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Comment Re: Bad move (Score 1) 375

Any website that mentions 'Turanean' is now pseudo science -even though at one point in time it was an academically acceptable term.

I've never heard the word before, but based on the first couple of pages of Google results I think you need to qualify it a bit, because it seems to be quite heavily used as a geographical descriptor in describing the range of plants and animals. (I'm assuming that's not the usage which you think is pseudoscience, but I could be wrong).

Comment Re:Question (Score 5, Insightful) 121

"Alan Turing's notes" is somewhat overselling it. They're not talking about a white paper: Bletchley would have produced hundreds of sheets of these kind of scrap workings every day, so they were genuinely worthless then. They're only worth anything now because all of the rest were destroyed. To put it in perspective, they're more valuable to us than a shopping list from that era would be, but less valuable than a shopping list from ancient Sumeria would be.

Comment Re:Bound to happen (Score 5, Insightful) 619

could you imagine if every website was paywalled?

No, I can't imagine that. In particular, I can't imagine paywalling my own site (or putting ads on it). I remember the days before advertising was big on the web, when content was provided by universities and hobbyists. Comparing the web now with the web then, I suspect that the death of online advertising would harm clickbait sites more than ones with valuable content.

Comment Re:To be fair... (Score 1) 388

There's another fairly major point: although the title of this /. thread talks about "computing teachers", the summary talks about "primary and secondary teachers", and the original press release talks about "teachers responsible for teaching computing". Primary school teachers, who were already expected to know everything about everything, are now (PDF warning) expected to teach programming, debugging, networking, etc. There's no particular reason why people who signed up to teach 5 to 7 year-olds ten years ago would be more likely than the general populace to be good at debugging.

Comment Re:The Full List (Score 4, Interesting) 249

As the parent of a Straight ‘A’ gifted child I can say for a fact Hard Work is the most important factor.

As a former straight A gifted child, I can say that you're wrong. Maybe hard work is the most important factor for your daughter, but you can't extrapolate from her to every successful student.

The only year in my education in which I worked hard was my first year at university, partly because I didn't know how good I was relative to my peers and wanted to compete, partly because a quarter of my course was material which I did actually need to work at, and partly because my one-on-one for that material was with someone who really pushed me. When I finished in the top three and won a scholarship, I didn't feel the need to prove myself in the second and third years, and I had more freedom to choose courses which I found easy. The most important factors for my academic success were intuition, a memory which was good at retaining the things that matters for the subjects I chose, and curiosity.

Just to be completely clear: I'm not knocking hard work. The person who finished first in my course in the second year was a friend whom I met up with once or twice a week to explain the things they hadn't understood in lectures. I think they worked quite hard, and maybe I could have finished first if I'd worked harder. But I preferred to spend about twenty hours a week working and have lots of time to participate in various student societies, because university is about more than grades. (I still got first class honours, so I didn't judge it too badly!)

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