I'm preaching to the 4-digit choir here, I know. Let me issue the disclaimer that I am not a teacher but a bunch of my friends are, and my job does depend on staying up to date.

I am not sure what my ability to remember the login information for an account I created in 1997 has anything to do w/the discussion; however, EVERYONE's job depends on them staying up-to-date, it's just that most people choose not to and fall behind.

Technology funding in school districts (in my area these are tax levies) is already insanely high; mostly because we're pushing for tablet devices in schools driven, behind the scenes, by extremely lucrative vendor deals.

Without adequate training, the related curricula are severely limited and thus the added benefits when compared to related cost are low, if at all positive.

Now, this research, as well as the districts, are rightly saying the teachers need more training in order to leverage the technology effectively; however, what really needs to be understood is just how much training is really necessary and whether the tech gap between teachers and their students can really be mitigated.

It is my unfounded opinion that it will never be mitigated enough as teachers are not usually well enough equipped at their own subject matter, let alone keeping up with the taxing knowledge demands of technology.

What we need to do is take a step back and ensure that these additional tax investments in technology are actually doing anything to further student development and because they aren't, think about what we can do to actually concentrate on doing that instead of buying the new and shiny and letting it, effectively, collect dust in the corner while levy after levy is passed to support it.

Actually, that's not true. The average American pays (considerably) more for less service than the average Canadian, and it's not just Canada. Every country in the world pays less for health care than America and many of them also get better service. Last time I checked the American health care was the most expensive in the world. As a country, the U.S. spends 50-100% more (17.9% of GDP) than other first world countries (9%-12% of GDP) on health care and Americans get the 38th best health care in the world.

Of course you would and that's why medical expenses are one of the leading causes of brankruptcy in the United States. People like you gamble and when they lose, they stick everyone else with bill. Frequently while braying endlessly about how everyone else should take personal responsibility for their actions.

We're not talking about planned economies but rather universal health care and anyone who isn't lib-tarded should recognize that you can't have a fair market when the first question is "how much will you pay to not die today"?

Not particularly important since it was never printed.

Actually, most of the listed papers are nit-picking. For instance, one of them complained that one of the papers misreprented expertise on the topic of climate change because they used a metric based on number of papers published in the field of climate science to measure expertise. The complaint was that since the vast majority of scientists working in the field believed that climate change was a real phenomonom that the paper looking at what the vast majority believed was biased towards what the vast majority believed. Shocking.

None of the criticism presented look particuarly compelling or notable, which seems to be why no one else is paying much attention to them. They are underwhelming and overhyped by your site.

Well known skeptic or not, the author in question directly contradicted the abstract of the results for his own study. It's right there for us to read and we can easily verifiy that his statement to your site was false according to the abstract of his study. So either the abstract is wrong and the author made a msitake in his paper or the author is wrong about his own paper, neither situation bodes well for the criticism. It's been known to happen, particular among so-called "skeptic" scientists where their public posturing is frequently different from their scientific results, possibly because their co-authors are less biased or they know their actual results will be rigorously reviewed unlike comments delivered to a blog of no particular noteworthiness.

A quick review of your site show it to be "politically independent" much like Fox News is "Fair and Balanced".

You're linking back to the same site, with the same problems.

The first "peer reviewed rebuttal" listed there is a complaint that Science refused to publish a letter that claimed that one of the studies was wrong. That certainly convinced me. I mean, a letter that wasn't ever published? What could it be more devastating? If they're starting with the strongest evidence, I am seriously under whelmed.

The second one is from Energy & Environment the editor of whom has admitted that she picks articles to further her political goals (which include opposing environment groups and activity).

Several of the papers listed in the linked blog post are from the exact same people who complained about the Cook paper in the previous link you posted.

The remaining are nit-picking papers complaining about how this or that metric used to measure expertise is not perfectly accurate.

Over billed and underwhelming, as usual.

First of all, they're posted on "Watts Up With That?" and that's never a good place to start.

The central problem with "no global warming since 1997" is that 1998 was an unusually warm year due to an unusually strong El Nino effect (which started in 1997). When you start your trend line with exceptional data, you will always get garbage results and it doesn't matter what trend you're trying to measure. Interestingly enough the years 2005, 2010 and now 2014 are all warmer than 1998 and none of them feature a strong El Nino like we saw in 1998. Since a strong El Nino will raise global atmospheric temperatures by around 0.5 degrees, that means we have definitely seen warming when the year-to-year noise of ENSO (El Nino and La Nina) effects are accounted for. There's also the little tidbit that 1998 is only year in the top 10 warmest years that not in this century, which makes the "no warming since 1998" seem a bit bogus, doesn't it?

You don't have to take my word for it, though you can read more about it, if you want.

Wow. A biased, conservative, science-denying site says the paper is unreliable, imagine that. The paper hasn't been demonstrated to be fraudulent, it's been claimed to be fraudulent by some guy writing for a web site. He's managed to find a whole 7 people who disagree with the classification of their papers. 7 out of 11,944, clearly an error rate of 0.05% is unacceptable.

I should note that at least one of the disagreements was erroneous, the abstract from the author's paper directly contradicts the author's claim and supports the categorisation given to by the Cook study. And another claims that the referees made him take out the unjustified conclusions that he wanted to include that would have made the paper less supportive of AGW, if only his conclusions could have been justified with actual science. Of course, those errors mean that the author of the blog post denying the Cook paper has at least a 28% error rate, but clearly that's acceptable when it's supporting your particular views.

I'm not anti-nuclear, but requiring other people to agree to your solution before you'll admit the problem exists is pretty pathetic bullshit.

How about we agree there's a problem and then start determining what the best solution will be? I'm pretty sure it will include nuclear power, so there's no reason to be an asshole about it.