I don't really get the point of the Google initiative. I think that most schools have an intro to computing/programming concepts course that is geared toward catching up those who don't have prior programming experience. Not sure why booting white males and Asians out of the room is necessary or fair.
I think most schools do the same thing. My college did. The intro to CS was two courses, but you didn't take the first one if you had prior experience.
We didn't even need to take a test or require the assistance of Google's affirmative action task force or anything. We just self-selected ourselves into the appropriate course and that was that. I guess life is more complicated now.
80% of the class spoke some dialect of Chinese at home
That can be a little dangerous. A buddy of mine in high school spoke Russian at home and took Russian for the easy A. Wound up being an easy F because he was illiterate and his grammar was atrocious and he didn't realize until too late that he needed to study.
His had animations and sounds when the exercise was only to add a column of numbers.
I like to think that a decent teacher wouldn't have let one outlier student screw up the grading for an entire class. Especially since animations and sounds were not required and introduced unnecessary complexity into his codebase.
I never did figure how to make a recursive function work.
You probably had a shitty teacher, then. Recursion is a little tricky to get the hang of at first, and it's easy to screw up and create an infinite recursion, but if you follow a few simple rules, you should stay out of trouble.
I didn't know that American classrooms were a zero-sum game... Is that common?
Not really, but it's usually up to the teacher how to assign the grades, so it's entirely possible that the grading was normalized and only a certain number of each grade was awarded. That's not usual, however.
A typical grading curve in the US is to take the top X scores as a baseline for the highest grade and everyone who gets a certain percentage of the top X grades gets an A, then a certain percentage lower is a B, etc. In that sense, GP could have distorted the curve by being an outlier score.
I had that happen in an Econ class once. I had already taken the course in high school and had already finished my degree requirements, but still had to take the intro course to graduate. I earned 100% in the class (I was qualified to teach it at that point) and ruined a lot of freshmen's transcripts. I think the Econ department has since loosened up that requirement a bit.
I think the bell curve is likely the entire problem. There simply should not be one.
How many classes did you take that were graded on a strict bell curve where there were a certain number of each grade to be awarded, and the scores were forced into that grading distribution? I don't think I had even one course graded that way.
I had many courses that were graded on a curve, but the formula was generally based on a percentage of the top X scores achieved in the course. In theory, the entire class could earn As, but it would not be possible to have all students fail.
FYI, they don't all last the rest of your life. There are some that require boosters in adulthood. If you see the doctor regularly you should be covered, but just letting you know.
I'm sorry, but you are the one who is arguing irrationally.
GP didn't say that vaccines were bad. He said that he was uncomfortable with the government forcing medical treatments on its citizens. Yet you responded all huffy-like that vaccines are good. Well, no shit vaccinating is a good idea. But that is beside the point.
If you want to respond to GP's assertion that he is uncomfortable with the idea that governments should be forcing medical procedures on his citizens, then you need to argue why it is a good idea for government thugs to be kicking down doors and stabbing citizens with needles at gunpoint. Because that is the point that is under discussion.
How about that drug war, where they arrest you for putting things IN your body? Or even for just possibly having the idea.
Most people around here aren't too happy about the drug war, either.
Governments take thousands in school taxes, then tell you that if you don't want to send your kids to their public school that you'll have to send thousands more to a private one.
What are "school taxes"? I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the US that has such a thing. There are property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, use taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, service fees, etc., but those are paid by everyone, regardless of whether they send their kids to public or private schools, and indeed regardless of whether or not they have kids at all! My 90-year-old grandma pays all of these taxes, and I can assure you that she does not have any children in school right now.
Often, home schooling is even prohibited.
[citation needed]
I have little doubt that most diets are completely unsuccessful after 5 years, but I also wouldn't really expect a doctor to have so much information on various diets. Your friend would probably have better luck asking a registered dietician for that information.
Anecdotally, most of the weight loss success stories that I've heard involve the person making lifestyle changes that naturally appeal to the person, and also just happen to involve increased physical activity and/or caloric restriction. So it's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. It's more like sitting down and saying to yourself, "Self, what could I change about my life that would primarily be really fun, but would also promote weight loss?"
For me, I'm an economist by training, so I found enjoyment making a satiety vs. calories maximization problem out of it (i.e. what foods kept the hunger away for the longest time for the least amount of calories consumed?). So, I dutifully logged everything that I ate or drank in myfitnesspal and kept notes on how long everything kept me sated. Now, I have a list of foods that, for me anyway, keep the hunger at bay so I can simply eat less food and not feel tired/hungry/grouchy.
I realize that most people would hate doing this, but since I have a love for The Dismal Science, it appealed to me. Others needs to figure out what would excite them.
There's a certain subset of people for whom that is just never going to happen
I'd say that that subset of people who lack the self discipline to deny themselves in the long run would be "most people".
Anyone can say "no" to themselves once, twice, or even several times. But eventually indulgence will win out over self-discipline, because really, which one feels way the fuck better than the other?
Not to be preachy, but
Have you ever noticed how the words, "Not to be ___________, but," always seem to precede a bunch more words that are the epitome of ____________?
I have!
Fellow greybeard here. I actually just looked into Docker a few days ago so I'm far from an expert, but it seemed like a neat idea. Docker doesn't really give you anything that you couldn't do before, but it does make it easier to let developers do their jobs and sysadmins do their jobs.
The idea is that the output of software development is a "container", and that container is then handed off to the tech services group to deploy wherever makes sense. It's very similar to a VM, except it's (I think) based off of OpenVZ so you have a shared kernel. This keeps a container more lightweight so you don't have the OS overhead on every container. But anyway, the idea is that the admin can deploy the container on any hardware and as long as docker is installed on it, it just Just Work(TM). And from the developer's side, the idea is that they get their application running in the container on their laptop and then they can ship it off to tech services and it should Just Work(TM).
I've never actually used it, and I don't think it's super applicable to the type of work that I do, but I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless. A lot of people really like it, and there's a pretty big community of off-the-shelf containers for the major open source packages.
Random certification check after the person is hired? Nah.
More likely is that the employee blabbed to someone and the secret got out.
It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and failed. - motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere
