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Last post Author Topic: Interesting "stuff"  (Read 1189001 times)

tomos

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1125 on: February 03, 2016, 05:33 PM »
Grease was a raunchy, raw, aggressive, vulgar show. Subsequent productions sanitized it and tamed it down. The show mentions social issues such as teenage pregnancy, peer pressure and gang violence; its themes include love, friendship, teenage rebellion, sexual exploration during adolescence, and to some extent, class consciousness/class conflict.

Grease (musical) - Wikipedia

interesting :-)
The movie was one of the first I saw in the cinema. Was censored to boot, which made for some confusing sequences.
Tom

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1126 on: February 03, 2016, 05:59 PM »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1127 on: February 03, 2016, 06:00 PM »

Arizona Hot

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Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1129 on: February 08, 2016, 10:17 PM »

IainB

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US National Debt hits $19 trillion.
« Reply #1130 on: February 10, 2016, 06:00 AM »
I missed it whilst I was sleeping, but the US Debt Clock carries the news that the US is now in uncharted waters, due to the US National Debt - as tracked by the US Debt Clock - having exceeded $19 trillion.
I would presume/suppose that there is no way back to get out of this condition, should anyone want to try.
We are living in interesting times...

40hz

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1131 on: February 10, 2016, 02:18 PM »
When someone first showed this to me, I thought it was a joke.

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. This is how they're "teaching" math using something called the 'common core' approach.



Isn't that interesting? I don't think you could have gotten more of a WTF??? reaction out of me if you tried.  :tellme:

And this is the even funnier part. Here we have a half incoherent presentation by a gentleman by the name of Dr. Raj Shah of the Math Plus Academy who will "explain" to us why this method is better than the way math was traditionally taught in schools. (Hint: it's because the traditional way didn't work for everybody, and that was making some students think they couldn't do math - and were feeling bad about themselves because of it. Horrors! We can't have students ever feeling bad about themselves. It's simply "not done" in this our more enlightened (except for the waterboarding) society.)



Those of us old enough tor remember "The New Math" back in the '60s - or unfortunate to have suffered with it in a classroom - will probably hear and see a lot in this presentation they remember. It's that old whine in a new bottle.

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
When change is absolute there remains no being to improve
and no direction is set for possible improvement:
and when experience is not retained, as among savages,
infancy is perpetual.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- Santayana
« Last Edit: February 10, 2016, 02:32 PM by 40hz »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1132 on: February 11, 2016, 10:19 AM »
Clipboard01.jpgInteresting "stuff"

The best part is, not only do the folks at M&A care about art and beauty and the planet - and actually DO something about it - they know how to throw a kick-ass party. Past events have featured architectural towers of food and beer custom-brewed just for the occasion, and the New Year's Eve fete celebrating the end of the golden era was equally gourmet.    There was a fountain of chocolate that had the couple kids in attendance going majorly ga-ga over their Willy Wonka fantasies come to life, while the adults sipped fine champagne and gobbled garlicky escargot in a very civilized fashion until the whole kid thing became totally contagious...and...Voila! Chocolate-snail fondue! Would you believe it was actually quite tasty?

CHOCOLATE-COVERED SNAILS AND OTHER NEW YEAR'S DELIGHTS


IainB

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1133 on: February 11, 2016, 01:28 PM »
As a parent, I find those "Common Core" critical videos somewhat disquieting.
I looked at some others that were linked/associated with them in YouTube, and the one that helped me make sense of it all was the description of how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pumped and is pumping billions of dollars into what seems to be a half-baked bureaucratic approach to education, driven by some kind of a high-sounding slogan of "No child left behind" ideology, or something. As Deming pointed out, an ethos based on slogans can be devastating in its destructive consequences in any process, and is an example of irrational behaviour - "Action that is not based on sound theory is irrational by definition". Combine that with money/power and you find a motivation for almost anything stupid or evil that mankind has done or is doing around the globe. So Common Core would seem to be in the mix there.

The ideology is bankrupt. The reality would seem to be that we are NOT all born equal in the mental faculties department, and some people will inevitably start to lag behind from the moment of their birth, as HJ Eysenck pretty much established, there being a relatively large distribution of IQs in any given population sample, being arranged about a relatively classic bell curve of a normal distribution with the notional average of 100.
Let's not forget here that IQ tests measure not intelligence per se but a person's ability to answer the artificial IQ tests devised by unscientific psychologists, who suffer from their own human fallibilities, so they will probably only get things partly right at best - with the odd lucky exception, I suppose.

Core Curriculum represents a change, and, good or bad, the majority tend to resist a change. It seems to me that the point made in some of the videos about Core Curriculum math laboriously teaching understanding of how and why basic math calculations are performed was not shown as a necessary preliminary transitional state before teaching efficient calculation methods/algorithms. So be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

When it comes to helping children to become speedy calculators, I think nobody has yet improved on the Trachtenberg speed system of basic math, yet most teachers would not even know what that is and I don't know of any school that teaches it. The fact seems to be that when we calculate (using mental arithmetic), we do it using learned mental algorithms or "tricks", and whilst we are doing it we are not actually really thinking per se about what we are doing. Research has shown fairly conclusively that we can focus on only one mental process at a time.

That's the problem facing educators. To establish its worth, each new approach is essentially going to have to be tested on an unsuspecting population, and only time will tell whether it was better or worse than the last/previous experiment. Kids are the guinea-pigs in all of this. This is the research in prototype.
Using this unresearched hit-or-miss (QED) methodology inappropriately with a secondary objective of also determining some measure of teachers' efficacy/performance as teachers is likely to be a double fail. It will be demoralising, intimidating and likely to cause unintended consequences and sub-optimal coping behaviours as the beleaguered teachers desperately struggle to work the system such as it gets them the best results for their own performance measure.
I predict outcomes of fraud, incompetence and disaster for the teachers and the luckless students who are to be compulsorily afflicted with this experiment. The quality of educational output will necessarily suffer in all of this. One probably only needs to look at India's educational system for a comparison.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2016, 02:54 PM by IainB »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1134 on: February 12, 2016, 11:18 AM »

Arizona Hot

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40hz

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1136 on: February 12, 2016, 03:08 PM »
I predict outcomes of fraud, incompetence and disaster for the teachers and the luckless students who are to be compulsorily afflicted with this experiment. The quality of educational output will necessarily suffer in all of this. One probably only needs to look at India's educational system for a comparison.

This.

I think it will eventually land in the same scrap heap as the old "new math" and "transformational grammar."

Once again I think it's motivated by some person or persons (possibly with the noblest of intentions) that simply can't accept the fact that not everyone is as interested, motivated, or 'smart' about mathematics as he/she/they are, and has therefor decided to "DO SOMETHING" about it. I sometimes think it's part of the larger Messiah Complex the United States sometimes suffers from. Other examples of it in action are: Prohibition, the "No Child Left Behind" fiasco; and our disastrous forays into "nation building" in Viet Nam, and more recently, the Mideast.

I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for someone to reintroduce something in education to show how we've been doing it "all wrong all along." Which is funny because mathematical and general illiteracy has been slowly climbing for the last thirty years in the good ol' USA. Apparently we used to know how to teach reading and math. But we've apparently lost the secret recipe somewhere along the way. Possibly it got lost in the shuffle when "interrelationship education," "caring," "cultural sensitivity," and "feeling good about yourself," turned better than half of the available classroom time into amateurish and badly conducted group therapy and rap (in the old sense of the word) sessions.

But I suppose the upcoming generation will want their crack at reintroducing failed educational experiments and social initiatives as they come into their majority. So be it.

8-kurt-vonnegut-quotes-every-leader-should-know-6-728.jpg

So it goes.  ;)

Arizona Hot

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wraith808

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1138 on: February 13, 2016, 10:20 PM »
[ Invalid Attachment ]

iOS bug warning Setting this date on your iPhone or iPad will kill your device permanently




According to Ars Technica, this happens because January 1st, 1970 is the first day of the Unix epoch, and that allowing the phone’s battery to go completely dead (or disconnecting the battery) will reset the date.

Stoic Joker

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1139 on: February 15, 2016, 06:52 AM »
[ Invalid Attachment ]

iOS bug warning Setting this date on your iPhone or iPad will kill your device permanently




According to Ars Technica, this happens because January 1st, 1970 is the first day of the Unix epoch, and that allowing the phone’s battery to go completely dead (or disconnecting the battery) will reset the date.

Aren't the batteries non removable in those things? The rogue time server option sounds quite doable ... But IIRC there is - generally - a max adjustment limit built into the NTP protocol which Apple could/might/damn-well-better-start using.

wraith808

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1140 on: February 15, 2016, 01:10 PM »
[ Invalid Attachment ]

iOS bug warning Setting this date on your iPhone or iPad will kill your device permanently




According to Ars Technica, this happens because January 1st, 1970 is the first day of the Unix epoch, and that allowing the phone’s battery to go completely dead (or disconnecting the battery) will reset the date.

Aren't the batteries non removable in those things? The rogue time server option sounds quite doable ... But IIRC there is - generally - a max adjustment limit built into the NTP protocol which Apple could/might/damn-well-better-start using.

They are (supposed to be) non-removable, but you can let it go dead like any other device.  Or if you don't care about the warranty, they are removable.

Here's an example for a 4s: http://www.cnet.com/...ne-4s-battery-for-8/

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1141 on: February 16, 2016, 07:34 PM »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1142 on: February 16, 2016, 11:16 PM »

IainB

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Re: Interesting "stuff" - avoiding "Groundhog Day".
« Reply #1143 on: February 19, 2016, 01:37 AM »
When it comes to trying to understand American politics, it always feels like an uphill battle for me - a battle where I invariably feel that I am the loser as it all seems incomprehensible to me.
I therefore read with interest this post by one Glen Lipka about a rule for determining which U.S. presidential candidate will get elected, based on a historical perspective: The Presidential Charisma Rule – commadot.com
Presidential Elections Rule #1: The one with more charisma will win.
__________________________

I presume that the symbols (D) and (R) as used in the post represent the divisive dichotomy of Democrat and Republican, respectively, in the essentially two-horse race that is seemingly the only choice consistently allowed the American voters - this being my perspective as one of the people who voted in a referendum for a change to the electoral process by the implementation of a system of PR (Proportional Representation) to put an end to a similar (and disruptively destabilising) dichotomy in the election process in New Zealand.
It slowly dawned on me that the above "Charisma Rule" gave one a working theory which could help to explain things more scientifically in the context of any political selection process - that is, if only one could put a notional and reliable statistical measure on the defined quality of "charisma".

I slowly realised that it joined some dots together and could potentially be very useful. I know something about charismatic leaders, having:
(a) worked for one in an an organisation at 4 and 3 management levels below a charismatic CEO (he was an excellent guy to work for and with), and
(b) studied various research of reasons for corporate collapse in the US, UK and Germany, where one of the 3 main causes of such collapse was invariably found to be a charismatic leader whose appointment/selection typically led to a kind of meteoric rise of the organisation and himself (it was never a woman), followed by an abrupt collapse and demise due typically to unintended consequences in his edicts/decisions. Thus the end result of selecting a charismatic leader was ultimately and inevitably fatally destructive for the organisation, its employees' careers, and its charismatic leader's career in that organisation. This is potentially predictable/repeatable in practice and applied equally in the case of my charismatic CEO.

Thus the "Charisma Rule" for me not only helps one to feel that one understands US politics a little more, but also it fits with the leadership selection experience in the essentially 2-party system that generally prevailed in New Zealand prior to the introduction of PR, and it fits with the researched experiences of the selection of charismatic leaders in corporate organisations, and the (now) predictable failure outcomes.

What I find especially interesting about all this is (for me) the new freedom and scope for choice that it can give one by extending one's potential capacity for choice. That is, if once one observes that there seems to be a common thread there - i.e., the selection of a charismatic leader - then one probably feels obliged to at least consider whether one wishes to passively remain stuck in a system where one finds oneself, but now being aware of its having a disappointingly predictable and disruptive cyclical outcome, or to change oneself or the system to escape the seemingly "Groundhog Day" nature of it all.

H.G.Wells: Prisoned From The Cradle To The Grave
- Author: H.G.  Wells (from "The History of Mr.Polly")
from Chapter 9 - The Potwell Inn
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery.  If the world does not please you, you can change it.  Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.  You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting.  There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.  There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.
_____________________________

22_300x300_ADF4AEC9.png
« Last Edit: February 19, 2016, 01:52 AM by IainB »

Arizona Hot

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Edvard

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1145 on: February 22, 2016, 08:29 PM »
Software Piracy Hurts Linux Adoption, Research Finds
...
New findings published by Norwegian economics researcher Arne Rogde Gramstad show that software piracy significantly decreases the adoption of desktop Linux distributions.

https://torrentfreak...search-finds-160221/

angry-penguin.jpg



from CodeProject News

Arizona Hot

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1146 on: February 23, 2016, 05:25 PM »
10 Symptoms that Warrant a Trip to the ER.jpgInteresting "stuff"

10 Symptoms that Warrant a Trip to the ER

6 ways to free up more space on your smartphone.jpgInteresting "stuff"

6 ways to free up more space on your smartphone

Is there anyone here who has Android Marshmallow and uses Adoptable Storage?


wraith808

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1147 on: February 24, 2016, 08:24 AM »


And now we know why robot overlords hate us so much.  And about their destructive attention to hockey sticks.

tomos

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1148 on: February 24, 2016, 09:08 AM »
And now we know why robot overlords hate us so much.  And about their destructive attention to hockey sticks.
  ;D

does seem arbitrarily cruel...
Tom

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Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Reply #1149 on: February 24, 2016, 11:28 AM »