I actually have seen the closed garden nature of Apple be listed amongst its attractive features between laypeople. There’s no fiddly bits, everything is simplified, almost no configuration required, and the closed garden means there’s some implied quality control going on. For people for whom computers and technology is scary, the closed garden is a feature, not a bug.
Iunnrais
joined 2 years ago
So, once upon a time, the radio airwaves were free for anyone and everyone to use as they liked. There were incompatible protocols, congestion, crowding, and so on and so forth. One day, the Titanic sunk, and a major contributor of it was the fact that there were no standards for ships to be listening for distress signals on the radio.
So international regulations were established be treaty, the Radio Act if 1912 in The US, and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912. These laws and treaties not only established mandatory radio watch for ships at sea, but also sought to reduce crosstalk and bandwidth hogging by people— you’d need to get a radio license to transmit on a specific frequency for a region.
A public spectrum was established for anyone to use, and another spectrum was reserved for dedicated amateurs to advance radio technology (requiring a test to prove dedication— HAM radio), another spectrum was dedicated for government use (such as police), another for hospitals, and another segment for commercial usage.
If you violate the licensing requirements, you are a pirate radio station… and this is actually taken quite seriously. Regulators will actually take measures to track you down. One thing that the HAM radio community does is something called a “fox hunt”… it’s basically like a region-wide game of hide and seek, where the hider is repeatedly broadcasting a radio signal, and the seekers use whatever technology they can muster to track the hider down. The hiders also use sophisticated means to hide their location, such as bouncing signals off of water towers to hide the origin and other even sneakier tactics. Fox hunts are a lot of fun, but always end up with the fox getting caught.
Pirate radio tends to end up the same way.
In D&D, the standard assumption is that elves mature just as fast as humans, but they are culturally treated as children until around hundred or just a bit higher. But I’ve started developing a campaign setting where elves really are the equivalent of kids until that age, and all the implications of that. One of which is that, if humans attended school alongside elven kids, they’re going to lose their reputation of mystique and wisdom— they’re going to be viewed as kinda slow and dimwitted, as the humans graduate through the grades and the elevens get held back a decade or so.
That would be Winamp… ~unless I missed the joke?~
It also wouldn’t work, nor would it likely trigger his delusions any more than not doing it. My understanding is that fundamentally, schizophrenia is when someone’s running internal monologue gets cross wired and confused with external input. Your stray random thoughts gain as much, or more, validity as actual events that you can see, hear, taste, touch, etc. Sane people know they have imaginations and random BS thoughts, and we have the ability to distinguish those from reality… but even so, sane people can be disturbed by their own random thoughts too. Now imagine if you physically COULDN’T distinguish them, or even a subset of them.
Adding additional external inputs isn’t going to do jack shit when the problem is actually the internal inputs. Not unless your external inputs are really able to make him start thinking, and thus generate more internal thoughts.
Maybe just a touch of cgi, like for the rippling wall when they cross dimensions, or morphing species when hit with the de-evolution ray. But that barely counts. The practical effects and set design were wonderful, and despite the weirdness of the mushroom king, definitely still hold up.
Super Mario Bros. No, not the new CGI one, the old live action one. I know I’m not alone in loving this movie, but man is it divisive— those that don’t like it, HATE it, and I think that’s the majority opinion.
I unironically love this movie. It’s not just nostalgia either, though I did watch it as a kid. I also watched the old Zelda cartoon as a kid when it first came out, and I loved it then but I can’t stand it now. No, I’ve watched this movie recently and it still rocks. It’s perfect for what it is, I think.
I remember roughly a decade ago I worked out that a gold was equivalent in purchasing power to somewhere on the order of $100, and $100 was a nice round number that’s easy to use to get a ballpark feel for what something is worth, so I pretty much always use that. I’m guessing inflation and/or doomsday preppers (or political culture) has significantly raised the price of gold since then. Inflation too.
Three-cue and whole word memorization are scams, yes. Possibly not maliciously intended scams, but they’re counterproductive anyway. Phonics is not.
I haven’t heard of swindled before. Forgive me, but I used an LLM to summarize it for me. Based on the summary, my professional analysis of the summary it gave me (again, I haven’t listened to it in total) would be that the podcast was critiquing the specific commercial product “Hooked on Phonics”, not phonics in general, and that the critiques involved this specific product being heavily marketed to parents (not educators) as being a panacea despite not utilizing best practices— even best phonics practices.
I’ve never used Hooked on Phonics specifically… again, it’s marketed toward parents, not educators. Some cursory, surface level research seems to show that early editions were especially bad, and in fact led to FTC citations for false advertising. Their marketing linked their product with phonics in general, which was generally untrue, and apparently the company didn’t even consult with experts (neither experts on phonics nor literacy in general!) when initially developing the program. So it sounds like they were probably a good source of material for a podcast on scams.
That doesn’t make phonics itself bad pedagogy. Phonics itself is fantastic, and produces the absolute best results.
If you were taught using “whole word” or “three-cueing” strategies (I’m guessing you were given the three cue method, as that’s been pushed in the past two decades pretty hard, to the detriment of everyone, but whole word isn’t great either) you’re more likely to have internalized inefficient, error-prone, and mentally tiring reading habits. Obviously you can still read, but you will find it more difficult and less enjoyable, adding an extra layer of stress when learning other things that is actually unnecessary.
It’s possible you learned/figured out phonics on your own from exposure. Some are able to do this— humans are the best pattern finding machines in the universe at the moment— in which case these problems won’t present themselves. However, being taught wrong can create issues such as guessing words based on context (or images/diagram presented with the text), skimming for clues instead of deciphering the word itself, memorizing entire words instead of pieces of them that contain sounds and meaning.
These strategies all “work”… they enable you to read, but they create extra problems when you encounter new, uncommon, or just unfamiliar words (necessary when learning new concepts), when the context is unclear (such as when picking up a new novel to read, or analyzing technical or scientific papers without illustrations), or when you need to read and comprehend things quickly and under timed pressure (such as when there are work deadlines, or… you know, standardized tests).
You can read, sure, but you probably can’t read well, unless you’ve managed to figure out patterns and strategies that weren’t expressly taught to you on your own.
Here’s an article that may lay things out for you clearly. It says much of what I’ve said here, but with more detail and probably better prose. It’s a persuasive piece, but it is backed by the current scientific research and understanding we have. At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers
Not that I’ve heard of. Now, whether Homo sapiens idaltu is a real separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens is disputed, so there’s a question as to whether the second sapiens actually differentiates us from anything… but I haven’t seen any signs of any consensus against calling ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens to date.