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Education Official Says Bad Teachers Can Be Good For Students 279

Posted by samzenpus from the hiring-on-a-curve dept.
Zenna Atkins, the chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has raised some eyebrows by saying that, "every school should have a useless teacher." She stresses that schools shouldn't seek out or tolerate bad teaching, but thinks bad teachers provide a valuable life-lesson. From the article: "... on Sunday Ms Atkins told the BBC that schools needed to reflect society, especially at primary level. 'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage.'"

Comment All things in DC rise with taxes (Score 0, Troll) 362

by zazenation (#32804362) Attached to: Price Shocks May Be Coming For Helium Supply

What this seems to say is that the price of helium has historically been inversely proportional to the televised quantity of hot air generated by Washington pols. Now they're changing the rules so it is directly proportional to Washington gas emissions. This includes all gases generated by any Washington orifice -- lighter than air or not...

Comment Movie references (Score 1) 896

by zazenation (#31531028) Attached to: What Free Antivirus Do You Install On Windows?

From the movie "The Treasure of Silicon Valley", Bill Gates in a bandito hat indignantly replies to Humphrey "Don't" Bogart:

"Antivirus? We ain't got no Antivirus. We don't need no Antivirus! I don't have to show you any stinkin' Antivirus!"

Often misquoted from "Blazing Windows" as
"We don't need no stinkin' Antivirus!"

Comment Re:Culture, not money (Score 1) 290

by zazenation (#30637288) Attached to: Is Early Childhood Education Technology Moving Backwards?

You hit the proverbial nail -- Sad to say.

      I'd like to add how television aids in reinforcing this behavior pattern. It would probably be a safe bet to say that education desire/absorption is inversely proportion to the number of hours in front of the tube.
      (In my formative years, I could count on one hand the number of UHF and VHF channels. Therefore, less TV watching, not to mention that one had to actually get up off the sofa to change the channel. A TV in one's room was a non starter.)
      Try and convince the inner city single parent to limit the hours in front of the electronic babysitter. The imagery on the tube almost never reinforces education for advancement. Street smarts and gaming the system is all that is required to get ahead and/or be popular.

Comment Boogie man (Score 1) 434

by zazenation (#30229106) Attached to: Australian Govt. Proposes Internet "Panic Button" For Kids

Good idea -- incorrect routing.

Have the dolphin button ring the parents cell phone with a message like:
"(Kid's name) is having an Internet Panic Attack --- If you don't respond to this message, then the call will be routed to your local law enforcement division -- Remember, please monitor and talk with your children!"

Supply a pager to the parents without a cell phone. Seems like a far less costly method than having to hire thousands of police and/or SS workers to handle the plethora of "I wanna see someone jump when I feel bad" abusers.

And don't forget the legions of lawyers that will be necessary to sort through the pile of litigation!

Comment Re:The soylent nature of /. --- is people! (Score 1) 92

by zazenation (#30081808) Attached to: Mimicking Materials and Structures In Nature

My initial gut reaction was also ants.
But ants are unconsciously programmed to create a huge feeding mechanism for their queen and her progeny. They throw themselves on the metaphorical sword in its defense. I don't see that in /.
More like piranha at times.

Maybe some kind of hybrid ? Or ants on LSD? I remember reading some time ago they somehow dosed a spider with LSD and the resulting web was pretty bizarre and unsymmetrical.

This is /. after all -- free your mind. I've had my fill of the Bickersons.

Comment The soylent nature of /. --- is people! (Score 1) 92

by zazenation (#30069274) Attached to: Mimicking Materials and Structures In Nature

Though not strictly a physical material, this got me thinking.
What would be the underlying metaphorical model for /.
  ?

Ants, piranha, beavers, jellyfish, cats?

Leave It to Beaver, The Honeymooners, Star Trek?

The school lunch room, D&D party, After work at the pub, French salons on hypnotics?

Logical / illogical anarchy at its finest?

?????
The Internet

EU Telecom Deal Finished — No Three Strikes 109

Posted by Soulskill from the infield-fly-rule-still-applies-though dept.
a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The battle was hard, but the final text of the agreement ensures that people in the EU are not disconnected from the Internet without a chance to get a fair and impartial hearing beforehand. The important part is: 'Accordingly, these measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned, subject to the need for appropriate conditions and procedural arrangements in duly substantiated cases of urgency in conformity with European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed.' This means that if someone is accused of copyright infringement, they can't just be disconnected from Internet. It lets the accused get a chance to disagree and take it to court first. The urgency clause means that a computer can be disconnected if it is part of an ongoing DDoS attack. Next, this has to be implemented into the EU nations' own laws, so the final ruling on how this will be implemented is not out yet. But, overall, it looks like a great success in stopping informal three-strikes disconnections."
Programming

Submission + - The Pathologies of Big Data

Submitted by ChelleChelle
ChelleChelle writes: Although it remains difficult to define for sure what exactly counts as "big data," one thing remains clear--if you scale up your datasets enough, all of your apps will come undone. Big data often causes big problems, especially, according to Adam Jacobs of 1010data Inc., when it comes to analysis. In this article Jacobs provides an overview of a few of the problems that can arise when analyzing big data, discussing the inability of many off-the-shelf packages to scale to large problems; the paramount importance of avoiding suboptimal access patterns as the bulk of processing moves down the storage hierarchy; and the replication of data for storage and efficiency in distributed processing.
Math

Submission + - First ever application of string theory

Submitted by
PeterM from Berkeley
PeterM from Berkeley writes: "Scientists are claiming to have made the first practical application of string theory to the problem of high temperature superconductivity, a physical phenomenon no one has previously been able to explain. This brief from Science Daily presents an overview of an article published in Science. String theory has come under fire for producing no testable predictions. This would represent a first application of string theory to a practical problem and one where other theories have provided no explanation."
Transportation

Submission + - Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which "map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching." Sat-Nav "speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road," writes Moran. "More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater." But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like "make a legal U-turn" and "recalculating the route", as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. "Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections.," writes Moran. "Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.""

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