>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:

I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.
Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.
The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.
I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.

That's probably the first rebuttal to climate change I've ever read that doesn't spout nonsense and lies. Kudos to you.
Out of interest, you say you're "not entirely a layman". May I ask if that means you have studied climatology or simply that you read the papers?
As for water vapour, it's not really a "forcing agent", it's reactive. It's better explained here.


My background is computer science but that requires a strong math background as well. When doing any manner of computer simulation of a complex and unknown system, the purely theoretical models are rarely sane. The reason being you can't model the bare physics of a complex system, so you have to essentially estimate(fake) the macro effects and properties. You get good computer models by comparing the results to real data and iterating back and forth until your model starts doing a better job of reflecting reality. The big red flag for me with climate models is the really limited real world data available to compare models to. I don't models aren't worthwhile, scientists are building them because they are useful. The trouble is what they are useful for. By definition, the models have to be treated as less reliable than the raw data we calibrate them against and run our sanity checks against. Neither does it matter how many different models we run, all that gets is closer to the same reliability as the real world measures that we have.

That ties into the article I linked, where the climate guys trying to rebuild temperature data to calibrate computer models from where themselves not strong enough in statistics to notice very significant flaws in the methods they were using. Flaws that systematically produced the results they initially deemed significant. Without a strong grounding there, I have to assess we are still left with a long road to go before really saying we understand this.

As for water vapor being reactive, I would very much disagree. Any climate scientist trying to tell you that is trying to simplify things for you to the point they are no longer being accurate. Ice caps melting, oceans rising, and cloud cover doubling is going to drive climate. It is going to force climate more strongly than anything else. The big unknown is just what parameters water vapor works under, it's simply not well understood yet. Computer models don't even know what sign to assign it as a forcing agent for pitysake. Most likely because it can act as both positive and negative based on environmental factors which are dependent on temperature among other things. When it comes to what kind of forcing H2O does the honest answer is that it's role is so complicated we just simply do not know. What we DO know is that currently, it contributes to 60-90% of the overall greenhouse effect. That tells me it's role in forcing is a much more worthy area of focus and study than CO2 and it's a crying shame so many more dollars are spent on CO2 than H2O when what we really need is to understand the whole system in order know what is really going on.

Thanks for the quality comment!

In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
*quality

I have some very close friends who are farmers. They have to be proficient in a vast number of very different things. From repair of very complex equipment--in the fields--to horticulture, to veterinary medicine, to computer science. They don't call a repairman to fix something--they fix it now, or learn to fix it themselves.

*quality

I have some very close friends who are farmers. They have to be proficient in a vast number of very different things. From repair of very complex equipment--in the fields--to horticulture, to veterinary medicine, to computer science. They don't call a repairman to fix something--they fix it now, or learn to fix it themselves.

How does a baby fair to the idea of a yes or no statement about a concept he has no idea of? Further, how can you say no to a concept than you don't understand to be true? Moreover, how is abstaining from a decision about something not a 3rd choice? For instance, what do you believe about the cardinality of infinities being infinite as they relate to the divisibility of finite sums? Huh? Not thought about it before? Need more information or time to form an opinion, I know I do. Abstaining from making a choice is not a no, yet, but nor is it a yes. Both yes and no require a justification, and for myself, that justification needs to be something more than just an inclining.

I agree; this is saying "I don't know", which I think is a legitimate answer, and the only intellectually honest one barring actual knowledge. This was my point that the atheist position is "no" to the proposition "does God exist?", which requires a justification.

As to belief, I think you are misusing the word here. Everything one thinks about something is a belief. Belief is the cognitive recognition of an idea. So yes, while the answer to the certain knowledge of God's existence is, indeed yes or no, the tribulation of the human experience is that we have few good ways of "knowing", and for the agnostic, we have no good way of "knowing" God's existence.

This was my position as an agnostic, so I understand what you mean. It was very difficult to even define what truth could be in that mode of thinking. When I understood that truth was a tangible concept that could be grasped, it blew me away. I will say that you have a good way of knowing whether God exists. If you prayed to Jesus and asked Him what the truth is, He would show it to you.

When I refer to knowing, I refer back to the Cartesian understanding of knowledge (which has been challenged rather unsuccessfully, imo, by Popper); justified, true, belief. True is uppercase true, belief is cognitively asserting the true belief, and justified is a more complex idea in that you need some way of asserting this IS the way it has to be and not some other, a possition that can't be reduced away froml by reductio ad absurdum, for example, or any other means.

The tension is between the objective and the subjective viewpoint. To define a universal concept such as truth, you would need an objective viewpoint. God is the only being which could have such a viewpoint, so therefore, unless God tells us, we have no way of knowing. Finite human beings are locked into their subjective bias. We cannot get outside of the Universe to look in and see what is really going on.

I do agree, however, that many atheists like to posit the position that God, indeed, does not exist. That would require some evidence as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Yes, they do like to posit that. When asked for that evidence however, they like to say they merely "lack belief", which is meaningless. Basically, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say no to the question of whether God exists but escape the burden of proof. That is what this "lack of belief" is all about. It's not an "i don't know", it's a "no, but i dont have to provide any evidence for that".

There is no compelling reason, to me, to decide either way. So in that, I am an Atheist because there is no overwhelming compelling story, beyond all doubt, what the idea of God should even be. I am Agnostic because I don't think there is a way we will ever be able to know. This is one area I would hope to be wrong on. I would prefer there to be some order, some cause, some point to life beyond some cosmic hapistance, but so far, I have no real reason to believe either story; purpose or accident.

That you're interested in the truth, and you are open to what it could be, is a very good thing. When I was agnostic, I felt much the same way. When I found out God is real, I wasn't even specifically looking for Him. I was searching for that truth and it ended up finding me. God rewards that open mindedness, that curiosity and drive to know what is real. What I suggested above is the shortcut; just ask Him and He will show you.

By the way, there is a whole area of computer science based in this idea. Multi-valued logic is my current area of study for developing asynchronous computing systems. The Aristotelian view of logic; of values being true or false, is, like I mentioned before, still the ontological certain position of outcomes (if you don't consider Turing's halting problem that is), but many times, the certainty of outcomes isn't needed to continue process on some other value of computing (like waiting on the slow ass system clock, when the ram is ready for more data from the bus, which is also ready). In that same way, I realize the great value in answering the question of God, it forever consumes my thoughts, but this doesn't have to halt me to processed onto other thoughts without a current answer. Humans are, in fact, natures most amazing asymmetric processor after all

I agree, and I will submit to you that all other truths are relevant to this question, and in fact, their ultimate reality could only be determined by the answer to that question. The funny thing about it is, the answer to it could only ever be yes. If it is no, you will never hear about it. The only thing you will ever hear is yes.

Your work sounds highly interesting. Could you direct me to any resources which would describe it in more detail?

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
Hey @hpqp, I'd like to thank you for your reply and let you know I plan to have a furthering of that discussion when I get off work (on lunch break), but I had to address @shinyblurry rock argument.
How does a baby fair to the idea of a yes or no statement about a concept he has no idea of? Further, how can you say no to a concept than you don't understand to be true? Moreover, how is abstaining from a decision about something not a 3rd choice? For instance, what do you believe about the cardinality of infinities being infinite as they relate to the divisibility of finite sums? Huh? Not thought about it before? Need more information or time to form an opinion, I know I do. Abstaining from making a choice is not a no, yet, but nor is it a yes. Both yes and no require a justification, and for myself, that justification needs to be something more than just an inclining.
As to belief, I think you are misusing the word here. Everything one thinks about something is a belief. Belief is the cognitive recognition of an idea. So yes, while the answer to the certain knowledge of God's existence is, indeed yes or no, the tribulation of the human experience is that we have few good ways of "knowing", and for the agnostic, we have no good way of "knowing" God's existence.
When I refer to knowing, I refer back to the Cartesian understanding of knowledge (which has been challenged rather unsuccessfully, imo, by Popper); justified, true, belief. True is uppercase true, belief is cognitively asserting the true belief, and justified is a more complex idea in that you need some way of asserting this IS the way it has to be and not some other, a possition that can't be reduced away froml by reductio ad absurdum, for example, or any other means.
I do agree, however, that many atheists like to posit the position that God, indeed, does not exist. That would require some evidence as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is no compelling reason, to me, to decide either way. So in that, I am an Atheist because there is no overwhelming compelling story, beyond all doubt, what the idea of God should even be. I am Agnostic because I don't think there is a way we will ever be able to know. This is one area I would hope to be wrong on. I would prefer there to be some order, some cause, some point to life beyond some cosmic hapistance, but so far, I have no real reason to believe either story; purpose or accident.
By the way, there is a whole area of computer science based in this idea. Multi-valued logic is my current area of study for developing asynchronous computing systems. The Aristotelian view of logic; of values being true or false, is, like I mentioned before, still the ontological certain position of outcomes (if you don't consider Turing's halting problem that is), but many times, the certainty of outcomes isn't needed to continue process on some other value of computing (like waiting on the slow ass system clock, when the ram is ready for more data from the bus, which is also ready). In that same way, I realize the great value in answering the question of God, it forever consumes my thoughts, but this doesn't have to halt me to processed onto other thoughts without a current answer. Humans are, in fact, natures most amazing asymmetric processor after all <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/teeth.gif">
Ok, rant over! Back to work, slave!

Hey @hpqp, I'd like to thank you for your reply and let you know I plan to have a furthering of that discussion when I get off work (on lunch break), but I had to address @shinyblurry rock argument.

How does a baby fair to the idea of a yes or no statement about a concept he has no idea of? Further, how can you say no to a concept than you don't understand to be true? Moreover, how is abstaining from a decision about something not a 3rd choice? For instance, what do you believe about the cardinality of infinities being infinite as they relate to the divisibility of finite sums? Huh? Not thought about it before? Need more information or time to form an opinion, I know I do. Abstaining from making a choice is not a no, yet, but nor is it a yes. Both yes and no require a justification, and for myself, that justification needs to be something more than just an inclining.

As to belief, I think you are misusing the word here. Everything one thinks about something is a belief. Belief is the cognitive recognition of an idea. So yes, while the answer to the certain knowledge of God's existence is, indeed yes or no, the tribulation of the human experience is that we have few good ways of "knowing", and for the agnostic, we have no good way of "knowing" God's existence.

When I refer to knowing, I refer back to the Cartesian understanding of knowledge (which has been challenged rather unsuccessfully, imo, by Popper); justified, true, belief. True is uppercase true, belief is cognitively asserting the true belief, and justified is a more complex idea in that you need some way of asserting this IS the way it has to be and not some other, a possition that can't be reduced away froml by reductio ad absurdum, for example, or any other means.

I do agree, however, that many atheists like to posit the position that God, indeed, does not exist. That would require some evidence as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is no compelling reason, to me, to decide either way. So in that, I am an Atheist because there is no overwhelming compelling story, beyond all doubt, what the idea of God should even be. I am Agnostic because I don't think there is a way we will ever be able to know. This is one area I would hope to be wrong on. I would prefer there to be some order, some cause, some point to life beyond some cosmic hapistance, but so far, I have no real reason to believe either story; purpose or accident.

By the way, there is a whole area of computer science based in this idea. Multi-valued logic is my current area of study for developing asynchronous computing systems. The Aristotelian view of logic; of values being true or false, is, like I mentioned before, still the ontological certain position of outcomes (if you don't consider Turing's halting problem that is), but many times, the certainty of outcomes isn't needed to continue process on some other value of computing (like waiting on the slow ass system clock, when the ram is ready for more data from the bus, which is also ready). In that same way, I realize the great value in answering the question of God, it forever consumes my thoughts, but this doesn't have to halt me to processed onto other thoughts without a current answer. Humans are, in fact, natures most amazing asymmetric processor after all

Ok, rant over! Back to work, slave!

Embedded programming is currently one of the biggest programming fields out there. Add to that any sort of low level system programming (such as the Linux kernel), and you'll see there's a reason why it sees so much use to this day. It's certainly not an easy language to use, but if you want results in those fields, you use it.
>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^chtierna:
From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."
... and still going strong. That says it all.

That's unfortunately true. No disrespect to dmr; C was a great language for it's time, and tonnes of great things were achieved with it, but it's well past it's use by date for most tasks.
Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.
That said, dmr was one of computer sciences true innovators, and will be missed.

>> ^chtierna:

From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."
... and still going strong. That says it all.


That's unfortunately true. No disrespect to dmr; C was a great language for it's time, and tonnes of great things were achieved with it, but it's well past it's use by date for most tasks.

Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.

That said, dmr was one of computer sciences true innovators, and will be missed.

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^westy:
child is traumatized by how much of a rip off angry birds is of this game http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle
Oh, come on... Scorched Earth, Worms, and a million other physics-based games where you lob, shoot, throw, fire, or catapult something at something else were before both those games. I remember playing a Scorched Earth-like game on a TRS-80 in Computer Science when I was in high school.


No, no, no... Scorched earth and worms are totally different games from Angry Birds and Crush the Castle. Yes, they use physics. So do a million other games. Yes, you shoot things, just like a hundred million other games. But Westy's right. Angry Birds and Crush the Castle are set up in almost exactly the same way. Total ripoff. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

>> ^westy:

child is traumatized by how much of a rip off angry birds is of this game http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle
Oh, come on... Scorched Earth, Worms, and a million other physics-based games where you lob, shoot, throw, fire, or catapult something at something else were before both those games. I remember playing a Scorched Earth-like game on a TRS-80 in Computer Science when I was in high school.

@blankfist

Research that purporting that teaching is a difficult job based on 6 criteria. I suggest the whole document but here's the jest of it.
______________________________________________
---------->Societal Attitude:
The participants in this study believed that the attitude of society toward the teaching profession was unfair and detrimental to their overall functioning. They did not believe that they were valued, despite their advanced levels of education. In a recent nationwide survey of over 11,000 teachers and teacher candidates, Henke, Chen, Geis, and Knepper (2000) found that only 14.6% of the teachers surveyed were satisfied with the esteem in which society held the teaching profession.

--->Denise, a high school English teacher addressed the issue of respect:

"There is a lack of respect for teachers. It's not just the money, but also the attitude I get from administrators and politicians that teachers are trying to get away with something. We have taken these cushy jobs where all we have to do is stand up in front of a bunch of kids and BS for a few hours, and only work ten months of the year, at that teachers have it easy! Every time we ask for something (like, in my county, that the county pay our contribution to the state retirement system, for example), they make us out to look like whiners - give 'em an inch; they'll take a mile. The truth is, though, that teachers care so deeply and work SO much beyond our "contract hours." I can't tell you how many come in for weeks during the summer, as I do, and take on clubs after school (for which we are not compensated), and work during vacations. This lack of respect for teachers gets me down."
______________________________________________
---------->Financial Issues:
On top of the perception that they are not being valued by society, teachers are notoriously underpaid in our country. Four years after their graduation, Henke et al. (2000) surveyed a large sample of college graduates between 1992-1993. They found that the teachers were tied with clerical staff and service workers for the lowest salaries. A recent report from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, 2000) found the following to be the case for the 2000-2001 school year:

For new teachers, the $28,986 average beginning salary lagged far behind starting salary offers in other fields for new college graduates. For example, accounting graduates were offered an average $37,143; sales/marketing, $40,033; math/statistics, $49,548; computer science, $49,749; and engineering, $50,033.
The $43,250 average teacher salary fell short of average wages of other white-collar occupations, the report found. For example, mid-level accountants earned an average $52,664, computer system analysts, $71,155; engineers, $74,920; and attorneys, $82,712.
The majority of the participants in this study related that they were simply not paid enough to live comfortably. They drove old cars and lived in inexpensive apartments. Others struggled to save enough money to buy a home.

--->Calvin, a high school science teacher, talked about his pay:

"I love teaching, but I don't know if I love it enough to deprive my family and myself of necessities. I have a baby and another on the way. I can't see how I can ever save enough to make a down payment on a house, even with a second job in the summer."
______________________________________________
---------->Time Scarcity:
Many new teachers were physically and emotionally fatigued to the point of exhaustion. They reported that they worked long days at school, and then took home lesson plans to create, papers to grade, and parents to call. They also worked nights and weekends on school-related work.

--->Jessica, a high school math teacher:

"I work 70 hours a week, and after 3 years it's not getting any better. When Friday night rolls around, all I want to do is fall asleep at 8 p.m.! Obviously that doesn't lead to a very exciting social life, or much of a "life" at all, if I can hardly stay awake long enough to go out to dinner with my friends and family. Even at holidays there are always papers to grade."

--->Fred, a high school English teacher also had difficulty with the amount of time required to do his job, pointing to the effect the time constraints had on family relationships:

The time commitment is the worst. During my first two years of teaching I worked 70-80 hour weeks, including time worked during the school day, in the evenings and over the weekend. Time commitment varies with the subject taught and with experience, but this aspect of the job nearly ran me out of teaching on several occasions and I witnessed one great new teacher leave teaching for this very reason. "It's my job or my marriage," she explained. "I never see my husband, and we're living under the same roof."

______________________________________________
---------->Workload:
The data reveal that it is nearly impossible for a conscientious teacher to complete all that is expected of them in one school day. At the high school level, teachers were teaching five or more classes in a traditional school, and three in a block schedule school. For each class this meant that the teacher's task was to design a complete lesson lasting at least one hour. This lesson had to follow the state curriculum, be engaging and interesting to students, and include various components as required by the school district, such as a warm-up, class activities, and homework. The teachers wanted to use outside resources such as the Internet to connect the material to real world applications. Additionally, they reported that there were often several special needs students in the class, and each of them needed some special accommodation. They found that planning was not a trivial task; it took several hours to design one effective instructional plan.

According to the teachers in this study, class sizes were another difficult feature of the teacher's day. In public high schools, most class sizes ranged from 25 to 35 students for a total of 125-175 students in a traditional school, and 75-105 in a four period block school. Henke et al. (2000) reported that the average number of students taught by secondary teachers each day is 115.8.

--->Abby, a high school history teacher explained the effect of large class sizes:

"Imagine any other professional trying to deal with the needs of this many "customers" at one time. If a physician were seeing patients, and grouped this many together, it is readily apparent how ridiculous it would be to expect her or him to address the needs of each person. The same is true for teachers.
Each student is an individual, with needs and issues that must be addressed. In a class period, the teachers expressed frustration because they could not address the needs of 25 or more students. "

--->Gina, a former high school science teacher described the variety in her workload as well as in her students' abilities:

"What I least expected was the amount of paperwork I had to do. Grading papers, progress reports, parent conferences, English-as-a-Second Language, exceptional students, ADD paperwork, and even work for absent students seem to take more time than "teaching."

To compound the issue, teachers also related many learning issues, where students had questions or misunderstandings that could easily have been cleared up with a few minutes of one-on-one time. They also reported discipline issues that got more serious when they were not addressed. Some students were bored. Some lacked basic skills and could not perform without help. In general, the teachers expressed being frustrated because they are educated professionals who could address these issues, if there were time to get to everyone. There was simply not enough time to address the variety of issues that simultaneously too place. Farkas et al. (2000) reported that 86% of new teachers report that the change most likely to improve teaching is reducing class size.

--->Eva, a high school English teacher summed up her frustration with large class sizes.

"This was not a matter of poor time management; it was a matter of too many students with too many needs and one harried teacher trying to be superhuman. There were times that I had a great lesson plan, only to have it totally derailed because of one or two students who needed individual attention and could not get it."

The total number of students that this professional was expected to evaluate, plan, and care for each day was as many as 150.
______________________________________________
---------->Working Conditions:
School administrators varied in their support of young teachers, and many teachers reported that this support was inadequate. The new teachers felt that they were evaluated and judged, but they would have preferred real feedback and suggestions for improvement of their teaching. They felt that they were often not supported in discipline issues or in conflicts with parents.

--->Carol, a former high school math teacher:

"I was very frustrated with the lack of support from my principal/administration in that after three observations I never got any feedback either in written or verbal form. I never really knew how I was doing. I felt I was doing a good job, but did not think the administration cared one way or the other."

--->Fran, a high school mathematics teacher expressed a need for more funds:

"Teachers should be given all the supplies that they need - $25 is not enough! At all other jobs that I have worked at, whatever you need to do your job is provided."
______________________________________________
---------->Relationships with Students and Parents:
A common problem reported by beginning teachers was student apathy. Many of the novice teachers reported that students had no interest in learning. In addition to attendance problems, a number of students often came to class without pencil, paper, and textbook. It was difficult to force or entice them to participate in classwork, and virtually impossible to get them to do homework.

--->Owen, a former high school mathematics teacher, was frustrated by his students' apathy:

"The vast majority of my students had no interest in learning math and I quickly tired of trying to force them (or entice them). They refused to bring paper or pencil to class, refused to do homework or classwork, and frequently came to class late or not at all. Most of them, to my great surprise, were not at all belligerent or confrontational about their refusal to do anything in class; they just had no intention of working at anything."

--->Mattie, a former high school history teacher, could not deal with the frustration:

"I just became very frustrated teaching to a class of 20 students and about 5 were interested or at least concerned with their grades. I decided not to return, because I was so exhausted and depressed at the end of the year. I just couldn't see "wasting" my time in a classroom where the kids don't care about themselves or what you're trying to accomplish."

--->Eugene, a former high school math teacher, also reported problems with apathy:

"I was frustrated with the apathy of the students. Many days I felt as though I was standing up there talking to myself. It was the longest year of my life. I was an emotional wreck because I felt as if the kids/parents didn't care enough to try or participate."

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

I agree with everything you just wrote.

The only thing that I would point out is the media is biased as Jon Stewart put it to be lazy, and to generate conflict, but it will spin what is going on in society either conservative or liberal to get out of real reporting, and to be sensational. Anything they can do to get people to consume said media is fair game. That laziness falls on both sides of the political spectrum media wide. And it doesn't help when society tunes out when the story isn't something that elicits an emotional response, or doesn't have a simple lesson or solution. Nuance and complexity is something most Americans abhor.

Case in point, when is the last time you saw something on the news that showed how many IT jobs are given to people with work visas, and compare that to how many people are graduating college with computer science degrees to illustrate that portion of outsourcing? I don't think I've ever seen that presented in the news. That point is very hard to pin as conservative or liberal because solutions to remedy it could come from both parties. And there's no easily identified villian, either. So instead, let's paint the big bad evil corporations for outsourcing in general because that's easy to report on, throw some basic generalized stats up about number of jobs outsourced, show corporate profits increasing, and do people love to consume that kind of story. I see that left and right in IT. I know friends who see it left and right in other sections of the economy like bioengineering, etc. But it never gets reported on. These are the jobs and sectors that will be growing in the modern economy, and we as a nation are doing a poor job preparing the next generations to succeed in them, no question about it.

Or conversely, if you love you some Fox News, let's focus on the fact that there's this agency called Planned Parenthood, that is in part funded by federal tax dollars, and it performs abortions! OMG! This must be this huge problem! Only, if you're a sane individual, you'd normally then want to know how much of this is going on, and you quickly realize the number of abortions that are performed in these facilities is under 100 annually nationwide, and it's dubious at best if federal dollars actually paid for any of those procedures. But finding those statistics is either purposefully omitted to sensationalize and stir up conflict, or done so out of sheer laziness. But conservative Americans eat that stuff up, because it's easy for them to follow, clearly identifiable villians, and fits their ideological narrative of the US crumbling from disregarding "traditional values". The facts of course clearly show this isn't a significant problem.

Back to the housing crisis, etc, the truth is there's blame to go around with the banks, government, and consumers. I also have a friend who took on a mortgage he shouldn't have. Got an 80/20, he's a single income earner, wife is in the process of getting a degree in nursing, they have two kids. In 2006, they got this big massive house in a brand new neighborhood. It's the American dream. Now, it's not like this guy is dumb. He took out $400,000 mortgages (80/20), very high interest, etc. on a single income, knowing full well his wife was going to school, and he didn't have an emergency fund to speak of.

I don't care what he was told by the lenders and real estate agent - he had no one to blame but himself in the end. He had a perfectly good house in a good neighborhood already. He just bought a new car as well. He had credit card debt. He wasn't putting much money away for retirement either. There's nothing anyone can say but "it's your fault" when the economy tanked in 2008, we both worked for the same company, and they cut our salaries to avoid layoffs. I'd have been sympathetic if he were doing the basics right, had a good emergency fund, could put a good 20% down for the mortgage, had no credit card debt, etc., then got caught later despite his best efforts, or lacked the mental capability to know he was walking into a potential economic deathtrap. But he wasn't putting forth anywhere close to a best effort financially speaking. When the same thing happened to me, I cut back on paying my mortgage off early, and sat on a six months emergency fund if the layoff ever came, and increased my retirement contributions when the market tanked to jumpstart it when the market would inevitably rebounded. There was never a sleepless night.

He's in better shape now, we got our salaries put back, and what did he do? Took that several year "postponed" trip to Disneyworld with the wife and kids, put off contributing to the reinstituted 401k, never has started an IRA for him or his wife, no college fund for the kids, only has one month emergency fund, although he has reduced his credit card balances.

I wouldn't pretend to know which is worse in the US - predatory lending and other abuses by businesses against consumers, or a complete lack of personal responsibility. But I know this - there's plenty of both, but you certainly don't hear it's both from pretty much any media outlet.

Hey ghandi, remember me, the crazy guy with the crazy idea? I switched majors to biology but I keep on keeping on with the dreaming. Chemistry is a lot more interesting than a state university's current idea of computer science. My wait-and-see attitude, coupled with my tendency to only do things i enjoy, lets me stick to projects where I can make personally satisfactory progress. Other people will have to complete the LDP as I sort of always knew.

Check these out regarding logical discourse:

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"This seems like the perfect question to pose to Slashdotters: how would you foster more dynamic spaces for online news discussion? How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls? " Sound familiar?

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/203221/Ask-Slashdot-Going-Beyond-Comment-Threads

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Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. With our images and statistics, you can help identify misuse of Twitter. Our first application was the study of astroturf campaigns in elections. Now we're extending our focus to the diffusion of all types of information in social media.

http://truthy.indiana.edu


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United States Patent 7,805,291 Berkowitz Appl. No.: 11/137,594
Filed: May 25, 2005
September 28, 2010

Method of identifying topic of text using nouns


Abstract
A method of identifying a topic of a text. Text is received. Then, the nouns in the text are identified. The singular form of each identified noun is determined. Combinations are created of the singular form of the identified nouns, where the number of singular forms of the nouns in the combinations is user-definable. The frequency of occurrence in the text of each noun that corresponds to its singular form is determined. Each frequency of occurrence is assigned as a score to its corresponding singular form noun. Each combination of singular form nouns is assigned a score that is equal to the sum of the scores of its constituent singular form nouns. The user-definable number of top scoring singular form nouns and combinations of singular form nouns are selected as the topic of the text.

Inventors: Berkowitz; Sidney (Baltimore, MD)
Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the Director National Security Agency (Washington, DC)
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This paper was coming out about the time I started to get interested in the possibility of analyzing for semantics and stuff. Good thing someone smarter figured it out.

Modeling public mood and emotion: Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena
Authors: Johan Bollen, Alberto Pepe, Huina Mao
(Submitted on 9 Nov 2009)

Abstract: Microblogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, also known as tweets, to the public or a selected circle of contacts. A variegated mosaic of microblogging uses has emerged since the launch of Twitter in 2006: daily chatter, conversation, information sharing, and news commentary, among others. Regardless of their content and intended use, tweets often convey pertinent information about their author's mood status. As such, tweets can be regarded as temporally-authentic microscopic instantiations of public mood state. In this article, we perform a sentiment analysis of all public tweets broadcasted by Twitter users between August 1 and December 20, 2008. For every day in the timeline, we extract six dimensions of mood (tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion) using an extended version of the Profile of Mood States (POMS), a well-established psychometric instrument. We compare our results to fluctuations recorded by stock market and crude oil price indices and major events in media and popular culture, such as the U.S. Presidential Election of November 4, 2008 and Thanksgiving Day. We find that events in the social, political, cultural and economic sphere do have a significant, immediate and highly specific effect on the various dimensions of public mood. We speculate that large scale analyses of mood can provide a solid platform to model collective emotive trends in terms of their predictive value with regards to existing social as well as economic indicators.


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Cheers,

Vairetube

The Tau Manifesto
Michael Hartl
http://tauday.com


Vi Hart — Blog
http://vihart.com/

I am a recreational mathemusician currently living on Long Island, NY.

I like most creative activities that involve making a lot of noise, mess, or both. Aside from composing, I love improvising on various instruments, drawing, sculpting, and other methods of making things. My main hobby is mathematics, with special interests in symmetry, polyhedra, and surreal complexity. This usually manifests as collaborative research in computational geometry and other areas of theoretical computer science, or as mathematical art. I think the human brain is incredible and strange, so I have developed a great interest in dreaming and consciousness. As a result, I am a trained hypnotist and a lucid dreamer. The human body is pretty neat as well, so I enjoy dancing and judo. I always love to learn new things—variety is the food of creativity!
You can email me at vi (at) vihart.com.
If you'd like to leave me voicemail or send me an SMS, call or text (+1) 530‑7VI‑HART [530‑784‑4278].

When I was teaching in Sweden we had problems with mostly foreign students cheating. It's possible that everyone was cheating equally much but the Swedish students didn't get caught as often. I got it explained to me that foreign students had a lot of pressure to do well and they always took as many courses as they could simultaneously which inevitably led to them "having" to cheat.

I also had it explained to me that the foreign students were the ones keeping the school afloat since every course they got through and every education they finished brought in money for the school. Some courses were a joke, they made them easy just to keep the throughput high.

The blame can be spread far and wide. Students were lazy etc (I was lazy too sometimes). Planning new courses could be a nightmare. The formula went like this: Out of 100 students applying to a course, only 50 would finish the course (or even show up) and only 25 would get a passing grade. Still you needed lecture rooms and equipment and everything else for the 50+ people. If you made the course too hard and not enough people passed, the school took a hit.

I taught a course in programming that was initially intended for around 30 people, but almost 200 people signed up and over 100 showed up. Panic. I was officially only a teaching assistant but the main teacher didn't really know programming (she was a doctorate and dumped the whole course in my lap) and now suddenly I was lecturing a class of 100+ students, mostly foreign, with little or no computer experience (they dont have the same amount of equipment abroad apparently), most of them studying 150% and studying for re-exams at the same time. I think in the end around 20 students passed (I wrote the exam and the course responsible cleared it without reading it and realizing I'd made it "too hard"). I know it sounds like I'm just making this stuff up. But it really happened. In Sweden (!).

I guess I don't have a moral of the story, I'm just venting Seeing things from the other side I realized what a mess education could be.

>> ^Porksandwich:

I was a computer science major in my 4th year...so I was in a lot of classes with graduate students. They had a few extra things on exams and projects they had to do for their graduate portion of the class. What was hilarious is that most of them were Indian and most of them came in to class with what looked like a xerox copy of each others work with their name signed to it, and this went on all quarter. On the last exam one of them sat next to me and was obviously trying to cheat off my exam, so I spent awhile writing down false answers and making them very easy to read because this whole Indian group of students seemed to ride on each others work and no one called them on it. While I saw undergraduate US citizens being busted for the same thing (I can only assume this was motivated by money and enrollment/scores).
So after I knew I wouldn't have enough time to keep up the false answers, I hurried up and changed all my work hunched over my test so he couldn't read it anymore and finished. Turned it in and told the professor that he was copying off me and the two Indians in front of us were sharing answers with him. I mean you'd have to be blind to not see the guys turn around during the test multiple times.

And on my exit interview for the school I ranked it down and told them that I was pissed that those Indian students were never punished, since them cheating off undergrads makes it appear that undergrads are the ones cheating if you just look at the data and assume graduate students should know the answers. Plus I marked off some things for other stuff. And the dean of my school changed my numbers scores to higher scores because he would question me on something and I'd say "Maybe, but I feel my personal experience warrants that score." He would say something like "But isn't that too harsh, so maybe we should......" and I'd disagree, but he'd still change the score.
It's kind of a shame when you like the subject you study but the people teaching it to you make a mockery of the university by having double standards for the various grads/undergrads and ethnic groups. They still call me up and want alumni donations, and I tell the people calling my story and why I won't ever donate to that university...and why they should transfer out ASAP. Assuming they don't have a heavy Indian accent....