Oh internet... Is there nothing you won't show naked?

Nope.

It depends what you mean by "how long" -- how long in a given day, or how long between vacation periods? Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that the spacing of study occasions is highly important for learning and long-term retention. The education literature is full of studies on summer learning loss. So Obama isn't just making this up out of nowhere -- he's basing his proposal on a substantial body of empirical research.

Sounds like you and your American friend were both making the same mistake.

And why wasn't this published? The very conclusion is that we should be more careful when trusting fMRI results and conduct more testing before jumping to conclusion.

Perhaps because what he's saying isn't new? As far as I can tell he's merely restating a substantive point that was recently made by someone else, which attracted substantial publicity as well as sober rebuttals (along the lines of: nobody actually uses the flawed statistical methods that you're critiquing). All this guy is doing is illustrating the point in an absurd and attention-grabbing way.

Everybody in this thread and below seems to think the monitors are going to be used for medical monitoring. But the summary doesn't say that, and I doubt that's the case.

Heart rate monitors are pretty commonly used in cardio training to help individuals identify an optimal level of exertion to benefit from their workout. Presumably, giving heart rate monitors to different kids with widely varying fitness levels might allow a gym teacher to tailor activities to each kid and help them track their own, individual progress. I'm not sure that the tech is really necessary for 7th and 8th graders, but it's not as harebrained as medical diagnosis.

it is very common in this age range of employees

And there's the key. It isn't about texting or any other technology. It's about the fact that a 17-year-old is still maturing and still learning how to be a responsible adult.

You didn't always know how important it is to show up on time and be fully mentally engaged with your job. At some point along the way you had to learn that. If you don't remember not knowing that when you were a teenager, it's okay. You probably didn't even realize what you didn't know because you were, you know, a teenager.

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." - Socrates, 400 BC

Stop trying to turn it on the poster. We can see through your canard.

I think /.ers will realize before turning the first page that even the most ridiculously complex security system can be thwarted by stickies posted to people's monitors.

What I suspect many /.ers do not adequately consider is that the most ridiculously complex security systems are especially likely to be thwarted by user behavior.

The folks who design security systems need to realize that human beings are part of the system (i.e., pay attention to usability and to the peculiarities of human cognition, motivation, and behavior). If they cannot get past blaming users, they will simply continue to design computationally elegant but functionally ineffective security systems.

83% of cancer patients but fewer than 83% of healthy volunteers

Let me introduce you to my friend Reverend Bayes.

Except that if you actually click through the word "Altruism" to the writeup, you'll see that they mention kin selection and reciprocity in the very first paragraph.

Also, the word "altruism" is not outmoded in the scientific literature. Nor is it a synonym for helping behavior. In fact, that seems to be the source of your confusion. Altruism refers to behaviors that benefit others but not the individual doing the behavior -- and in the context of TFA (and many philosophical discussions), evolutionary advantage is not considered "real" altruism. "Altruism" is thus being used here to refer to helping behavior that confers no evolutionary advantage. Which is why it is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. QED.

factor in how much of your tax dollars when into that and then get back to us with a valid point....

Gee whiz, I don't know whether I can handle the math. Somebody help me out, what's 44 cents minus zero?

The "obvious" answer that everybody is mentioning is that condoms reduce sensitivity. However, it is a fact that some men use condoms consistently, some men use them some times and not others, and some men avoid them whenever possible. "It feels like a garden hose" is a vague and general statement about condoms that offers little useful information about the nature of those differences. Something else must be going on. Are some men using condoms wrong? Are some men overestimating the reduction in sensitivity, perhaps because of preconceptions? Are some men underestimating the risks associated with unprotected sex?

"Wasted tax money" is a red herring designed to give people an excuse to titter and dismiss this research without thinking it through. The obvious applied goal of this research would be to get more men to use condoms when having potentially risky sex. If you can identify the relevant factors (between men, between their partners, between situations) you might be able to increase condom usage. That has the potential to reduce STI and HIV infections and unwanted pregnancies. The real problem with this research is that it threatens to suggest something other than "abstinence until marriage and then one opposite-sex partner for life" as a potential model for a safe and satisfying sex life.

Technically I'm going to be Godwinning the discussion, but for what it's worth, I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just throwing in some historical background...

Early in the 20th century, a lot of very prominent, very reasonable people thought eugenics was a good idea. People like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Alexander Graham Bell were all supporters. It's only with the perspective of history (the horrors of WWII) that eugenics has been so widely viewed as a bad thing, because the holocaust was (among other things) a case of eugenics taken to an extreme.

As a result, I think the historical evidence gives a lot of people enormous hesitation and unease about whether and how genetic screening / artificial selection can be done ethically. The Nazis were an extreme case and nobody is saying we're anywhere near that. (Tangent: Is that like an anti-Godwin? Does that mean I win the discussion?) But we need to figure out, as a society, where to draw lines so that we don't go down a slipperly slope. And for many people, the line is that we can screen out traits that will cause clear and unambiguous suffering, as long as the suffering is an intrinsic part of the condition and not a societal response (as would be the case, for example, for somebody born gay in a homophobic society).

Bottom line, I think things like eye and hair color remind people too much of where eugenics has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And it's not just a matter of parents' individual choice, because if enough people do it, it changes the makeup of society and the gene pool for all future generations. So I think it is very reasonable that people want to make sure the technology doesn't outpace the ethical deliberations, so we can figure out rules and lines to draw.

US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size

Correction, that should have read "thresholds of less than 20 and greater than 50..."

You just have to lie.

And to generate a controversy on slashdot, you just have to lie in the article summary.

Look, I have no doubt that all kinds of universities do all kinds of crazy things to influence their rankings. But the summary gets a lot of stuff wrong.

For example, on the faculty salaries... Apparently, Clemson did two things. Firstly, they raised actual salaries, which would have a real and legitimate impact on their ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. Second, they corrected a previous under-reporting of compensation. US News bases its formula on total compensation (which combines salary and benefits), and apparently Clemson had been previously only reporting salary. (Here's the money quote: "Clarifying Clemson's approach after the panel for a reporter and an interested Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News's college rankings, Watt said that the university had added benefits to its faculty salary reporting to U.S. News after previously having failed to do so, as the magazine requires. So its jump came not from double counting or including information that it should not have, but from playing catchup." [source]

On class sizes, the way Clemson "manipulated" the data was by... um, actually changing their actual class sizes. They made their smaller classes smaller and let their bigger classes get bigger, because US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size. Sure that helps their numbers... but it's also not a bad thing from a pedagogical point of view. With a discussion-oriented seminar, reducing below 20 makes a real difference. And with a big lecture, 55 versus 100 is not that much of a difference. So they might have actually improved their delivery of education.

As for the fake applicants mentioned in the summary, I couldn't find that in any of the linked articles. But one of the articles said that Clemson tightened their actual admissions standards (i.e., required higher high school class ranks and SAT scores). That isn't manipulation, that's objectively becoming a more selective institution.

The dirtiest accusation is that in the peer rankings, Clemson deliberately gave low scores to close rivals. If that was really done intentionally (which Clemson denies), that is genuinely dirty, but not terribly shocking. And that kind of a pattern should have been easily detectable by US News, if they had bothered to look for it.