On the Benefits of giving School Children Homework

From an article by Alfie Kohn ( Principal, January - February 2007):

The positive effects of homework are largely mythical.  In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research.  The results are nothing short of stunning.  For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school.  For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement.  At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.  Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.

 I think someone should tell the children!

Verity Stob on Acrobat Reader

It pleases me to see I am not the only person that thinks that Adobe have lost the thread with recent versions of their PDF reader:

Recent versions of Adobe Reader (as it has now called) have shown distinct signs of megalomania, and I claim - rather boldly - that it has now put on its wetsuit and is paddling in Great White waters.

Here’s some circumstantial evidence:

• A splash screen lingers for so long that you get a chance to memorise that huge list of patents that Adobe claims to itself, and even perform some basic arithmetic on the first few numbers, by way of passing the time.  Have you spotted that sequence of primes yet?
• There is that groan of realisation that can be regularly heard everywhere on the internet, when an accidental click on a PDF in a search results page means that the user is now confined at Adobe’s pleasure for the next minute or so, until Acrobat chooses to give back control of the web browser.
• Have you ever made the mistake of letting the thing upgrade itself via Internet downloads?  I let version 7 have its way, and it rebooted the machine three or four times on the trot.  Honestly, one of the more gullible heuristic algorithms in the virus checker thought I had got an infection.

Enough. There is an alternative is called Foxit; it is time to remind Adobe that it is mortal too.

Wonderful stuff!  From here.  I must look up some more of Ms Stob's work.

Java Quotes

A couple of quotes about Java. Tim Bray on the complexity of Java generics:

Java worked so well because it hit the 80/20 point; for my money one of the loudest, cleanest 80/20 technology victories ever. Subsequent attempts to fill in the 20% were, well, mostly harmless. Until generics, which are a disaster; they have made Java harder to learn and to understand, and you can't avoid them.

Steve Yegge on Java's tendency to produce code bloat:

Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.

Hate Mail for Linguists

From an interview with Steven Pinker:

... you wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs, ...

Multi-Track Hollow Ways on Kempswithen

Kempswithen is a hill near Kildale in the North Yorkshire Moors.  It is crossed by the old road that runs from Guisborough to Westerdale and at several places alongside this road there are traces of earlier routes that the road took.  The section shown above is only about a kilometre north from the Little Hoghrah Moor hollow ways mentioned here and the latter is very probably where the road used to cross Baysdale Beck (instead of further down-stream at Hob Hole). 

As I said in my earlier post, I like to think that these multiple tracks were formed by the road meandering over time: people used one track until it became too muddy and rutted, then they moved over to one side and took a slight different, less muddy and rutted, route.  However, I suspect that it is more likely that most of the parallel tracks were in use at the same time, as herds of cattle and sheep were driven along them in the middle ages.  If that was so then they would have appeared as broad gashes in the landscape, much like motorways do nowadays.  The North Yorkshire Moors, which are nowadays so quiet, must have once been much busier.