Signal variance is nothing new. I remember personally noticing it in late 90's that with my GSM (900MHz) phone, moving it on table just for about 5 centimeters could bring it down from full signal to no reception at all. Of course with analog radios you also notice how easily signal changes with location. If you've been ever playing with TV antenna in in bad reception and so on. Moving your hand in other room might block TV signal or make it crystal clear even if you would make there's no connection what so ever. With 2.4GHz people often forget that interference from other sources can significantly contribute. So signal quality and signal strength aren't same thing at all. Getting to the root all these things require professional, which I'm not. So one type of measurement defined as "signal strength" probably misleads you badly. Is it a good idea to select a wifi channel that doesn't have any other wifi boxes? Well, the reason might be that the channel is totally overpowered by local wireless CCT or phones. That's the reason why nobody's using it for WiFi and then you think it's a great idea to select a free Wifi channel?
Radio stuff is (truly) really tricky. With higher frequencies it's just like light. Why some things are in shadows and some things are well lit?
I'm in a relatively large appartment building.. I can see about 20 other wifi options in my area on my laptop... fortunately, my signal quality is significantly better (higher end asus, with shibby tomato) spent a fair amount of time tweaking the settings a bit that seem to work very well for me... I can keep signal on my phone across the parking lot (I'm facing the pool, which is adjacent to outside parking) ... no wifi really gets into the garage though, but cell phone signal does...
It's really wild how a foot or two difference could make all the difference in the world...
Well, yes to both questions, but on a macroscopic scale the wave equation can explain the collective effect of zillions of photons to more accuracy than you'll ever need.
If you're looking to work on your eating practice, I suggest eating when you're hungry and only when you're hungry. Don't eat at any particular time of day. Make sure you're truly hungry. Some of us don't even know what that feels like anymore because we eat so often.
As a further challenge, try to stop eating as soon as you no longer feel hungry (and be sure to eat slowly). Some of us don't stop until we've finished our massive portion regardless of how full we feel. You may be surprised to see just how little food you need to consume in order to satiate hunger.
I gathered that you'll only start to feel sated after about 20 minutes after starting to eat, so yeah, eating slowly would definitely help. Of course, limiting portions to what you actually need instead of a seemingly infinite stack of food will also help.
There are a few things, many impacted by the current economic state in the US today: (doing any of these is a big help as a parent)
1. Being there. With both parents working --a lot, more often than not, kids are left to their own devices, and those devices are the new baby sitter. Games, media, Internet, etc...
While these are not bad things, they do not replace seat time and face time.
Technology can enable, but it takes people to understand people, and we are set with the task of making great people.
Hold that thought...
2. Access to resources.
Kids need a diverse set of experiences to self-identify well enough to understand how to learn how to learn and how they personally can thrive. This varies considerably among people. Parents who bring experiences, tools, mentors, their own time and expertise to the table very significantly augment the work of educators.
3. Learning with your kids.
Learning is infectious. When parents are able to be engaged, participate with their kids, everybody bonds well and everybody gets the benefit of a shared effort to improve. This sets good norms, in terms of growth, etc...
Compare and contrast Dad coming home to down a 40 after doing a 60 hour week, mom doing a 40 herself, and they are tired, checked out, managing the kids, but not investing in those kids. I'm not blaming parents here, just citing an example and it's impacts.
With:
Dad who worked an ordinary 40, mom working part time for "mad money", both of whom have energy sufficient to play with the kids, learn with them, explore hobbies, and pursue their own personal development, sharing that too.
(On a side note here, how we value labor very seriously impacts our education burden)
4. Participation in the school
Where parents can be a part of the program, there are many gains to be had. Volunteer work, kid sports, clubs, tutoring, working with educators for special needs kids, all augment the education investment.
I personally did a lot of this, due to being an adoptive foster parent. The kids needed work, and they had some special needs. Teachers were hungry for help, tips, advice. They wanted to be effective, but the personal research burden for them was high. Teaming up was magic.
One of many examples:
I attended "computer class" at a middle school, where introductory computer literacy was being taught by the "business teacher", and the school thought, business equals computers, so there you go. The introductory material was incomplete, riddled with errors, and I could go on and on.
Frankly, I rewrote a lot of that material and offered to clarify anything that educator needed. We had a few sessions and they helped a lot. Again, good educator, they just needed stuff. Stuff the school wasn't really sourcing for them as they could have. Parents can help identify these things just as much as a school can, and everybody should.
These kids will care for us in our old age. Think about that.
5. Community / peer review of student progress.
What is the goal of education?
When I ask this, I get all sorts of answers, ranging from making kids job ready, to "literacy", etc...
I submit these are the goals:
a. Building good people.
Each of these kids has some potential and it's up to us to tease it out of them. We can do that with diverse experiences, collaboration between educators and parents, and by offering a wide range of possible education options for them.
Some kids are going to be academic, headed for higher education. Some are going to be tactile, or mechanical, and we need those people too. Some will be empathetic, and could be care givers, or performers. Whatever it is, they need to self-identify, and we need to prod them in various ways to tease it out and help them maximize it.
b. Maximize who they are
People are who they are. We can influence this, but to expect everybody to fall into some cookie cutter box or other is nuts! We are much better off keeping their options open, and when they grab hold of something, help them to take for the best ride they can.
c. Good citizens
Our future leaders need to understand government, civics in general, and be critical thinkers. We don't do anywhere near enough here in the US, and there are lot of political reasons for that I'm not going to touch on, but being a good human, and a good citizen is part of education.
d. Learn how to learn and grow to thrive.
These are in no particular order. But the ability to self-learn is so damn empowering we can't afford to miss out on the benefits of it. Not every student will be able to maximize themselves in this way, but a lot of them can, and should.
6. Parents need to get real about the politics of education.
Education in the US is hosed. We've got way too many people flirting with, or in poverty, forcing more labor than is appropriate for parenting, conflicting requirements, standardized tests that hobble good educators while pushing along marginal to poor ones, and we don't even talk much about the educators who just need help!
Funding is at issue, public vs private, "maybe I can get MY kid into a good school, screw everybody else..." Yes, that goes on, and should it really?
We all have to live under the product of our politics here. So why don't we get along and recognize the education debt we are accumulating and it's impact on our future?
None of those goals are partisan things. They are all focused right on the kids and their potential. And they are appropriate for everybody, business, our future leaders, parents, home makers, etc...
And it's more than attitude. Parents can't just trust the system, and the system can't just do the right thing either.
If we want to maximize our young people, and we should, then it's in all our interests to get the raising of them done proper. Blaming won't cut it.
The cost of failures here will accrue. We will pay them, and it won't be pretty, and we could very well have made the right investments early on to avoid the big balloon payments coming due very soon.
Downvoters: Care to comment? It's more productive that way you know. You might have it right? Door is open. Sell me.
While I wait:
I got most of the things I put above, and as a parent, was able to supply most of the above, both to pretty great effect.
For what it's worth, taking blame off the table is rarely popular. Why?
Because then we realize we aren't so exceptional, and that we really should be doing something together on this, and that it's going to involve some real work in the form of face time and seat time.
You will find in your life that is true whether or not it appeals.
Carry on though, but don't think that goes without notice.
Very large numbers of us are not equipped to perform the task well. Of those who are, some challenges, such as socialization, special needs, learning issues, subject matter coverage, all could require considerable involvement with public schools.
Education isn't a trivial investment. I did write a lot about face time and seat time, and the parent working alone, or perhaps in a small group, will find their own time, personal growth, career opportunities, and more strained or blunted due to the real investment required.
Often, it's the kid who suffers where those gaps exist. Secondly, when the kids are suffering, or are abused, say in a religious extreme home school type setting, there is a very real potential for bad outcomes.
Lots more to say here, but I'll just say "do it yourself" isn't a slam dunk, and it's no meaningful option where the greater scope of getting our education back on track is concerned. Point, niche solution at best.
Homeschooling requires at least one dedicated, knowledgeable teacher.
These days, where more and more families have both parents working, sometimes even in multiple jobs, homeschooling is only viable for the upper middle class or above.
The large government run National Household Education Survery which is the best data available shows little difference in homeschool and public income demographics. Over the last 4 surveys('99,'03,'07,'11) homeschoolers have had ~20% in poverty and 50+% within 200% of poverty.
I can't add too much to what ddingus said, but will try to offer just a couple of subtle points.
Maybe this would be different in some other country. But I think parents in the US who expect the school to educate their kids with no oversight or intervention, are leaving too much to chance. Short of homeschooling, there are some specific issues that could fall directly on the shoulders of parents:
1. Preparation of kids starting at age zero.
2. Gauging if your kids are doing well enough by your standards.
3. What happens when things go wrong, e.g., when a kid falls behind or runs into disciplinary problems? So called "involved" parents will either draw on their own instincts, or learn from the network of involved parents, how to guide the school towards a resolution that doesn't involve a lowering of expectations.
That surprised me as well; though perhaps it's just that "such as parsers" applies to more code than the author realized.
A parser is a discrete chunk of code that's general-purpose (likely to be called from lots of places with different content), but with a fairly straightforward list of cases that you can/should test to see how correct and robust it is.
There's a lot of code that fits into this category; not just parsers.
I use st exclusively. It's bound to my new terminal key mapping and I've never found a reason to use a different one. I tried urxvt and xterm but stuck with st.
They appear to be using the term "slow reading" to distinguish it from online reading:
"One 2006 study of the eye movements of 232 people looking at Web pages found they read in an "F" pattern... None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say."
I personally have 3 styles of reading:
- Fiction, I read incredibly slowly, and always have done.
- Technical books, I absorb very quickly, often scanning through parts covering topics I already know well, and spending longer on anything that is new. In any case, there is no "narrative" to follow, but the structure still tends to be linear (one topic builds on the last).
- Online, I read in a "spiral" pattern, skipping between headlines, then reading the first and last parts to narrow in on what I think is most relevant.
Reading every word from start to finish is an inefficient way to extract information online. If I am interested in a particular topic, I don't have to read just one article on that subject. 90% of online content is badly written or factually incorrect in some way, so over-committing to one source typically results in a lot of wasted effort. The better strategy is to speed read 5 or 6 different sources and then return to whichever one gets its point across concisely. This also tends to reinforce a bias towards content that is presented in small chunks with diagrams.
Over the last 18 months I've been spending a lot more time than usual reading technical books and I have noticed that the amount of time I spend reading online has affected my ability to speed read technical books the way I normally do. I have to concentrate harder to avoid scanning in an F or spiral shaped pattern.
That strategy works online because the aim is to discard bad content as quickly as possible. It does not work when your aim is to follow the narrative of a book that is almost always linear and is often more information-dense than online content.
This linearity is amplified further in fiction because it is an intrinsic property of the narrative structure (except perhaps, in "choose your own adventure" books).
It therefore makes sense that reading fiction helps people avoid the habit of scanning content, skipping over the middle parts. Online, the middle parts often don't matter because the signal to noise ratio is low. In other formats, that is often not the case.
There is a short paragraph that's actually quite good:
"Slow readers list numerous benefits to a regular reading habit, saying it improves their ability to concentrate, reduces stress levels and deepens their ability to think, listen and empathize. The movement echoes a resurgence in other old-fashioned, time-consuming pursuits that offset the ever-faster pace of life, such as cooking the "slow-food" way or knitting by hand."
One wonders what's wrong with using the phrase "offline reading" or "electronically-disconnected reading" to denote this style of reading we used to simply call... "reading." Alas, I suppose it's simply not catchy enough for the neo-digital age.
