If you want to follow along and do some of the same activities a student is doing, you can post that here (or you can make a topic for yourself in the Unbounded or Other category).
You can also use this topic to discuss the concept of tutoring, tutoring methods and whether to get tutoring.
And you can share comments on someone’s tutoring posts that aren’t relevant and helpful enough to go in their topic but which don’t need a whole topic of their own.
I did the assignment for @Eternity to explain the concepts of analog and digital. I didn’t time myself but I think It took around 15-20 mins initially, then I added a couple things later. If I do more in the future I’ll make sure to time it. Unlike Eternity I didn’t feel unclear on what analog and digital was.
Blurred for spoilers.
Analog vs Digital
They are both different ways of dealing with quantities and with information.
A familiar example to most people is clocks. An analog clock has hands that are continuously changing value. A digital clock has a display that is, at any one time, in a discrete, definite state. A digital clock’s display changes its value every minute. An analog clocks value is constantly changing.
‘Big digital’ begins to approximate analog. The more values that a digital measurement can take, the more it resembles a continuum. Some ‘analog’ clocks are even actually ‘big digital’ clocks, with each hand having 60 consecutive but discrete positions it can be in.
Conceptual differences between analog and digital:
In an analog system, the amount of values between any two values is infinite. In digital a digital system, it is finite. For example, in analog the amount of values between 0 and 10 is infinite. In a digital system going from 0 to 10 (11 discrete values) there are 9 other values between 0 an 10.
You can turn an analog continuum into digital quantities by introducing breakpoints, under or over which the value changes.
As an experiment I did the assignment for @Eternity to pick a topic people would disagree about and write five one sentence arguments about it that you think are correct in under 15mins. Mine took about 30 mins. I also think 5 sentences are related by one main argument, and aren’t totally distinct.
The topic is: the use of price controls
Price controls that set maximum prices create shortages because their effect is to both expand the demand for a product and decrease its supply.
The goal of maximum price controls is to make it easier for marginal consumers to get access to goods but their result is shortages of the very same goods.
Price controls that set minimum prices create surpluses because they both decrease the demand for a good while maintaining its supply.
The goal of minimum price controls (for example minimum wage laws) is to help marginal producers sell their goods for more but their result is to decrease demand for the marginal producers goods.
In the same way, the goal of minimum wage laws is to help marginal workers but instead they have the effect of decreasing demand for marginal labour (destroying low paying jobs) and therefore creating unemployment for the same marginal workers.