On this fine Christmas Eve I'd like to mention a TV commercial that aired recently on one of the oldies TV stations. It was very short, less than a minute, but it was for Henry Repeating Arms. Perhaps it's a sign of the times but I don't think I've ever seen a gun company advertised on TV before, at least not in Chicago.
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Any discussion of public education should also include not only the curriculum but also the methodology, how it is being taught. The United States is no piker when it comes to funding public schools but somehow we don't get much bang for the buck. I'll put some of the blame on the bureaucracies that control the schools; too much funding is being sucked up by administrative processes to the detriment of actually teaching the students. Programs that include the arts, music, and physical education are all being slashed. The teaching profession is not held in high regard and many good teachers are driven out of the system because they are teachers and not disciplinarians, administrators, or bureaucrats.
I've been reading a little about the Finnish school system, one of the most successful in the world. They have a completely different approach to education than that of the US. Children don't begin school until the age of seven; prior to that they are in day care where they learn to socialize, play, and be children. Letting children be children is a big part of their system and the students are usually fully engaged in their classes. Little or no homework is assigned and classes are loosely structured. I don't know the level of parental involvement but I suspect it is much higher in Finland than it is in the US, so that is a major factor which should not be ignored. The teachers in Finland spend all of their time teaching and are not bogged down in administrative duties, standardized testing, or other distractions and have no interference from school boards, administrations, or politics. And they are held in high esteem, which is nice for them. We could probably learn something from them, they have some interesting points of view. They don't say the weather is bad, they say your clothing is inadequate.
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AI hasn't gotten much mention lately but there are a couple of things that have popped up recently. Our good friends, the Chinese, have an AI system that uses facial recognition to identify a person in seconds from a database of more than a billion faces. Quite a trick, since most Chinese often look alike to me. You could use a live stream from the CCTV cameras that are common in public areas and identify everyone on the feed in a matter of minutes. I think it works the other way around, too. You give the system a face and it lets you know when it shows up on a camera. They've been arresting a lot of bad guys since they don't have to go searching for them anymore. Sooner or later any person of interest will show up on a camera, somewhere.
Another interesting development is an AI robot that taught itself chess in about four hours and then proceeded to defeat a chess grand master. Big deal, you say? It used moves that have never been seen in the history of chess, and that's scary. The AI systems are becoming so advanced that the eggheads don't know how they work, and they work very well. Until they don't, of course, but by then it will be too late. AI can be a real threat, and there is a great video on YouTube sponsored by some AI researchers. It's called SlaughterBots, but it's only fiction, for now.
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Cornbread are square? Not in this kitchen.
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