grego

Well, the teachers usually have a masters degree and it is quite a popular profession, so it is somewhat hard to get into the University to be a teacher.

Finland is also very egalitarian, or socialist if you will. This means that there are not so many good or bad schools, all schools have pretty much the same resources. Of course there are differences, but nothing as flagrant as in the US.

Private schools are practically non-existent (less than 2%).

So while the Finnish system lifts the average, I'm not sure how much the top performers benefit from it.

Beep, wrong answer.

The PISA test the article quoted is given to 15-16 year olds. Those kids have not yet taken the vocational track, at least not in Finland.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/faqoecdpisa.htm#The_Test_and_Questi...

Pisa tests measure and rank average. Finland for example can keep the average high, which is generally good for the nation. But average alone does not tell the whole picture.

I think the original articles only merit was in raising the discussion about education, which is always good. It did not convey any profound knowledge of education and the problem space, not to me at least.

It's basic research. Some countries' politicians were convinced that you need basic research to do applied research. It's also a great international collaborative project, where subcontractors from many countries get actual money making contracts to build the required detectors, magnets, etc.

Like there are many coding free apps for Android and making no money doing it... kids or first timers. I believe in few years there will be less of both, as the first generation doing this has turned bitter and told everyone who cares to listen not to make the same mistake.

Now we are living exceptional times in that cost of hardware to do good work is so cheap that anyone can have a go at photography / programming / ...

The thing weighted about 200kg, so the stand was there so that he would not have to lift it up.

Also, at no point it was really an emergency as he had ample rations.

~25% of Android apps, at least games, are native applications, not Java apps.

Bollocks I say. It's all about latency and bandwidth. If I'd have fiber in my cabin in Montana, I might agree. Perfect connectivity all times is just a dream. Plus native will always have an edge. Sure my calendar is in the cloud, but everything.. nah, don't think so. For photos and videos the pipes ain't fat enough for anything but backup and sync.

Note that with respect to Nokia what you describe is no longer the case. Last I checked it took 1 Euro to register as a developer, and Nokia QA+signing is free. Developers get 70% cut as elsewhere.

What ads? I thought all the smart people were running AdBlock...

Qt Creator is quite good for C++, cross platform, +free. http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools/

IMHO it is the best there is for Linux, and better for C++ than XCode.

I would think a cell phone camera would have served just as well, something like a used Nokia 5800 would be good as it has a reasonable camera.

The weight would be less and you could do away with the separate cell-phone for GPS. One would need to code a little to make the camera auto-shoot, but while at it you could record all sorts of interesting accelerometer and GPS data. Would be a nice school science project.

I suppose the original author is worried about U.S. average falling with respect to world average.

If they don't want to alienate existing developers, a logical choice would be official Qt support for Android. Meego could also be tweaked to run Android, as it is already being done by others, see for example http://www.aavamobile.com/

Hmm, in my opinion Qt/Qt Quick is certainly superior to Android in many respects today. And I do use both.

How about just let the rich be rich and get richer, but making it very hard to pass on inheritance. So their kids would be on equal playing field with everybody else. That would make it their vested interest to improve conditions in that field for all.