Quotulatiousness

April 6, 2011

A good example of what not to crowdsource

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

The Guardian tried to enlist the brainpower of the crowd to solve the problems at Fukushima. As innovative as some of these solutions might be, it does demonstrate that there are things that cannot be crowdsourced:

Todd: “Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. […] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste.”

Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: “repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens”

Andrew, Inventor: “water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific.”

Hugh, Geology Student: “I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench.”

Max: “I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant”

OmegaSector: “IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil.”

Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: “Small scale nuclear strike.”

Kevin: “Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that’s over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?”

Not Einstein: “friendly radiation… to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire.”

Oscar. Mike. Golf.

India’s educational triumphs and hidden flaws

Filed under: Economics, Education, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:00

India has vastly increased the numbers of students who go on to post-secondary education, and strives to keep tuition low and entry open to as many prospective students as possible. This great success in enrollment hides some pretty nasty deficiencies in the actual quality of education being offered:

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

[. . .]

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What’s more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

[. . .]

Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

There’s no easy solution to this problem: by lowering educational standards, you reduce the employability of your existing graduates. If you raise standards, you increase the cost of education, both to students and to the government. Privatization may be the answer, but it won’t come cheap, and therefore will be politically dangerous to implement.

Latest polling results

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:46

XM-25 video released

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:14

XM25 from PEO Soldier on Vimeo.

If the field trials in Afghanistan go well, this could be a very useful addition to the US Army’s armament collection. As the video shows, however, firing a 25mm round means there’s quite a kick to the soldier firing the weapon. The capability the weapon provides, however, isn’t available at the squad level any other way, so just hand it to your biggest trooper . . .

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