Comment Re:PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score 1) 70
I heard that a motion was filed to rename the case "Jarndyce and Jarndyce".
I heard that a motion was filed to rename the case "Jarndyce and Jarndyce".
Well, dark matter and dark energy are about 95% of the cosmos, so apparently so.
Border agents have been able to conduct searches of persons and their effects entering the country since the first Congress in 1789.
First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.
Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.
This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.
So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.
But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore.
You never could. Parents do their kids' homework all the time, or siblings, or friends.
Homework used to be a measure for yourself to indicate whether or not you really understood the concepts being taught. Math is a prime example here. If you found your homework speed accelerating with confidence as you worked through problems correctly and accurately, it was a pretty good indicator of how you would perform on a test.**
It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.
Ideally, teachers should give a large pile of optional homework.
For those students gifted with high motivation, they already recognize the value of optional homework that exists today. Any child gifted with high motivation wants to practice more, and is likely being raised by a parent who is more than capable of presenting those challenges. And does.
Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.
The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.
This is unfortunately no longer a valid measure because testing has become an exercise in psychological coddling. With time limits, bright lights, and the concept of failing, removed.
Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.
When I was in high school we got detention for not doing homework (Catholic school). I was a "smart" kid in honors classes, and at this time (late 90s early 2000s) Google was new as was SparkNotes and Wikipedia. I used them all. I plowed through homework just to get it done and avoid detention rather than actually caring about the material. I absolutely hated the strict and conservative environment of the school, so I refused to take notes in class (doodling instead) and almost never studied for tests. I'm probably in the top 1 percent of successful graduates of that school, and the most successful I'm aware of from the honors program in my graduating year. So yes absolutely, smart kids and rule-following academically hard working kids are not an overlapping group.
They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.
First, the smart kids who understand the material quickly will do just enough to make sure they understand it and then will stop wasting their time, but will still have feedback on the work that they did do.
I love that you didn't explain what the effect of this will be on the "not smart kids." Do you think they're going to hit the books and do a bunch of non-optional homework to learn the material? Have you met a single child?
The effect of this would be that the teacher would quickly intervene and tell the kid that they need to do more of the work, because they don't seem to have fully grasped the concepts. If the kids ignore this, then at the parent-teacher conference after the first six-weeks period, the teacher would encourage the parents to either make their kids do more work or put their kids in an after-school program that would do so.
And if that doesn't work, you can also make the participation points be contingent on whether they are grasping the concepts, where if it is clear that they're not getting it and aren't doing enough work to learn it, you tell them that they won't get participation points unless they do more of the problems.
Who bothers with computers when you just created the World in 6 days?
One could argue that no one is doing it in six days without a shit ton of automation support. Some cherubim in ops saved eons when he wrote createstar.pl and it's still running in production today (though it looks like creategalaxy.pl stopped executing some time ago and hasn't been restarted and/or patched yet).
This was a reasonable screed two decades ago (and probably at least somewhat factual) but today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.
Especially since it's not clear what's in it for Iran. They're not at war with UK, but they are at war with US
They hit what they can. Iran has attacked or threatened many countries, including the UK.
It's understandable. If I were the head of the Islamist regime in Iran, I would be trying to build up nuclear weapons that could hit America as quickly as possible.
https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...
And DARPA has a whole program for it:
"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths