saulrh

88 ms·

811.
by saulrh 15y ago
In school people clan and desperately look for some identity to copy. This struck me. The most intelligent and self-aware of my friends seem to have consciously chosen some person or character to copy in high school or middle sc
812.
by saulrh 15y ago
Morgan Freeman: I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history. Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism...? Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man.
813.
by saulrh 15y ago
On the flip side, it'll probably be used for constant Wikipedia lookups and trivializing boring organizational work. Computers streamline memorization and scheduling and my agenda and a thousand other things that would normally disrupt my t
814.
by saulrh 15y ago
It's already been going around the public news circuit for a while, and they undoubtedly got some extra support and funding because it did. PLoS ONE publications are much easier for the public to access.
815.
by saulrh 15y ago
Buildcraft[1] and Industrialcraft[2] are also good for teaching automation, logistics, and resource management. For example, buildcraft+redpower will let you build a machine that digs a giant hole in the ground, smelts the ores, incinerates
816.
by saulrh 15y ago
Even if they aren't teaching from an evidence base and from proper research, they're better at defining requirements than the legislators simply because they're the ones in the classroom and observing their students' progress. I assume you'
817.
by saulrh 15y ago
Again, more measurement is not better measurement. I spent fifty hours a week in a classroom for nearly twelve years. Quite a bit of that was watching my fellow classmates struggle to understand things that I'd learned from the textbook at
818.
by saulrh 15y ago
Sure; that's exactly what I advocated in a comment on the last thread. Basically, we need to stop ranking students against a fixed list of objectives and go back to ranking them against each other. Give students space to expand rather than
819.
by saulrh 15y ago
There are ways to evaluate teachers other than running tests. In particular, I was in about ninth grade when NCLB hit, and its effects started rolling in in 11th grade. I was sufficiently aware of the situation to observe. It was a lot more
820.
by saulrh 15y ago
I've had bad teachers before, and I've had good teachers before. What I've observed is that the tests tend to prevent the good teachers from being good without really detecting the bad teachers. A few of the best teachers I ever had were fo
821.
by saulrh 15y ago
Ensuring that scores are reported correctly won't even start to fix our educational system. We don't need to cut down on cheating; rather, we need to realize that more data is not better data, that teachers know a lot more about teaching th
822.
by saulrh 15y ago
I've long been out of the field Speaking as someone that came out of high school a couple years ago and watched No Child Left Behind start taking effect, I've seen two different styles of test: one from the mid-90's, when it sounds
823.
'A Test You Need to Fail': A Teacher's Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students(commondreams.org)
464 points by saulrh 15y ago|175 comments
824.
by saulrh 15y ago
Closures and first-class functions aren't an achievement. Closures and first-class functions in a language low enough and fast enough level for systems programming? That's an achievement. Same for unicode. These aren't just features. These
825.
by saulrh 15y ago
On the other hand, they're seeing a spike in exactly the same place that the LHC's been seeing a spike. That's good news - it means that there's new physics in there rather than just a measurement error.
826.
by saulrh 15y ago
Huh, didn't know that. I stand corrected. That Raman amplification is nifty. :D
827.
by saulrh 15y ago
Modern telecoms cable is some amazing stuff. These days there's no metal in the entire cable. Instead, it's all lasers through glass fiber, and when the signal attenuates, it gets boosted by passing through sections of doped fiber that lase
828.
by saulrh 15y ago
Speaking as a recent high school graduate, please, please don't give up. I made it out of school knowing calculus and more because I had one physics teacher and one math teacher that hadn't given up. They wrote their homework themselves,
829.
by saulrh 15y ago
Pretty much what I figured. I look forward to seeing your future results! Or to seeing you to get shut down by the NSA. :P
830.
by saulrh 15y ago
Do you expect your system to scale easily to the "the entire internet" data set? You mention that you degrade gracefully as the problem size increases; is getting the accuracy up to a usable figure only a question of more signals and proces
831.
by saulrh 15y ago
I am not entirely sure why you need multithreading in a text editor for example. I can see a few uses for it. The big one for me is semantic analysis. Intellisense is a surprisingly large computational burden, for a single example
832.
by saulrh 15y ago
It's no more alarmist than IE telling you it doesn't recognize the file you just downloaded, so be careful. Except that IE still presents you with a "Run" button. This just... stops you. Condescending Sure. Poorly worded on
833.
by saulrh 15y ago
"May damage your computer" is accurate, but alarmist and misleading. It will dissuade more good software installations than it prevents bad installations, and it will raise distrust of computers and lower computer aptitude and overall under
834.
by saulrh 15y ago
I think the really big factor here is that scientists don't want to go into politics! Pretty much my guess. A lot of people I know say that, if they were mysteriously elected president, their first words would be "I quit!".
835.
by saulrh 15y ago
Heh. We are definitely just as vindictive and scheming as anybody else, I'll admit. The thing is, though, that our worldview is based on evidence. No matter how vicious the funding committee meetings get, we are expected to have rational a
836.
by saulrh 15y ago
China is socially repressive and an environmental catastrophe in progress, but it's also one of the fastest-advancing nations in the world. Chinese citizens were starving to death en masse as recently as the 70's. The fact that they've pull
837.
by saulrh 15y ago
On the other hand, we've seen that people are clearly willing to download bittorrent clients to get their stuff. Add in PEX with DHT and tribler-like functionality (versus having to go find a sufficiently non-seedy website, and not having t
838.
by saulrh 15y ago
LiPo batteries explode if you short them. Doesn't even need to be a very long short, or a very big one. They are incredibly sensitive to fast discharges. Water easily conducts well enough to cause problems, especially if it messes up anot
839.
by saulrh 15y ago
So far I've been one of those smart people (though I'm finally finding people that are smarter than I am, and it's a great feeling), and I have my parents to thank for it. As far as I can tell, one of the big things they did was answer my q
840.
by saulrh 15y ago
I'd assume that "maintainable" code is boring code - code that is instantly understandable when you look at it and that is hard to get wrong. He's complaining that that code is boring and not creative , and that as a startup your job is

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