A mixed bag of results here. I don't think this really supports either side of the Question 2 debate, but it does show that the state is going to want this data no matter the outcome of Question 2. Like I said in the previous post about Question 2, if teachers are supportive of Question 2 in order to not feel pressure to "teach to the test", then I think the rationale is wrong. These tests aren't going anywhere. Even if MCAS were completely eliminated, something like MCAS is going to take its place.
Boston and New York are probably the closest to European cities with respect to transit that you will find in the States. Plenty of people live in those cities without cars. I lived in Boston for a long time (now in the Boston suburbs) and plenty of adults I know there haven't even bothered getting their driver's license.
The other Northeast Corridor cities are probably the next tier down. DC has decent transit if you make live and work near transit stops. Philadelphia can work, but SEPTA has been unreliable at best in my personal experience. I haven't really spent much time in Baltimore to be able to say.
Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the only other option really would be the San Francisco bay area with its BART system. It has decent coverage and I have family that lives in the area and enjoys it. However, I don't have much firsthand experience with it.
This largely depends on where you are in the US. I have moved a lot over the years, from dense city centers, to the dirt roads of rural America. Here are my experiences:
NYC would probably be the most comparable to your experience in London, but seeing as I haven't lived there, I can instead talk about Boston. When I lived inside the subway range in Boston (Somerville specifically), my experience matches up with yours. I was ~5 minutes from a supermarket and ~15 minutes from the subway/train stop by foot. I was even closer to a couple bus stops for lines that would take me to places like a mall, nearby universities, or the next subway line over (we don't have an equivalent of the Circle line).
I currently live in Boston suburbs (Metrowest for people that know the area) and can't really walk anywhere as my street and adjacent streets don't have sidewalks. I could try to walk on the street, but with the narrowness combined with the speed at which people drive through this neighborhood, it would not be fun. If I hop in the car, I am ~5 minutes from a strip mall with a supermarket, pharmacy, liquor store, etc. and ~10 minutes from the commuter rail train station that I use to commute to the city for work. If I want to head to a large shopping hub with a mall, then it is ~20 minutes away by car. There is a skeleton of a bus system in my area, but it would require traversing ~1.5 miles on streets without sidewalks to get to the nearest stop for me.
When I lived in a rural area (rural PA), things were very different. To get to the nearest supermarket (a WalMart), it took ~30 minutes worth of driving. If I wanted to go to the mall, it was closer to 60 minutes. I am sure there are even less dense areas than that in this country.
I am a current resident of MA , but moved here as an adult, so I don't have firsthand experience with these tests. However, I moved to several different states through school and took something like the MCAS in those states. The reality is that even if Question 2 were to pass, the state would likely want to keep MCAS (just without the graduation requirement) or replace MCAS with some other standardized test as a way to assess school district performance. Which should be a good thing since it is how the state can identify school districts that are underperforming and providing them the help they need.
I am sympathetic to the Teachers' views that they feel like they are being asked to teach to the test. However, in those other states I went to school in, those teachers still spent time teaching to the test because the school district was exerting pressure to improve their performance on those tests. So, the pressure to teach to the test is unlikely to go away, but will simply be applied from somewhere else. I don't think Question 2 is the freedom from standardized testing requirements that the Teacher's Union is portraying here.
I would be more supportive of additional ways to alternatively meet the requirement, especially for those students that might struggle with a language barrier.
!lightnovels@ani.social for light novels from Japan
!aoblightnovel@bookwormstory.social for Ascendance of a Bookworm specifically (which just recently published its final volume).
It should be noted that burying lines in this case is not for aesthetic reasons, but because trees falling on/growing into above-ground lines is one of the most common causes of wildfires. Putting the lines below the ground is much safer in that respect, but it is much harder to do maintenance on the lines should something go wrong.
Most of these lines are likely in regions where almost nobody lives, but a fire started in those forests can threaten a much larger swathe of customers.
I am in the greater Boston area and just pulled up my most recent bill. Total cost for me (including generation and delivery) came out to $0.33 per kWh. When it comes to the total cost each month, my cost goes down dramatically in the winter when the gas is used for heat instead of the electric for AC.
Two that are local to me:
@borebore@lemmy.world does an admirable job with these two. I try to chime in when I can, but am mostly busy with the communities I am running elsewhere.
I think that user donations are easier when an instance has a good focus. There are some other instances I can think of where the donation model has been enough to cover things. In addition to feddit.dk and beehaw, an instance I use most of the time, ani.social, is more than covered by donations last I checked. ~~It looks like @hitagi@ani.social even took away the donate link in the sidebar.~~ Never mind, I am just blind. I didn't notice the little Ko-fi badge at the bottom. I was looking for a text link.
There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.
This is what I do. I have a VPS that handles all the 443 traffic and then proxies it back to my home server on the correct port. I also just serve some things directly from the VPS since I have it already. It also works well to have a second box for things like uptime monitoring.
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The fraud surrounding Alzheimer's research continues... Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.
I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer's products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer's research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?
I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don't have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.