We have timers on most of the lights here in Podunkville Ohio.

It's a college town and we have lots of pedestrians. I guess the idea was to make intersections safer and discourage jaywalking. Didn't curb that, but really helps in timing your approach to an intersection.

It is as much the school as the parent, in some cases.

After receiving a diagnosis of ADHD, we set a meeting at the school with the teachers and psychologist. A month later, we met. The psychologist had not read the report, observed my child or even met him. But, the teachers were proactive and worked to get a plan developed, approved and in place.

That said, we spent over $1000 on tests, missed days of work and traveled 100's of miles to get the testing done at reputable sites. None of this was reimbursable on insurance. If we had just used a pediatrician and taken the meds, our costs (time and money) would have been minimal.

So, I agree that socioeconomic status is also important.

Too often we try and look at costs from the wrong perspective. I spent $1000+ to save my insurance $10,000+.

Meds are not always the answer and a child psychiatrist is the best person to know. We had our son tested twice (3 years between). The first was borderline. We saw no improvement and after more discussions with the school (attention and not behavior issues) we had him tested again. These were real tests that took hours, over several days. He scored high and received the diagnosis. But, they didn't want to try meds at first.

We met with the school (teachers and school psychologist). A plan was devised and it seems to be working. He gets a break to walk around, occasionally, and some extra time on some tests. I'm much happier that the school was able to make a couple of accommodations, and the teachers are happier to have one less zombie in the classroom.

I agree on the diminishing returns. I don't have an HD box (no OTA where I live) and watch almost exclusively SD. I have a USB stick that gets some HD, but I usually watch SD.

Why? The information (image/sound) is there in SD. HD adds higher resolution, but what I want to see and hear is conveyed in the SD. All HD does is fill my disk up with huge files. When I move them to my tablet, or stream them, it's too much wasted space or bandwith.

I know that my virus scanning service seems to be running at 2-5% most of the time. And, my process list looks a mile long.

I think we expect our windows devices to be real computers and load them up with full applications. Then, we expect them to sip juice like Android. Can't comment on the OSX. My netbook on linux is 5 years old and doesn't have much of a battery left.

I quit memorizing shortcuts when I stopped using emacs and vi (oh, and edlin).

As for windows applications, I use too many in my everyday work to memorize shortcuts for each. Somehow, my mouse knows the way to all of the functions. And for those that were infrequently used, I could figure out the functions from the context of the menus.

Six Degrees of NSA - what's you number?

Sorry, but after 5+ years of dealing with the ribbon I still regularly use Google to find out how to do something I know I could do in Office. Many of the functions in tools like Excel are not easily found behind the limited ribbon.

This whole ribbon thing was the start of a bad trend. From Unity to Metro, this dumbing down of the interface to the 3rd grade level shows how organizations see their customers.

What exactly are the failure modes of these batteries? If they can charge more quickly, then the assumption would be that they discharge more quickly.

1) Failure due to short circuiting the capacitor via mechanical failure (accident)
2) Failure due to normal wear.
3) Failure due to material defects.
4) Failure due to improper installation...

Really, there are 100's of ways that the system could be compromised. Some may be mitigated with logic in the car to identify failing components. But, instantaneous failure modes must be accounted for.

And, when every panel contains power, could the jaws of life ever be used on one of these vehicles?

That's the point. They didn't throw out the old method (at least not locally). At the end of the module, the teacher took some time to go over a different approach. He explained learning styles and then showed the different approach. For the 3 or 4 students who didn't get it, the new approach helped. For the others, they either reinforced their understanding or likely goofed off.

That is what we should be doing in primary education. We lose opportunity when we teach to 80% of the class. A simple addition of 10 minutes at the end of a module helped most of the remaining 20%.

The kicker is that this teacher has been quite vocal about how student performance is now linked to his compensation. He has told this to the students on more than one occasion. Would he have gone to the extra effort in the past? I prefer not to speculate.

Just last night I was helping my elementary age son study for a test on fractions and percents. We went through all concepts and he was still not getting it. Finally, he drew a line and started segmenting it. The teacher had shown the class "another way" to conceptualize this topic. He completely understood this approach. He then told me that his teacher told them about learning styles and tried to present the topic in multiple ways. So, while it seemed simple from one perspective to most of the class, others needed a different conceptualization.

I see no problem with exploring different approaches to learning. And, finding a better visualization for those types of learners is more than appropriate.

When asked if he wanted his pizza cut into 4 or six slices: "You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six." - Yogi Berra

If you look at the last 3 months http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201306-201308, you'll see that the decline has stopped. As of last month, they peg the users of XP at a little over 20%. As the second largest OS, that seems significant to me.

I would tend to agree with this. But with less mature students at a research university, even tenured faculty need to be entertainers to motivate students.

As a tenured faculty member, I can attest to the fact that tenure/tenure-track faculty at many research schools are evaluated (raise/promotion/tenure) on metrics different from adjuncts and instructors. Devoting sufficient time and effort to teaching can be counter productive for your career. For many disciplines, external funding and publications are the primary criteria for evaluation. Ultimately, energies in teaching are focused on graduate students - who support those activities. Add in service (committees, societies and the like) and it's often an issue of limited time.