Last seen: 3 hours ago
downstreamer is a guy from Leland, Michigan, USA
"Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash. Otherwise, everybody would have croaked long ago. They all knew that." from `One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' downstreamer
Rated • 12 reviews • education, creativity • ted.com
"If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Ken Robinson's talk is funny and profound - how schools kill creativity by making a hierarchy - math and language on top, art and music on the bottom. Creativity involves mistakes, and our education system is geared to the simple answers of right and wrong.
Rated • 1 review • politics, health care • nytimes.com
From the page: The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.
Rated • 3 reviews • politics, banking, society • kunstler.com
Kunstler opines:
From the page: The 'corn-pone Hitler' scenario is still another possibility - Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want 'to keep gubmint out of Medicare!' - but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what's more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within.
Rated • 2 reviews • education • canada.com
From the page: Elementary and high schools tend to emphasize math and languages at the expense of the arts, thanks in part to our fixation on measuring student performance.
The arts, after all, don't lend themselves well to traditional metrics. And if we can't measure artistic performance, then there is little point in spending precious time and money on teaching the subjects.
Thanks to mlok.
Rated • 18 reviews • literature, quotes • quotes4all.net
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Rated • 3 reviews • asia, society • bbc.co.uk
Smile, or you're fired. Und vee haf ways of meschherrring you!
Rated • 21 reviews • film noir • spectacle.org
Very cool
"In the penultimate scene, when someone lights a candle or strikes a match, we have all been shot; some are dead and some are only wounded. Sirens are heard in the background, coming from the decaying city."
Rated • 1 review • politics • american.com
I knew it:
"Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education and performance on mathematics and reading assessments."
You gotta be dumb to believe that we're headed for a "socialist" takeover. I mean, really.
