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Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a
nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a
"Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed
considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense
initiatives more successful? Can such an application of
science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable,
necessary or impossible?
Read Debates, a new
Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published
every Thursday.
(3970 previous messages)
rshow55
- 05:46pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (#
3971 of 17697) Can we do a better job of finding
truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have
done and worked for on this thread.
Reading instruction matters in itself. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/23FRI4.html
But the discussion I'm trying to make clear matters for
more general reasons, as well. Some of them reasons that
philosophers have been thinking about, and concerned about,
for 2500 years. Plato's problem -- which is, in essence, the
question of how we "know" so much by "connecting the dots" - -
how the Socratic method works so well - is partly explained by
the statistical insight that when things become known, and the
number of remaining variables gets smaller, finding answers is
hugely easier. I don't feel that people have
appreciated how much easier - and how compelling the
implications of that are. I'm working to focus the imporant
work of Landaur, Dumais, and others on latent semantic
analysis.
The discussion is directly related to missile defense -
where the odds of success are vanishingly small -- and to the
essential certainty that a key assumption about the logical
and geometrical structure of radio wave ranging and
positioning arrangements, now more than fifty years old, can
easily be changed. When that assumption is changed - it
becomes clear that the US is making a trillion dollar mistake
- betting on airplanes that are going to be easy to
shoot down. 1317 rshow55
4/12/02 6:59pm I don't feel that I'm guessing at all about
that. I just made the sort of statement that a PE doesn't make
in public lightly.
I want to take time to carefully set out the reading
example first - to clarify some of the key issues involved -
before I set that out.
I'm taking some time to be careful. I want to make things
clear to professionals who seriously look at this thread -
because I believe that there are some. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@180.9Yb1ao4drSi.0@.ee7b085/337
3946 rshow55
8/23/02 6:59pm 3947 rshow55
8/23/02 7:00pm
Under a lot of circumstances, the odds of getting
orderly answers, and discarding mistakes - is much
better than people have understood. Enough better to give
reasons for disciplined hope.
And enough to show how important it can be to shoot certain
kinds of boondoggles right between the eyes when they are
muddled and hopeless beyond redemption.
rshow55
- 06:27pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (#
3972 of 17697) Can we do a better job of finding
truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have
done and worked for on this thread.
http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/313
Playing Know and Tell by John Schwartz http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/weekinreview/09BOXA.html
.
Schwartz's piece ends:
" Listen."
lchic
- 06:49pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (#
3973 of 17697) ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to
be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong
foundation
Listen in the sense that top-down dogma may not necessarily
be right.
backtracking here:
Interesting use of the term 'processor' and that there are
cognitive processors
For spoken language, there is a phonological
processor , a meaning processor , and a context processor .
The phonological processor handles the recieving and
sending of spoken language sounds - hearing and speaking.
The meaning processor and context processor deals
with the meanings of words at different levels of
abstraction and in context.
There is feedback
between the phonological processor and the meaning
processor, in both directions. There is feedback between the
meaning processor and the context processor, in both
directions. For reading there is an additional orthographic
processor which responds to written words as the
phonological processor responds to spoken words.
The
orthographic processor is linked, in both directions, the
phonological processor AND to the meaning processor.
So if reading is a process, and were it treated as
production line, should workers attatched to the line look
towards quality improvement along it?
Showalter asks
Can a rudimentary orthographic processor connected at
first only to the phonological processor, and working only
for the most common words, be trained first ? With
reference to Deming the 'failure' to learn to read rates can
be demonstrated. These figures should show via
'test results'. There actual numbers-statistics-proportions of
each age grouping who are demonstratively being 'failed' by
the system.
The statistic that 90% of prisoners have literacy problems
is real.
The money and human resources put to looking after
prisoners represents a huge budget allocation.
That the cultural background breakdown of prisoners is not
evenly reflective of the entire population is telling.
Were people better able to grasp rudimentary elements of
reading, without 'pain', would they go on to become productive
citizens?
~~~
ARE Educators working on the 'reading production line'
prescribed top-down methodologies that they 'have' to use?
If these methodologies are widely prescribed and enforced -
and are wrong - what's the outcome for the client?
What if teachers were freer to select and use the
metholodgical tool most appropriate to need?
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