Some US states have 60/40 plans built into their education budgets. What that means is 60% of the money the state gives to local schools must go to the "classroom." Now, how a state defines classroom is very loose. Most of the time, supplies, working facilities, new desks, books, and teaching materials fit into it. What is the other 40%? Administrative and teacher salaries, lunch programs, and transportation.
In my experience, schools in the US actually waste a huge sum of money because they have incompetent administrative staff (with the added bonus that they're overpaid).
I've acquired a growing distrust of Amazon's seller accounts in the past year. For a while, I was making my rent on used books I'd acquired over the years. However, I found Amazon was more likely to side on the buyer side, even when there was a preponderance of evidence that I had done nothing wrong. So, Amazon closing a person's account and giving no reason is right up their alley.
Education and its trying-to-be-legitimate partner Educational Psychology is even worse. It is essentially a smal set of theories based on very small sample quantitative and sketchy qualitative research. There's an added bonus of philosophical and political policy initiatives that go against accepted theory "just cause."
Yeah there's a 'hard science' crowd among educational (psychology) researchers, that only accepts quantitative, experimental, randomized studies, but even that form of research has serious flaws when applied to education. They ignore biases that can affect results (most often experimenter expectancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect ), and they ignore ecological validity (many findings 'from the lab' end up not working at all, being weakened or even reversed when tested in a classroom). On top of all this, they never open source their software (if any), and they don't share the data.
As one person put it, these studies, usually done with college student volunteers as participants, "include participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time" (http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-the...)
Most research is driven by the constraints of tenure-track jobs. Theory doesn't get you tenure. Journal articles with empirical p values < .05 do, regardless of whether they are never replicated, never applied to the field, and never influence changes in practice.
Doing theory takes more time and more space (word wise) than a typical journal affords - it's more compatible with books than journal articles, and most journals don't publish theoretical articles. Books are often not counted for tenure, actually: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/would-dewey-piaget...
Yeah, I think the problem with the 4S is that it's a fairly minor update. Look at the difference between the "smartphones" before the original iPhone and after, the iPhone and the iPhone 3G(S), and then the iPhone 4. Each was a significant upgrade in both technical prowess and on-board features. However, the consumer market has already seen -everything- the 4S with this year's Motorola, HTC, and Samsung offerings.
Honestly, I don't know anyone who really seeks out BBB accreditation as a means of judging a business's credibility (I'm talking at the consumer level). In fact, the only times I've ever caught myself viewing any of their web content was for businesses I already knew sucked.
My field is more Education than CS or engineering, but I don't think publishers add value as much as, simply create a convenient baseline for readers to judge the quality of the work. Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing. With that sort of ingrained mindset, it's really no wonder why publishers still exist (and probably will continue to exist) even with the recent advances in open source.
I know from my experience though, that many in academia would not publish papers without a journal because their contracts with the university either forbid such action or part of their contract explicit state they MUST be published by a respected publisher.
>Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing.
The problem isn't that Wikipedia is free. The problem is that Wikipedia is, by definition, a secondary(where it links to a primary source) or tertiary source(where it links to another link that links to the primary source). If you're doing the proper research, you should be using primary sources as much as possible. That means you should be directly citing the paper that Wikipedia is using, not Wikipedia itself.
Looks to be a very interesting idea. In fact, I do want one. Buuuuut, I'd have to wonder with those prices for the full models and DIY kits if he is not overcharging by several hundred dollars. True, you're buying a piece of tech for its look and feel more than functionality, but as a guy who's actually bought, played with, and used old style typewriter, $700 is a bit much for anyone.
Could any enthusiasts (I consider myself an amateur) weigh in?
Looks like for your money you get a typewriter (presumably refurbished), a display and the electronics. As you noted, he sells a DIY kit if you want to provide your own screen and typewriter (with an estimated assembly/install time of 6-7 hours for an experienced person.
Actually sounds like a fair price to me. But perhaps you are used to getting your electronics assembled overseas on a massive scale by (essentially) slave labour.
Display? No. Those are iPads in the Etsy store. The typewriters are essentially USB keyboards. For $600-$800 you get an old typewriter and an pre-wired-up Arduino board. You're paying for the integration of this http://www.etsy.com/listing/62642931/diy-usb-typewriter-conv... into the typewriter.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/82254797/usb-typewriter-computer... I own this exact typewriter. I bought it a few years ago for $20. Now, if you have the money to spend, perhaps for a gift, and you don't feel confident that you can find a good typewriter and assemble it yourself, $700 might be worth it to you.
I think some of what you're saying is a bit too broad, but more or less on the same point as I am. Technology drives human progress, some could argue it -is- human progress and the idea that there is anything to fear from computers or "nanobots" is about as ridiculous as believing "The Matrix" is based on a true story.
Luddites have existed in our society (by that I mean First world) for a long time. The ITS is just another in a long list of people conspiratorially whispering about things William Gibson wrote about in fiction 20 years ago.
Which is funny, because the goo is actually green.
I never understood the fear of nanotech, because I see no reason that tiny robots would be any more scary or harmful than all the bacteria out there already. And the bacteria can already both self-replicate and kill us.
If bacteria were as powerful as nanotech, there would not be any need for nanotech. Nanotech could potentially be to bacteria what the space shuttle is to a horse.
Nanotech can neither replicate nor kill us yet. It's not magic, and evolution has a huge head start on dealing with issues like powering it and self-replication. Devices at that scale are, generally, quite frail to things like stray cosmic rays or other background radiation causing them to break down.
And the space shuttles are dead; there will be no more of them. Horses, meanwhile, have survived for millions of years, so you're making the opposite point by mistake.
It's been a while, but a long time ago I heard the phrase, "The Rolling Stones are not in the music business, they're in the t-shirt selling business." In that way, I think if you examine Google's practices and its strategy with Android, it's that Google is an advertising company. It's where all their money comes from. Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle are traditional software companies in the sense they derive their profits from consumers and businesses purchasing services.
> They may have dressed it up as pious and open – but for their purposes, it's a land grab. Is it anticompetitive? I'm not sure.
Well, then, isn't GNU/Linux in general anti-competitive? Or free-libre software since many developers don't charge for services?
As for Google's trustworthiness with patents versus patent-abuse, anyone know a site with a good summary of Google's patent disputes?
Just an anecdote, but I have been using chrome for the last six months because everything else was slow as a dog on my Mum's MacBook Pro, and chrome was super-fast. But the lack of decent keyboard link navigation is driving me crazy, and may drive me back to firefox soon.
In my experience, schools in the US actually waste a huge sum of money because they have incompetent administrative staff (with the added bonus that they're overpaid).