As a species, we're spectacularly bad at negative externalities.
We are also very bad at anything very long term. We've hardly pulled off any physical project to last more than one generation recently. We barely invest in any.
The winning energy tech of the future better have as little negative externalities as possible, especially long term ones.
At least used to. Last few years Finland's PISA scores as measured by the OECD have plummeted and now they are just a bit above average but nowhere near what they used to be.
I always felt like the teaching method in primary school was very much like "no pupil left behind". Teachers really tried their best to keep everyone up to speed on what they taught. If you were a huge troublemaker or just couldn't keep up with the (slowish) pace you would get moved to a special class where you would get more attention (even smaller class sizes) and wouldn't slow the rest of the group down.
As a "smart kid" it sometimes felt like waiting for everyone in class to grok something before moving on was a waste of time and that personally I'd learn very little, but ultimately I think it worked very well to ensure that everyone was on common ground.
At some point it was deemed that the current system wasn't inclusive enough so the special education for the troublemakers was gutted and they were put back into regular classrooms. At the same time, due to lack of funding and lack of teachers, class sizes ballooned from <15 to up to 30 or even 40 students per class in larger cities. I think there's some critical point where that system breaks down and now we're past it. The teacher has too many students to make sure everyone is up to speed, and giving too much individual attention in such a large class wastes everyone else's time.
Immigration has also played a role I think. Finland used to be quite monocultural, but that has changed. There are now more and more students who speak Finnish as their second or third language and as such have trouble keeping up. I don't think the solution is to stuff them into their own schools either as that promotes segregation and makes integrating into the society as an immigrant harder, and I don't pretend to know the perfect solution (if one even exists), but one thing's for sure: the Finnish school system was 100% unprepared for it.
The solution is almost always more teachers (though at some point you have two teachers per kid and that’s likely to be excessive).
A class of five can handle darn near anything; a class of fifty needs everyone to be as nearly identical as possible.
You can artificially increase the number of “teachers” by combining classes of different grades sometimes. 12 year olds can do great assisting 6 year olds.
Some common themes in the conversation are neoliberal cost cutting, failed attempts at inclusion and immigration.
* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.
* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.
In summary, Finland has brought the policies that have caused much destruction in other Western countries into their own education system, where those policies have also caused destruction, much to everyone's amazement.
Yep, this country is no longer that special by European standards. Childcare is still good, but later education and healthcare are very mediocre.
In EU only greeks are less satisfied with the availability of healthcare. Our unemployment rate is pretty similar to Greece and Spain as well. This is what right wing governments want I guess.
It's usual in Finland to let babies sleep outside in the strollers (even when it's cold) but in this case no one checked how the child was doing for 3 hours.
> * Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
Politically, isn't this the ultimate fate of most developed nations? I haven't yet see an answer to this. How do you deal financially with this? The obvious answer is for people to be in charge of their own late stage health but is that possible for the average minimum wage worker?
Bosch are nasty in many ways though. Their ebike battery and motor system in particular is extremely hostile to diy anything. Repair, generic battery with Bosch motor, using your Bosch ebike battery outside the ebike, ...
The main problem with this system: even most university educated people cannot thoroughly understand it. [0] That potentially undermines trust in the system.
Maybe democracy just has to be a bit complicated to work?
As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all?
The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically representative system. But if we can't have all, I think dropping simple is better.
Parties tend to like safe seats. (This is one thing that dominant parties on both sides of the aisle can agree on.) Unfortunately, the very concept of a "safe seat" means one individual's vote doesn't matter.
There's a distinction between the complexity of choosing how to vote, completing a ballot paper and administering an election. I don't expect any one can be minimised without raising another.
The tradeoff might be made easier by expecting less of any single elected body/office. If we had a national legislating chamber, elected by at-large proportional representation from a single constituency, and we turned instead to local government for geographic representation, and the second legislative chamber were elected by local government to exert geographic influence over legislation, then maybe voters could make fewer, easier, and more impactful choices. I don't know of any country that works like this, but Germany is close.
Is there an acronym for edge/local/offline? ELO could be confused with something AI already dominates at. As someone working in the edge/local/offline space it’s interesting to hear these together though. Offline is local but local often isn’t offline :)
FOSDEM organiser here. The shoestring budget is accurate, as is the badges or registrations thing. The security thing is not. We do have proper security. Organising an 8k people conference without would be unsafe and illegal.
Thank you for your contribution to the FOSS learning space.
Here's a few random suggestions:
- spaced repetition. Again, anki style.
- audio. Can you make it easy to record a phrase, anki style? Or maybe even make AI pronounce them correctly?
Thank you so much! I will definitely add those ideas to the roadmap in the README (pointing out this comment).
I believe the spaced repetition feature must be prioritized because that's the most important thing in this app. I mean, what's the purpose of seeing the words over and over again if I already have confidence with them?
For the pronunciation feature, I had similar work before and there are great open source tools and libraries we can build upon that analyze your pronunciation and spot where you made mistakes. We can use open source TTS libraries to pronounce the correct version.
I also would definitely want to see audio questions in exercises similar to Duolingo, and it would be great to work on those features.
I am learning Turkish so I built something like that for me. You can highlight any word online and it will translate colloquially so you can actually use it irl.
It also has audio and pronunciation. It is around the halfway mark in the demo.
We are also very bad at anything very long term. We've hardly pulled off any physical project to last more than one generation recently. We barely invest in any.
The winning energy tech of the future better have as little negative externalities as possible, especially long term ones.
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