No. There is no such button on my Firefox. Nor anything about who wrote this, what it is, or what it does. Lots of social media "invite" type things though.
I feel doubtful about this article. They claim that the man-o-war is the largest colonial organisms, but there are HUGE siphonophores that are 100m long.
I find it interesting that the vast majority of comments seem to focus on race and politics, and only one that I noticed that mentions social media and phones as possible factors.
Because we all have our pet-theories as to why this is all happening. I don't think it's us trying to rationalize it away or divert blame from ourselves, but rather just us applying our own worldview and internal problem-solving heuristics onto an "unexplained" or "emergent" property of a complex system.
I personally don't think we need to even try figure out the cause. We just need to not lower the standards for entry into subsequent grades, highschool and college, and the problem will fix itself without us figuring out "why" it's happening at all.
> Because we all have our pet-theories as to why this is all happening
Not to defend anyone else's comments (which I actually haven't read through), but many of his have kids and see first-hand how poorly math is taught today.
I'm quite ignorant about my phone. I struggle to send someone a photo with it. Every time I have to interact with android for anything trickier than making a phone call or sending a text I just end up angry and frustrated.
I don't use apps on my phone except for phone calls and texts, mostly because I have no clues whatsoever.
I'm probably in your target audience, but:
1) Too expensive for something I'm not convinced will improve my life (it seems to me that people who know how to use smartphones spend 90%+ of their free time looking at it, rather than interacting with real live people), which leads to
The way to give this teeth is for any proposed law to charge the parent or guardian of social networking children, as well as the social networking site. Once it hits the parents' pockets they'll start to get involved in their kids lives and see what they're looking at on the web.
I'll take your word for it since I don't have kids in that age range, but I'd tend to think that hormones are in the driver seat all the way up to the 20s.
I'm one of those people who find maths really easy. I've also had extensive experience working in mathematics education, from primary to tertiary levels. I've even written policy for our state education department.
You are spot on the money. I've seen "progressive" educators who believe that technology, including CAS is the answer to teaching calculus to high school and tertiary students. I think the tech is mostly useful _pedagogically_ after the student has a very firm grip on the content. Using it as a shortcut to "real world problems" leaves the student with no real understanding of the dynamics/functions involved, leading in turn to believing the machines are magic and always right, regardless of whether you've hit all the right buttons in the right order.
The most extreme example of this I've seen was in a classroom I was auditing. The students were learning about harmonic motion and trig functions by using a mass on a spring and an ultrasonic transducer. The students were told to "keep all the digits, because the machine gave them". Students were doing sums with 14 significant digits. When I pointed out that most of them were meaningless, being measures in the Angstrom range, the "teacher" said "the machine gives those figures".
Even when I pointed out that measuring 10^-14 m required a very high frequency, which meant high energy, all supposedly from AA batteries that last for months, he agreed that it did seem strange, but after all, the "machine gave the figures".
The man teaching (he was head of department AND author of the state mathematics syllabus) was unaware that only fractions with denominators with only 2 and 5 as factors can be expressed exactly in binary without using custom datatypes and arithmetic logic.
Now as I said, for me maths is easy. It's not for most people. Most people won't grasp it all as "but that's obvious", so for these people having the skills to check the result the machine gives is vital if they are not to cause all sorts of fun as bridges collapse, cars explode and mortgages go into default. Those skills are developed by doing it by hand, and learning what numbers change in what ways.
TL;DR Modern trend to use CAS in mathematics education is well intentioned but misled, in this retired maths educators very informed opinion.
> only fractions with denominators with only 2 and 5 as factors can be expressed exactly in binary without using custom datatypes and arithmetic logic.
You mean decimal, not binary. For binary, it’s only 2.
This is getting offtopic, but back when I was in grad school I TAed some physics labs and the number one thing that annoyed me to no end was students didn’t understand or care about significant digits at all. They had no idea that 2.1cm they measured was in fact (2.1 \pm 0.05)cm, they just put 2.1 in the calculator and wrote down 9.7831m/s^2 the calculator spit out. I would point it out, and next week, same thing. Thankfully I never TAed an electronics lab to see what they read from digital meters. Btw that was in Princeton, the students weren’t dumb.
Two of my housemates have just bought new iPhone 16 Pro and ProMax. Between them, and associated accessories, it's cost them over AUD$5k. My phone is a cheap android, and cost AUD$290.
I can't see where they get 10 times the value. Yes, it's got a better camera.
The below is not a scientific opinion. But it is an opinion.
Apple is 100% milking the buyer in a way the lower end Android chain just isn't in the business of.
People don't not buy top flight iPhones because something else is worse, it's because they 1) can't afford it (priced out) or don't "know" better (don't have an appreciation for just how great the experience is).
Maybe, a top flight Apple experience really is 10x a lower end Android experience.
First, it's the fact that everything has a decent (if by now overbearing) design language and everything (more or less) just works and fits in the Apple ecosystem, and the momentum to date has meant the feature set and 3rd party app offering is pretty darn good (Anrdoid may have great hardware and an equivalent feature-set in software, but is it as consistent and polished or truly well-designed overall?).
Second, it's the fact that there are no good alternatives. Sorry, but the Android ecosystem is not good enough. Not close, not second best, just a non starter, for Apple acolytes.
Third, there is no serious competition. Ok, there are oddball more independent offerings, but let's be real. They are nowhere near as polished.
Therefore, nothing much is really pushing top flight Apple prices down other than people's ability to pay. Because enough "experiences" have been pushed to mobile by now, it's sort of a necessity to have something to answer that need.
Maybe, someone, somewhere, could make a serious competitor to iPhone. It is 100% possible. But it does not seem to be done now.
And so, the price is what Apple has figured out people are able to pay in order to maximize overall corporate profit.
Is it worth it? Well, if it enables serious business, then, yes, best Apple phone and best apple laptop are worth it, easily.
The problem is this (best iPhone) became the stack for mobile when things (capabilities all around, specs, and prices) were more middling, and it's hard for such people to go to Android. And it's hard to juggernaut into serious competition in the particularly highly complex technical space because of the hardware and software investments made in the past couple of decades that have really built up. (When iPhone started it didn't have copy/paste, but look at the over-complexity now.)
reply