While it is true that people have very strange perceptions of the education system and the quality of education being administered, but that says nothing to whether there is a crisis in education. I am of the opinion that the information we track about education, including the information you linked to, is bizarre and is a very poor indicator of the performance of education to produce engaged, capable members of society. Just because we are doing better than we did and reasonably well compared to other larger developed populations at preparing students to recite information in fields defined for academic study doesn't mean we are doing a good job of aiding students in skills which will help them to live happier, fulfilling, more productive lives. How good is it that we graduate people who can name eighty percent of the capital cities of the world if they don't know how to defend themselves in traffic court or have a strong idea about their interests and abilities which they might be able to exchange for income or a litany of skills which impact nearly everyone's life? If we are measuring the wrong things what does it matter how we stand against the past or others? Our education system is in crisis because we never bothered to have serious discussions about what it should be accomplishing, and while 'education reform' in the United States (privatization and standardized-test-based evaluation) only reinforces this flawed system, this doesn't mean that education reform (generic) isn't necessary

One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?

By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.

So, you can extract the hydrogen effectively from the plant material, but now you have the energy in a form which is difficult to store and transport. This still requires producing large amounts of plant material which is an environmentally difficult-to-sustain prospect in order to capture solar energy. In the end, it has nearly all of the problems of ethanol plus a bunch of serious ones for a smallish efficiency gain.

Why do we still not have a set of generic laptop form factors where we can mix and match components? And don't give me that 'cramming a bunch of stuff into a small shell requires custom engineering' BS. Laptops are already very similar in structure with compatible devices from other manufacturers and I fully expect that there would need to be a slightly larger range of form factors for these devices than for desktop PCs since the space trade-off is a bit more demanding, but it's not a tremendously difficult problem and ethusiasts would love it.

The argument was that when there is price inflation, hoarding cash is discouraged because it is losing value. You seem to understand the concept, but misunderstood the statement.

This is a bold statement which simply fails economic analysis. When money becomes less available for settling debts, then people who have debts become less able to service them, resulting in more defaults or the requirement for larger amounts of debt which generates more virtual currency. While we teach that saving is good in personal accounting, there is a reason that economists tell politicians that saving isn't particularly good for the economy as a whole. Appropriate amounts of positive inflation encourages people to either make their currency available through purchases or by lending it at lower interest rates. Deflation encourages hoarding of money and increases the cost of borrowing, which stifles economic growth.

Your cited Minneapolis Fed analysis is laughable. Linear regressions on charts of inflation vs economic growth? Without controls for government interventions during the event? Seriously? This sort of analysis shouldn't even be taken seriously at an undergraduate level, but unfortunately documents like this get produced all the time and get dragged to defend all sorts of preconceived notions.

How is it not designed to be deflationary? Introduction of new currency is designed to get slower and the presumption is that adoption will increase. When demand for currency outstrips supply, you get price deflation and everything about Bitcoin is intended for this result. Even if we presume that there is zero 'loss' of these, if things go as planned, we see deflation. Deflation leads to hoarding, hoarding leads to deflation and it all results in a bubble. Talk to currency traders and see what they think of a currency which increases eight-fold in less than two years. They will tell you that any position in it is simple gambling; can you force yourself to get off before the music stops?

While I am skeptical about a lot of things in this project, this likely isn't as bad as one might think. This is the full serial time to build all of the components, which could be parallelized, meaning that in production they would only have to worry about the single component with the longest generation time. This is probably still quite a long time using this technique.

This is an example of social scientists challenging a 'law' of the social sciences, namely that there is no genetic reason why almost any reasonably large population of people should perform significantly better or worse than any other and any discrepency should be attributed to other socio-environmental factors.

Compare, for a moment, to the 'laws' of the physical sciences. These aren't necessarily completely accurate descriptions of the universe, but they are persistently true despite numerous challenges and the scientific community has essentially decided that they will disregard all but the most compelling challenges and that people who try to advance uncompelling challenges regarding these topics had better be prepared to be publicly shamed for it. If you look at the example of the CERN faster-than-light neutrino results where the team responsible essentially said that they got a strange result, please help them figure out how their instruments are malfunctioning, we still ended up with denunciations from all corners of the physics community.

Even though social scientists work in a field where it is difficult to be anywhere near as certain as physicists and thus they tend to shy away from the term 'law', but this is a law which is quite defensible. The history of challenges to this assertion is long and storied with very little utility arising from it; every claim of the genetic superiority of some populations over others in social matters has been handily discredited as not able to isolate genetic and social factors. When researchers try to isolate social factors, they are unable to identify genetic signals on the population level greater than the (admittedly strong) statistical noise. Compare that to the history of social engineering which uses bad research in this area to claim legitimacy and the atrocities they cause, and we have an example of a very poor risk/reward ratio. It is only fitting that social scientists should demand that people making these sorts of claims show due reverance to the political implications of their statements and back their assertions with highly compelling evidence. As many of the other comments to this article note, not only is this evidence not 'highly compelling', it is downright poor work and by this measure deserves the shaming it is receiving.

If you ask people 'do you like generally non-controversial policy X', they will support it in droves. The public's ability to understand how much things cost, how much they are willing to pay, and how they should prioritize their concerns is a completely different matter. I couldn't find it in three minutes of searching, but Pew had a poll a couple of years back where the only category the US respondants could agree on is cutting foreign aid to cut the defecit, which is only because the budget doesn't have a line item for 'waste and abuse' which seems to be how most people think we will get most of the way to making debt payments. When it comes to public policy, most voters seem to be deluded, but we are particularly gifted in the land of the free.

FROM SPAAAACE! Is the sort of thing which is apparently supposed to sound impressive, but rarely is. The ability to 'see' something from orbit is about as precise and interesting as saying that you can 'see' a shrub from a couple miles away while standing on the hill in Kansas, which is not much at all.

While I'm at it when something 'makes its own weather' it is about equally as impressive.

This isn't anything new, we have known for quite a long time that the biggest predictor of classroom success is "Can I align my desires with the expectations being placed on me enough to overcome my other impulses." By all accounts, boys have stronger impulses and over a period of decades have been socialized to be more oriented toward self-fulfilment than other-fulfilment. This is incongruous with classrooms and other current teaching heuristics which demand high levels of conformity and are rather intolerant of behavioral and interest diversity.

The answer is also nothing new. Education needs to change its curriculum and practices both to accommodate and to adjust the dispositions students possess from external sources. The problem is that education is among the most conservative institutions in our society and despite numerous efforts to change it, about the only things which have changed in education is a sharp reduction in corporal punishment and the desks now often face each other instead of the front of the room.

This poll is a great example of the physical bias that people, and particularly technology geeks, tend to have. The areas needing the greatest study (in my estimation) are organizational in nature: governance, economics, society. These all potentially address the question, 'How do we efficiently employ the time of humanity for the greatest sustained good?'. None of the options the survey provides seriously engage this question except in extremely weak, speculative ways. If we don't figure out how to make the world more peaceful, cooperative, and sustainably prosperous, our explorations into and application of all of the survey's areas are going to be stunted.

Actually, it is ridiculously terrible. All it shows is that geolocated timestamped messages can be searched, but either their search criteria was awful or there aren't enough people creating these things to draw any conclusions about a meaningful population. The fact that they then tried to draw state-level conclusions on this dataset shows a feeble grasp of statistics.

Most of the world is not going to care about this complete non-issue. I'm sure most /. readers wouldn't even know about it if Soulskill didn't keep bringing it up every few months. I have been hearing claims that GUIs are going to escape from the bonds of skeuomorphic design as people become more tech-savvy, but somehow we have to continue to tolerate the whining. Apple has always tried to appeal to the fountain-pen-never-used-on-the-desk market and has embraced that asthetic in its GUI decorations. If anything, this is an asthetic which is seeing a resurgence with the rise of 'hipsters' who want to make digital pictures look like 70s era polaroids. Non-skeuomorphic designs are available to replace pretty much everything on any of these devices, so if you want it so bad, go get it and incentivise people to cater to your whims, but please stop cluttering /. with this long, pretentious word.

Metaphor can be useful, but it can also cause problems. Here is a shot at a simple explanation without metaphor.

A version control system maintains a log of all changes that are made to the source code of a piece of software. When a problem arises in a piece of software, the version control system can help find out what code was changed, when it was changed, and who changed it. Without this information, tracking down the piece of code causing the new bug can take a lot longer. This log can also be used to undo changes which prove to be problematic.

Explaining how version control helps developers recognize conflicting commits is a specific example and likely lost on lay folk without quite a lot of explaining.