Watched a great documentary on the Barkley awhile back. I've done a city full and a trail half marathon, but its mindblowing to comprehend just how rough this race is. For those not familiar with the handful of people who have finished, these guys are seriously tough. Brian Robinson has a wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Robinson_%28hiker%29) that highlights his accomplishments, and the Barkley is one of them:
"Brian Robinson was the first person to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide Trail (or the Hiker Triple Crown) in one year, a total distance of over 7,000 miles."
"In the years following the Calendar Triple Crown, Robinson became an active ultra-marathoner. He has completed several 100-mile races, including the Western States 100 and the Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run. In 2008 he set the course record at the Barkley Marathons, a grueling 100 mile course in Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee."
Jared Campbell has also, I believe, won Hardrock previously.
Wish a Windows version was incoming as well. Alas, I'll have to make do with Googling various phrases whenever I want to try and find a webpage I recall seeing and want to find again, but can't remember the name of.
Thanks for pointing that out; I didn't mean to imply that only people with serious advantages get left behind
"you might just come from a social/family background that encourages you to take a job as soon as you finish high school and you get stuck at you minimum wage job."
Not only that, but before finishing high school as well. A lot of people forget that 15% or so of adults (25 or older, I believe) don't have a high school diploma or GED.
DARE and a lot of programs like it have been shows, time and again, to be fairly ineffective. Hell, the DARE program was, in 2001 (curriculum may have changed since then, I don't know), placed on the list of Ineffective Primary Prevention Programs by the Surgeon General. Our current model for drug programs simply doesn't work. And consider too that in many, MANY areas sexual education is limited to abstinence only, which has been demonstrated to be radically ineffective the world over. I would imagine too that many of those areas are also in ones with a very low coverage of abortion clinics. So while you may have taken those warnings to heart, consider that such programs usually just don't work.
And I do agree with you that there are much cheaper ways to, say get a couch, but I do take issue with your food budget. You're making that out to be a low cost, when in reality $100 bucks per person per month is HUGE. If you've got yourself and a kid to support, that's say $200 (with very careful budgeting and probably fairly low quality nutrition) on an after tax monthly income of maybe $1200 bucks. That's an enormous chunk of change, particularly when coupled with other recurring costs like rent and gas money. Also, regarding the couch, as some in this thread have pointed out the idea that everyone thinks logically is unfortunately false. Someone's already under enormous stress from an erratic work schedule and barely eking buy, perhaps has other issues to deal with like health problems, and they want the sense of having one thing that 'normal people' do. It's a very, very powerful motivation especially when the store oh so enticingly packages it as being a few dozen bucks a month.
That, unfortunately, kind of comes with the territory of a site where most users likely don't face those issues on a daily basis.
I, fortunately, can say that I'm privilaged enough to have not faced the scenario described in the article, though through work over the years I've gotten to know a number of people in a very similar situation.
You get a minimum wage job, say at a grocery store, because, well, you literally have no other options. You couldn't focus in high school, maybe you dealt with drug issues, had ADHD, got pregnant in a family that wouldn't permit abortion (or in one of the many states where you have to drive hundreds of miles, have multiple appointments on separate days, and jump through a variety of other hoops). By the time you're in your 20s, you have no high school education and even if you want to turn your life around you need to put in extensive effort to, say, get a GED, go to community college, etc. All while working full time in order to just have food on the table and, if you're lucky enough to have moved away from your parents, a roof over your head.
With the job itself it becomes tough. Say you make $400 a week before taxes working $10 bucks an hour at a grocery store. A fair chunk of that is going to go towards food, and frankly that's not going to be very healthy food for the amount of money you're able to spend and the time you have to prepare it. You've then got to spend 10% of that every couple weeks so you have enough gas to get to work, probably payments on a cheap used car (and numerous repairs that will likely have to come on credit), rent, cigarettes (its an addiction, keep that in mind) and god knows what random medical or accidental expenses come up will eat up pretty much the rest. IF you're lucky you might be able to put a few bucks in a savings account, but chances are when you have those accidental expenses you'll want to use some of those savings just so you don't have to put it all on credit and add more to your reoccurring expenses.
To make matters worse, you have very little control over when you actually work. Most minimum wage employers give you a two week schedule at most, sometimes just a one week, often determine how many hours you have with that short of notice, and have wildly different hours. Working at a Safeway recently I dealt with, say, 35 hours during the week, some late night shifts from 3:00pm-11:30, but then eight hours later being called back in to help open at 7:30 (yes, they can do that). Further, that store only did one week scheduling, so you wouldn't even know until Thursday if you were working THAT UPCOMING SUNDAY. And furthermore they frequently took advantage of loopholes in the contract to have their employees working six, seven, eight, sometimes even ten days straight with such irregular hours. The ability to sign up for classes, make it a regular routine to, say, learn some new skill, becomes winnowed down to nothing.
To make matters worse, you have little opportunity to move somewhere where there might be better opportunities. There's a reason wealthier people are much more likely to move away. You need a deposit plus first and last months rent anywhere new you're moving, but with how little you're able to save that's a huge burden to come up with. Furthermore, the sheer cost of moving, usually in the order of thousands of dollars, is even greater. Plus, if you do chose to do that, you're leaving the only real support network you may be lucky enough to have: your family.
So before those in this comment thread disdain them for making the choice, however illogical, to try and have some sense of normalcy in their lives (or at least the normalcy projected ad nauseum by the American media and in the ad campaigns of the very places they're working), consider the sort of stress they're already under.
Clearly you've never dealt with an addiction before. For some people cigarettes aren't just an expensive 'vice', they're a physical need due to chemical dependency. It certainly doesn't help that the most prominent cigarette ads tend to be in low income areas.
Looking at the actual situation in countires, though, this is kind of a false argument.
Take Africa. Given that there were only two uncolonized countries, the sample size there is too small to be meaningful, though the fact that neither Liberia nor Ethiopia fall into the lowest group of African countries in terms of either HDI, and there are a number of countries below both in Africa that did fall under colonial rule (Central African Republic, DR Congo, Malawi, Burindi below Liberia, plus Niger, Mozambique, Eritria, Guinea, Togo, Madagascar, and Guinea-Bissau below Ethiopia), would seem to indicate that colonial areas can be quite bad off.
Lets also look at your example of Hong Kong. The issue there is that you're conflating a single city, one that was used as primarily a trading and financial hub for the British Empire, with an entire country. Cities across the world tend to be more prosperous in general than the rest of the country. Plenty of Latin American capital cities are quite modern, and many other coastal Chinese cities are as well, but that belies the widespread poverty that might exist in rural area.
I haven't actually poured through the data set linked in the article, but skimming it gives the impression that it includes a variety of images from 1964-70, which seems to me like a lot more than just a snapshot. It even mentions in the article that they were able to see multiple years of polar ice.
I do think, though, that as lake99 pointed out there could be TREMENDOUS value in this. Extending our image record a full 17 years is has enormous scientific value. It gave examples of imagery of the Aral Sea, which allows for significant study there, and 17 years more of full polar ice records. All of that has pretty big implications for a number of fields.
Always found that strange as well. I've always loved being a runner in Seattle because its generally cool, cloudy, and often light rain. To me that's the perfect weather for a run since it prevents you from overheating or dehydrating as quickly, and, in my experience, the sun tires you out much quicker. I've always been confused about the fact that you see by far the most people out running on a hot, sunny day. Every one of them seems to be sweating bullets.
"and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important, instead of them being just a replaceable cog"
Problem with this is that most workers don't have the skills and experience, and self-teaching can only go so far in a lot of specialized areas.
Further, you run into the issue of a worker who is, say, 50 and has just been 'automated out'. Learning an entirely new skill set and trying to get into a field where your previous experience may not even be applicable at that age would be brutal, if its even possible in many instances.
To make matters worse, some developed countries (UK and USA to name a couple) have taken to the mindset of cutting education and skills training and prioritized those areas even lower so that it'll only become that much harder for workers to build up skills in the first place...
I wholeheartedly agree that strong moderation does a LOT to foster strong communities, and frankly very positive ones.
Both of my favorite subreddits do this very well, as does my favorite forum, and though you get the jokes about 'fascist mods' and the genuine complainers who would rather be able to troll to their hearts content (and who inevitably flame out in a couple months time), they are very enjoyable to be a part of. Rather than having inane comments, stupid back and forths, and, in the case of one more factually based subreddit, misleading comments, you get what the majority of well-intentioned people actually come for.
Big problem with this. Particularly with dining plans, many of which don't refund at the end of the term/academic year and are required for the dorms. You want to be thrifty and only spend 600 or the 800 you had this spring? Too bad, you're going to have to splurge the last 200 somehow or you're not getting it back.
Crows as well. One radio report I recall discussed how they not only recognize human faces but can inform others about individuals that threaten them. The researcher who was featured has to wear a mask when he is performing experiments or else he risks being attacked by other birds while walking around campus...
As I said, maybe one since the Cold War. I knew South Sudan, but didn't think about Timor-leste. So if you take out the various eastern bloc states breaking up that's only two new countries.
I'm not surprised at all... It's not every day that a country democratically permits succession. There has only been, what? One new country since the end of the Cold War? Further, while Scotland isn't London, it has a large standing in culture for a number of English speaking countries due to it being the background of many people there, and further it still has some big economic issues surrounding it. 90% of the UK's North Sea Oil anyone?
One of the big issues with the testing argument is that, the way common core is implemented at least, it produces no real meaningful change from past failed testing initiatives like NCLB.
An increased emphasis on tests sadly tends to lead to teaching to the test. I experienced this in the early days of NCLB even in a gifted and talented program where several weeks leading up to the test ate up time outside of normal class in order to prepare for the battery of standardized tests that had little relevancy to much of what went on in the classroom. In schools where instruction is already poor, it tends to take even more focus away and devote it towards this specific niche.
The other big issue is more one with common core's implementation itself where Pearson has ultimate control over the incredibly lucrative market, and the various contractors they are working with tend to do a fairly shoddy job of it. Test question writing has devolved to such a poor point, due to endless cheapening and outsourcing in order to lower costs, that a question on a major test may net the writer a few dozen dollars. Forgive the anectodal evidence, but my mother worked for a long period as a freelance writer, and when she considered going back to it recently she discovered that many of the questions, ones that have an enormous impact on education, are going for a pittance. Further, in her current occupation teaching adult basic ed and GED prep (they have to work towards common core too), much of the official testing materials and prep questions for educators have been so poorly designed that neither the students nor the teachers can understand them.
So yes, quantitative measurements can certainly be a good thing in order to help support improvement, but the current testing model is horrendously broken and moving further towards it is not really the right way to go.
Exactly this. From what I recall, and from what I hear from several relatives and acquantances who have been teaching for years, is that traditionally the ratio was roughly 70-30 'fiction'-'non-fiction; the latter being novels, poems, plays, etc. ranging from classical to contemporary sources, the former being speeches, news articles, think pieces, analysis of literary or rhetorical techniques, etc. Common core essentially reverses this, putting a much higher emphasis on what the group of reformers behind if feel are more practical, and importantly which contribute more to test scores, whereas many teachers vigorously oppose the notion that the latter sources should be given precedence. At least in my own readings on the matter, and from speaking with individuals who are involved with the movement in the Seattle School District to block implementation of a lot of the new measures, educators tend to feel that the older ratio contributes better to a well-rounded individual, and has a better impact on long-term educational development.