Worse yet is that there is a world of difference between being able to recognize a word when primed, and being able to recognize it when not primed. When it decided that I need refreshing on a phrase I probably got flashcards corresponding to translate this English phrase into Russian, translate the Russian phrase into English (from a set of pre-chosen words), type this Russian phrase in Russian, and maybe type the English version of this Russian phrase and/or type the Russian version of this English phrase. All with the same phrase. Lumped with many other variations of the exercise on the same topic.
Introducing them all together is helpful. However after some level of proficiency I would like to receive them separately. In a group with unrelated exercises. On a schedule indicating how well I know that phrase.
That said, they have been a painless way to gain a basic foundation.
My observation from using Duolingo (Spanish) was similar to this. My theory was that there spaced repetition was simply based topic and then once a topic was chosen it then decided what words to test you on. This is crude, simplistic and ineffective (IMHO). Like you say, there are words you see rarely.
Also, certain topics end up reinforcing earlier topics. I lost count of the number of times that the stupid "algorithm" would make me go through the exercise of translating "no, nada". At some point, don't I just know this?
Additionally, when you have topics that aren't "gold", it simply selects the first non-gold one to repeat. This can mean that a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the tree gets rusty because you don't get to it while you end up redoing stuff you know backwards.
I made this observation in the forums but couldn't really get any traction on the issue.
At some point they also introduced the stupid heart system, which was pretty much my trigger for just abandoning the whole thing.
Also, I'm really not sure how much this format actually works. Like having completed the Spanish tree, I'm honestly not sure if I really remember anything more than a small fraction of it.
If you look at some of the core languages like German the course has a 'words' tab and it shows you exactly how strong it thinks you know each word and when you saw each word last.
It could be different between languages, and who knows how well it works.. but it's definitely something they seem to be working on and putting thought into.
Thing is, I do less than 1 lesson per day. Probably 3 lessons per two weeks. Meaning that I press Practice button about 100 times in that two week period.
After about 40 days, I went back to go through some of the previous lessons, given their new Crown update, and realized I haven't seen some of the words at all.
Don't forget to take into account that new words are added to each course regularly. For newer languages and any of the beta languages, the words you are taught can change very frequently.
I've found that Lingvist is pretty good at spaced repetition. It focuses on hammering in the words I don't pick up quickly, but it still reviews all of the vocabulary it offers pretty regularly.
For a country that is so weighed down by the health issues around obesity, it's quite weird taxes/incentives based on calorie per gram isn't anywhere in sight. The savings from not having to take care of so much sick people would be enormous.
It's clear from the situation that the free market choices are suboptimal. Who wants to suffer through most of their life and die early? Yet these choices are still made. If you can't educate, then tax fairly and force them to make the right choices.
I'm pretty sure taxing by calorie density would make things better. There's no cost in doing that, it would just shift people to eat less calorie dense food like fruits, vegetables and leafy greens.
The main problem is that the current laws, taxes and infrastructure are heavily optimized to produce calorie dense foods. Another is that people like some of those foods on a regular basis in their diet, so they might complain.
I would say this would cost more in political points than in real money.
"Collective" is practically a trademark term of the communist movement. It's one of their signature policies, the #1 guaranteed way to produce mass famine on fertile land!
(When tired of mass starvation, the strategy is to export oil & buy wheat from the prairies, if you have enough oil.)
What labels marxist theology applied to its imaginary systems is besides the point. This was all just words which the guys with guns made a certain class of intellectuals spout for their bread, to make sure everyone knew who was the boss.
An accretion disk is not a black hole. Current physics have no other explanation for the disks, but it does not mean that the black holes are really there.
There is also some lack of precision on the LIGO experiment that does not invalidate all reasonable alternative explanations.
As people already said, the evident is overwhelming on the side of black holes existing. But we don't have any definitive measurement of them.
I think this is as definitive a proof we'll get until we get close enough to directly measure Hawking radiation. Of course, by that time we should also be close enough to "see" the black hole directly...
It's a bit a matter of definition or interpretation but I would count the LIGO observations as direct observations of black holes. But as others pointed out there's lots of evidence for their existence.
>If only we didn't waste all of the antibiotics on non-human animals.
This is the one thing that makes me want to turn vegetarian.
we waste antibiotics on cattle.
regardless those same cattle become reservoirs where new diseases that could kill us are incubated, because they are mammals like is.
It would be very difficult for a plant disease to jump to us.
To be fair, I remember an E Coli outbreak in spinach that laid a lot of people out. (I probably eat as much spinach as I do any meat :| and here I like to say I’m not much of a gambler)
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Not to take away from your collective points at all. Rehashing the entire situation makes us look like a foolish species to have burned through such an advantageous technology so quickly. One can only hope we might come to yet more elegant solutions.
Well, spinach E Coli is there because we use cattle poop all over it. Nothing better than fertilising our vegetables with manure rich in antibiotics resistant E Coli.
Antibiotics for human use are nothing. There's around 70 billion domesticated land animals being born and dying every year. That's 700 billion Petri dishes with varying antibiotic power in just 10 years, and that number is more than all of the humans that ever lived on Earth. More than enough for some massively superior bacteria to evolve.
Zuckerberg stated that they delete all of the data after user deletes their account (not deactivate).