I think I should also gently suggest here that the issue could also be expectations. The idea that you put 30 random children in a class and that therefore there must be some who are "gifted", and there must be some who are "slow".
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
Don't have kids huh...gifted is just a classification for those with test scores in the top 1-5%. So if you have 100 kids, there is a pretty high likelihood you have 1-5 gifted kids (yes its not that simple, whatever).
And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.
PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.
PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.
>people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system
You know when I did my student teaching stint to certify? 1993.
PS: You know why they say tracking works? Because we throw out data from after high school graduation. Ever wonder how those, uh, "gifted", kids who got "A"s in high school Calc typically do in Calculus streams at the University level? I can assure you there are many many professors out there dealing with the results of our tracking system, (that being where the proliferation of "gifted" programs came from), who would not say that it is "working".
I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?
Most of the people selling LNG for instance, do not have any control over the definition of a "cubic meter". Even so, none of them cheat, because the US for example, very much does have its own definition of a cubic meter and it isn't going to pay you a penny more, nor a penny less, than what that cubic meter is worth.
All that to say, you could probably try to cheat the system, but I'd imagine the people in Sumer and Akkad had what they considered to be a precise unit of weight with which to measure your delivery. It doesn't matter what someone in Mohenjo-daro said, you were only going to get a certain amount in trade for your freight in Sumer. So I could see a centralized authority for weights, (the customer), at the same time as having no one in charge of that unit of weight in Mohenjo-daro.
I could see people agreeing to it essentially because that's all you're getting paid for. Because I saw the same behavior long ago at work with Halliburton.
The trade actually involved different measurements. The shekel (silver, commodity-money) was weighed by the Sumerian purchaser and then given to the trader in Dilmun (he would literally have a bag full of weights and silver)
The Meluhha commodities themselves were measured seemingly with the Meluhhan weights. So the units went from Indus -> Dilmun in Indus quantities, and were purchased and verified that way. The Sumerian guy was buying an "Indus quantity" and paying in a weight "Sumerian silver." So there wasn't a disconnection between Dilmun and Mohenjo-daro like you're implying.
It doesn't matter if you measure LNG in litres, gallons, or cubic inches. The market is going to pay you the precise amount for whatever you delivered measured in cubic meters. So what you measure in is irrelevant. Or more precisely, only relevant insofar as you want to have some idea how much you are going to be paid when you reach the market. And even then, it's only relevant to you. The market doesn't care what you measure in, because the market measures what you deliver in cubic meters. And the market has its own definition of "cubic meter".
So market participants, no matter where they may be, are incentivized to ensure whatever unit they're measuring out for delivery in will relate to the "cubic meter" as defined by the customer in a precise and verifiable way. If not, they could lose money. Thus, every freight measurement standard, would, again, effectively be set by the customer. Because no matter what units you deliver in, s/he is only paying you for the amount measured in his/her own measurement standard. So your standard has to conform to that standard in a fashion that is well defined, consistent, and well understood by you.
In ancient terms, this means the trader in Mohenjo-daro would have calculated that conversion factor out in a precise fashion. So they would walk around Mohendro-daro with a standard weight for measurement that was based on what they would expect to happen in Sumer. All the other traders in Mohendro-daro would eventually discover the same conversion factor. So everyone lands on the same weight for measurement, but no one collaborated. Because everyone, (every trader anyway), only cares what they can get for that weight in Sumer. It's not that everyone uses Sumer's units. It's that Sumer's units define what everyone's understanding of their own unit is through trade.
Not to be that guy, but you know this is gonna hit Iowa and Iowa State in the recruiting department. Athletics was part of the way some of these schools thought they’d make up for cuts in research and declining revenue elsewhere given increasing costs. “We’ll just get rich off football and basketball!!!”
realistically though, the rest of the B1G is definitely going to negatively recruit against this. Just like they are being told to negatively recruit southern states around the voting rights act stuff. Not that Iowa State cares about the B1G but they are generally going after the same guys. Now the B1G schools have wayyy more money, and the recruiting high ground.
The question is what serves their interests at the time? Whatever serves their interests at a given time, well, that’s what they believe at that time. That will have no bearing on what they believe in the future.
Let's be honest, compare the amount of money a corporation can make helping visually impaired people to the amount of money they can make replacing software developers and financial analysts.
Don't get me wrong, Apple using these technologies to help humans who are in need of help is laudable. But let's not pretend we don't know why most corporations don't look into this kind of thing. I think if we're being honest, we all very much know why they leave this sort of thing to the always nebulous "others".
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.” It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does “a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.”
Apple's competitors have had these features for years (Android for 7, Windows for 1), so it's really an indictment of Apple. They give lip service to helping the visually impaired, and this press release is good marketing for the non-visually impaired people who don't know this.
Really? I haven't used Android recently, but I very much doubt 7 year old Talkback was any where near as good as Voiceover. I also haven't seen a single accessibility improvement in Windows recently. The most accessible Windows apps are usually based on older toolkits like win32. Edge is very accessible, but 99% of that comes from Chrome.
Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.
I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT.
The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump.
If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it isn't sustainable. (But I'm not an economist so take that with a block of salt.)
I don't think anyone has the answers. It's just some of us are honest enough to concede we have no answers, while others promote an answer that aligns best with their belief system.
"It'll all work out."
"It's the immigrants/blacks/jews/whatever dragging us down."
"Nothing's going to happen and we can all continue doing the work we always have."
"Burn the rich."
Etc etc.
Not a lot of serious attempts out there at even getting a hand on the issues, let alone fixing the issues.
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
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