Three days to Invinctus Sol!
Dec. 22nd, 2006 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptOnce again, stealing time while I can to serve up a suggestion of links that you'll like.
The New York times has published the redacted version of an editorial - the original was considered classified. Linked to a story about that earlier, about how the original author claimed there was nothing classified in his writing, but agreed not to publish. Which suggests two questions - how did the New York times ge a hold of this, and what drove them to published the blacked out version? (BugMeNot will help on the NY Times)
There may be a new way of detecting Alzheimer's disease with a chemical called FDDNP. It has promise that it might show people who are getting the disease well before they start exhibiting the symptoms of it. (NYTimes - BugMeNot is your cure)
Here's an odd way of looking at the truth or falsehood of global warming and environmental crashes - a Foreign Policy blogger says if it's all not going to happen, then why say anything? Why not prey on the fears of the people to make significant money? There's a certain evil logic to it - if you can prove that the disaster's never going to happen, there's a lot of money you could make in real estate and elsewhere.
Marc C. Taylor, in an opinion column in the NYTimes, suggests that the age of religion is already here, but that the task of the future is to study religion and its practice and see its influence, as well as to inspire critical thought of religion, rather than being pressured into saying nothing about religion because someone will be offended by it. The same could be said of several ideologies and ideas - critical reflection and thought should be engaged, rather than dogmatism of one way or another. In a word: Think! Otherwise, people who are will speculate that religion is inherently violent and call for people to move spiritually beyond it into something better. If you want to keep your belief system, and not be seen as a wingnut or a fringe lunatic, it's time to give some serious thought to the beliefs that you have. Best to find, expose, and destroy the dark side of the belief system before it does the same thing to you.
Or, at the very least, you can keep it from getting more of your money by believing the pitch of the ridiculous idea of a "War on Christmas". This idea is proving to be a lucrative way of fundraising for several groups in favor of indefinitely perpetuating the War on Christmas. And if they're emboldened by people flocking to them over Christmas, I wonder what they'll do with issues that actually have weight, like reproductive rights, homosexual marriage, and other bigger-ticket issues.
Because it's so very close to Christmas (observed), there's been a whole sequence of birth stories coming out of the BBC. (At least, that's my guess.) So we get a story of a woman who gave birth to three children from two wombs.
Something of potential interest, in robotics, in computing, and possibly in technical support as well - your computer may soon know what your mood is. If it's equipped, say, to be able to access your webcamera to track your face while you're using it.
The last bit for tonight is something from Time. It's a six-page article on how to get the public education system into the 21st century. Which is a discussion we need to have at all levels of government and policy, but most people are silent on, even in non-wars of distraction years.
The New York times has published the redacted version of an editorial - the original was considered classified. Linked to a story about that earlier, about how the original author claimed there was nothing classified in his writing, but agreed not to publish. Which suggests two questions - how did the New York times ge a hold of this, and what drove them to published the blacked out version? (BugMeNot will help on the NY Times)
There may be a new way of detecting Alzheimer's disease with a chemical called FDDNP. It has promise that it might show people who are getting the disease well before they start exhibiting the symptoms of it. (NYTimes - BugMeNot is your cure)
Here's an odd way of looking at the truth or falsehood of global warming and environmental crashes - a Foreign Policy blogger says if it's all not going to happen, then why say anything? Why not prey on the fears of the people to make significant money? There's a certain evil logic to it - if you can prove that the disaster's never going to happen, there's a lot of money you could make in real estate and elsewhere.
Marc C. Taylor, in an opinion column in the NYTimes, suggests that the age of religion is already here, but that the task of the future is to study religion and its practice and see its influence, as well as to inspire critical thought of religion, rather than being pressured into saying nothing about religion because someone will be offended by it. The same could be said of several ideologies and ideas - critical reflection and thought should be engaged, rather than dogmatism of one way or another. In a word: Think! Otherwise, people who are will speculate that religion is inherently violent and call for people to move spiritually beyond it into something better. If you want to keep your belief system, and not be seen as a wingnut or a fringe lunatic, it's time to give some serious thought to the beliefs that you have. Best to find, expose, and destroy the dark side of the belief system before it does the same thing to you.
Or, at the very least, you can keep it from getting more of your money by believing the pitch of the ridiculous idea of a "War on Christmas". This idea is proving to be a lucrative way of fundraising for several groups in favor of indefinitely perpetuating the War on Christmas. And if they're emboldened by people flocking to them over Christmas, I wonder what they'll do with issues that actually have weight, like reproductive rights, homosexual marriage, and other bigger-ticket issues.
Because it's so very close to Christmas (observed), there's been a whole sequence of birth stories coming out of the BBC. (At least, that's my guess.) So we get a story of a woman who gave birth to three children from two wombs.
Something of potential interest, in robotics, in computing, and possibly in technical support as well - your computer may soon know what your mood is. If it's equipped, say, to be able to access your webcamera to track your face while you're using it.
The last bit for tonight is something from Time. It's a six-page article on how to get the public education system into the 21st century. Which is a discussion we need to have at all levels of government and policy, but most people are silent on, even in non-wars of distraction years.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 12:58 pm (UTC)...I'm in China, I have to make my own fun.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 01:13 pm (UTC)One of the problems I notice the article does *not* address is what I call "final exams are final indeed" syndrome...IE, that kids only remember information until they use it up, and then flush. They gave an integrated post-final to ... Stanford grads, I think, and they failed them to a man, prompting that comment from one of the researchers.
"To earn an I.B. diploma, students must prove written and spoken proficiency in a second language, write a 4,000-word college-level research paper, complete a real-world service project and pass rigorous oral and written subject exams." - That's another thing. Objective scoring is appropriate for certain disciplines (mathematics and running are the two that come to mind immediately)...but subjective scoring, for all its flaws, still works better for other subjects (music, first off, and I'd argue English/second language comprehension as well...hell, that's how the HSK, DELF, and TESOL handle it).
And I'm all for teaching autodidactism...now, if only we knew how...
I'm sorry, this was a coherent thing when I started...
no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 01:53 pm (UTC)It's not as much as a problem as you present it to be. What is important is not facts (which finals test). Facts are not useful at all. Even in the sciences and engineering, no career really tests your fact recall (even in medicine, it's not that you can memorize every symptom as much as you can recognize anatomy and you can tell if something feels wrong. Then you look it up.) Outside the sciences, exact facts are even less important.
Fundamentally, college teaches you skills. The ability to synthesize facts and build an argument, the ability to critically analyze data and writing, the ability to pick out important things to memorize and retain them long enough to be useful, the ability to find facts that you need quickly and using good sources, and probably most importantly, to have a "feel" your subject and what "feels" right and what "feels" wrong. Of course facts and exact skills are very important in a different way, they're there to help you learn that they exist. I probably can't recall exactly how to solve a specific kind of PDE important in laminar Newtonian flows in a square channel, but I know it's solvable, can tell you exactly what kind of assumptions are needed to make it solvable, and can tell you which reference books could give you the complete solution. And just by glancing at the reference, I could solve it, since I've done it before. In real life, that's exactly what I would do.
Finals that test facts are important because fact recall is an important skill, but the exact facts are easily forgotten with minimal detriment.
This isn't to say I don't think the US education system needs help. It really does. Globalization is just one aspect, the second is that too much time is spent by administrators trying to make all the parents happy, instead of making the students learn.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 03:19 pm (UTC)