Look up images of LA pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. It was madness. And even with that obvious, visible soup we called air back then, there was extreme resistance to anti-pollution measures.

Reference: air quality index by year: http://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php

Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing, which is debatable.

What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

I'd also add this: The internet is developing quickly into a literal extension of the human mind. I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information.

These are students sneaking cell phones into an exam, and going out of their way to surreptitiously look up answers with them. There's no moral ambiguity here.

> Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing.

No it doesn't.

> What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

These are primary school-children. There's nothing wrong with asking them to learn basic skills like literacy or numeracy (or, say, basic integrity) even if they're disconnected from "jobs".

> I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information.

Sure, and there will be tests for that set of skills where accessing the internet during the exam won't be considered cheating. But in this situation it is.

Just because the rules are different for different exams doesn't make cheating fluid.

The rules are there to provide some semblance of a level playing field and to ensure that the relevant skills are being assessed. An elementary school arithmetic test is a pointless exercise if calculators are allowed; an undergraduate engineering test would be a farce if calculators weren't allowed.

At minimum they want you to be able to articulate a phrase and mostly to understand one and, who knows, maybe to have you try to make sure that you'll be able get critical thinking and hopefully not be a little manipulated, cheating prick that will vote an incompetent as a president just to prove a point to an unknown "enemy".

The purpose of the exam is to show that you have a vocabulary, and you can understand and answer some questions about a text you're seeing for the first time.

This is important for a lot of jobs, and it isn't something you can google. Sure, you can google individual words, that is less useful if you're the one writing.

The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.)

I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being misunderstood (ha!).

The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off, but nope.

Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org, thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...

>Poe's law is an Internet adage that states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views

Similar, there was also the Bert is Evil website from 1997, which attempted to "prove" the Seasame Street character Bert was evil. It contained a photo of Bert photoshopped with Osama Bin Laden which actually appeared on a sign at a pro-Bin Laden rally in Bangladesh. The sign holder simply printed out a picture they found on the web, unaware of who the character was or that the photo was a parody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_is_Evil

>After this photo was released on the news wires, the owners of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, raised the possibility of pursuing legal action against Ignacio. In response, he took down the "Bert is Evil" section of his website,[10]:736 also stating that he did not want to undermine the character in the eyes of children who watched Sesame Street. "I am doing this because I feel this has gotten too close to reality", he said.[11] Since the original Bert/Osama picture had been posted to Dennis Pozniak's mirror, he too was bombarded by the international media seeking interviews. As a result of all the attention Pozniak also closed his mirror.[12]

I did mine when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter back in '96. I had quit smoking cigarettes, and this was one of my outlets. It would be cool if someone could produce an accurate timeline of all the AOL, Geocities, etc. sites. Too bad we only have incomplete snapshots! I wouldn't even now how to start something like that.

Is this the same Poe's law referenced in a pull-quote, above the fold, in the linked article?

This article's author properly used block quote positioning, but our minds have been trained to skip it as we assume it is a pull quote.

Later, I posted an article that proposed smoking coffee like crack. A Fox News station actually contacted me when they were working on a piece about teens smoking coffee to get high. They quickly dropped the conversation when I pointed out that the site is not a serious news source--as is evidenced by the fact that every posting is absurd.

Edit: And this is the post that Fox was planning to reference in their story (if you're short on time, scroll past the blather and just enjoy the photos. Like they did): http://www.porkulent.com/2013/11/how-to-prepare-coffee/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13800566

One also occasionally finds weed seeds in dried lentils and beans. And I imagine that there's selection for weeds with similarly sized seeds.

I remember that! It was kind of an in-joke among those of us who haunted the Weir Hall computing labs in our high school days, cadging Internet access to make up for our lack of modem ownership and benefiting from the benign disinterest of ill-paid undergraduate admins.

I enjoyed this in the article as well -- even people whose job revolves around writing jokes (Joe Rogan & the Register) completely missed the joke.

Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.

As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas, were people are driving 100 anyway.

The more insidious statist leaders create deep, subtle, lasting harm. It's the Bushes and Obamas who set up the largest illegal domestic spying operation ever and got away with it because, even when called out, people trusted them not to commit evil acts with the store of data they were collecting. It was Obama who routinely violated journalists rights yet continued to be generally supported by mainstream news outlets.

That genre of politician will be making a comeback after Trump, and that's when people will start feeling comfortable again and go along with anything that promises stability and safety. And I believe that's the environment where the type of manipulation described in this article ("liberal paternalism") can really thrive.

Why, for example, do curriculum developers create (or choose to adopt from textbook publishers) scenarios where if one person fails, everybody in the group suffers? That's not why we collaborate. In fact, that's the opposite of why we collaborate. We don't do it to create multiple points of failure.

It's also a problem with the way we assess and the fact that we almost exclusively conduct summative assessments on these types of projects with high-stakes consequences rather than formative assessments that allow the experience to be used to foster understanding.

I'm a parent (and an education journalist). I see a lot of this. My daughter has had to do the entire work for several "collaborative" projects to maintain her GPA just because the other students wouldn't do the work or wouldn't do it well. That's a common complaint.

Two ideas for getting around that:

1. For the types of assignments where a small group produces a single outcome and shares responsibility for it, assess formatively. If the group does poorly, the teacher sits down with them and gives them supplemental instruction. And, in talking to the students, that teacher can also discover where the weaker students are and focus on them. That way you get assessment with zero high-stakes consequences, and you help advance learning rather than ending it with a letter grade.

2. Assign projects where each student has a job and is evaluated singularly for that job but is allowed to work collaboratively with other students (and the teacher) to complete it. There are all kinds of ways to encourage collaboration in those cases without resorting to punishing others for one person's failure in the end product of a collaborative assignment.

As others have said, there's also the question of assessment itself. Why assess for a grade or points or what have you? There's a movement to do away with grades and test scores. It's working fairly well, but it requires serious dedication from the teacher to ensure that students are learning. Large-scale, that's difficult. We don't have 4 million+ teachers who would be willing to do that extra work.

In my experience at least the weaker contributors to the groups success, even those that just coasted, were still very honest when asked to assess their contribution and the contribution of others.