American Kids Aren't the Only Ones With Low Test Scores

For years concern has been raised that American children do not fair as well as children from other countries in academics. Public education has been trying, in my opinion unsuccessfully, to rectify this problem by introducing standardized curriculum and standardized testing across the country, but it hasn't seemed to make the impact that was desired.

Unless you ask the companies who create the standardized subjects.

From MSN:

WASHINGTON — It's long been known that America's school kids haven't measured well compared with international peers. Now, there's a new twist: Adults don't either.
In math, reading and problem-solving using technology — all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength — American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results released Tuesday.
Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test. Beyond basic reading and math, respondents were tested on activities such as calculating mileage reimbursement due to a salesman, sorting email and comparing food expiration dates on grocery store tags.
Not only did Americans score poorly compared to many international competitors, the findings reinforced just how large the gap is between the nation's high- and low-skilled workers and how hard it is to move ahead when your parents haven't.

The study does note that children of college graduates do preform better than those children of parents who did not attend college.

The point is this: we are too concerned with teaching political trends in our school systems today, especially at the younger ages, than we are in teaching our children how to do one simple thing, the art of thinking. We have removed the thought process, the practice of using intellect and reason, from our classrooms and school systems, teaching a watered down, spoon fed, agenda driven curriculum in the classroom, that agenda mainly being the content of what will be on the standardized tests that students take at different points throughout their school years. Our kids are becoming experts on filling in the little bubbles on a card that will be scanned in to check their responses, but give them an essay examination  and the results are often frightening. Correct grammar is hard to find, as text message lingo often is used in place of correct grammatical entries. Throwing in the allowance of cell phones into the classroom,  kids today have learned a new way of getting answers that they've found on television, most notably from game shows, by using the "phone a friend" method of getting answers to questions they don't know themselves.

If the United States (I still, personally, cringe at using the generalized "Americans," as there is no nation called "America") is to succeed internationally in competition with other countries, then we're going to have to revert to an older method of teaching, and that is to include using rational thought processes back in the daily curriculum

Sic vis pacem parabellum

MT

"Come with me if you want to live..."

It's no secret that I support Israel. I always have. I don't stand with the left in thinking that Israel should give up land for peace. They've done that all along and it never works.

I firmly and fully believe in the right of Israel to defend herself against the constant onslaught that they face. Every nation should have that right, no body of nations (re: the United Nations or the Arab League) should denounce a single nation for standing in defense of her citizenry.

NO OTHER NATION ON THIS EARTH would stand for years of attacks the way Israel has done and not go full throttle after their attackers.

That being said.

Remember the Terminator movie series? Arnold as a terminator cyborg from the future chasing after John Connor to kill him because he was the future savior of humanity in the first one, then sent back as a SECOND cyborg in the second and third movies to protect him from other terminator cyborgs. In the movies, the machines had risen to destroy humanity after becoming "self-aware" and determining that mankind had had our day.

Science fiction writers have often included the use of cyborgs and androids or other intelligent sophisticated systems in their writings. Be it the Robot from Lost in Space, Mr. Data from the Star Trek saga, HAL from 2001, or the Terminator himself (or my personal favorite, Tricia Helfer's Cylon character on the new Battlestar Galactica series), science fiction has blended the interaction of man and machine into our minds as common place in future society.

The future may be closer than we had expected.

Israel has announced plans to begin implementation of artificial intelligence systems into it's air defense network.

Israeli military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for... autonomous operations,' Brig. Gen. Daniel Milo, commander of Israel's air defense forces, tells Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome. And in the event of a "doomsday" strike, Opall-Rome notes, the system could handle "attacks that exceed physiological limits of human command."

Current air defense systems have automatic tracking systems that will allow the weapon to acquire a target and then a human has to make the determination to fire it. This sort of system would take the human element out of the equation and make the weapon totally automatic and rely on artificial intelligence to make the decision of when and if to fire, other than one incident in South Africa in October where 9 were killed in an accident involving an automated weapons system.

Or had it become "self-aware?"

Definitely something to ponder, I think.

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man


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Daylight Savings Time? Moving it Back a Week

(Note: Before any of you start thinking that you've gone Groundhog Day, this IS a reposting from last week. It's done to make a point on how RIDICULOUS the concept of continuing daylight savings time is in our day and age.)

How many of you woke up this morning to clocks having different times, an hour apart, throughout the house? I personally awoke to see my tv and vcr with one time, my computer and phone with another. I know spree didn't, before we even talk today, because Arizona is the ONE state in the Union that doesn't practice this stupidity.

In an age that is so hi-tech that we can punch in our addresses and see our houses via satellite in space, an age where we can travel across the oceans in a matter of hours rather than in the weeks and months ocean travels took until as late as two centuries ago, an age of corporate farming with machinery, an industrialized, modern society, WHY DO WE STILL NEED DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME? And WHY, for the love of peace, rock and roll, and green eggs and ham, did it have to be MOVED A WEEK from what it's been since we were CHILDREN?

Daylight saving time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Daylight saving time (DST; also summer time in British English) is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn; several ancient cultures lengthened each summer daylight hour instead. Modern DST was first proposed in 1907 by William Willett, and saw its first widespread use in 1916 as a wartime measure aimed at conserving coal. Despite controversy, many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.

Adding daylight to afternoons generally benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but it can cause problems for agriculture and other occupations whose hours depend on the sun. Extra afternoon daylight appears to cut traffic fatalities; its effect on health and crime is less clear. DST is said to save electricity by reducing the need for artificial evening lighting, but the evidence for this is weak, and DST can boost peak demand, increasing overall electricity costs.

DST's clock shifts complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, and heavy equipment; they also serve as twice-yearly fire safety reminders. Many computer-based systems can adjust their clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST rules change.

Origin

In this ancient water clock, a series of gears rotated a cylinder to display hour lengths appropriate for each day's date.

Though not punctual in the modern sense, the ancients adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into 12 equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer. For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started in modern terms at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin anonymously published a letter in 1784 suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by arising earlier to use morning sunlight. Franklin's mild satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise, in the spirit of his earlier proverb "Early to bed and early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Franklin did not propose shifting clocks; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep accurate schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.

William Willett invented DST and advocated it tirelessly.

In 1905, the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett was inspired to invent DST during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915; see Politics for more details. Wartime Germany, its allies, and their occupied zones were the first European countries to use DST, starting 1916-04-30. Britain, most other belligerents, and many European neutrals soon followed suit, but Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the United States did not use it until 1918. The Netherlands have used their own time system until the second worldwar. Since then the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.

So.

The world suffers confusion twice a year because some whack job wanted to play golf longer at night. MARVELOUS.

Wikipedia has a full feature on the pros and cons of DST, which is where this information on this post was found.

If the rest of you think, as I do, that this practice is ridiculous and has outlived its usefullness, please let me know. Perhaps we could lobby Congress to drop this, as the State of Arizona has done, and we could all sleep NORMALLY those two days out of the year when we're staring at our clocks and trying to remember which way to set them (at 2am, no less).

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man

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