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Education

More Schools Go To 4-Day Week To Cut Costs 614

Hugh Pickens writes "As schools return to session in South Dakota, more than one-fourth of students in the state will only be in class from Monday through Thursday as budget constraints lead school districts to hack off a day from the school week. Larry Johnke, superintendant of the Irene-Wakonda school district, says the change will save his schools more than $50,000 per year. In order to make up for the missing day, schools will add 30 minutes to each of the other four days and shorten the daily lunch break. 'In this financial crisis, we wanted to maintain our core content and vocational program, so we were forced to do this,' says Johnke. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance, but many of the 120 districts that have the shortened schedule nationwide say they've seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. Others say that not only did they fail to save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren't in class enough and didn't have enough contact with teachers."

Comment Arma2... (Score 2) 186

Whoever wrote this article obviously hasn't played it. Its a game that is astonishingly close to "realism." As, much as possible anyway.

I would simply argue that concessions away from realism in "realistic" titles exist in video games because a mouse and keyboard is a poor substitute for your body and a monitor is a poor substitute for your eyes.

Once we have more "immersive" input/output hardware, the lines between reality and the game world will become blurry.

Comment Trying too hard to be relevant. (Score 2) 45

I like the idea but it seems like Syfy is trying to hard to be relevant. First with the name change and then with this.

What they really need to do is tell good stories with believable characters. Create a good show and a fan base will follow. Go back to the fundamentals.

The reason the network does poorly is because most of it's original programming is garbage.
Transportation

US Team Seeks To Top Steam-Car Speed Record 108

Zothecula writes "Steam-engined vehicles are quaint, retro and obsolete ... right? Well, maybe not. The current land speed record for a steam-powered vehicle currently sits at 148 mph (238 km/h), set by the British car Inspiration team in 2009. Now, Chuk Williams' US Land Steam Record (USLSR) Team is hoping to steal that title in its LSR Streamliner, powered by a heat-regenerative external combustion Cyclone engine – an engine that could someday find common use in production automobiles."

Comment Just like text messaging... (Score 1) 433

As the cost of transmitting large amounts of data goes down due to new technologies, the price of access either stays the same or goes up. This is the exact same as text messaging. It costs the cell phone companies in Canada hardly anything yet they charge users a fortune to do it (0.30$ per inbound or outbound message in most cases).

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