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izz aty

If I Was Poor (A Letter Written by a Billionaire) « The Activists - 0 views

  • If I was poor I would steal bread, I would steal food, I would steal my life back from those who thrive from crushing the lives of others. If I was poor, I would not lie submissively waiting for the billionaires to become humane, I would seize the means of production. If I was poor, I would form a gang of poor people and take control of the streets. If I was poor, I would spend every ounce of energy showing other poor people how to rise above their inner and outer poverty. Unfortunately for you poor scum, it is I, that writes the laws. Unfortunately for you starving children, it is the club of billionaires that change and modify the laws to suit their needs.
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    There was a protest in my city, I called the idiotic mayor and told him to put curfew rules into places, the law is my friend. The law is your enemy, the law is the enemy of those with no power. The law is a reflection of the appetites and needs of the powerful. I am the law, you are the slave of the law. I am the lawyers, you are the ones arrested and brutalized because of your skin shades. I am the law, you are the poor citizens who cannot even afford a lawyer.
izz aty

The Goal of Learning Everything « Scott H Young - 0 views

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    Recently, I wrote about my goal of learning everything. This is more than a tad ambitious, and probably impossible. Even learning a small fraction of everything can have huge benefits that ripple outwards towards every other area of life. Unfortunately, most people fall into a group I'll call "functional" learners, and severely cut off their potential.
izz aty

How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying | zen habits - 0 views

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    In high school, I rarely studied. Despite that, I graduated second in my class. In university, I generally studied less than an hour or two before major exams. However, over four years, my GPA always sat between an A and an A+. Recently I had to write a law exam worth 100% of my final grade. Unfortunately, I was out of the country and didn't get back by plane until late Sunday night. I had to write the test at 9 am Monday morning. I got an A after just one hour of review on the plane. The fact is most of my feats are relatively mundane. I've had a chance to meet polyglots who speak 8 languages, people who have mastered triple course loads and students who went from C or B averages to straight A+ grades while studying less than before.
izz aty

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views

  • cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is
  • cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is.
  • There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present.
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  • The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.
  • he third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right.
  • They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
  • What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves.
  • The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things
  • then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.
  • What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.
  • the remembering self is a storyteller.
  • "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise. The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B.
  • The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.
  • And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.
  • Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.
  • From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.
  • We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.
  • when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
  • basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.
  • we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self
  • Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?
  • there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.
  • The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately.
  • now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.
  • You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa.
  • What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low.
  • if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things.
  • it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are
  • their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision.
  • When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans
  • 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat
  • money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly.
  • n terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.
  • people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon.
  • How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self.
  • CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be -- the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics.
izz aty

Issues about Outcomes Based Education - 0 views

  • Outcome-based education (OBE) is one of those that is new, even revolutionary, and is now being promoted as the panacea for America's educational woes. This reform has been driven by educators in response to demands for greater accountability by taxpayers and as a vehicle for breaking with traditional ideas about how we teach our children. If implemented, this approach to curriculum development could change our schools more than any other reform proposal in the last thirty years.
  • According to William Spady, a major advocate of this type of reform, three goals drive this new approach to creating school curricula. First, all students can learn and succeed, but not on the same day or in the same way. Second, each success by a student breeds more success. Third, schools control the conditions of success. In other words, students are seen as totally malleable creatures. If we create the right environment, any student can be prepared for any academic or vocational career. The key is to custom fit the schools to each student's learning style and abilities.
  • Outcome-based education will change the focus of schools from the content to the student
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  • The teacher's role in the classroom will become that of a coach. The instructor's goal is to move each child towards pre-determined outcomes rather than attempting to transmit the content of Western civilization to the next generation in a scholarly fashion
  • the focus is no longer on content. Feelings, attitudes, and skills such as learning to work together in groups will become just as important as learning information--some reformers would argue more important.
  • Where traditional curricula focused on the past, reformers argue that outcome-based methods prepare students for the future and for the constant change which is inevitable in our society.
  • Reformers advocating an outcome-based approach to curriculum development point to the logical simplicity of its technique. First, a list of desired outcomes in the form of student behaviors, skills, attitudes, and abilities is created. Second, learning experiences are designed that will allow teachers to coach the students to a mastery level in each outcome. Third, students are tested. Those who fail to achieve mastery receive remediation or retraining until mastery is achieved. Fourth, upon completion of learner outcomes a student graduates.
  • According to William Spady, a reform advocate, outcomes can be written with traditional, transitional, or transformational goals in mind. Spady advocates transformation goals.
  • Traditional outcome-based programs would use the new methodology to teach traditional content areas like math, history, and science
  • Many teachers find this a positive option for challenging the minimal achiever
  • An outcome-based program would prevent such students from graduating or passing to the next grade without reaching a pre-set mastery level of competency.
  • Transformational OBE subordinates course content to key issues, concepts, and processes. Indeed, Spady calls this the "highest evolution of the OBE concept." Central to the idea of transformational reform is the notion of outcomes of significance.
  • Spady supports transformational outcomes because they are future oriented, based on descriptions of future conditions that he feels should serve as starting points for OBE designs
  • little mention is made about specific things that students should know as a result of being in school.
  • The focus is on attitudes and feelings, personal goals, initiative, and vision--in their words, the whole student.
  • It is in devising learner outcomes that one's world view comes into play. Those who see the world in terms of constant change, politically and morally, find a transformation model useful. They view human nature as evolving, changing rather than fixed.
  • Advocates of outcome-based education point with pride to its focus on the student rather than course content. They feel that the key to educational reform is to be found in having students master stated learner outcomes. Critics fear that this is exactly what will happen. Their fear is based on the desire of reformers to educate the whole child. What will happen, they ask, when stated learner outcomes violate the moral or religious views of parents?
  • Under the traditional system of course credits a student could take a sex-ed course, totally disagree with the instruction and yet pass the course by doing acceptable work on the tests presented. Occasion-ally, an instructor might make life difficult for a student who fails to conform, but if the student learns the material that would qualify him or her for a passing grade and credit towards graduation.
  • If transformational outcome-based reformers have their way, this student would not get credit for the course until his or her attitudes, feelings, and behaviors matched the desired goals of the learner outcomes.
  • Another goal requires students to know about and use community health resources. Notice that just knowing that Planned Parenthood has an office in town isn't enough, one must use it.
  • transformational outcome- based reform would be a much more efficient mechanism for changing our children's values and attitudes about issues facing our society
  • the direction these changes often take is in conflict with our Christian faith
  • "Who has authority over our children?"
  • Outcome-based education is an ideologically neutral tool for curricular construction; whether it is more effective than traditional approaches remains to be seen. Unfortunately, because of its student-centered approach, its ability to influence individuals with a politically correct set of doctrines seems to be great. Parents (and all other taxpayers) need to weigh the possible benefits of outcome-based reform with the potential negatives.
  • who will determine the learner outcomes for their schools
  • consideration of what learner outcomes the public wants rather than assuming that educators know what's best for our children. Who will decide what it means to be an educated person, the taxpaying consumer or the providers of education?
  • If students are going to be allowed to proceed through the material at their own rate, what happens to the brighter children? Eventually students will be at many levels, what then? Will added teachers be necessary? Will computer-assisted instruction allow for individual learning speeds? Either option will cost more money. Some reformers offer a scenario where brighter students help tutor slower ones thereby encouraging group responsibility rather than promoting an elite group of learners. Critics feel that a mastery- learning approach will inevitably hold back brighter students.
  • With outcome-based reform, many educators are calling for a broader set of evaluation techniques. But early attempts at grading students based on portfolios of various kinds of works has proved difficult. The Rand Corporation studied Vermont's attempt and found that "rater reliability--the extent to which raters agreed on the quality of a student's work--was low." There is a general dislike of standardized tests among the reformers because it focuses on what the child knows rather than the whole child, but is there a viable substitute? Will students find that it is more important to be politically correct than to know specific facts?
  • whether or not school bureaucracies will allow for such dramatic change? How will the unions respond? Will legislative mandates that are already on the books be removed, or will this new approach simply be laid over the rest, creating a jungle of regulations and red tape?
  • although districts may be given input as to how these outcomes are achieved, local control of the outcomes themselves may be lost.
  • Many parents feel that there is already too much emphasis on global citizenship, radical environmentalism, humanistic views of self-esteem, and human sexuality at the expense of reading, writing, math, and science.
  • education may become more propagandistic rather than academic in nature
izz aty

James Mollison's Photos of Children's Bedrooms Are a Commentary on Class and Poverty - ... - 0 views

  • Mr. Mollison posed his young subjects — more than 200 of them — in front of blank white backgrounds for their portraits, leaving their bedrooms to do the talking. More than 50 pairings are in the book, which has a glow-in-the-dark cover (a nod to the glow-in-the-dark stars on so many childhood ceilings).As much as the project is about the quirkiness of childhood, it is, more strikingly, a commentary on class and on poverty. But the diversity also provides a sense of togetherness.
  • Everybody sleeps. And eventually, everybody grows up.
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    "As a child, that's your little space within the house," Mr. Mollison said. Mr. Mollison's new book, "Where Children Sleep," had its origins in a project undertaken for a children's charity several years ago. As he considered how to represent needy children around the world, he wanted to avoid the common devices: pleading eyes, toothless smiles. When he visualized his own childhood, he realized that his bedroom said a lot about what sort of life he led. So he set out to find others.
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