be worth the effort, but I'm betting he has better uses for his time than designing sites at this point in his life.
Obama didn't wait. He implemented TARP (passed under Bush), bailed out the automakers, did cash for clunkers, a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts, a partial payroll tax holiday, home energy efficiency credits, etc. He tried to get the banks to voluntarily renegotiate mortgages. Meanwhile the Fed cut interest rates to zero, did two rounds of quantitative easing, and loaned money to banks foreign and domestic.
Remember that Obama inherited a real mess. John McCain was so worried about a collapse of our financial system that he suspended his campaign and went back to Washington to make sure that TARP got through. Bush had turned the Clinton surpluses (I remember talk of retiring the twenty year treasuries) into record deficits.
While he did all of that the Republicans screamed about deficits and the threat of inflation. If he'd tried more stimulus, perhaps they would have been right. Trying to Do more would also have increased the chances of more of his agenda being blocked. It seems to me that you are faulting Obama for making choices that didn't magically turn what many feared would be the next Great Depression into an economic boom. Given the pickle he was put in, I say he did a fine job of balancing the need for stimulus, political compromise, the threat of inflation, and the size of the deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is religion unnecessary for morality but often religion is often used to justify immoral actions. Think of all the acts of terrorism, crusades, Inquisitions, colonial domination, and genocides committed in the name of one good or another over the last few centuries. To claim that religion is the embodiment of morality is to ignore its history.
when I sold my software company and went from a 60+ hour work week to a variable one with maybe 35 hours. A few of the more rewarding things I've tried are learning a foreign language (in may case Japanese), taking a class on Udacity, coaching middle school debate, and doing gifted and talented math pull outs in an inner city elementary school. I'm starting a chess club in that same school next fall. I know the plural of anecdote is not data but learn about things that interest you and give back by teaching things that interest you.
Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity
neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.
There may be disadvantages to viola lessons, chess tournaments, learning languages, soccer practice, and poetry but I'm confident that the advantages of all of those things far outweigh the disadvantages. I do, however, limit the time my kids spend in front of a TV. There is research showing that TV has a detrimental effect on cognitive development.
neuroscience researchers are increasingly coming to a consensus that bilingualism has many positive consequences for the brain. Several such researchers traveled to this month's annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., to present their findings. Among them: Bilingual children are more effective at multi-tasking. Adults who speak more than one language do a better job prioritizing information in potentially confusing situations. Being bilingual helps ward off early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/26/health/la-he-bilingual-brain-20110227
I have seen research showing that kids in immersion bilingual programs, though they initially lag, have a larger English vocabulary than their peers by 6th grade. There have also been documented advantages in math.
Anecdotally, my 7 year old reads Rick Riordan for pleasure, knows his nth roots, can solve basic algebraic equations, and speaks some Mandarin Chinese. Maybe it's because he didn't fill the limited space in his brain with the names of 10,000 Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh characters ... Oh, wait, he memorized those too.
That's a bit like saying that time spent exercising is using your muscles' limited capacity without really moving anything. Exercising your mind in certain ways has beneficial effects.
As a parent who desperately wants his children to become fluent in at least two languages I am stuck with horrible choices because I live in America. I have cobbled together language training for my two older sons while they were young enough to learn but it was extremely difficult. Now, to get an immersion Chinese program for him, I am using school of choice to send my youngest to an inner city school where they are so poor that they just fired all of the elementary school art, music, and PE teachers to close a budget gap. When will we make education a priority in this country?
It isn't welfare, Medicare, military spending. It is all these little small waste of money projects that add up.
You just took welfare (12%), Medicare (13%) and Defense (25%) off the table http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_budget_2012_4.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_federal_budget Good luck finding enough unneeded paper clips to eliminate from the budget when you've declared half off limits already.
As well paying for inefficient policies in the government, which are harder to track down.
Have you worked with humans before? I've worked for and in lots of large companies and I can assure you that we do things inefficiently. I have yet to see a compelling argument that Government (with all its failures and inefficiencies) is any less efficient than the private sector. Think about Worldcom, Countrywide mortgage, Enron, AIG, pets.com... Besides, after decades of Government that has been focused on cutting down on "waste, fraud, and abuse" surely we've got at most of the easy stuff.
It was a beginner friendly way to code android apps. I used it with my kids, who loved it.
Just not a computer language. I use flashcard programs and mp3s from Pimsleur and Japanese Pod 101 to learn Japanese. You can do the mp3s while walking outside as others have suggested. It has worked well for me, though my breaks last about 15 minutes.
I've taken only one Udacity course and not in programming, so I have a n of less than one but I found the course I took less than ideal.
On Udacity I took introductory statistics, as a refresher. I took classes in scientific stats, business stats and forecasting many years ago so I have some basis for comparison. I found that the course sometimes emphasized technique over understanding and broke lessons into small bite size chunks that were often so small that I questioned the utility since if a problem is broken into baby steps I can sometimes complete each step without understanding the approach to the whole.
No, but you can waste their time every time that they call. The reason that they robocall is that it is cheap. Just string them along so that they have to pay a person for the time to talk to you. Ask which cards they will take. Ask if you can roll in your home loan. Ask them to wait while you look up your balances. After a while they get wise and hang up on you. If enough people waste their time eventually they will go broke. Needless to say never actually give them an account number.
You might try SecondLife. It is less like a conventional video game and more of an excuse to socialize with people from all over the world that you would never otherwise meet. One of my best friends is somebody that I met on SL who I never would have gotten to know otherwise. My wife dragged me in 4 years ago and can't get me out.
Government regulations are nearly always outdated and too cautious.
The original article in the Times makes no such claim and the blog post that the /. article links to, which was based on the Times article offers no evidence that this sweeping claim has any validity. In fact, I remember bridges collapsing and financial institutions collapsing, which leads me to believe that there are many cases where regulations are not cautious enough.
without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone.
Give me a break. What happens is the EPA acts based on scientific evidence like this:
The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html?pagewanted=all and then the politicians caves in to industry. Mercury regulations were delayed 20 years despite that based on the scientific evidence.
EPA estimates that the new safeguards will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year. The standards will also help America’s children grow up healthier – preventing 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/bd8b3f37edf5716d8525796d005dd086!opendocument of course, now industry is suing to block the new regulations. http://www.edf.org/health/timeline-delay
Five centuries ago people collected tulip bulbs. They became an investment and a bust followed. A century or two ago people commonly collected birds eggs. They've been around a lot longer than Legos too, but a bird egg collection today is not worth much. The postage stamp collection market is not what it once was because it is a lot cheaper to print stamps then it is to buy them. I'd not bet on Legos enduring because they've existed for 40 years.
One study found that you are less likely to die young if you drink wine instead of beer. It's not because beer causes death or because wine wards death off. It is because at the time the study was done the ratio of wine to beer consumption was strongly correlated with income. Having a higher income was positively correlated with adequate nutrition and health care. Just because drinking coffee correlates with something doesn't mean that it causes it.
In the class war that has been raging for the last couple of decades the wealthy have pocketed the lion's share of the gains in productivity, partly by passing corporate friendly laws. Now, some are arguing that they should have the right to any idea that I have at any time. Why not also give them the right to any vegetables I grow in my garden? After all, I can talk to other employees about gardening around the water cooler and dream up new gardening techniques at my desk. Oh wait, didn't we decide that you can't own a person in the 1860s?
Indeed. I just got one too. I try to waste their time with a live operator occasionally, but they have gotten very good at figuring out that you are stalling.
We learned to program in BASIC first on TRS-80s from Radio Shack, then on a PDP1134 using dumb terminals. I never thought I'd use it professionally, but we learned to write games, steal passwords, spoof e-mails. I moved on and thought no more about it.
Fast forward 8 years; B.S. in biology, 2 years as a lab tech in molecular cardiology, an MBA and I walk into a temp job where they are using Business Basic on a mini-computer. I ended up running the IT department. After 4 years of that I moved on to owning a software and web development company. Aside from picking up a CNE to run our Novell Network no other formal training. I sold the company in 2003 and work part time now, by choice.
Not bad payback for a high school semester. The key, in my opinion, was a good teacher that encouraged us to play and students that loved to fool around with the computers.
Sorry, didn't mean to post as an anonymous coward. Clearly, I did not learn quite enough it that class after all.
it's not actually shameful to have your donation to the women's shelter go to the salary of their childcare provider or other employees.
but it is shameful if 90% of the money goes to the CEO and board of the shelter. Looking at the 990 lets you know what the money has paid for in the past.
No weapon kills people, people do. That's why no one should deny me my constitutional right to buy a tank and build a nuke.
When my wife went to medical school twenty years ago every lecture was transcribed and a copy distributed to each student which obviated the need to take notes. My understanding was that was pretty much universally true in medical schools. I doubt that has changed and now that she is teaching in a medical school I know that all of the lectures are also videotaped and posted online.
It sounds to me like your son, like me, is not going to spend a lot of time designing sites. I've helped with the occasional site done in a WYSIWIG editor. Every time, I have a steep learning curve and when I come back to it 2 years later because the owner needs a hand again I have to learn a new version of the software in which they have inevitably moved something on the menus, changed the layout of the controls, etc. It's a royal PITA. Sure, if your son is going to code a site a month a WYSIWIG package may be worth the effort, but I'm betting he has better uses for his time than designing sites at this point in his life.
Remember that Obama inherited a real mess. John McCain was so worried about a collapse of our financial system that he suspended his campaign and went back to Washington to make sure that TARP got through. Bush had turned the Clinton surpluses (I remember talk of retiring the twenty year treasuries) into record deficits.
While he did all of that the Republicans screamed about deficits and the threat of inflation. If he'd tried more stimulus, perhaps they would have been right. Trying to Do more would also have increased the chances of more of his agenda being blocked. It seems to me that you are faulting Obama for making choices that didn't magically turn what many feared would be the next Great Depression into an economic boom. Given the pickle he was put in, I say he did a fine job of balancing the need for stimulus, political compromise, the threat of inflation, and the size of the deficit.