הבעיה הייתה למצוא משהו שמתאים לתלמידת חטיבת ביניים

לקח לי המון זמן למצוא משהו איכותי, אחרי הרבה בירורים מצאתי את הדבר המושלם. הקורס הזה עולה לחודש פחות ממה שאני משלם למורה פרטית לשיעור אחד והוא מאפשר לילד ללמוד כמה שהוא רוצה! כבר עלינו מ65 ל80 !

שווה לנסות! אנגלית חינם

http://www.trainingpeaks.com/bbs-forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=52420&posts=1

GOOGLE says many interesting things about it!

I decided to post now because I feel this place as a whole is very functional and social place. I love looking at all of the topics and topics here and considering that I am not much of a poster, I came to the conclusion to make my very first thread.

I recently created my very first website and felt the need to share it with all and get some constructive feedback.

The site is http://computerrepair101.wetpaint.com – computer repair

The request for factual data originated from another journalist (Lapointe). Struck me as reasonable in principle, though odd coming from someone who provided no factual data himself.

By that journalist’s standard, no, you can’t be believed. If you disagree, take it up with Pascal, who set the standard, not me. And take up your other complaints about greed, etc., with someone who actually talked about it.

On the jobs sides, lazy journalism contributed to the great oversupply of scientists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Too many applicants meant dropping wages, dropping opportunities, longer apprenticeships, and so on.

More current is that bad journalism of the ’some say this, some say that’ school has contributed substantially to the problems detailed by Chris in The Republican War on Science. Had the reporting noted that the ’some’ who denied climate change, value of vaccines, theory of evolution, … were not scientists and were a small minority, while the ones who saw the value in each were actually scientists, and were studying the issues, we wouldn’t be where we are. Where we are is that people trying to teach the overwhelming consensus understanding on those topics have their jobs threatened, funding reduced (see the EOS program in the 1990s, for ex.), and quite a lot more grief in non-professional situations (including the death threat I received) because the journalists involved presented the science and anti-science positions as if choosing the science position was purely a matter of preference rather than evidence.

Your non sequitur is interesting on its own.

Do people become scientists because of science journalists? You say, minus even any anecdotes, yes. I am a scientist. How we got in to the area is a common topic of conversation at meetings. Among written sources of science interest, the overwhelming majority is science fiction — both short stories and novels. For written non-fiction, the overwhelming majority is science books (not magazines), and most of those being science books written by scientists (Asimov, Gamow, Gould, Sagan, Wilson, …). Next, and occupying a small minority, would be magazines like Scientific American and Discover — which are also notable for routinely having their science articles written by scientists. The magazines usually, however, follow an interest in science, not lead it. It’s the other sources that produced the interest. At best, the magazines can nurture an interest that already exists.

The news is no better in the visual field. The overwhelming majority is science fiction (again) movies and TV shows. Next is science non-fiction shows like Nova, National Geographic, and such. Maybe in this latter case journalists get involved. I’m not sure. I am sure that the credits listing in such shows a goodly number of scientists as actively involved. If the topic is near my work, I typically know personally at least 1/3rd of the scientists credited. Then there’s one of the most successful series of all time on science — Cosmos, written by and starring a scientist. (Carl Sagan)

Journalists are really pretty irrelevant to this target, a point it looks like the journalists who award the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction books (the only category science can show up in) are inclined towards themselves. Of 9 books in that category (that I recognized, as listed by Wikipedia), I make 6 as being by scientists rather than journalists. I commented about this over at initforthegold earlier today. The 9 are:
Journalists writing on science:
Richard Rhodes
Tracy Kidder
John McPhee

Scientists writing on science
Carl Sagan
E. O. Wilson (twice)
Douglas Hofstader
Jonathan Weiner
Jared Diamond

I’ve probably missed some, and chances are that I’ve missed more journalists than scientists. Still, there are at least 6 books by scientists on that list. That’s amazing, considering that the judges aren’t scientists, in fact are journalists and may not know anything about science to speak of. Perhaps you can finish off the list with careful examination of all the awardees. Note, however, that I’ve already been liberal — Kidder’s book was about engineering rather than science.

What’s especially striking here is that the category is for writing towards the general public, not for professional audiences. Scientists get jobs and promotions for writing to professional audiences, not general public. It is journalists whose entire job is to be writing for the general public. And they lose at this extremely elevated level to amateurs.

Science journalism is important, I think. But if your contention is that science journalists are on the same ‘team’ as scientists, you (and Chris) need to produce some evidence for that. As best I’ve seen, journalists are on the team of producing more revenue for their media outlet. That’s a rather different team than trying to understand more about the universe. And if your contention is that science journalism is important because that’s how future scientists get interested, you need to produce a lot of evidence since I have extensive first and second-hand knowledge from scientists that this isn’t so.

Where science journalism is important, I think, is in the realm of contributing to an informed society that can make informed decisions. The lousy reportage of the last 20 years that contributed to what Chris wrote about in Republican War on Science is not contributing to an informed society.

Some of the blogs I once held in drastically low esteem have gradually progressed in quality — not so much quality on the side of the most knowing or expert contributors, but on the side of the less scientifically literate opinionated contributors.

Gradually a trickle down has occurred, it seems to me, such that if there remain many naive questions and unsupportable opinions and contentions, some of those refer — in however tiny increments — to allude to actual events and situations more often, and to choose opinions less on basis of totally wrong assertions of fact and less on basis of totally illogical attempts at rationalizing from those facts.

All humans (and scientists are most of them human)are insufficiently informed about nature, and less than absolutely objective in interpretation. Some of us are merely less hamstrung in having perfect knowledge, and perfectly rigorous thinking on the meaning of the roiling pool of ‘discovered’ facts at our cumulative disposal than are others.

No matter how the most astute and self-honest and most ‘reasonable’ among us may protest against it, we all have in common the necessity of muddling with less than a full deck of
fact cards, or a fully settled set of value judgments, or a fully perfected system of deciding which interpretation of facts ‘gets it right.’

What is blogging but a broad spectrum dialogue amongst the less ignorant and unreasonable with the more ignorant and unreasonable. None of us, no matter how highly regarded by ourselves or others, is above being wrong about some questions in science. And nothing stifles wisdom more, this old fart believes, at least, than smug, sanctimonious assurance that we who have the MOST empirically testable facts to play with are thereby licensed to have the last word on an assumption, or an interpretation about the meanings of data, even to the point of opinions about nature, human nature, what society should and should not do, and who should only shut up and listen to our
exalted take on things.

Blogs educate the educable at all levels of naivete or expertise. Valid questions sometime arise like pearls from the mouths of innocents.

I discern that there is a homeostasis of learning that takes place in a society in a way somewhat akin to that among the cells of a biological organism, where, if one cell does not understand what another is like, or what it is about, it nonetheless is rendered more capable of living in concert with the ‘community’ if it is somehow in touch with it.

No more is science capable of running the world optimally — in absence of interfacing with other organs of society than is a heart or a brain capable of living outside a body nor — given a body to function within — can it survive and contribute to the muddling of the rest without participating an an ongoing dialogue.

Such a dialogue is blogging. It crosses interdisciplinary boundaries within the sciences where — goodness knows — there is much ignorance by the left hand of what the right hand is doing. It crosses boundaries between the science professions and science academia, where, once again — goodness knows — some strange interpretations beyond the realm of any data have resolved may tend to be taught as grounded in fact. It crosses the boundaries between the data gatherer and the philosophically oriented, where questions of the meanings and significances and values of things cannot be firmly established but can be given the highest and best argumentations as to how they might be interpreted. And last, but not least, they cross the boundaries between the otherwise totally naive formers of opinion, where those opinions can serve (in a democratic society) to influence what the sciences and science professionals can, and cannot do… which can be beneficial to the whole of a society or downright obstructive of the very research and development of ideas and technology that could serve to provide solutions to major problems.

Okay, okay… I wax grandiloquent… but there is wisdom to be shared and cultivated and grown by the kind of great dialogue which, in this old fart’s respectful opinion, is provided by
the mechanism of blogging.

In a very real sense, sharing of scientific ideas and issues and opinions has a potential to raise a society to a higher level of wisdom — even as it may knock a few bigots off their self-styled pedestals, when they get carried away with their own academic or professional accolades and forget that they can be mistaken in extracting ideas too far beyond tight esoteric circles and supposing them to be what is best for everyone.

Blogging circulates more freely the life’s blood of learning, both top down and bottom up in a society.

It’s one of the best phenomena that has come along in ages.

So there. You’ve gained the benefits of this olf fart’s opinion. If it has merit, learn from it. If not, it conveys information about one way of looking at the question raised
(:>)

Is there any piece of evidence to such a claim? On the contrary, numerous scientists have said over the years that, as young people, they’ve been encouraged to become scientists by reading or listening to good science on TV or in magazines.

By the way, Chris, good piece.

For my preference, I’d rather see a lot of good science reporting, and science journalists. I’d also rather see a lot of good science being done and reported. Journalists (science- or otherwise) these past 40 years have contributed to the job problems of scientists. It’s odd, then, to see a plea for scientists to save science journalists’ jobs. (Not least odd is that anyone thinks that scientists could do so! If what scientists thought mattered to media, science coverage would have been tremendously different for generations.)

You mention the faculty adjuncts, never destined for tenure and seem to think it a bad thing that science journalists now have similar problems. You know when there was an enormous increase in that as a way of life for scientists? Late 80s, when science journalists mindlessly ran ‘projections’ of a ‘looming shortage of scientists’. There was no such shortage, looming or otherwise. The definition of ’shortage’ used was 150% as many scientists as jobs. Even the most trivial of research would have revealed it. Instead, the reporters echoed the report, and there was a major increase in graduates. With, then, far more graduates than jobs, tenure-track positions all but disappeared, adjunct positions greatly expanded, post-docs went from an option to consider in my field (about 1/3rd took them in 1987) to heavy majority (2/3rds in 1989), and from one postdoc to a series of postdocs until either the person got lost (too long a gap in their postdoc treadmill), gave up, or, if extraordinarily fortunate, actually got a more or less stable job doing something that more or less resembled science. When things hit the rotating blades 1989-1995ish, what were science journalists doing? Reporting that there were whiny lazy science graduates and that (still) there was a ‘looming shortage’ of scientists.

A generation later, it’s science journalists’ turn. The newer crowd of science journalists has my sympathy, since I do know what that period was like for new would-be scientists.

For science reporter-bloggers, this entrepreneurial patchwork that Chris describes comes with the additional challenge – always true for freelancers but more so now – of funding the necessary beat-background work that enables reporting as opposed to repackaging. It takes time to read deep into journals or go line-by-line through a budget. Science-media staff salaries used to pay for that time. The loss of staff jobs raises the question of who among the freelance corps will be able to afford to do that deep work.

I meant that in other cases, he and other bloggers point out actual mistakes in articles that appear in publications that you and I write for – that’s the point at which we should start building a dialogue. I mean, bloggers make mistakes all the time – unfortunately the convention of the strikeout and the “UPDATE” has yet to make it into news articles.

1) I think you’re wrong when you say blogging and science journalism have yet to fuse, or that the result (which is as much blogging or “news blogging” as anything else) has yet to turn into a career for anyone. Do you read the science coverage at Ars Technica? It’s a blog. And it has staff devoted solely to science.

Scientific American also employs one full-time blogger – Jordan Lite. There will be more — they just aren’t recognized as bloggers because they’re not allowed to talk about their cats in between talking about new discoveries.

2) Larry Moran is a bit of a straw man — holding him up as an exemplar of the opinion of the science blogosphere is taking an outlier and making it the mouthpiece for a heterogenous group of people. That said, he occasionally has a point.

3) When bloggers point out the mistakes of the MSM, they’re performing a service — even if their primary motivation appears to be the universal delight all humans take in being smug. It’s high time we figured out how to open up a dialogue so that those corrections can make it into our pieces, and so that experts in general can help us to be better journalists (like it or not, we’re the professional communicators tasked with getting their knowledge to the public, at least for now).

The goal is getting good information to the public, and ego has to be set aside if that’s to happen.

I agree, blogging is not a replacement for journalism and science bloggers might be journalists or they might not, just as they might be scientists or they might not.

Larry was most certainly out of place, but many of the scientists I know have a tendency to be myopic and quick to generalize about other people’s situations.

Personally, I don’t think many scientist bloggers are going to have the kind of time it takes to do serious investigative journalism. And that’s a sad state, since we need that sort of work now more than ever.

It’s a shame what Larry Moran is doing with his blog. You’re right. It’s like he’s attacking his own. It’s just kind of sad.