My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.
In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
Phys.org often bumbles headlines (and implications) a bit, but I like to use it as a stepping stone to the original paper (which I likely wouldn't have heard of otherwise).
Sadly the authors paper isn't easily found on the public internet for free but the abstract [1] describes coupling an idealized ophiolite obduction model with a carbon box model, giving δ13C predictions that align with known examples of cooling in rock record. As you rightly point out, this doesn't replace well studied phenomena like Milankovich cycles, but it does suggests there's more the the story. I have to say I'm not terribly surprised though, weathering of (ultra)mafic rocks has been examined as a sequestration method for at least 5 years [2] but it's still kind of neat to see models matching the rock record.
QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps.
The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.
QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
Extremely clear and satisfying lectures that covers all of basic physics. Much of it is accessible to anyone with some spare time and first year university!
I love nature documentaries, I'll have a look at that one!
I agree, lots of animals use tools in one way or another. Starting or even just controlling a chemical reaction does seem like a big step above mechanical methods though. I wouldn't really be that surprised overall if we eventually discover that H. Naledi or other hominids had some control of fire. I will be surprised if the Dinaledi site turns out to be the first evidence of it
I'll believe it when they release geochemical data for the soot and plot the locations of the "hearths" on the cave map. Where is the published peer reviewed paper associated with this announcement?
This discovery was made in 2013, in a cave that was believed by the SA caving community to be well understood. Where are the hearths they claim to have found? Why did nobody in the previous 9 years of exploration and decades of caving see this? What makes them certain these are not carbide dumps from humans in the last 50 years? [1] Or organic matter that may have fallen from roof cracks? Also, what has happened to the 1500 bone fragments they have excavated
Baboons in modern times are known to navigate caves without fire [2], the paleoanthropology community should still consider the possibility that H. Naledi had no need for light to place their dead these caves.
The systematic teaching of math at some universities doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. Why should linear algebra be taught after calculus? Why is number theory basically ignored by most of engineering and every other science at the undergrad level?
Something important for anyone engaged in technical design work is judgement. Ralph Peck, a famous geotechnical engineer has a good video lecture. It's a bit specific to civil engineering, but the broad strokes of exposure to history of your field, recent developments, a sense of proportion, and commitment to professional development are applicable everywhere.
It seems there is not a complete english translation available from a single translator, or one affiliated with any university/previous scholarship at least. I couldnt find any in a quick search of a few major city library catalogues and major universities in NA. I did find a few journal articles about the book though, and it was very easy to find other Solzhenitsyn books in grade school and other libraries.
The pdf translation below has a typo in the very first line of the introduction and the first chapter was translated by someone(s) on 8chan {1}. So I'm not terribly surprised that typical public libraries don't have a copy.
I like the concept. What happens if a company claims to have removed their recommendations yet has not? Would this even be enough to cause a scandal with real consequences?
In the western world the vast majority of people I know already have zero issues being tracked, advertised to, recommended to, and generally manipulated for "engagement" and profit. A weak law, passed too early and without widespread cultural significance would serve only to give a tighter, more insidious grip on a typical used's view of media, music, and reality in general.