Tag Archives: test

The Best Tips for Going Zero Waste on a Budget

by FelicitSumpter Posted on January 14, 2019

Going zero waste or plastic-free is often touted as a way to save money by simplifying. True, most people who go zero waste eventually spend less (you stop buying disposables?month after month, for example), but the initial set-up for a zero waste lifestyle can be a touch spendy.

First, there’s the need to buy reusable items that will stand the test of time. Most people who begin their zero waste journey invest in a few items like refillable jars, cloth produce bags and hankies?all items that make living zero waste day-to-day a whole of a lot easier. But, they have a cost.

Second, bulk grocery goods (pastas and dried fruit from bin dispensers, for example) aren’t always the cheapest option. In some cases, you win out?saving a little cash where you would have paid for packaging. But in other instances, high-quality bulk goods just aren’t that much cheaper.

So, if you’re on a budget, take the following tips to heart. Going zero waste may not halve your expenses overnight, but you’ll gain?in other even more meaningful ways in the long run!

1. Start small.

One of the best things you can do to save money while transitioning to zero waste is to start small. Start by purchasing only the essentials (this list is a great start) and spreading out other purchases over time. Remember: going zero waste is all about limiting consumption, after all.

2. Take a break from other shopping.

Set a clear intention to do no unnecessary shopping for an entire month. It’ll be tough, but rewarding, and can help free up some cash for zero waste purchases at the start of your journey. (More on that here.)

3. Avoid comparison.

Sure, everyone loves a gorgeous zero waste pantry complete with uniform glass jars and hand-stamped labels. But is that really necessary to get the job done? No. Avoid comparing yourself to people who are further along in the process than you. Right now, an empty jam jar and a collection of containers will do just fine.

4. Shop secondhand.

If this sounds cliche, consider us proud. We are huge proponents of secondhand shopping. It’s a cheap way to shop and reduces the consumption of new items – two things we are all for!

5. Substitute with what you have.

As much fun as it is to purchase that cute little travel set of silverware, odds are you have a few extra forks lying around that could serve the same purpose. Substitute for what you already have whenever possible. Make produce bags out of old t-shirts, use a cloth napkin as a nap sack and dive into the wonderful world of baking soda hacks. There’s always a solution.

Related Stories:

51 Fantastic Uses for Baking Soda
How to Keep a Zero Waste Pet
How to Host a Zero Waste Dinner Party

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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The Best Tips for Going Zero Waste on a Budget

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Too Much Cheating? Shut Down the Whole Internet.

by AshlyUGQCibbe Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tim Fernholz reports today that countries around the world have lost billions of dollars in economic output by shutting down the internet for various reasons:

The countries most affected? India, accounting for $968 million in lost output….shut off internet service during school exam periods to deter cheating. To keep students honest, India imposed a ban from 9am to 1pm in certain areas.

Say what? They shut down the whole damn internet for four hours to keep kids from cheating on exams? Yes indeed. And they aren’t the only ones:

India: “Mobile internet services will be blocked from 9 am to 1 pm in Ahmedabad….The Revenue Talatis Recruitment Exam is being conducted by ‘Gaun Seva Pasandgi Mandal’ (Gujarat State Subsidiary Selection Board or GSSSB) across the state….Considering the sensitive nature of the exam for recruitment of talatis, internet service providers have been asked to shut down all internet-based social media services from 9 am to 1 pm to prevent the misuse of mobiles during the exam.”

Uzbekistan: “Uzbek authorities suspended Internet and messaging services across the country on August 1 to prevent cheating at university entrance exams….The restrictions on the additional services have become an annual practice on exam day as authorities fight against corruption and cheating.”

Algeria: “Algerian authorities have temporarily blocked access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to try to stop cheats posting high school exam papers online, state media reported on Sunday….’This is to protect students from the publication of false papers for these exams.’ “

Iraq: “Iraq has shut down the entire country’s internet in efforts to prevent students from cheating in exams….Wondering why the Iraqi government chose to take such a drastic step just for sixth grade finals? The reason why preventing sixth graders from cheating is such a high priority to the government is because, according to Iraqi law, education is compulsory only till the 6th grade. As a result, the pressure is fairly high on sixth graders to score well, as those who don’t make the cut are almost definitely pulled out of school.”

As you can see, this practice extends all the way from sixth grade to high school to universities to civil service exams. I guess building Faraday cages at all the test centers was too expensive, while strip searching every test taker was considered a step too far. The only option left was to shut down the internet for everyone.

All this said, the most common reason for shutting down the internet was in response to protests and other forms of civil strife. So I guess everyone is sort of used to it.

Originally posted here: 

Too Much Cheating? Shut Down the Whole Internet.

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Guardian: American Cities "Cheat" on Lead Testing of Tap Water

by Mikayla48A Posted on June 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Guardian claims that “at least 33” large American cities use testing methods deliberately designed to undercount the presence of lead in tap water:

Of these cities, 21 used the same water testing methods that prompted criminal charges against three government employees in Flint over their role in one of the worst public health disasters in US history.

….Testing methods that can avoid detecting lead include asking testers to run faucets before the test period, known as “pre-flushing”; to remove faucet filters called “aerators”; and to slowly fill sample bottles. The EPA reiterated in February that these lead-reducing methods go against its guidelines, and the Flint charges show they may now be criminal acts.

….The EPA has warned since 2008 that pre-flushing is problematic and goes against the “intent” of regulations designed to detect lead….Further distortion is achieved through the removal of “aerators” — the small metal filters at the tip of faucets. These filters can collect lead particles and add to lead detected in tests.

I don’t know how serious this is. I suppose no one will know until these cities collect data properly and compare it to their old results. The EPA says it plans to release new testing rules in 2017.

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Guardian: American Cities "Cheat" on Lead Testing of Tap Water

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Texas Schools Are Performing Pretty Well. Surprised?

by aleidasharrington Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Leonhardt:

When the Education Department releases its biennial scorecard of reading and math scores for all 50 states this week, Florida and Texas are likely to look pretty mediocre. In 2013, the last time that scores were released, Florida ranked 30th on the tests, which are given to fourth and eighth graders, and Texas ranked 32nd.

But these raw scores, which receive widespread attention, almost certainly present a misleading picture — and one that gives short shrift to both Florida and Texas. In truth, schools in both states appear to be well above average at teaching their students math and reading. Florida and Texas look worse than they deserve to because they’re educating a more disadvantaged group of students than most states are.

This conclusion is based on a new report by the Urban Institute. That’s fine, but we pretty much knew this already. Texas has large black and Hispanic populations, and they tend to do worse on academic tests than whites—which makes the overall scores for Texas look weak. But if you head over to the NAEP site and look at scores for each state disaggregated by race you can get the real story in about five minutes. The chart below is for 8th grade math, but you can do the same thing for any other test. It’s sorted by black test scores, and as you can see, Texas is 3rd in the nation. (Florida is 15th.) It’s also 3rd in Hispanic scores, and 5th in white scores.

The Urban Institute controls for other factors besides race (poverty, native language, special ed), and that makes Florida look even better than the disaggregated NAEP scores suggest. But Texas looks good no matter what. If education reporters would pay attention to this stuff, it might not come as such a big surprise. Like it or not, Texas has been scoring pretty well for quite a while.

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Texas Schools Are Performing Pretty Well. Surprised?

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Let John Oliver Explain How Standardized Testing Makes Kids Anxious and Vomit Under Pressure

by LawrencOUS Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every year, students around the country are subjected to an insane amount of mandatory, standardized testing. So much so, the average number of tests a student completes by the time they graduate high school is a staggering 113, according to the latest “Last Week Tonight.” As host John Oliver noted on Sunday, all the stressful bubble-filling is taking an inevitable toll—with teachers reporting their students throwing up under the pressure so often, official testing guidelines specifically outline how to deal with kids vomiting on their test booklets.

“Something is wrong with our system when we just assume a certain number of students will vomit,” Oliver said. “Standardized tests are supposed to be an assessment of skills, not a rap battle on ‘8 Mile’ Road.”

Watch below as Oliver explains how our education system arrived at this extreme point:

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Let John Oliver Explain How Standardized Testing Makes Kids Anxious and Vomit Under Pressure

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Colleges Don’t Teach Much, but College Students Don’t Know It

by JoannaHein Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

The Collegiate Learning Assessment is just what it sounds like: a test that measures critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and communications skills in college students. Several years ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reported that most students didn’t improve much on this test after four years of college, and a full third didn’t improve at all. Now they’ve written a follow-up, which concludes, unsurprisingly, that students with high CLA scores do better in the job market than students with low scores. Kevin Carey provides the highlights of the rest of the study:

Remarkably, the students had almost no awareness of this dynamic. When asked during their senior year in 2009, three-quarters reported gaining high levels of critical thinking skills in college, despite strong C.L.A. evidence to the contrary. When asked again two years later, nearly half reported even higher levels of learning in college. This was true across the spectrum of students, including those who had struggled to find and keep good jobs.

Through diplomas, increasingly inflated grades and the drumbeat of college self-promotion, these students had been told they had received a great education. The fact that the typical student spent three times as much time socializing and recreating in college as studying and going to class didn’t change that belief. Nor did unsteady employment outcomes and, for the large majority of those surveyed, continued financial dependence on their parents.

….Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa’s latest research suggests that within the large population of college graduates, those who were poorly taught are paying an economic price….Yet those same students continue to believe they got a great education, even after two years of struggle. This suggests a fundamental failure in the higher education market — while employers can tell the difference between those who learned in college and those who were left academically adrift, the students themselves cannot.

I suppose this is a specialized case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people don’t realize they’re incompetent. There’s probably not much universities can do about that, but it’s disheartening that they’re motivated to actively encourage it.

On the other hand, I suppose you can argue that it doesn’t matter. After all, employers seem to figure out pretty quickly who’s good and who isn’t, so it doesn’t do them much harm. And the kids themselves are better off for having a degree, even if they didn’t learn much. So perhaps this is a Pareto-efficient situation after all.

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Colleges Don’t Teach Much, but College Students Don’t Know It

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A California Hospital Charged $10,000 for a Cholesterol Test

by LouisaDunckley Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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By now, I assume we all know that hospitals charge widely varying rates for similar procedures. But it’s often hard to pinpoint exactly what’s going on. Sometimes it’s due to the amount of regional competition. Sometimes the procedures in question vary in ways that simple coding schemes don’t pick up. Some doctors are better than others. And of course, hospitals inflate their list prices by different amounts.

All that said, be prepared for your jaw to drop:

Researchers studied charges for a variety of tests at 160 to 180 California hospitals in 2011 and found a huge variation in prices. The average charge for a basic metabolic panel, which measures sodium, potassium and glucose levels, among other indicators, was $214. But hospitals charged from $35 to $7,303, depending on the facility. None of the hospitals were identified.

The biggest range involved charges for a lipid panel, a test that measures cholesterol and triglycerides, a type of fat (lipid), in the blood. The average charge was $220, but costs ranged from a minimum of $10 to a maximum of $10,169. Yes, more than $10,000 for a blood test that doctors typically order for older adults, to check their cholesterol levels.

A lipid panel! This is as standardized a procedure as you could ask for. It’s fast, highly automated, identical between hospitals, and has no association with the quality of the doctor who ordered the test. You still might see the usual 2:1 or 3:1 difference in prices, but 1000:1?

So what accounts for this? The researchers have no idea. No insurance company will pay $10,000 for a lipid panel, of course, so the only point of pricing it this high is to exploit the occasional poor sap with no health insurance who happens to need his cholesterol checked. Welcome to health care in America. Best in the world, baby.

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A California Hospital Charged $10,000 for a Cholesterol Test

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Test Scores Are Up! (Except In the One Place It Actually Matters)

by julyye49 Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

I periodically try to remind everyone that test scores for American students have not, in fact, plummeted over the past few decades. In fact, they’re up. To the extent that standardized tests can measure learning, American kids simply aren’t doing any worse than kids in the past. They’re doing better.

But there’s always been a caveat: this is only for grade school and middle school kids. All those test score gains wash out in high school, and today brings the latest evidence of this. Scores from the 2013 NAEP—widely considered the most reliable national measure of student achievement—are now available for 12th graders, and they confirm what we’ve known for a while. In reading, scores have been basically flat since 1992, and the scores for every racial subgroup have been pretty flat too. Math has only been tested since 2005, and scores have risen a few points since then. But not enough to demonstrate any kind of trend.

There are technical issues with testing 12th graders that can affect these scores. As dropout rates go down, for example, the test population becomes less proficient. And senioritis can affect how much effort kids put into these tests. Still, the best evidence indicates that we’re making pretty good progress improving the proficiency of students all the way through middle school, but we still haven’t cracked the code for high school. And in the end, that’s all that matters. It’s great that fourth graders are doing better, but if all those gains wash away in the final three years of high school, we’re not ending up any better than before.

UPDATE: Actually, math has been tested since 1990, but the test was revised in 2005 and scores before then aren’t comparable to current scores. A crude comparison suggests that scores actually have increased for 12th graders since 1990, perhaps by as much as ten points, though this is in direct contradiction to the long-term NAEP, which shows no gains at all for 17-year-olds. My own guess, based on both of these results, is that math scores have increased slightly since 1990, but probably not enough to really be noticeable.

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Test Scores Are Up! (Except In the One Place It Actually Matters)

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America’s Coming Geek Gap

by MeganChelmsford Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

You may have seen some alarming statistics on the downright puny numbers of girls and students of color taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam in several states. Last year, not a single girl took the college-level coding test in 2 states and no black students tested in 11 states, including Mississippi, which has the biggest black population in the country. Those stats, taken from a Georgia Tech analysis of all AP exams taken in 2013, are abysmal—if unsurprising.

Less remarked upon was the fact that practically nobody is taking this test. Check out the number of all exams taken in AP Computer Science compared to five other subjects:

Computer science wasn’t even in the top 20. More than three times more students tested in Human Geography (114,000) than Computer Science (31,000). No knock against human geography, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 1.4 million new jobs in software engineering will be created between 2012 and 2022. At current rates of enrollment, just 30 percent of those jobs could be filled by US college grads majoring in computer science.

It’s worth noting that the number of students taking the AP Computer Science exam has doubled over the last 10 years. But in the same time period, the number of students who took the World History exam grew 6 times, and 15 times more students tested in Human Geography last year than in 2003.

You might question the relevance of a high school computer-science credential in a field that loves to tout the Ivy League dropouts and self-taught programming wunderkinds helming tech companies valued at billions of dollars. That’s fair, but for kids who don’t gravitate toward coding at home (i.e., the vast majority of kids), getting exposure to new subjects and interests at school is sort of the point of going to school. Yet most kids don’t even get a chance to thumb their noses at computer science; the report shows that of the 18,000 US high schools that offer AP courses, just 3,000 offer AP Computer Science:

In fact, the number of high schools offering the course has gone down by 51 percent since 2005. There’s a whole host of complicated reasons few schools offer the test and few kids take it, from boring material to a lack of qualified teachers to the fact that in most states, computer science counts only as an elective. So while it’s absolutely fantastic that much attention is being paid right now to school’s role in tech’s gender and race gap, the system really is broken for everybody.

Note: Until 2009, the College Board offered two courses in computer science, AP Computer Science A (one semester long) and AP Computer Science AB (a full year course). The latter was discontinued in 2009. All data pre-2009 reflects a total across both courses.

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America’s Coming Geek Gap

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BP negligent in Texas refinery leak but absolved of wrongdoing

by celicjusz Posted on October 15, 2013

BP negligent in Texas refinery leak but absolved of wrongdoing

By

BP

The Texas City refinery.

Yes, of course BP was negligent when it allowed at least 500,000 pounds of toxic gases to stream out of a refinery in Texas City, Texas, for 40 days in 2010.

So ruled a Texas jury. But that’s where the good news out of a lawsuit that could affect 48,000 refinery neighbors ends. Despite the company’s negligence, a jury concluded that the fumes it released, which contained such cancer-causing chemicals as benzene and nitrogen oxides, caused no harm to its neighbors.

The Houston Chronicle reported that a 12-person jury deliberated for nearly three days before concluding that BP had been negligent but that it was to be absolved of wrongdoing:

“Today’s verdict affirms BP’s view that no one suffered any injury as a result of the flaring of the BP Ultracracker flare during April and May 2010,” BP spokesman Scott Dean said. “Armed with the knowledge gleaned from this case and this important jury verdict, the company will immediately begin to prepare for any additional proceedings involving other plaintiffs.”

Tony Buzbee, the attorney for the three residents who said they were harmed by the release, said he was surprised by the verdict.

“But I respect juries,” Buzbee said. “This was only the first one of the test cases. We learned some things. We will gear up and try another one in a couple of months.”

The three plaintiffs in the case said they fell ill and endured foul odors because of the gas leak. Now they have something new to feel ill about.


Source
Jury absolves BP in gas leak trial, Houston Chronicle

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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BP negligent in Texas refinery leak but absolved of wrongdoing

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