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Optimism != RealismI would just say a pessimist more than anything else.
Marcus Bryant, DarkReign, ExtraStout, WH23, CosmicCowboy and 101A should all get together for the inevitable downfall of the United States.
I'm slightly more optimistic.
yeah, that would be an interesting posse. a sort of existential anarchists club.I would just say a pessimist more than anything else.
Marcus Bryant, DarkReign, ExtraStout, WH23, CosmicCowboy and 101A should all get together for the inevitable downfall of the United States.
I'm slightly more optimistic.
i'm with you though. a little more on the half full side.
Optimism != RealismI would just say a pessimist more than anything else.
Marcus Bryant, DarkReign, ExtraStout, WH23, CosmicCowboy and 101A should all get together for the inevitable downfall of the United States.
I'm slightly more optimistic.
Agreed. I've seen many a picture showing what Detroit has become. An abandoned run down city that is disgraceful. But that has already been made quite clear by DR.
Only in the 20th century and beyond has poverty been subsidized by the government to the extent that we see now, except in a few other cases - one in particular would be Rome's initiating the public dole and later adding the games as an attempt to appease the city's poor, which it was IMHO. In the past Mother Nature had control and through her many techniques - disease, drought leading to starvation, natural disasters...etc was able to liimit poverty's population. And was more effective when you combine that with the ruling elite's total indifference to the problem. Now that control has been removed to a great extent. And a significant portion of the ruling elite have become concerned about the plight of these people and have stepped in with massive government programs in order to solve what seems apparantly to be an unsolvable situation.
I know that these people are human beings and deserve a helping hand but there will come a time when their negative effect on society will have to been addressed. This situation reminds me of the movie "The Matrix" when Agent Smith was descibing to a captured Morpheus his thoughtrs about the human race. That it was a virus, consuming all the resources in one area while mulitplying and moving on to another and repeating the same thing over agian. Poverty in this day and age seems to be heading in that direction at our expense.
How to control this situation better? Dunno but I doubt if we'll be able to employ Mother Nature again like in the olden days.
agent smith was sartre and neo camus in that instance. of course neo defeats agent smith which was the point of that scene and one that i think is applicable to the very subject at hand (at least philosophically speaking).
It's true. Hispanics are about a century ahead in new means of space travel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Chang-D%C3%ADaz
One we run out of natural resources after locust like whites have consumed them all, we're going to be up creak unless we leave.
Cmon DR. You know the real truth's somewhere in the middle.
When speaking on the issues of possible legislation, negotiations with promises of compromise are usually expedient (although not particularly effective, imo).
On the other hand, in the assessment of threats against a nation and the corresponding dialogue of options and strategy to defend itself, negotiation and compromise are the tools employed by the conquered.
My son took a free on-line course in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford. He said it was super hard but he loved it. Now he's having a hard time deciding which free on-line course to take at which top school.
Combined with all the free how-to stuff for just about everything on Internet, the only excuse is not having Internet access (which is comparitively expensive and slow in USA, but that's how the free market works ( s you every chance it can).
Referring to the OP dropout rate, you can lead a punk to school but you can't make him think.
Just heard on the radio this morning that "Haven for Hope" our multi-million dollar city homeless shelter is going to have it's first kid raised there leave for college at Baylor this fall. He's going to major in anthropology. ing great. after he graduates he can come back home and move back in with mom and dad.
Or travel the world exploring ancient ruins or do enting different species of animals or working in a museum.
With a PhD maybe. With a batchelors? Pffffft.
C'mon Stringer..that was funny and you know it...
Wow, that's really cool. MIT's OpenCourseware is easily the best website I have ever found on the internet (Lewin's physics lectures are particularly amazing), so I can't wait to see how they have this setup. I just hope they're not dumbed-down versions.
holy sweet Jesus, there are little boutons running around?
LOL they said the kid was "raised" there? That place hasn't even had residents for 2 years yet. Taking credit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...rsity-naughtonUnder the classical model, universities were ins utions that created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students or scholars wished to access that knowledge, they had to come to the university. But, Noam argued, the internet would threaten that model by raising the question memorably posed by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: "Where is the Library of Congress when it's on my desktop?" If all the world's stored knowledge can be accessed from any networked device, and if the teaching materials and lectures of the best scholars are likewise available online, why should students pay fees and incur debts to live in cramped accommodation for three years? What would be the USP of the traditional university when its monopolies on storage and dissemination eroded?
If that was a good question in 1995, it's an even better one today. The answers offered by traditional universities over the years varied according to status and mission. Some universities went into denial and pretended that Noam's "dim future" wouldn't happen to them. Some decided that their USPs – their elite brands – would protect them from the gathering storm. Others decided that they would become primarily research-driven outfits with undergraduate teaching being regarded as a tiresome chore that could be outsourced to graduate instructors. A few experimented with distance teaching and the delusion that putting their educational "content" online would solve the problem. But, different though these responses were, all universities were agreed on one thing: in the end, students would have to come to them because only universities could give them the appropriate credentials. QED.
In behaving thus, universities put themselves in the role of the mythical frog in a saucepan of water that is being slowly heated on a hob. As time passes, the frog notices gradual changes in the temperature, but each increment seems relatively tolerable, so the creature adapts to it. But then there comes a moment when the water boils...
Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities. The key development is a set of three courses created by Stanford University academics and colleagues in three subject areas: machine learning, database design and artificial intelligence. What makes these significant is that they are: intellectually demanding; free; presented entirely online; taught by world-class academics; and inclusive of assessment as well as tuition.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/...MIT-universityWhat all of these new ventures have in common is that they are outside of the existing system of college credits and degrees. The traditional college degree monopoly has long been sustained by three mutually-reinforcing factors. First, colleges are highly subsidized through some combination of direct government funding, non-profit status, and student financial aid. Second, only accredited colleges can receive government subsidies and offer credits and credentials that are recognized by employers and other colleges. The accreditation system, meanwhile, is controlled by existing colleges themselves. Third, our society has made an enormous psychic investment in the idea of traditional colleges. Most people don’t know how to think about credentials any other way.
Straighterline, Udacity, and MITx exist outside of that system. They aren’t accredited or subsidized. The value of their credentials will rest on nothing other than the authority of the grantor and the transparency of the process by which they were granted. That’s why it’s highly unlikely that these credentials will be worth as much in the job market as traditional degrees at first. But in that sense, they fit perfectly with the classic theory of disruptive innovation.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/mag...3.php?page=allMaybe the three ans of Harvard, Berkeley, and MIT will propel edX to victory, or maybe the user experience expertise and facility with the economics of Silicon Valley will help Udacity carry the day. Coursera’s marriage of world-class brands with valley know-how seems like a formidable combination. Pearson, the British textbook giant, is working to build a platform of its own. There is a great deal of money and power at stake now. We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.
It will probably take a little while to digest. Cars and automobiles almost entirely killed the long-distance passenger train industry, for example, but railroads today carry more freight than ever, and it would be almost impossible to build automobiles if railroads did not exist to transport the raw materials. Similarly, TV did not replace radio, but merely diluted its influence. Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms. As the platform wars commence and huge online courses grow in prominence, most of the first adopters won’t be American students forgoing the opportunity to drink beer on weekends at State U. Instead, they’ll be students like Bali, among the hundreds of millions of people around the world with the talent and desire to learn but no State U to attend. The initial MOOC statistics bear this out—according to Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, more people from Lithuania signed up for his Stanford class than attend Stanford itself.
Instead of trying to directly challenge American colleges—a daunting proposition, given the political power and public subsidies they possess—the new breed of tech start-ups will likely start by working in the unregulated private sector, where they’ll build what amounts to a parallel higher education universe.
Well said.
It's very interesting, even exciting, development, but will employers give on-line learning anymore credibility than they do to for-profit college scammers? Or do employers really count? Perhaps if people, self-selected, are energetic and disciplined enough to learn, seriously, successfully, for years, on line, then maybe they can earn a living without being an employee.
Yes, that is much more the norm for college graduates majoring in anthropology......
noYesOr do employers really count?maybe, if they work hard.Perhaps if people, self-selected, are energetic and disciplined enough to learn, seriously, successfully, for years, on line, then maybe they can earn a living without being an employee.
I would a lot rather hire someone that gave 100% effort to the University of Phoenix and learned the course material than some off that spent most of their college years on 6th Street and got a paper from UT that says they managed to survive 5 years and barely got out.
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