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AOPA and others have stridently opposed user fees, preferring to continue funding the aviation system through excise taxes on fuel. |
"Imposing user fees is expensive, cumbersome, and inefficient," Fuller said. "Pay-at-the-pump has worked since the dawn of powered flight, and it still makes sense today." |
While fuel taxes are collected at the point of sale, a user-fee system would require the creation of a new bureaucracy to administer the charges. And, while tax increases must be approved by Congress, no such congressional oversight would be required to raise or extend fees once they are in place. |
The fee proposed in the President's 2014 budget comes not only with new administration and collection costs, it also comes with a special commission whose sole function would be to recommend a "replacement charge or charges that would raise no less in revenue" than the $100 fee. |
"The language of this proposal is designed specifically to open the door for new, higher fees in the future," said Fuller. "With no Congressional oversight and no safeguards in place, this proposal would give the Obama Administration a blank check to spend pilots' money." |
The White House estimates that the proposed user fee would generate $7.3 billion over 10 years, but the actual cost to operators could be much higher while the proceeds could be far lower. In addition to the fees themselves, users can expect to incur costs to meet accounting and documentation requirements. And the anti... |
Although recreational flights and some types of aircraft would be exempt, it is unclear exactly how the government would determine whether or not a specific flight meets the criteria for the fee. It's also unclear whether a flight would be considered the time from takeoff to landing or calculated some other way, leavin... |
Of greater concern is the possibility that aircraft operators would reduce their flying, stretch fuel supplies to minimize the number of stops, or simply avoid using air traffic control services. |
"User fees would compromise safety and do irreparable harm to an industry that supports millions of jobs and contributes $150 billion to the U.S. economy each year," Fuller warned. "At a time when the economy continues to struggle it just doesn't make sense to undermine an industry that is making a positive contributio... |
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Friday, August 10, 2007 |
The Kundu case: What if ... |
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Clearly, NCCS is staring at some bleak choices. |
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1. pradeepkumar said... |
If Kundus group had used Molecular Dynamics (Now part of GE) phosphorimager, an instrument very common and which I daily use, to scan their Western blot gels, its not that difficult to find out wheather or not they have provided the same images for two different experiments. The simple thing to do use is to open th... |
2. Rahul said... |
That's a valuable comment. One has to ask why the Padmanaban Committee did not do this already, or did not report doing this. |
What causes a rainbow? |
Rainbow. Photo copyrighted. |
The technical details of rainbow formation were first analyzed by Isaac Newton in 1665. His brilliant optics work concerning reflection and refraction certainly does not detract from the beauty and promise of the rainbow. On the contrary, Newton's scientific insights show the marvelous complexity of creation. The rainb... |
“I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of a covenant between me and the earth… Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.” (Genesis 9:13,15). |
A rainbow occurs when raindrops and sunshine cross paths. Sunlight consists of all the colors of light, which add together to make white illumination. When sunlight enters water drops, it reflects off their inside surfaces. While passing through the droplets, the light also separates into its component colors, which is... |
Rainbow. Copyright, Films for Christ |
A rainbow is usually seen in the opposite direction in the sky from the sun. The rainbow light is reflected to the eye at an angle of 42 degrees to the original ray of sunlight. The bow shape is actually part of a cone of light that is cut off by the horizon. If you travel toward the end of a rainbow, it will move ahea... |
Weather and the Bible The bright, primary rainbow has red on the outer edge and blue within. Higher in the sky there is always another, dimmer rainbow with the order of colors reversed. This secondary rainbow results from additional reflection of sunlight through the raindrops. It is most visible when there are dark cl... |
[Print our coloring page on rainbows] |
Author: Dr. Donald DeYoung, Ph.D. (Physics) as excerpted from Weather and the Bible, pgs. 96-98, published by Baker Book House. Supplied by Films for Christ (used with permission) |
Go to Films for Christ |
Go to index page click for Kid Explorers |
Get Posts by E-mail |
Archive for the 'tech enthusiasm' Category |
Kids like them. |
Last year I asked you guys to submit your own graphs and stories which I edited together by hand. |
Today, in a joint collaboration with the BuzzMath team, we're releasing 24 of those videos for immediate download and use in your classrooms, all tagged by content and math. (ie. "a step function about ponies") |
You guys were way more creative than I had anticipated: |
Call for Submissions (Sort Of) |
I'm never gonna do what I did a year ago ever again. Editing all those videos by hand took months of my time and probably a year off my life. But I would like to know what holes you see in this library and what we can do to plug them. |
Do we need more videos with periodic functions? Do we need more videos featuring bacon? Suggest them in the comments. If it's a good idea and you can film the video, I'll make your graphing story on a case-by-case basis. This thing will grow larger and awesomer. |
BTW. Be sure to drop a tweet @BuzzMath thanking them for their killer work here. |
We know there are important steps [pdf] you can take to ready students for an explanation of key concepts. Riley Lark is helping you do several of them very easily with his open source ActivePrompt project. While Dave Major and I continue to bat around very specific implementations of digital curricula, Riley has creat... |
This is everything: the student sees an image and has to place a red dot somewhere on top of it according to instructions given by the teacher. It sounds too simple to be of any use. |
Two Uses |
Drag the red dot to where you put the cafeteria so that it's the same distance from each school. |
Drag the red dot to where line m will intersect line n. |
You see where this goes, right? Even with the second prompt, which isn't explicitly "real world" in the sense that we usually mean it, students now have experience with the context, which makes it real to them. |
Then we start to abstract it and help students work with these concepts: |
These brief experiences help immensely to set up and motivate the explanation that follows. It would be great (note to Riley) if the teacher could establish the correct answer at the end of the task (a teacher dot) which would then inform the students how close their guesses came. Also: student names on mouseover, mobi... |
You can play with it immediately on Heroku. Be sure to link up your creations in the comments so we can all play along. |
BTW. My hope in sharing Dave Major's work and Riley Lark's ActivePrompt and my own experiments is that you will become agitated and unhappy with whatever curriculum you are currently using, and that you will express that agitation and unhappiness to the people who publish and sell you that curriculum. None of us are an... |
The modern digital textbook isn't a collection of content to be consumed. It's a collection of experiences, of which content consumption is only one part. |
Riley Lark's red dot is one of those experiences. |
2012 Nov 29. Riley Lark takes you behind the scenes and shows off several creative ActivePrompts. |
2012 Dec 4. Learning Catalytics (a for-profit product) seems to have done a lot of good work in this area already. |
Better Online Math |
tl;dr version |
Currently, online math websites comprise video lectures and machine-scored exercises. |
For several different reasons, online math websites should add an introductory challenge that activates a student's intuition and intellectual need. The video lecture should then be directed at satisfying that particular intellectual need. |
Here's an example. Let's make this happen. |
tl version |
Online math sites are quickly defining math down to a) watching lecture videos and b) completing machine-scored exercises. I'm not going to re-litigate whether or not that definition of mathematics is as good as what we find in the best classrooms in the highest-performing countries. (It isn't.) Instead, I'm going to t... |
What should we improve? It isn't the lectures. |
For some time there, I was meeting with founders who were pitching their startups as "Khan Academy plus [x]" where x was anything from better graphics, better lesson scripting, a face on the screen, or multiple choice questions embedded in the video. (Here's basically the entire set of [x] at once.) I don't believe the... |
So what should we improve? It probably isn't the exercises either. |
The machine learning crowd seems very impressed by the millions of rows in their databases which represent the clickstream of hundreds of thousands of users. That clickstream can tell a teacher how many hints the learner requested, how long she spent on a given problem, whether she's more apt to score well on machine-s... |
So what should we improve? We should improve what happens before the lecture. |
Currently, the online math experience begins with a lecture. The implicit assumption is that students need to be talked at for awhile before they can do anything meaningful. Not only is that untrue but it results in bored learners and poor learning. |
Dan Schwartz, a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University, prefaced student lectures with a particular challenge [pdf]. He asked students to do something (to select the best pitching machine from these four) not just to watch someone else do something. Those students then received a lecture explaining and formalizi... |
I'll show you an example of how this could work online. Head to this website and play through. |
Let me explain what I'm trying to do there. First, any student who knows or can intuit the definition of "midpoint" can attempt that opening activity. It's an extremely low bar to clear. The lesson will ultimately be about the midpoint formula but we haven't bothered the student with a coordinate plane, grid lines, coo... |
Once the student guesses, she sees how her classmates guessed, which queues everyone to wonder, "Who guessed closest?" |
We've provoked the student's intellectual need and set her up with the kind of introductory challenge that prepares her for a future lecture. |
So we move into the lecture video, which has several goals: |
1. It references the introductory challenge explicitly. The point of the lecture is to bring some resolution to the conflict we posed in the introduction: "Who guessed closest?" |
2. It offers a conceptual explanation of the midpoint formula, not just a recitation of procedures. |
3. It explains very explicitly why we use abstractions like x-y pairs and a coordinate plane. This satisfies John Mason's recommendation that we become much more explicit about the process of abstraction. |
After the lecture, the student sees the original problem, now with x-y pairs and a coordinate plane. No longer does she simply guess, aim, and click. She calculates. There's are blanks for the answer now. We have formalized the informal. |
The student calculates the answer and finds out how close she was. We should also throw some love on the closest guesser who may be a student who doesn't usually get a lot of love in math class. |
After that resolution, we ask students to practice their skills, but not just on automatically generated clones of the same problem template. We give them the midpoint and ask them to work backwards to one of the original points. That's essential if you want me to have confidence in your assessment of my student as a "... |
That's it. An intuitive challenge that precedes a lecture video that explains how to resolve the challenge. That'll result in more engaged learners and better learning. |
Other examples? |
And on and on and on. There isn't a recipe for these challenge but I know two things about all of them: |
1. Math teachers have a stronger knack for creating these challenges than people who haven't spent years fielding the question, "Why am I learning this?" fourteen times a day. |
2. These challenges are more fun when they're social. It's one thing to see my own guess at the midpoint. It's another thing entirely to see all my classmate's guesses next to mine. We need the Internet to facilitate that quick, cool social interaction. It just isn't possible with bricks and mortar alone. |
Current online math websites have managed to scale up the aspects of decades-old math learning that few of us remember fondly. We can tinker around the edges of those lectures and exercises, adding a constructed response item here or a Morgan Freeman narration track there. Or we can try something transformative, someth... |
1. I made that site for my final project in Patrick Young's summer Front-end Programming course at Stanford, which, as I mentioned previously, was a pile of fun. If I can make that site in a couple weeks with a thimbleful of programming knowledge, I'm eager to find out what your team can do with its acres of talent a... |
2. This isn't real-world math. I thought initially to pull in some tiles from Google Maps and set up a scenario where the student had to place a helicopter pad exactly between two cities. I don't think it matters. Students ask "Why am I learning this?" because they feel stupid and small, not because they want you to ... |
3. Cost-benefit analysis. Too often we apply a benefit-benefit analysis to edtech. But there are clear costs to the model I'm suggesting here even apart from the cost of the technology itself. There were at least five different moments over that five-minute lecture where I wanted to stop, pose a question, or have stu... |
2012 Nov 7. |
A couple of useful tweets. |
I'm concerned the competitive vibe appeals only to males, but FWIW this is exactly the kind of reaction I'm trying to provoke. |
It isn't! It's passively discouraged, which is a huge bummer. I can think of at least two ways a student might think about the midpoint and how to find it. You can take half a side of the right triangle and add it to the point with the smallest value or you can subtract that half from the point with the largest value. ... |
2012 Nov 12. Mr. Samson reminds me of the Eyeballing Game, which has been nothing if not an enormous inspiration for the work I'm doing here. |
2012 Dec 7. David Lippman does this discussion a favor and creates an environment where the video pauses for student input. Discuss. |
Featured Comment |
Michael Serra, author of Discovering Geometry: |
Curiosity and engagement will always trump "real world" applications. Games, puzzles, being surprised or caught off guard with something new and trying to find out why, these are big tools in our teacher toolbox. |
1,400 Rectangles |
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