wsprague

10 ms·

31.
by wsprague 17y ago
Let me echo what some people are saying .... training and education. Duh.
32.
by wsprague 17y ago
And one more thing!! We always need to remember that there are subtle ways that students get sorted into "smart" and "not-smart", even when we are trying to be objective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
33.
by wsprague 17y ago
My only concern is that we have to come up with a plan that can be explained to the 100,000 or primary school teachers in the USA. Rarefied curriculums are like rarefied programming languages -- they don't "take", or they just distract. W
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by wsprague 17y ago
At the risk of being downvoted, let me rant: We need to reinstate hard-assed, traditional, back to basics curriculum. Period. Get rid of teacher credentialing systems and touchy-feely bullshit, and have kids start memorizing formulas, di
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by wsprague 17y ago
This makes me very happy! A lot corporate nastiness has remained unregulated due to arguments based on the tenet (ridiculous, in my view) that corporations should be afforded the same rights as human beings.
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by wsprague 17y ago
I think the teaching certification cluster is due to a few cultural dynamics: 1. There is an overall trend to more bureaucratization, and bureaucracies often evaluate their officers based on formal certification, especially when there is n
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UK Postal Code Data leaked
1 points by wsprague 17y ago|1 comments
38.
by wsprague 17y ago
I really like Tcl/Tk, and I hope anyone wanting to hack together a quick GUI interface gives it a try!
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by wsprague 17y ago
The question of why is there so much crappy education is interesting. I think part of the answer is that society is well-served by the failings of the educational system in that widespread educational crappiness helps support the class sys
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Work flows for data analysis
2 points by wsprague 17y ago|0 comments
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Why Did Economists Get It So Wrong(nytimes.com)
1 points by wsprague 17y ago|0 comments
42.
by wsprague 17y ago
My point wasn't that college is the best way to do numbers 1,2,3, just that it DOES provide these for better or for worse. If we are going to talk about alternatives, we need to talk about how college can provide these. I agree that on #1,
43.
by wsprague 17y ago
I think the debates about online education confuse the different roles that educational institutions serve: 1. Impart knowledge. And when it comes to teaching grammar or differential equations, online education is probably a more effectiv
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by wsprague 17y ago
I think part of the problem is to use "free will" as a name for thing (like an organ, next to, say, the liver), rather than as a name for a process. If we ask "how do we DO free will", we might start to get somewhere, I think. I think we "
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by wsprague 17y ago
Just a quick couple comments: 1) There are lots of unifying themes and grounds of meaning besides God -- the motherland, the continuity of the family, evolution, personal actualization, etc. 2) I disagree with most statements to the effect
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by wsprague 17y ago
I think that there is a problem with scale in Vonnegut's analysis: sure, most weeks things go up or down a little bit but remain basically even and boring. But on the scale of years, there are turning points at which there is a HUGE amount
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by wsprague 17y ago
It baffles me that supporting a rigorous traditional curriculum would be associated with a capitalist political and economic outlook. The only thing that I can think of is that the connotations of "traditional" or "rigorous" are unappealin
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by wsprague 17y ago
God bless him for giving himself (grudgingly?) to the public, and god bless him for ending his public life when we all remember him so fondly. I must admit that he wasn't on my radar until now, though I read his guide to Ruby, but now I lov
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by wsprague 17y ago
I find that every computer language does one thing best (ML with pattern matching, Tk with quick GUIs, Perl with text, Python with object orientation, Java with .... never mind), but in most other respects falls short of some other computer
50.
by wsprague 17y ago
I think "don't worry about normality" is a ridiculously bad statement. But perhaps "selectively denormalize when you run out of other optimzations" would be a little more reasonable. One approach is to make all your denormalizations popula
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by wsprague 17y ago
God I hate Fox Media -- the most simplistic, off-base trash.
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by wsprague 17y ago
That is one of the best posts I have ever read.
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by wsprague 17y ago
Because Unix IS an IDE already, with text editors like emacs or vim fitting in nicely with scripting, make, etc, etc.