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I bought an encyclopedia

optoutproject.net

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Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#81

Post by elicksaur »

contingencies wrote: post #65
ClosedPistachio wrote: post #2

Similarly, I purchased a copy of "Bosch Automotive Handbook" [1]. For $65 it will literally walk you through every component of a vehicle, from the metals required, the fuel, to the electronics. It's presence on my bookshelf is meant to be aspirational. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/

Thanks! Looks like a great book, and it's on libgen (11E). However, the English is positively atrocious . The next edition would be wise to invest in a competent editor. Very first page: The International Convention on Road Signs and Signals [1] defines a motor or power-driven vehicle as a self-propelled road vehicle. Rail-borne vehicles and country-specifically mopeds which are not treated as motorcycles are excepti…

This vs the and motor vehicle needing quotes are debatable. The last sentence doesn’t need a comma but probably should be reworded for clarity.

Seems about as difficult to parse as typical highly technical writing.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#82

Post by keiferski »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #53
keiferski wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge of and use of AI tools in non-tech industries is still pretty low. I wouldn’t expect a publisher of encyclopedias to implement AI tools for years.

AI disclaimers already appear in journalism. It's a short leap to the broader traditional publishing world.

I don’t think that’s true. Traditional publishing is much more time consuming and expensive and doesn’t have the instant publishing model that online journalism does.

In general tech workers on HN tend to overestimate how familiar with technology non-tech workers are.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#83

Post by musicale »

aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

> asked to "do research" for their school projects

What is the educational goal of such an assignment?

Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.)

But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and written up in a more useful, tutorial format, in textbooks?

I suppose there could be exceptions, perhaps current events or popular culture, or maybe developments in particularly fast-moving fields. But in this case I think students would be well served by a curated collection of sources rather than being cast off in the deep end without guidance. If the goal is to expose students to primary sources (which can be very interesting) I think a curated collection would also work well.

Encyclopedias are great though, for both random and focused reading. Both subject-based and alphabetic organization can be good for browsing and discovery.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#84

Post by Jap2-0 »

musicale wrote: post #83
aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

> asked to "do research" for their school projects What is the educational goal of such an assignment? Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.) But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and…

Sure, the subject matter is in the textbook, but that's not necessarily the only thing being taught—research skills (source evaluation, comparison, synthesis, etc.) also need to (or should) be taught at some point. And teaching material in multiple ways (and having student participation) is beneficial for learning and retention.

Now some parts of the case mentioned above obviously aren't great, but there are absolutely good justifications for this from an educational perspective.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#85

Post by aidenn0 »

tivert wrote: post #43

> How do we make crayons? If you're being retro, old Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers episodes covered that regularly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM https://www.pbs.org/video/mister-rogers-neighborhood-competi... > We had just bought an emulator to teach them to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They loved it, but wanted to quickly look up clues --- quick, he drove off in a car with a blue and yel…

I still have my 1988 World Almanac from that game. It had a color insert with all of the world flags. I used to love looking at that.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#86

Post by contingencies »

elicksaur wrote: post #81
contingencies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Looks like a great book, and it's on libgen (11E). However, the English is positively atrocious . The next edition would be wise to invest in a competent editor. Very first page: The International Convention on Road Signs and Signals [1] defines a motor or power-driven vehicle as a self-propelled road vehicle. Rail-borne vehicles and country-specifically mopeds which are not treated as motorcycles are excepti…

This vs the and motor vehicle needing quotes are debatable. The last sentence doesn’t need a comma but probably should be reworded for clarity. Seems about as difficult to parse as typical highly technical writing.

It's not technical, it's just bad.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#87

Post by habi »

patrickdavey wrote: post #78
pixelmonkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android, the official Wikipedia app is surprisingly good at marking articles for offline reading, organizing them into collections, and downloading them, including related assets like images. When I'm traveling I install the app on my "travel phone" (which is Android / Google Fi) and take advantage of it along with Kindle app offline reading for Lonely Planet guides, and the Google Maps offline maps feature.

I can absolutely recommend osmand+ (Android) or maps.me (iPhone) for OpenStreetMap offline data. Streets better than Google maps ;)

Instead of maps.me I suggest to use https://organicmaps.app/, the privacy-respecting fork, since maps.me was sold to a payment processor. OrganicMaps is a fork from the original founders.

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#88

Post by iancmceachern »

aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

This is what most work looks like these days, so it's a good prep for that at least

Re: I bought an encyclopedia

#89

Post by 082349872349872 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #67

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was…

> The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate.

Where are you? In the US, education is "free to play"; to win, you need to pay to live in a good school district.

(ancient china worked similarly, if the anecdote about Mencius' mother is to be believed)

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