@kceaton1
@JiggaJonson

I think there's a big difference between instant fire-able offences (drinking on the job) and mediocre teaching. My mother is a teacher and she definitely talks about a dichotomy between those who try and those who don't.

Unfortunately the system they have in QLD, Australia for end of high school exams is that the teachers can set the exam themselves for their students rather than any form of independently set examination. This means there is a huge incentive, for say Math, to teach to a specific test, then give the exam with largely the same questions but the numbers changed.

There is performance tracking at a school level and principals are incentivised to create good results but often this can be achieved with rote learning rather than genuinely understanding the subject matter due to the lack of externally set examinations.

Meanwhile, while unions ensure that risk of job loss is low, principals can transfer teachers to far away schools with poor conditions easily, and since performance can be fudged, your ability to retain a specific position is largely determined by your personal relationship with said principal.

As far as students being able to address bad teachers directly, how? As you mentioned Jigga, they will likely not be taken seriously if they complain as some will assume it's as a result of work load rather than teaching performance. The only way you can really measure it is student performance objectively measured by externally set examination.

Yes, it's not a perfect measure. Student performance may be determined by the cohort or the effectiveness of teachers in lower grades. That's why you test them before and after to measure progress rather than raw performance. You can also look at average results over 3-4 years to avoid specific class bias and to allow room for improvement.

As far as standardised measures, a good test for say Math will require broad knowledge rather than specific facts as the questions that could be asked would be widespread and would test understanding rather than rote learning. For subjects with wider and less specific knowledge areas like say English or History you avoid advantaging specific knowledge by giving a wide range of options for essay questions.

Allow me to attempt to be dispassionately clearer.
I did not intend to be dismissive or disrespectful to YOU. I did intend to be dismissive and disrespectful to the beliefs the video was attempting to put forth as fact.
Others have provided factual links/info to support the position that this camp does not deserve respect or an ear any longer, and I would point to the video's obvious deficiencies in understanding statistics necessary to even make the claim it made, which was that the 'missing' data set COULD change the results. (perhaps they didn't say "would" change the results, only strongly implied it...either way would be wrong).
I am disrespectful of those that continue to further conspiracy theories about 'evil scientists' that 'fake/fudge/hide data and science' to further their careers (as scientists), as if that EVER happens in the scientific community. Peer review denies that possibility, and gets those people/theories removed from the 'scientific community', as has repeatedly happened with this issue. Even the 'scientist' that put forth this idea in the first place dismissed it as wrong well over a decade ago, but by then many people were so emotionally invested in the (now disproven) theory that they ignore anything that disputes their belief (it's a belief because new facts that dispute it are ALWAYS ignored). I get upset and insulted by the continued dismissal of all science to further ANY agenda, and that's what this video looked like to me.
I'm sorry you took such offence, but I still don't really understand why.
EDIT:Could it be the 'again' when I asked if it was a 'kneejerk reaction to someone who disagreed with you'? perhaps that was unwarranted. Sorry.

Hmmmm. It sure sounds to me like they're saying being born black without a birth certificate causes autism. If that's the only group that showed a correlation, and such a HUGE correlation that it changes the outcome of ALL the data for everyone else, there's something about that group, not the vaccine that everyone else got without effects.
Also, clearly autism is not only blowing up in the undocumented black community, as this guy claims.
Identifying race through school records is TERRIBLE. People fudge that data for different reasons all the time. It certainly is not factual data.

God, that dungeon master’s answer was terrible.

The job of the DM is first and foremost to make sure everyone is having fun. If you’re not fudging rules (or making them up on the fly) for the sake of dramatic storytelling then you’re not really getting into the spirit of D&D, in my opinion.

I suspect the girls' reaction to the game has a lot to do with how the game was run. Back when I was those kids age, we were mainly playing dungeon crawls looking for epic loot--basically a “Monty Haul” campaign. The role-playing aspect was minimized while combat was heavily emphasized. The story only existed to drive us to the next combat encounter. Sure there might be some girls into that (just like in video gaming there are some girls into hardcore FPS games) but I wonder if these particular girls would have been as okay with D&D if the game were run that way.

Fibre can go a pretty long distance before it affects the signal though...

Fibre is comprised mainly of silicone, the more pure the fibre, the less dispersion issues occur at or around 1550nm (one of the main wavelengths used for long distance transmission, as we can easily and cheaply amplify this using ebrium doped segments and some pumps!)

Any impurities in the fibre will absorb the 1550 at a greater rate than other wavelengths, causing linear distortions in the received carrier along greater distances. This is called Brillouin scattering.

In the context of the above video, consider a paralell cable sending data over 100m. If one of those lines is 98m, then every bit that is sent down that line, will be out of order.

Same deal with Brillouin scattering, only on the optical level. Thats one of the main issues we gotta deal with at distance, however it only ever occurs at or around 1550nm, and only ever when you are driving that carrier at high powers (i.e. launching into the fibre directy from an ebrium doped amplifier at +15 dBm)

Theres some fancy ways of getting around that, but its not cheap.

Anywhere from say around 1260 to 1675nm is the typical bandwidth window we use today.

So, say 415nm of available bandwidth.
If we want that in frequency to figure out the theoritcal bits/sec value from the shannon-hartley theory, then we just take the inverse of the wavelength and times it by the speed of light.

7.2239e+14 hz is the available spectrum.

...thats 7.2239e+5 terahertz....

Assume typical signal to noise on fibre carrier of +6dB (haha, not a chance in hell it would be this good across this much bandwidth, but whatever..)

For a single fibre you would be looking at an average peak bandwidth of around 20280051221451.9 mbps.

Thats 19,340,564 Terabits per second, or 18,887.3 Petabits per second.

You can fudge that +/- a couple of million Tbps based on what the actual SnR would be, but thats your average figure.....thats a lot of Terabits.

On one fibre.

Source: Im a telecoms engineer

Kinda looks like a big wedge cutting trough fudge

I lost it @ Fudge.

At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

>> ^hamsteralliance:

>> ^Boise_Lib:
>> ^hamsteralliance:
I like these petitions:
Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America.
Strip the Citizenship from Everyone who Signed a Petition to Secede and Exile Them

That's weird. I was looking at both of these and as I watched the deport one transformed into a mirror of the strip one.
I fully support both of these petitions, but I don't know if I want to sign up.

Or, more likely, I fudged up my copying and pasting of the links.
https://petitions
.whitehouse.gov/petition/deport-everyone-signed-petition-withdraw-their-state-united-states-america/dmQl1bXL
That's the correct deportation one.

The new link works, but I followed the original one to the deport petition--then it changed to the other.

Thanks.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^hamsteralliance:
I like these petitions:
Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America.
Strip the Citizenship from Everyone who Signed a Petition to Secede and Exile Them

That's weird. I was looking at both of these and as I watched the deport one transformed into a mirror of the strip one.
I fully support both of these petitions, but I don't know if I want to sign up.


Or, more likely, I fudged up my copying and pasting of the links.

Deport.

That's the correct deportation one.

>> ^braschlosan:

>> ^Jinx:
but colour is an invention of our brains anyway? Is yellow a specific wavelength or is yellow what our brain says is yellow whether its red+green together, or "true" yellow.

Either way the light output by your monitor is not 580nm like your brain is telling you but rather an even mix of 650nm and 510nm.
If our eyes didn't "fudge" colors in this way we most likely wouldn't have color television (or monitors)


I didn't read his post like that, maybe he's asking for a definition of yellow because as our cones are basically wavelength filters for photons whilst our brain interprets a message of "hey i caught something of this intensity" from each of them, what is this "yellow" that we all use and think we know what it means? It will eventually come down to the resolution of the eye; each photon from each source will be coming in from a different angle into our eye, by extremely small amounts - the smallest thing we can resolve is where our brain says "ok, i think that's coming from the same place; it's not red and blue separately but yellow."

It'd be the same if you have a green and red patterned circular board and spun it really fast. Our eyes effectively have a "framerate", a point where we see something as motion. Play a game and limit to 1 fps, then increase in say 5's and before 30 you should start to feel motion rather than stuttering frames, then as you keep going you can't see stuttering anymore, it's just all motion. Our eyes have something similar, we used to do it in science. My dad was head of physics and he stuck a ROYGBIV patterned board on a black and decker drill and when it was up to speed it looked white.

So if something registers as yellow to our brains, is that not yellow? We have no direct access to our cones, we just interpret the signals. If all we had were light sensitive cells everything would be one colour and no colour at the same time.

That's what the post meant to me and it's a great point really even if it's just an excuse for sciencey discussion! If yellow is defined as a range of wavelengths of light, he's right to say it isn't yellow, but i doubt many people think of yellow in that sense. Having said all that, the video was actually interesting and informative and i enjoyed watching it, and this is probably a philosophical question for others to bother with.

PS.
Bert and Ernie, Simpsons, Smurfs, South Park, Turtles? Not sure about B&E though.

>> ^Jinx:

but colour is an invention of our brains anyway? Is yellow a specific wavelength or is yellow what our brain says is yellow whether its red+green together, or "true" yellow.


Either way the light output by your monitor is not 580nm like your brain is telling you but rather an even mix of 650nm and 510nm.

If our eyes didn't "fudge" colors in this way we most likely wouldn't have color television (or monitors)

Pretty open and shut...

It's legal to openly carry a gun where he is.

It's illegal to stop him without consent unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon. It's illegal to search him unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon. It is illegal to confiscate his firearm unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon.

It most certainly violates standard gun safety to point any firearm, where you don't know if the firearm is loaded, at another person.

Public safety is irrelevant at this point as the law obviously has zero provisions in this case to invoke public safety concerns as a legal pretext for stopping, searching or seizing. Adding that in to the debate is a red herring because if there was a legal way to invoke public safety as a pretext, the officer or supervisor would have done it.

Personally, I tend to agree that little is served wearing the gun openly and the guy seems to be more interested in baiting cops for his video, but he is not breaking any laws or infringing on anyone else rights. As soon as you start condoning the law fudging the edges here and there for the "greater good" (rather than pursuing changes to the law to legally protect the greater good), you are condoning illegal activity by the police.

So the ensuing argument is pointless, if the cops weren't able to arrest him on some charge he has done NOTHING wrong under the law. Last time I checked, innocent people are innocent regardless of public opinion.

Who defined it? Don't avoid agency by using the passive voice.

That's what I mean by "rule", a pre-determined consequence. Who determined that disobedience would have to result in death (or the other "death" or whatever)? Surely God, right?

Natural death temporarily exists..the second death is eternal

Who gave the law? Enough with the passive voice.

Again, a ton more passive voice to avoid the issue of God's agency. God, himself, determined to give the law. If it's because of sin, God invented sin too. God invented sin and made us imperfect. God made commands that were against our natures to follow. Why not just not make those commands? It's like a parent leaving out a jar of cookies, and commanding the two-year-old not to eat them. What do you think is going to happen?

I've said pretty clearly that God defined what we should or shouldn't do, and outlined consequences for those actions. If you ask why God gave us the concept of right and wrong, could it be that He knew which behaviors were good for us and which were bad? If you ask why God gave us consequences, could it be that God wanted to discourage us from bad behavior?

Neither did God create sin. God created the conditions in which free will creatures could make a choice between obeying or disobeying God. He didn't create them to sin, and neither did He cause them to sin. He gave them an honest choice and it was their choice that created sin. What God allowed is the condition to exist where sin was possible. Why did God allow us to sin? Because if He didn't, we would be nothing more than robots.

I thought words had meaning. What the hell are you talking about with two deaths? Death is death. Now there's two kinds? why not eighteen kinds? Which kind did Eve bring?

The two kinds of death are, when the body dies, and when your soul is cast into hell.

This isn't a good analogy. A king is a mortal who has to maintain a false authority (unless you think that kings rule by divine providence). This king made a mistake, an oversight, and later realized the consequences of his mistake. So, he fudged it by letting his son keep his second eye (a tiny punishment compared with losing both eyes) took out one of his own (again, not a big deal, comparatively) and called it even. God doesn't make mistakes. God doesn't make oversights and later realize the consequences. He knew right from the beginning what would happen.

Are you saying that God was afraid of losing his authority or losing the force of law? How can there be any consequences for God when God invented the consequences and can change them at will?

It is a good analogy because it illustrates the conflict between justice and mercy, and why God sent His Son. On one hand, God is holy, and He must punish all sin. On the other, He is merciful and wants to forgive us. What I am saying is, God cannot compromise His integrity to forgive us. Therefore, He sent His Son to take our punishment, in our place, so that He could offer us forgiveness through the cross. If you want to know why God will not lower His standards, use some common sense. Should we just let murderers and rapists go free in the hopes they will reform themselves? Will this encourage or discourage more crime? What about the victims?

Why? Surely God decided that a sinless person would be required to act as a bridge? Why didn't God just make us closer to begin with? Or why didn't he just come on over himself? Couldn't he? Why did he determine that to disobey his commands would create distance?

God sent His Son over on His behalf, remember? Fellowship with God is a privilege, and to the extent that we abuse it, that is the extent to which He will remove Himself from it.

Exactly. And if my parents had also invented cars and paedophiles and put them near my house, I would ask them why the hell they did that. Wouldn't you? God created the law to protect us from a danger that God created himself. Why did he create the danger in the first place? Whim?

We created the evil in this world, not Him. He gave us laws to keep us from evil.

No, we are animals, and before God's law existed, we didn't know better. Otherwise, why make laws? I'm afraid to ask you to define "his image", but I've got to know how much we could possibly resemble an omnipotent omniscient omnipresent entity. Why make sin and laws and conscience and death and hell in the first place?

You believe you are an animal. And we did know better..God gave us a conscience to know right from wrong, and God told Adam and Eve what was good, and not good, to do. If you want to know more about what it means in the image of God, read this:

http://www.gotquestions.org/image-of-God.html

Why why why why why why? First, read some of the things I've said and connect the dots. Second, God created us to have fellowship with Him.

Death 1 or Death 2? Why does God need to punish us at all? Does that do any good once we're dead? Is he just trying to terrify the living into doing his will while we're still alive?

I've already answered about punishment. Again, God wants us to have fellowship with Him. Rebellion against God is a choice; God gives everyone enough information and opportunities to make the right choices.

So, man was uncorrupted before, but capable of sin, then immediately decided to sin and became corrupted. Simpler to say man was corrupted from the beginning, no? And it was just God's bad luck that the very first people he ever made screwed the pooch right off the bat? Or did he know they would screw up? Or did he design them to screw up? Did he make us a little too independent an rebellious? Could things have turned out any other way than they have?

Man wasn't corrupt before he sinned; he was created innocent. However, he was imbued with the ability to make a free choice. God didn't create man to sin, as I've said, and neither did he force man to obey him. He simply gave him the choices, showed him what was good and what wasn't, warned him of the consequences, and let him make the choice.

Did God know they would screw up? There is some contention there among theologians. Some believe that He did, and that He allowed creation to go forward to demonstrate His glory. I don't necessarily believe that, because scripture shows God dynamically interacting with His creation. If it were true that God knew absolutely everything that would happen, it would mean He was just "going through the motions". I believe that God does have an absolute foreknowledge about how His creation will turn out, and that He does know the future, but that He leaves some things open to give us free will.

And why did they become corrupt? That must have been one of God's rules, that when you sin the first time, you corrupt your DNA (or whatever) for all generations to follow. He created that consequence as much as he created the physical rules of the universe. Why?

They lost their innocence when they disobeyed God and ate of the fruit. Their nature fundamentally changed as a consequence. Also, death came into the world. The human experience went from paradise to paradise lost, and humans had to fend for themselves. The corruption was a confluence of all of these different factors.

Falsifying things is how scientists discover real truth. If you can falsify something, then it's false. If you can't, it might be true. Scientists who propose theories are often the ones who try the hardest to falsify them. If they can do so, they know they were wrong, or maybe a bit off-base. If they can't, then it stands as a very good theory. That's what I'm doing when I ask all these questions. I cannot possibly believe anything which on its face is impossible. What I'm trying to understand is you, the faithful person. In the face of what I see as a mind-numbing array of internal inconsistencies in the Bible, I'm curious to understand how an otherwise rational person doesn't see the same thing I do. So far, you've cleared up some misconceptions I did have, but otherwise you've managed to dance around things by changing definitions of words, defining things only vaguely, removing agency from God, and telling me I don't understand. The only thing I have ever done is challenge the theory you've put in front of me for my criticism. If it's true, then I'll eventually realize it, right? But the more I plumb its depths, the less plausible it is.

The only way you'll realize it is if the Holy Spirit changes your heart. Until then this remains the truth:

1 Corinthians 2:14

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

If I had such a son, and I'd also invented meth and venereal disease and made the human body both vulnerable and attracted to both of them, then I'd be pissed off at myself more than at him, and I would "uninvent" them both. And even in the real-life situation, my wife and I wouldn't resort to an ultimatum like hell. We would talk openly with him about what he's doing, what effects he thinks it's having on himself, on us, and on the rest of the family, and whether that's what he wants. We'd try and get the rest of the family to support him likewise. If he showed no intention of stopping and it was damaging the home environment, we would probably decide, regretfully, to ask him to leave with the understanding that any time for the rest of his life that he wanted to return and live like a family again, we would welcome him with open arms. What I wouldn't do is build a torture chamber in the basement and threaten him with it, then consign him there forever if he didn't change. That wouldn't be just.

God didn't invent the evil in the world, man did. Yes, you would kick him out of the house if he refused to change. What if after you kicked him out, he was shot and killed? Did you force him to act that way? Or did you do everything in your power to help him, and change him? Whether you think hell is fair or not, and remember that is based on your own imperfect sense of justice, I think you have to admit that people are ultimately responsible for their own choices. If God makes it clear what the consequences are, when someone ends up in hell, who else do they have to blame but themselves?

coming down from God out of heaven...

Cool. So it's only up to the last book of the Bible that heaven is in the clouds, and now heaven is on Earth. You're right that that's different from what's in the video, but it's no more ridiculous to talk about living in the sky than to talk about living in an alternate parallel dimension on Earth.

No, it's not. There is a Heaven in which God dwells, but He moves His dwelling place to Earth to live with us. That is what it says through the entire bible. What you're referring to is the pop-culture misconceptions of what scripture says. People hear their entire lives about scripture from the culture and assume they're true, and then they repeat them to others as fact, like in this video, because they are ignorant of what scripture actually says. Many of the bibles most ardent critics have never actually read it. Neither is it an "alternate parallel dimension" on Earth. It is here, on this Earth.

>> ^messenger

>> ^messenger:

This isn't a good analogy. A king is a mortal who has to maintain a false authority (unless you think that kings rule by divine providence). This king made a mistake, an oversight, and later realized the consequences of his mistake. So, he fudged it by letting his son keep his second eye (a tiny punishment compared with losing both eyes) took out one of his own (again, not a big deal, comparatively) and called it even.

There's a better reason why this is a bad analogy. The King in the story takes half of the prince's punishment upon himself because he seemingly feels some responsibility for creating a cruel law but still punishes his son because he broke the law, cruel or not.

God, however, takes no responsibility for his foolishness, neither does he apparently desire to punish those who are guilty of sin. Rather, he creates the most innocent person of all time and has him take the fall for everybody.

If he wanted to be just, he would punish sinners fairly. If he wanted to be merciful, he would forgive them or, perhaps, ease their punishment. By punishing the innocent in place of the guilty, he has shown himself to be a psychopath.

"His justice and His mercy", indeed.