The difference is 2 billion people. Which is a pretty big difference regardless of if you are one of those people or not.

There is no reason not to consider makeshift solutions. By consuming a more efficient food, we have less ground to cover on the limit population and consumption front.

When I first saw this I thought the premise would be to 'accidentally' text your parents from an unknown number or web service suggesting the drug deal, then seeing which parents try to take advantage of the opportunity to buy drugs.

But in the situation we are talking about here, taking the easiest classes doesn't get you your degree any faster. It just means that you can do fewer things.

To be fair, they still technically have an air gap :)

It is standard operating procedure for standardized tests and AP tests.

Could it be a series of small assignments throughout a course that are graded, tallied up, and then factored into the final grade? It sounds to me like your definition of what constitutes an exam could include the grades that girls are performing better than the boys in.

What's wrong with having grades that reflect how well you will do after the test? That seems really useful to me. How is that any more arbitrary than using a test to predict that? Better yet, why not use both and recognize that they both tell you useful information rather than insisting that one is flawed?

And I would say their job performance generally has little correlation to their test scores and some correlation to their grades. The correlation to grades may well have more to do with ability to organize and mange one's work than any material being taught. However, we know that both of our statements don't have anything to back them up right?

Tests are not necessarily objective, there is the issue of sterotype threat . The gist of it is that if you remind girls that they are girls (by asking them to fill in a bubble for gender) before a math test they performed worse. When asked to fill in the bubble after the test, they performed equally.

Not to mention how anxiety (which can affect boys and girls) can cause bad performance on an exam, when that person may have gotten excellent grades all through the course and continue to retain and apply the information that they learned in the course long afterwards.

I'm not saying exams are not to be trusted, but I think you can get a better picture of how much someone got out of a course by considering more than just a single data point.

It does and is well documented. It's called the Sterotype threat .

Or there is a flaw in the test. It goes both ways.

I just assumed 100 Minnesotan pedestrians passed through each year.

I agree with your sentiment that a tablet is a reasonable complement to the things to a child should interact with, but I'd like to point out that a "A learning device with no texture, fake 3d, no smell, taste, heat, or any other input for senses other than sight and hearing" could be used to describe a picture book (expect for the hearing part). Yet, no one is claiming that pictures books could be harmful for development.

That is hard.

I don't think you can treat the economy or workforce like an individual farm where you try to maximize profit by only producing the single most profitable crop. We need a diverse workforce in order to have a strong economy just like we need a diverse landscape to produce the variety of crops we need, regardless of which one is most "valuable". As an added bonus, a diverse workforce is more resilient when there is a downturn in an individual sector.

Right. Some of us consider learning a fond personal experience. It is also difficult to go beyond the bare minimum of education if you are working a ton of hours at some unrelated job.

Stargate SG-1 called; they want their ZPM back.