US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2893

On February 12 2016 01:54 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Do you mean the content? Do you disagree with any of the content in particular? Which content strands? I provided the Common Core links in a previous post.
Do you mean how the content is being taught? Because, again, Common Core doesn't give teachers marching orders on how they need to instruct the individual classes; that's left up to the discretion of the individual teacher.

On February 12 2016 01:48 Plansix wrote:

It’s a troubling trend that reminds me of the tea party and their tendency to go full burn down if they don’t get exactly what they want. Of course, Sanders is going to endorse Hilary if she wins the nomination and hopefully he can pull his supporters over, rather than them just walking away.

At least a dozen email accounts handled the “top secret” intelligence that was found on Hillary Clinton’s server and recently deemed too damaging for national security to release, a U.S. government official close to the review told Fox News.

The official said the accounts include not only Clinton’s but those of top aides – including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines – as well as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and others. There is no public evidence they were authorized to receive the intelligence some of which was beyond Top Secret.

A second source not authorized to speak on the record said the number of accounts involved could be as high as 30 and reflects how the intelligence was broadly shared, replied to, and copied to individuals using the unsecured server.

“My contacts with former colleagues and current active duty personnel involved in sensitive programs reveal a universal feeling that the HRC issue is more serious than the general public realizes,” Dan Maguire, a former strategic planner with Africom, and with 46 years combined service, told Fox. “Most opine they would already be behind bars if they had apparently compromised sensitive information as reported.”

Without access to the actual e-mails, Maguire said it was hard to ascertain what damage might have been done by the disclosure of human spying intelligence and secret material.

“Either way, the intelligence community is undoubtedly conducting damage assessments and evaluating the viability of any ongoing operation that may have been exposed to unauthorized personnel. The vulnerability of HRC’s server to foreign government hacking cannot be overlooked - even the DCI, John Brennan, has been the target of hackers,” he said.

....

Kennedy recently told the House Benghazi Select Committee that he knew about Clinton's personal email from the beginning, but did not understand the "scope" of its use for Clinton’s government business.

Kennedy's testimony now appears to conflict with emails released through the Freedom of Information Act that show he routinely sent and received government business from the Clintonemail.com account.

Toner said Kennedy learned about Clinton’s arrangement later. “He did not have knowledge of the computer server that she had set up [for] personal email or computer server she'd set up at her residence,” he said.

However, on the official State Department website, Patrick F. Kennedy’s biography says that he has worked for the department since 1993 and, in his current position as Under Secretary for Management, he is responsible for the “people, resources, budget, facilities, technology, financial operations, consular affairs, logistics, contracting, and security for Department of State operations.”

On February 12 2016 02:23 xDaunt wrote:
It just keeps getting better and better. Eventually, Bernie isn't going to have a choice but to start hammering Hillary on this issue.



Source.

On February 12 2016 02:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Do you really think he needs to bring it up, though? It seems like Hillary is getting enough scrutiny from everyone else, that she'll keep getting hammered with the e-mail scandal while Bernie can just keep his hands clean.

On February 12 2016 01:05 Plansix wrote:
Education, in the vague sense, isn’t about learning a set of things. It is preparing the student to navigate the ever changing world and deal with all the hazards that entails. Knowing your multiplication tables is cool, but solving word problems is the thing that teaches the student how to apply math to real life.

The promised land of education is giving the students the skills to determine what career they want on their own and the ability to enter that career. But that requires that education expose students to lots of different options and experiences that may not be part of any overarching lesson plan, which leads people demand be justified as “educational”.

Which is why hyper focusing on test scores is a red herring. It railroads the student and teacher into focusing on a single aspect of the process as the most valuable.

On February 12 2016 02:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Of course! But that has nothing to do with Common Core, as Common Core isn't a list of math problems. I think you're referring to the fact that some books and publishing companies (e.g., Pearson) or some teachers might create poorly-worded math problems, and that's always a legitimate concern... and has been forever.

On February 12 2016 03:00 cLutZ wrote:


Never seen the argument about word problems. They are so easy at the K-12 level to the point that you might as well write the equation out for the kid, and ramp up to near impossibility in the real world where the skill is in the accuracy in your assumptions weighed against the difficulty in solving the equations you end up writing.

One complaint that I do have about CC math is a personal bias, but I do feel it is designed to place roadblocks in front of the faster students. And generally, to give students wrist pains because most of the CC solving methods are not (contrary to claims) about fostering intuition, they are more akin to turning kids into brute force solving machines where they can plug in any problem (of the exact same complexity level because the solving methods are not really scalable unless you have 30 pages of paper) and get the answer.

Know that straight lines are widely used to model relationships between two quantitative variables. For scatter plots that suggest a linear association, informally fit a straight line, and informally assess the model fit by judging the closeness of the data points to the line.

For a function that models a relationship between two quantities, interpret key features of graphs and tables in terms of the quantities, and sketch graphs showing key features given a verbal description of the relationship. Key features include: intercepts; intervals where the function is increasing, decreasing, positive, or negative; relative maximums and minimums; symmetries; end behavior; and periodicity.*

Tuesday night, even as votes were being tallied in New Hampshire, the Supreme Court shocked many — including the Obama administration — by putting on hold the president’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, pending resolution of a lawsuit against it by a number of states, utilities and coal companies.

Everybody knew the Clean Power Plan would face major legal challenges, but few thought they’d significantly derail it so early on. One legal expert, the Sierra Club’s Bruce Nilles, told the Post it was “unprecedented for the Supreme Court to stay a rule at this point in litigation. They do this in death-penalty cases.”

Given litigation timelines, the move suggests that the fate of the plan now may not even be decided until after Obama has left office, in 2017. Moreover, the stay also suggests the Supreme Court’s conservative majority looks askance at the plan and sees the challenges against it as serious. This means the next president could now be a major player in setting — or un-making — the nation’s climate policy.

All of this has generated an uproar, and there will be much talk of how it embarrasses Obama on the world stage and undermines the U.S.’s position in the Paris climate negotiations, where the Clean Power Plan was key to demonstrating that as the world’s second largest emitter, we’re doing our part.

However, there’s another side of the story. The fact of the matter is that the Clean Power Plan wasn’t set to fully kick in until 2022 — and in the interim, the U.S. has been going through something that looks a lot like the kind of transition it is meant to prompt even without the plan in place.

Namely: The nation has been slowly decarbonizing its electricity system, through the growth of renewables and the switching from burning coal to burning natural gas.

The same day the Supreme Court stalled the Clean Power Plan, the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its monthly short term energy outlook. Here are some of the punchlines: Electricity from renewables is expected to grow 9.5 percent in 2016. “EIA expects utility-scale solar capacity will increase by about 80% (10 GW) between the end of 2015 and the end of 2017, with 4.1 GW of new capacity being built in California,” the agency adds (GW stands for gigawatt).

Meanwhile, total greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning actually declined in 2015, by 2.2 percent, the agency estimates. One key reason for this is that coal use declined 12 percent in the electricity sector, with much more burning of natural gas instead. EIA expects that natural gas in 2016 will, as in 2015, give coal a run for its money in supplying electricity, thanks to quite low prices.