I expected this to be higher up. I used pinboard for years, but finally decided it's not worth the money. Self-hosting this requires very little resources and knowledge. Super happy with it, use it daily.
I actually hope more teachers go for the simple overhead option. I do, using an overhead webcam.
A physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible has been shown to work far better than presenting ready-made diagrams. It also works better than digital drawing, probably due to the natural inclusion of pointing gestures guiding students' attention [1].
There is also evidence (and good theoretical reasons to believe) that a transparent lightboard leads to unnecessary distraction/split attention. [2]
Yes! Educational research supports being casual and conversational. Although for drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than Khan style video.
See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.
Do you mean the problem with the image from your OBS virtual camera turning green and glitchy? You seem to be able to fix this (in some cases) by using 1920x1080 at 30fps.
Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way. People were reliably producing alloys before metallurgy, flight happened well before any meaningful understanding of aerodynamics, and most famously, steam engines led to the development of thermodynamic science, not the other way round.
Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way.
Sure, technology does not depend on science in a straightforward way - it's dependency is quite complex but it's there. You can't translate Schroedinger's equation directly into an understand of semiconductors but you certainly need the basics of quantum mechanics for an understanding of modern chips.
As Joe said, the relation of dependence is complex. You added an extra caveat, of it being "straightforward" which wasn't part of my claim and I would argue is not even a good faith interpretation of the claim.
And all of this seems lateral to the point I was making: can we really trust Kuhn's arguments, which demand we dispense with a notion of scientific progress or independent reality of scientific truths, when we would never take such an argument seriously if made about technology?
You’re right, sorry, I jumped on your second paragraph a bit too eagerly. Pet peeve against the “technology is applied science” view.
That said, Kuhn definitely does not ask that we dispense with the notion of science making progress. New paradigms are accepted because they’re better, after all.
You're definitely right that technology isn't merely applied science and your examples illustrate that well. Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory. But my point was that nobody would get away with talk of paradigms and incommensurability in the context of technological progress the way Kuhn gets away with it in talking about scientific progress.
And those aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that we should wonder why the rules are different.
For Kuhn paradigm shifts are shifts of largely faith, and paradigms supposedly aren't "really" better or worse than one another. Any declaration that this is so is, Kuhn insists, an anachronistic re-interpretation from within a preferred paradigm rather than an actual insight into truth.
And as the article says, Kuhn frustratingly thinks the whole question of relativism implied by his philosophy is "beside the point." Which is even more frustrating than if the charge were answered positively or negatively. Having that kind of an attitude toward truth is like a banker saying it's "beside the point" whether you have any money in your bank account.
> Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory.
Not with blind trials, but technology has historically advanced (way) ahead of theory most of the time.
See, for instance, Clifford D. Connor's "A People's History of Science" or the authoratitive (in philosophy of technology circles) "What Engineers Know and How They Know It" by Walter Vincenti. One of the convincing cases Vincenti describes is the development of wing profiles. Structured, intelligent trial and error (parameter variation) to get to shapes that work, but no theory to speak of (nothing that helps the development, in any case).
The rules can be different because science and engineering are different. Linked, but separate.
And I've never gotten the relativism charge against Kuhn. In my reading, he doesn't claim one paradigm isn't "really" better than another. He claims that when paradigms compete, there is at that time not an objective test to select between them. That's why belief is required. But again, the proponents of a new paradigm believe (and do their best to argue, rationally) that it is better in some sense. More true.
There are many directions in which to move away from ignorance. That competing paradigms take such different routes away from falsity, that they're not both on one dimension, and that one is not incontrovertibly and obviously superior to the other in every way with reference to some imagined objective standard, does not mean that it isn't a step towards a more true and accurate representation of the world.
I only scrolled through TFA (added to read later list). I am Dutch though.
A lot of these systems require enormous (and growing) up-front investments, not feasible for small independent operations. There are a lot of family business in Westland, but they require massive mortgages and/or loans to keep up with the times (and the investments that they require). There are fewer and fewer small farms and more and more 'mega-barns'.
Little space is needed, but a lot of it is high carbon and high capital.
Also needed is a very stable environment, but infrastructurally and politically. A lot of these investments would never be feasible without for example the stability of the electricity network or the road network.
It can be argued if this is caused by the government, but the Dutch seem more maintenance-minded than most other countries I visited. Probably caused by all the dikes: if not maintaining something properly will kill your entire village, you have a lot of incentive to become very good at it.
We have, in fact, a dedicated form of local government for water management [1], and:
> These regional water authorities are among the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century.
To add to your point about economies of scale, Indian farmers are a reliable political bloc. Turning a million unproductive farmers into 10,000 highly-productive ones is, from a political perspective, disastrous if you rely on that bloc. It's a similar phenomenon to public union political capture in certain American cities.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. Some of those farms look like they have million(s) dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. And farming isn't exactly a high-margin industry so starting a new farm must be quite a risky venture. Are there government programs that help with the financing or it's all private capital?
As far as I know (I am not a farmer, nor do I know any greenhouse farmers very well), lots of it is private capital though.
One of the biggest banks in the Netherlands (Rabobank) has a (positive) reputation for financing farmers and other agricultural firms. (also a negative one due to the LIBOR scandal, incidentally)
