Obligatory Dilbert... http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/8000/300/18358/18358.strip.gif

Being a professor is one of the few professions where you get to charge someone for something and then act like you're the boss. They seem to forget that they are being paid by the student. If the student chooses to sit in the room and ignore the professor, it's the student's (or the parents') money that's being wasted, not the professor's. Imagine hiring a plumber who insisted on this level of authority. As long as it's not something that makes noise or is otherwise obtrusive to the other students, the professor should have nothing to say about it. Ultimately this is just an ego trip on the part of the professor. Nothing more.

Yeah well, at least downloading porn involves a little bit of exercise. With TV you just lay there.

Why would an automated process necessitate uniform pricing for everything? They could easily set it up so that if the OCR reads "Swimsuit Issue" on the cover, the "articles" are tagged differently and a different price is charged.

Yet another reason to say... FOR THE ALLIANCE!!!

Yes, yes. But nothing, NOTHING, compares to the heinous of act of giving fucking Ben "Frat Boy" Asslick the lead role in Phillip Dick's Paycheck. Or even putting Ahnuld in any of the other movies based on his stories. Asimov deserves no better than Dick.

"Somebody set us up the bomb?" This does not bode well....

And here, gentlemen, is all the evidence we need... To Wikipedia! (And thanks for saving me 300 bucks for roses)

That's interesting but why are you assuming a carbon bond needs to be broken to cause cancer? Cancer can be caused in a number of ways, including the an error in the process of replicating DNA. The DNA strands are not held together by chemical bonds, only by non-chemical hydrogen bonds. It is reasonable to wonder if a cellphone could be sufficiently disruptive of that process. I'm not implying that it does happen, rather that it's dangerous to think of it as "quantum physics says it can't happen, so let's not bother to test for something we might not have thought of.

Well, I never will again, that's for fucking sure.

Yes.

...in specific areas such as this is still sorely lacking. There are some generalized things that are pretty good, such as NetLogo that you could use to have your kids set up models and simulations of things to help them understand.

Here's one example of a demo in NetLogo that shows how buffers work and is interactive in that it lets you adjust the levels of acid and base at the beginning and lets you add them while it's running. To use it, click "setup", then "go". You will probably want to slow it down a lot.

NetLogo Buffer Simulation

It might be useful to let the kids play with this, or for you to put it up on a projector for them and fiddle with the settings to let them see what's happening. But what would really serve them (and the community) is to have them make their own simulation and post it. This accomplishes several things: they'll know they are actually contributing something to society, their depth of understanding will increase by causing them to organize the information in their minds to the point where they feel like they can explain it, the fact that their peers will be looking at it provides the only motivation kids of that age actually care about, and you'll be taking education out of the stone ages.

I'm not saying this is the only thing out there or even that this is the best thing (NetLogo). But I consistently see people answering questions like this by saying things like "don't make computers too important to the class" and "when I was a boy, we did it this way, so that should be enough for kids now." Neither of these answers is supported by research in the cognitive sciences or education. Use the computers. Education is the only area of human endeavor where you could take someone who was doing it in the 1800's and put them in a job today and almost nothing has changed. This is no longer good enough for a world where technology is evolving at an accelerating pace. Please, use the computers.

Mediocre artists borrow. Great artists steal. -Picasso

The best part is this quote is stolen from Oscar Wilde.

This is what MIT's Scratch is all about. It tries to turn programming into visual puzzle pieces so that even kids should be able to get the context without having to worry about semicolons and such. And to the poster below complaining of a "lack of capable teachers", the age of usefulness of capable teachers is coming to an end. What is more appropriate now from the point of view of educational and cognitive research is an age where we have capable coaches guiding us in the process of teaching ourselves. We don't necessarily need to know how to do something to help someone else figure it out; we need to know how to ask good questions and distinguish between good sources of information and Alex Jones.

I believe the correct term for that is "poetry".