Lots of complaints about corruption. It’s worth imagining how you would run a very low income developing country. Remittances and tariffs are the easiest items to tax for revenue. I’d love suggestions for better alternatives…
There's an important difference between tax (predictable, evenly applied) and corruption (uneven, unpredictable, and doesn't go to the government but individuals)
Curious about the design choice. Why not use the TI parts with integrated microcontrollers rather than two separate chips? Or even a FPGA with integrated ARM9 like the Zynq family?
The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?
Is "it" the propaganda (useful to politicians for achieving political power) or reunification? My sense is that the number of Taiwanese that are enthusiastic about reunification has probably bottomed out in recent decade(s)???
To the people who are thinking about other languages, "Lexical decoding" - recognition of a word during reading was the strongest predictor of reading compression (as opposed to phonological).
Restating the highlighted result: Gc ("Comprehension-Knowledge") had the strongest effect on both lexical and phonological decoding. Knowing a word makes it easiest to comprehend when reading. This is probably completely obvious, but the broader point is that rich conversations with students that involve teaching them lots of words will improve their reading.
Only partially supported interpretation/application - All this business about phonics will only take you so far if the adults in a kids life (including their teachers) are not talking to them richly about a lot of stuff. Asking teachers to do a lot of rote repetition risks cutting out the really important part of school where students are actually building vocabulary. Teachers that use/teach large vocabularies may be unexpectedly more effective at teaching reading.
I think that only applies if learning to read in English. In a more phonemic writing system, if you can read, you can read any unfamiliar word too. This way, even a young child can read anything to quickly acquire more vocabulary unrelated to what their parents ever acquired.
No, comprehension is again orthogonal to reading as it is needed in spoken language too. Remember: everybody's (unless you have a severe speech or hearing impairment as a baby) first language is a spoken language, and to extend it to a written language you will have to learn (be taught) an artificial orthography to map to and from. You can know a lot of vocabulary before learning to read (if you ever do). In a language with a phonemic writing system, your sets of spoken and written vocabulary are the same, whereas in English they only overlap. In both cases, knowing a word is orthogonal to knowing its meaning(s).
I’d love to take that bet. My deed (in Texas) states that my lot is subject to the rules of the subdivision which include a number of zoning style restrictions. (They’re called “deed restrictions” and are very common AFAIK.)
The subdivision rules are changeable only with a supermajority vote. I believe the city (Houston in my case) is prohibited by the state from unilaterally changing them.
(I wouldn’t mind more free property rights!!! I find TX “liberty” is often biased towards $$$)
I would gladly see that bet through because that's not zoning, even if its effects are the same as zoning. Subdivision rules are a restrictive covenant (much like how HOAs work). Zoning is not a restrictive covenant, it is by definition a municipally-reserved restriction on land uses, and can be changed at the discretion of the jurisdictional authorities.
I've actually encouraged NIMBYs to use those HOA-style restrictive covenants if they're so adamant on their "zoning" never changing, because a restrictive covenant is actually a volunatory restriction. A city cannot come in and remove them willy nilly (they do in special cases like red-lining, but it is a politically arduous process). Someone with a restrictive covenant by definition has more protection from their neighborhood changing than they would if they just relied on zoning.
The problem is, nobody likes restrictive covenants, and they don't like the HOA-like structures that govern them, and they really don't like the punchable-faced people that seek power in those kinds of organizations.
Because the markets don’t “forbid” anything, especially when they are profiting from it, which polymarket definitely is. It’s the government who must forbid things for the good of the citizens. But somehow the citizens were dumb enough to fall for the bullshit idea that you should put the same person who is profiting in charge of regulating their own crimes!
> in e.g. the Iran War just have to place their bets 3 days before?
It certainly wouldn't perfectly solve things but the further out a prediction is made the more risk there is that the outcome could change - even for someone with insider knowledge.
E.g. I've worked in businesses where an M&A has looked a nail on cert - as part of a small discreet team involved we were being readied for the announcement etc. only for it to stumble a few days before completion.
Obviously there are some markets/situations where a few extra days won't make a difference at all, but I could see how something like that would introduce more risk/uncertainty for those with insider knowledge.
The title really should specify “to teach remotely”. And I think more broadly the context is the dream that widespread internet would make it easier to educate people “at scale” (meaning for less money per student).
So maybe the real question is why we ever expected “teaching at scale” to be effective.
I think that it’s quite clear that for an individual, curious student, the ability to use modern LLMs probably makes the ability to be 1-1 tutored (by a human!) cheaper/better. But I don’t think anyone claims that watching random videos on the internet will be as effective for LeBron James as having a personal trainer focused on him.
It seems like the overriding issue is to understand whether students need to take courses they’re not interested in. If the answer is yes, perhaps we need find ways of having these topics be taught by tutorial…
I think you have the right question, but I think the answer is a resounding "no." Old thinking towards education seems irrelevant in modern times. Children should be taught the basics of mathematics ,language, and technology as a necessity for interacting in the real world. This should include arithmetic up to applied algebra, grammar, reading, and, ideally, critical thinking. These core topics should have traditional testing and homework.
Everything else should be about exposure. So children are lectured on science, history, or whatever other subject; but they don't actually need a grade in these subjects during elementary school. This would reduce the work burden on students and teachers. The only purpose is to light a spark in those with true curiosity.
In high school, students should be able to choose topics of interest that they learned about in elementary school to do more intentional learning with tests and grades. Everyone else continues on a general path with the core subjects being tested and non-core subjects simply being lectured.
In college, those who chose a specific focus in highschool accelerated their learning for that subject. For others, if they didn't find anything interesting, they can go into a trade or whatever else they choose. If they are late bloomers, they go to college and cultivate their newly found interests with a larger back log of pre-reqs.
There's no point in "teaching" children things that they immediately forget only for them to go on to become a generic office worker or retail employee. We should cultivate those with the desire to be cultivated, and stop pretending that it's actually feasible to have an entire society of "intellectuals." There is a place in the world for those who don't care about learning, but there is little sense in throwing significant education resources at them.
A big part of schooling that I didn't realize until I was an adult is learning self discipline. The boring terrible class you hate and can't pay attention for is a feature, not a bug. You ought to learn how to get over yourself, be able to dig in on something uninteresting, and get what you need to get done. That is probably the single greatest skill schools teach people entering adult hood. Unfortunately it only takes for some students. Those students who always get As, who went on to med school and what not. How did they do it? Probably by getting over themselves as a step one. I wish I could slap my 16 year old self across the head.
Rest assured, if you force students to learn basic english and math, the vast majority of students will experience this as being forced to study things they don't care about.
The difference with what I'm suggesting is that they won't be forced to learn about 7 or 8 different things they don't care about at the same time.
The allocation of teachers' time will be better with a more constrained curriculum, and the classes where students choose to learn about a subject will be a more engaged.
Framing learning things you're uninterested in as "learning to get over yourself" is odd. This isn't an ego problem, and dictating personality traits to such an extent is a questionable goal.
>Framing learning things you're uninterested in as "learning to get over yourself" is odd. This isn't an ego problem, and dictating personality traits to such an extent is a questionable goal.
It is an ego problem. You will not have the liberty to be choosy over whatever might be in front of you in life. You will have to shovel the shit, figuratively or quite literally in some cases. The sooner you can learn this lesson, the easier life will be for you, and the more helpful you will be to others around you.
I am not really a fan of liquor, but I do like the idea of having skills which are universally valuable.
If you air dropped me into a random village in Africa I doubt I could 'code for cassava' but I could almost certainly make a living if I knew how to set up a basic pot still and safely create booze.
You could sanitize and disinfect with that alcohol! You could also make extracts of any plants nearby that were useful. Whiskey and vanilla beans are sufficient to make vanilla extract!
Sub saharan africa already has a very large informal distilling network (especially of bananas), a niche largely reserved for women in many regions (not sure for what the reason is for that exactly).
Historically, brewing, fermenting, and distilling are all "wife chores", probably because of the feminine-coding you mention... until it becomes highly profitable, at which point men take it away.
Wine has always easy to trade. Mead and ciders, ditto.
Beer/ale, prior to preservative hops, doesn't keep long enough to be viable for intercity trade. The acceptance of hops in a communities' drinkers coincides with a gender change in brewers (documented in PhD dissertations and books).
Distillation always results in a shelf-stable product; ergo it quickly becomes male dominated in a cash society (even supplanting cash in colonial America!).
