I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when on I click on an article on an english-speaking forum and see a german translation, despite having my browser configured to tell websites that I speak both german and english[1].
This is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.
If I see "paid vacation" as an argument for why life in europe is better one more time, when an american doing the same job could take half the year off and still have more money left over, I'm gonna have an aneurysm.
The median US worker gets 10 days PTO, and about half don't even use all of it. "Could take half the year off" is a high-earner scenario that exists on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not the median experience in either place. The EU minimum is 20 days by law, for everyone, i.a., baristas, factory workers, nurses, not just people in high-paying jobs. But also, paid vacation is one stat out of like 40 on the site. There's life expectancy, safety, healthcare costs, democratic quality, CO2 emissions, renewable energy, education, press freedom... Reducing it to "just vacation days" is kinda proving the point that too many dismiss the data without actually looking at it.
Also if reading a stat about paid vacation gives you an aneurysm, you might want to get that checked; though I hear that can be expensive in some places ;)
Well, you have to get hired the next year, which is not easy and not instant either.
And after doing this a few times (leave after half year), no one will hire you.
Then there is this “little” problem of heath insurance. There are like other gothchas too.
If what you said would be feasible, lots of folks would do it. But the reality shows otherwise.
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.
I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.
I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
> With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.
Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.
Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.
The reason you want a touchscreen on a laptop isn't so that you can use it for "an extended period of time" but rather so that you can use it to do the few things that are painful with a touchpad, like drag and drop.
There’s been plenty of times where I would rather drag an item on the screen than fiddle with the sometimes flaky responsiveness and range of a touchpad. I’m usually fussy about my Asus laptop’s pad - the MacBook _usually_ does fine in the touchpad area. The best was my old ThinkPad’s nipple - preferable in most ways to what I use touchpads for at all.
I used to love swiping to type on mobile. Then I switched to iPhone. The issue there is if you have swipe enabled, it messes with the hit box of keys and you end up typing a lot of garbage if you type to fast when not swiping.
Beautiful. Another approach to visualizing the discovery of elements would be a "time travel" feature, where you see a timeline with just years below the table and can click on a year to see how the table looked that year.
You've added something that dims elements in years before they were officially discovered; but this is not “what the periodic table looked like at the time”. When I was a child, the periodic table had element names hahnium and kurchatovium on it. This is probably not easy to implement because many elements had multiple names between the US and USSR and they were not internationally standardized until 1997 (long after the fall of the USSR).
Hear, hear. I expect the same from app stores, but I haven't seen anyone announce it.
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