EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you about another technology that I’ve heard you say could solve a lot of problems. Automation usually gets thought of in the way you could lose jobs from it. I’ve seen talk about it in an interesting, the optimistic way, that if you could harness the right politics around it, automation could be a way towards a better, more economically dignified future for people. How do you think about automation and its role in the future of the economy?NOAM CHOMSKY: Any on Earth boring, destructive, dangerous work should be automated to the extent possible. That frees people up to do better work, more creative work, more fulfilling work, safer work. So that’s all to the good. How automation takes place is a matter of social and economic policy. It can take place in many ways. Let me just mention one important careful study, which showed what the choices are that the former colleague of mine find historian of technology, David Noble, unfortunately died a couple of years ago. His major work was on the machine tool industry, the core of much of modern industrial capitalism.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBy the 1950s, the machine tool industry was beginning to be automated. Numerical processing was coming in. Computers were coming in. Waves of potentially changing the machine-tool tool industry using the new tools that were coming along. There were two ways to do it. Both ways were experimented with. One way, de-skilled machinists that replaced skilled machinists, first of all, by automation, but also by turning the people themselves into robots, who just followed orders and so on. That was one way. The other way to do it put more power into the hands of skilled machinists. OK. Still using the same technology. As Noble shows pretty convincingly, there was no economic reason to pick the first way. It was picked, it was picked. That’s the way it was picked, but for power reasons.The ownership management class wants to deskill people, wants to turn them into subordinate subjects, not independent agents and actors. So they pick the mode of automation which deskilled machinists still around, but not skilled, and turn them into servants rather than controllers and actors. That happens all the time. Let’s take another case. 2009, the economy was collapsing. The auto industry essentially collapsed. That was pretty much nationalized, then use the term. But basically, the Obama administration took over most of the auto industry.Well, there were a couple of choices. One choice was to turn it back to the former owners, bail them out, so taxpayer pays them out, give them term ownership and control back to them, maybe different faces but the same class, and have them go back to what they were doing before on producing cars to create traffic jams and pollution and destroy the environment. That was one choice. The choice that was taken. There was another choice. Turn the auto industry over to the work force, and the stakeholders, the community. Let them have control. Let them think through what they ought to do. Maybe they’ll decide on the sensible thing.

Batch Processing

January 11, 2021

(d) All calculations shown in this appendix shall be implemented on a site-level basis. Site level concentration data shall be processed as follows: (1) The default dataset for PM2.5 mass concentrations for a site shall consist of the measured concentrations recorded from the designated primary monitor(s). All daily values produced by the primary monitor are considered part of the site record; this includes all creditable samples and all extra samples. (2) Data for the primary monitors shall be augmented as much as possible with data from collocated monitors. If a valid daily value is not produced by the primary monitor for a particular day (scheduled or otherwise), but a value is available from a collocated monitor, then that collocated value shall be considered part of the combined site data record. If more than one collocated daily value is available, the average of those valid collocated values shall be used as the daily value. The data record resulting from this procedure is referred to as the “combined site data record.”

1.1. Monitors For the purposes of AQS, a monitor does not refer to a specific piece of equipment. Instead, it reflects that a given pollutant (or other parameter) is being measured at a given site. Identified by: The site (state + county + site number) where the monitor is located AND The pollutant code AND POC – Parameter Occurrence Code. Used to uniquely identify a monitor if there is more than one device measuring the same pollutant at the same site. For example monitor IDs are usually written in the following way: SS-CCC-NNNN-PPPPP-Q where SS is the State FIPS code, CCC is the County FIPS code, and NNNN is the Site Number within the county (leading zeroes are always included for these fields), PPPPP is the AQS 5-digit parameter code, and Q is the POC. For example: 01-089-0014-44201-2 is Alabama, Madison County, Site Number 14, ozone monitor, POC 2.

The RDF model encodes data in the form ofsubject,predicate,objecttriples. The subjectand object of a triple are both URIs that each identify a resource, or a URI and a stringliteral respectively. The predicate specifies how the subject and object are related, and isalso represented by a URI.

separate the workflow description from its execution.

We have a universal goalfor our computational classes to get students to do something interesting with data (e.g.,visualization) within the first ten minutes of the first class.

In order to be useful during teaching, a formative assessment has to be quick to administer (so that it doesn’t break the flow of the lesson) and have an unambiguous correct answer (so that it can be used with groups). The most widely used kind of formative assessment is probably the multiple choice question (MCQ). A lot of teachers have a low opinion of them, but when they are designed well, they can reveal much more than just whether someone knows specific facts. For example, suppose you are teaching children how to do multi-digit addition [Ojos2015] and you give them this MCQ: What is 37 + 15? a) 52 b) 42 c) 412 d) 43 The correct answer is 52, but the other answers provide valuable insights: If the child chooses 42, she has no understanding of what “carrying” means. (She might well write 12 as the answers to 7+5, then overwrite the 1 with the 4 she gets from 3+1.) If she chooses 412, she is treating each column of numbers as a separate problem. This is still wrong, but it’s wrong for a different reason. If she chooses 43 then she knows she has to carry the 1 but is carrying it back into the column it came from. Again, this is a different mistake, and requires a different clarifying explanation from the teacher.

“Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it,” Ms. McGonigal said. “Attention is one way your brain decides, ‘Is this interesting? Is this worthwhile? Is this fun?’ ”It’s the reason television shows we tweet through feel tiresome and books we pick up and put down and pick up again never seem to end. The more we allow ourselves to be distracted from a particular activity, the more we feel the need to be distracted. Paying attention pays dividends

The thought that millions of years have been required for the creation goes far in helping us appreciate the uniqueness and preciousness of our earth. As we look at nature, we are looking into deep creation through an eye fashioned out of elements gleaned from the remains of burned-out stars. Not a nature fashioned by the quick wave of a hand, but one that has required about 13.7 billion years to cultivate (pg. 163).