So, once upon a time, the radio airwaves were free for anyone and everyone to use as they liked. There were incompatible protocols, congestion, crowding, and so on and so forth. One day, the Titanic sunk, and a major contributor of it was the fact that there were no standards for ships to be listening for distress signals on the radio.

So international regulations were established be treaty, the Radio Act if 1912 in The US, and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912. These laws and treaties not only established mandatory radio watch for ships at sea, but also sought to reduce crosstalk and bandwidth hogging by people— you’d need to get a radio license to transmit on a specific frequency for a region.

A public spectrum was established for anyone to use, and another spectrum was reserved for dedicated amateurs to advance radio technology (requiring a test to prove dedication— HAM radio), another spectrum was dedicated for government use (such as police), another for hospitals, and another segment for commercial usage.

If you violate the licensing requirements, you are a pirate radio station… and this is actually taken quite seriously. Regulators will actually take measures to track you down. One thing that the HAM radio community does is something called a “fox hunt”… it’s basically like a region-wide game of hide and seek, where the hider is repeatedly broadcasting a radio signal, and the seekers use whatever technology they can muster to track the hider down. The hiders also use sophisticated means to hide their location, such as bouncing signals off of water towers to hide the origin and other even sneakier tactics. Fox hunts are a lot of fun, but always end up with the fox getting caught.

Pirate radio tends to end up the same way.

Three-cue and whole word memorization are scams, yes. Possibly not maliciously intended scams, but they’re counterproductive anyway. Phonics is not.

I haven’t heard of swindled before. Forgive me, but I used an LLM to summarize it for me. Based on the summary, my professional analysis of the summary it gave me (again, I haven’t listened to it in total) would be that the podcast was critiquing the specific commercial product “Hooked on Phonics”, not phonics in general, and that the critiques involved this specific product being heavily marketed to parents (not educators) as being a panacea despite not utilizing best practices— even best phonics practices.

I’ve never used Hooked on Phonics specifically… again, it’s marketed toward parents, not educators. Some cursory, surface level research seems to show that early editions were especially bad, and in fact led to FTC citations for false advertising. Their marketing linked their product with phonics in general, which was generally untrue, and apparently the company didn’t even consult with experts (neither experts on phonics nor literacy in general!) when initially developing the program. So it sounds like they were probably a good source of material for a podcast on scams.

That doesn’t make phonics itself bad pedagogy. Phonics itself is fantastic, and produces the absolute best results.

If you were taught using “whole word” or “three-cueing” strategies (I’m guessing you were given the three cue method, as that’s been pushed in the past two decades pretty hard, to the detriment of everyone, but whole word isn’t great either) you’re more likely to have internalized inefficient, error-prone, and mentally tiring reading habits. Obviously you can still read, but you will find it more difficult and less enjoyable, adding an extra layer of stress when learning other things that is actually unnecessary.

It’s possible you learned/figured out phonics on your own from exposure. Some are able to do this— humans are the best pattern finding machines in the universe at the moment— in which case these problems won’t present themselves. However, being taught wrong can create issues such as guessing words based on context (or images/diagram presented with the text), skimming for clues instead of deciphering the word itself, memorizing entire words instead of pieces of them that contain sounds and meaning.

These strategies all “work”… they enable you to read, but they create extra problems when you encounter new, uncommon, or just unfamiliar words (necessary when learning new concepts), when the context is unclear (such as when picking up a new novel to read, or analyzing technical or scientific papers without illustrations), or when you need to read and comprehend things quickly and under timed pressure (such as when there are work deadlines, or… you know, standardized tests).

You can read, sure, but you probably can’t read well, unless you’ve managed to figure out patterns and strategies that weren’t expressly taught to you on your own.

Here’s an article that may lay things out for you clearly. It says much of what I’ve said here, but with more detail and probably better prose. It’s a persuasive piece, but it is backed by the current scientific research and understanding we have. At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

Teacher here. (EFL teacher, but phonics are necessary in EFL as well as L1 English classes)

The opposite. Phonics is the only thing that actually works, and any and all attempts to move away from phonics creates long term systemic issues in reading.

The issue is that phonics are hard to learn at first, but the payoff for the early effort is nigh-effortless reading in the future, enabling education to continue and making literally all future self-improvement better.

Alternatives to phonics focus on the “it’s really hard at first” thing. You know, if we skipped phonics and just memorized word shapes, we’d be able to get our 1st and 2nd grade test scores up… and that means more federal funding! And it works!!!

What do you mean our 3rd grade test scores are dropping… I guess we just need to pile on MORE HOMEWORK!!! And 4th grade scores are dropping too? And 5th? And middle schoolers are struggling? And high schoolers don’t read much either, and their writing is nigh-incomprehensible? Ehh… well, must be the kids fault, am I right guys?

Phonics teaches the rules that make English work. It gives you the ability to read and write as well as you can speak, which comes naturally. It gives you the method to learn new words in seconds or at worst minutes, instead of days or weeks. You can’t tell me that isn’t powerful.

I agree that if what you did works, go for it. But I will also tell you how my mother and grandmother taught me to knead, and see if it helps you any.

1. Take the dough, and fold it in half.
2. Push it down, so that you have a solid mass again with good cohesion.
3. Rotate it 90 degrees, then repeat from step one.

I don’t always get the best crumb this way, and I’m still trying to figure out why, but this is how I was taught, and it does quickly create all the nice long gluten strands you want when kneading dough. And that’s the main idea… pushing and pulling the dough in the kneading process makes long gluten strands. Folding the dough like I was taught stretches it. Pushing it, well, pushes it. Rotating it makes sure that you’re getting at all the dough, not just one portion.

But kneading like a cat does? Well, it does push and pull, which is kneading. The only thing I’d be worried about in your method is that it might not get all the dough kneaded, there may be spots left that didn’t get pulled or pushed, and even if you got everything, it might not be everything evenly.

But again… it it WORKS for you, then do what works.

Possible, but super tricky. Good luck trying to sell a producer on minimizing dialog!

Live service means the content comes from the company’s servers, and likely changes rapidly. The quintessential example is Fortnite. Updates are expected, not merely necessary fixes. Duke Nukem 3D had all the content installed on your computer from day one, without expectation that it would change (unless you made your own maps, or downloaded maps other USERS made).

Interestingly enough, originally it WAS a Mario game, during initial development! Doki Doki Panic started as an engine test for a new Mario game with vertical scrolling in addition to horizontal scrolling. It was swapped to Fuji TV characters shortly after, mid development… and then ironically switched BACK to Mario for the US release!

Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

I have fond memories of it too. Granted, those memories involved being utterly confused as to how to proceed, but also being utterly astonished by the graphics. I distinctly remember it being basically photorealistic to my 9 year old self— going back to play it with an emulator was a bit of a shock (and letdown) compared to my memories of it.

I did beat it as an adult. As a kid I may lot have been able to get anywhere, but it was magical all the same.

Feels like they took the best ideas from Mario Maker, polished it up to a glowing shine, mixed in some great movement, threw in a metric fuckton of whimsy and joy, and overall made a great game.

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.