News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

neilcrj

This is the problem Richard MacDuff was wrestling with at the beginning of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I love it when sci-fi from my childhood becomes reality.
> it costs $180-$600 to close-caption that video

It's a public university. They could pay a grateful student a federally-subsidized wage to transcribe 5 hours of video per week, and have it count toward the University's community service quota.

Re:Stepping into math: Open-sourcing our step-by-step solver on Friday January 20, 2017 @03:16AM (#13442374)
I have a standard rubric for questions like these, and would have scored the response above 1/5 for an attempt being made with an incorrect or unclear argument. My expectations are very clear.

I disagree with your characterization of grading as punishment. Added value in teaching is about 10% instruction and 90% feedback. If I let this opportunity to fix the student's reasoning pass, I am doing a far greater injustice to them than if I fail them on a quiz.

Re:Renewing Medium’s focus on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @08:53PM (#13324035)
> People who like modern UIs

Even more people like stable UIs.

> The thing I don't want is to think the kid is okay and then find out they've been holding it all back.

Great insight. Kids at that age are looking for parental/adult approval and they know that the adults around them want them to be "okay." They can hide a lot of emotions if they think they'll be loved more for being "normal."

I think this is their source:

"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or 20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/

He didn't "choose" to hand them to security agents, he was asked to empty his pockets, which contained the flash cards.
Re:Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug or a Feature? on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @08:30AM (#8922961)
If the author cleared them, then it explains the cover price.
Re:The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom on Friday January 09, 2015 @03:53AM (#8861348)
The tests the teacher is criticizing are standardized summative assessments used to rank, reward and punish students, teachers or both. These usually fail to provide any detailed feedback of instructional value, and frequently aren't even scored until students have advanced to the next grade. How do you use an SAT score to diagnose and then help Johnny with his conceptual misunderstanding of the relationship between exponents and logarithms? It is the wrong tool for the job.

On the other hand, TDD is formative testing: You iterate over the code until all the tests pass in a structured way. You don't fire programmers for writing code that doesn't pass all the tests on the first attempt, but deliver actionable feedback at every step. That kind of testing is massively useful in the classroom and teachers practice it with formal and informal assessments all the time.

The only difference between your definition and that of the parent is that you explicitly deny the existence of state terrorism, and I don't think that is an improvement.

I think we would all be better off separating terrorism (a tactic) from identity (organization/state). Then we could categorize militant groups as whatever you want: state, statelet, militia, guerrilla force, freedom fighters, caliphate, NGO or whatever and separately discuss their tactics with respect to whether they commit acts of terrorism.

This is a function of how gifted kids learn social skills. Before adolescence, children primarily seek approval from parents and teachers. Gifted kids get this in abundance, and learn how to earn, as you put it, social currency with adults (at least those who value academics), which is not the same as how to earn social currency with their peers in adolescence and early adulthood. And of course, gifted students learn more quickly, and are reinforced more. It's a perfect environment for developing anti-social behaviors.

For academic achievement, the majority of research backs up your thesis, and it isn't even a tradeoff, where you get better academics at the expense of worse socialization. Gifted programs don't work. It is far better to accelerate a student to a higher grade, even if it means putting students in classes with much older students (accelerating a gifted student is the most effective positive intervention that can be taken in K-12 education according to Hattie's recent review of meta-analyses, Visible Learning, and nothing else is close). It pushes them academically, and more often than not, helps them socialize, because they learn how older kids interact before internalizing too many abnormal frames and social habits.