Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in. The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news. "News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago. So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
What is the actual use of this? This research team used Google's first-party location data to identify San Jose's Interstate 880/US 101 interchange as a site with statistically extreme amounts of hard braking by Android Auto users. But you don't need machine learning to know that... San Jose Mercury News readers voted that exact location as the worst interchange in the entire Bay Area in a 2018 reader poll [1] It's not a lack of knowledge by Caltrans or Santa Clara County's congestion management agency that is keeping that interchange as-is. Rather, it's the physical constraints of a nearby airport (so no room for flyovers), a nearby river (so probably no tunneling), and surrounding private landowners and train tracks. Leaving aside the specifics of the 880/101 interchange, the Google blog post suggests that they'll use this worst-case scenario on a limited access freeway to inform their future machine-learning analyses of other roads around the country, including ones where presumably there are also pedestrians and cyclists. No doubt some state departments of transportation will line up to buy these new "insights" from Google (forgetting that they actually already buy similar products from TomTom, Inrix, StreetLight, et al.) [2] While I genuinely see the value in data-informed decision making for transportation and urban planning, it's not a lack of data that's causing problems at this particular freeway intersection. This blog post is an underbaked advertisement. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/13/101-880-ranks-as-bay-areas-worst-interchange-roadshow/ [2] https://www.tomtom.com/products/traffic-stats/ https://inrix.com/products/ai-traffic/ https://www.streetlightdata.com/traffic-planning/
Isn't it the opposite? I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!). What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized. A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol. There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two. Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse. Also, no phonics?! Wtf? People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4. Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least. I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system. EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Gmail, and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their photograph. Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. - Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for busy communities. A lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. - Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc. - It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that thousands of people have successfully contributed to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business. - We are a values-focused organization ( https://zulip.com/values/ ) where providing a public service is important to us all. - Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE). I'm happy to answer any questions.
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