> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.
That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).
By that argument, everything is bound to fail because there are a thousand variables in a society and a school system.
And yet another sidetrack not based on facts to add to my list:
* No, Finland's schools are not more disciplinarian than elsewhere. The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation: watching TV and hanging out with friends etc. is more fun than studying and everybody gets a good education for free anyway.
And no, the rest of Europe definitely doesn't match Finland in equality (income equality, gender equality, whatever you mean), let alone their schools doing that.
The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation
In fairness though, I'm sure the same applies to pupils in other European countries, yet the point you were replying to said that Finnish pupils are enjoying school less than pupils in other European countries. That is not explained away by your response.
That said, it's kind of obvious that a competitive environment, especially one that is stressfully though, is going to be problematic for intellectual achievement, and a focus on equity can help. There are plenty of studies that demonstrate that stress impairs lateral thinking etc.
Please don't confuse discipline with not enjoying school. The point I was replying to said:
the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe
This is not a fact. Instead, the opposite is the fact: I looked up an OECD study and Japan and Finland are on the opposite ends of the scale with Japan having the most school discipline.
No-one is claiming the Finnish system is the only way to get high PISA scores. Although, the PISA scores aren't the thing to strive for anyway. How about a school system that is relatively cheap, comparatively equal, produces great learning results as measured by multiple studies, takes up relatively little of the students' time etc.?
I don't think Finland is trying to force it on anyone but it could give some people ideas about what's allegedly "just not possible" and what to possibly concentrate on. The success of Saxonia can be another interesting data point along Finland, Singapore, Japan etc.
Yes, indeed. Also comparison with a number of countries, instead of just Finland, can give you a better idea of what works and what is just an accidental feature.
For example, in Germany pupils who fail two (or so) classes, have to repeat the entire year. That ends up costing the economy way more than giving those weak students special attention, and extra teacher time, to get them up to speed again. Also the German school system segregates people into university-bound and not university-bound at age ten. Switching between tracks later is possible, but hard.
I'm from Sweden and I don't find much to object to there.
In Europe there are no global companies based on web technology, no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon. Previous tech booms have left little to show for it, I guess ARM is the shining example.
Some old companies have been pretty nimble and have been ccompetitive in new technology, like Ericsson and Nokia. But the landscape is utterly different from the US, and it is not for the better, there seem to be a glass ceiling for startups.
As long as Europe is so pathetic in tech, we don't deserve better than to read self-congratulatory stuff like that. Maybe it will even spur some competitive instinct...
Europe is not the same as America, that's correct. But if you actually look at innovation, there has been more than a few aquisition of Swedish companies. Just counting "Swedish" companies there's MySQL, Skype, C3 technologies, Marratech, Tradera and a lot of others.
Intel is most certainly not using AMD's architecture, they are using AMD's instruction set, yes, but they internals have nothing to do with AMD's designs. The Core series was an evolution of the Pentium M which was based on the Pentium III architecture.
As a Swede, I can tell you we don't give a flying fuck about Assange and neither does the prime minister. If he had just come here and had his trial, he would have had about 95% chance of being acquitted (the courts being rather more cautious on sexual matters than the prosecutors here) and could go back to doing what he does.
As for the secret trials and disappearing thing. Sweden has such a good reputation on freedom that Wikileaks wanted to relocate here before Assange got into trouble. He's certainly no worse off here than in the UK.
The Prime Minister creates law. The press influence the courts through criticism and informing public opinion. The courts have already been subjected to almost a year of media coverage influencing them, and the politicians influencing them.
There is a reason why the politicians are not supposed to comment on criminal cases. There is also a reason why people are supposed to make their decisions on the evidence and arguments in the court rather than being influenced by the media.
Search on the internet for "Julian Assange is a rapist" on google.se and you will find countless claims that he is guilty coming from people in Sweden. Julian Assange är en våldtäktsman, brings up 1.5 million results on google.se.
Having a secret trial, in a country proven to declare the guilt of the accused - without hearing the evidence - is not a fair trial.
The whole thing makes a mockery of justice. He should be given a fair trial - as should anyone else on this planet.
Let's try and flip nationalism around for the moment. Assume You personally were accused of something by the prosecutors of Finland, or the USA. Then the president of the USA comes out and says that you are "an enemy of the people", and states that you have bad ideas on committing crimes. Then you are going to be shipped off to the USA for a trial - but of course the evidence will not be made public, people will just have to trust the courts.
There is a great risk of an unfair trial in Sweden for this case(not all cases). There is also a high risk that he will be sent to the USA and face execution once in Sweden - as stated by the Swedish prosecution.
International law, and human rights should apply. This should be taken to a higher court in the UK.
I really don't want to argue the point too much. We've obviously got different views on this, and differing experiences with the swedish judiciary system. PM Reinfeldt would not sign anything in to law regarding this, and parliament would never approve it. There's no basis in history for assuming anything like remotely like that would occur.
Also "Julian Assange är en våldtäktsman" returns 360 hits, not 1.5 mil, where most of them are the suffix of the meaning "If Julian Assange is a rapist...", so your interpretation is a bit off. As others have stated, the verdict is still out. Swedes are not smelling blood, and I resent that interpretation of Swedes as a collective and the accusation that he would not get a fair trial in Sweden.
It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.
We can evaluate a lot of things that are one inferential step away, because of the parallelism. But we're very bad at bridging more than a few inferential steps because parallelism is almost of no use there. It's very difficult for a human brain to think a few chess moves ahead, but incredibly easy to dismiss a thousand obviously stupid moves in a fraction of a second. The human brain has to precompute almost everything in order to function.
The only thing that would be more soul destroying than having a dull job would be having a dull job that you knew was just easily automated busywork that you were allowed to keep as a favor.
Doing a major intervention in the economy to protect jobs by injecting inefficiency seems rather misguided. If you are going to mess around that much, why not do it by creaming off a bit of the surplus and use it to encourage people to have more leisure time instead? Play beats work most of time, and with creative people, play can create more work.
Considering the stupidity and ignorance of technology the average person has, "easily automated busywork that you were allowed to keep as a favor" is something the average person can easily confuse with honest work.
Daycare for grownups? Are you fucking kidding me? You have never known any kind of privation in your life, have you? The kind of privation where there is no goddamn food available--not now, not tomorrow, not next week?
It wouldn't be daycare, it would be the preservation of your life.
Now, I agree with the idea of cutting back working hours for everyone, and possibly even subsidizing a large of chunk of an completely unemployed population, but your comfortable assertion that taking a boring job as your only means of survival is bad is really ignorant.
Uh, what are you speaking of? It wasn't the accepting of such jobs I objected to - it was the preservation of inefficient ways of accomplishing tasks.
There are plenty of productive things people can be made to do without having to resort to have them do stuff that there are no need whatsoever for, which is what inefficiency is.
There is no stdcall/ccall distinction on 64-bit Windows, there is only one ABI convention that sadly uses a different set of registers for parameter passing than Linux. Only the first four parameters uses registers, the rest is passed on the stack.
For anybody that is interested in executable formats and how they are created and used, the manuscript of the book "Linkers & Loaders" by John Levine is available for free (http://norfs.sourceforge.net/linkers_and_loaders.pdf).
