The Gates Foundation's Brave New World: Biometric monitoring bracelets and fMRI in the classroom!

[salvorhardin]

?

Yesterday I posted a blog about the Gates Foundation funding research at Clemson University for something called Galvanic Response Skin bracelets. The project will enable researchers at Clemson to work with researchers in the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to measure student engagement physiologically. ...

On Twitter, one of the readers of this blog told me about yet another Gates grant, this one to the National Center on Time and Learning, Inc., last November. This grant, for $621,265, has the following purpose: “to measure engagement physiologically with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Galvanic Skin Response to determine correlations between each measure and develop a scale that differentiates different degrees or levels of engagement.”

Link: http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/10/more-about-our-brave-new-world

One wonders how kids ever learned anything before.

[TheWraith]

1. So scientific research is now evil. Got it. nt

[salvorhardin]

2. Yes, sometimes it is.

At the risk of godwinning this thread, I would argue that Mengele's research was evil. Or to pick an example closer to home -- the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

But this isn't science -- it's pseudoscience in pursuit of an agenda.

[loyalsister]

13. Eugenics was a pseudoscience invented to advance supremacist principles

AND good intentions.
Bill Gates has good intentions matched with an elitist attitude. I saw him discussing his polio vaccine initiative. Very noble and very valuable for millions of people. I was disappointed by his logic.
His primary motivation is not humanitarian, it is out of concern for the expense burden on others to help maintain the lives of people who are affected.
Apparently his benevolence is accompanied by a pretty complicated agenda.

[girl gone mad]

5. Please don't smear the name of science by associating it with this type of pseudoscientific junk.

[NYC_SKP]

3. I think this is fine.

Collecting data that might be useful in identifying effective and ineffective teaching practices seems to me to be perfectly reasonable.

As long as privacy concerns are fairly addressed and assuming that the data collected aren't used in some nefarious manner, I see nothing wrong with looking for new tools to improve education.

...

[salvorhardin]

8. Why don't we give the kids EMF meters too?

Hey, the data might be useful.

[Angry Dragon]

4. The implanted chip is not far behind

[longship]

6. What do you expect from an uneducated college dropout.

He has money only because he leveraged his idiocy into an operating system, which he did not code, into the worst so-called operating system on the planet. He did so by monopolistic tactics, crushing his competition by shear force of the market. This, in spite of any technological advances which demonstrated better ways.

So I am not surprised that this same college dropout would present himself as an expert in another academic field.

Bill Gates is a fraud. As anybody versed in computer tech already knows, he has always been a fraud.

If you disagree, you need to hear some stories about Bill Gates in the earliest days of microcomputers.

Fuck Bill Gates!

[randome]

7. I couldn't care less about Bill Gates as a person.

But I agree Windows is an awful operating system. The only one I use but it reeks of idiocy, from painting menus with icons that mean absolutely nothing to trying to shoe-horn every bit of data into the same tree view-like experience without regard to what's really best for user consumption.

I think it reflects Gates' personal shortcomings, such as Asperger's Syndrome. It's amazing to me how much the planet has changed due to one person's personality.

[longship]

10. Personality, plus total ignorance of OS design and implementation

I use only Linux. It is secure, stable, and extremely reliable. In 15 years the only crashes were due to hardware, never the OS.

I have helped Windows users solve their problems many times. Most of the time it was some idiotic, stupid operational issue -- easily remedied. But the second cause was some viral incursion, something I have never experienced in over 15 years of continual Linux use.

Windows sucks because it is inherently insecure. It is a bloated marketing platform that uses its insecurity to sell product to make it secure.

I have never run a virus scanner on my Linux boxes because I have never had a problem like that.

Fuck Bill Gates!

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Then there's this ...

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Greetings, learning units !

Please enter page 97 in the "Go To" box<CR>
Begin reading<CR>

[salvorhardin]

12. Hah!

At the end of your assignment, you will be presented with a brief survey to help ensure teacher effectiveness.