I don't even think it's a good strategy for creating elite athletes. Can we really determine someone's "elite potential" by how good they are as a young kid? If one kid has parents who took them skating a couple of times and the other didn't, the first one is going to absolutely destroy the second in a competition, but does that really tell us anything about how they will perform, 10 years down the line at the olympics? Yet we filter out anyone who doesn't conform to this standard.
True. Traditional (and still popular) beliefs that sports talents can be identified early are questioned a lot within the sports science community. [1] Canada has implemented a scientifically-based LTD (Long-Term Development) model of sports development [2], and while it's based a bit on concepts of optimal windows of trainability (like the age where flexibility is trained best), it draws on the fact that everyone's journey in sports is unique. This non-linearity is also a basis of a modern coaching science known as the Constraint-Led Approach (CLA) [3] – it's basically a non-linear pedagogy applied to motor skill acquisition practices.
It's exhausting trying to find these brands. You have to do a ton of research, most of which is sifting through ads and the worst google results you've ever seen. If your already in the space you might be so lucky to already know a good reviewer.
You also have to update your knowledge constantly, as lots of brands start to decline in quality once they get popular or change ownership.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, it's not just different from person to person but also from hobby to hobby. For me climbing is mainly about 1, but on reflection I defnitely spend more time talking about competative games than actually playing. I can also think of a few people who have hobbies that focus around 3 and 4.
>If you want to be good at math, piano, chess, sculpture, or whatever you need the talent and then it can be nurtured.
No offense, but you sound like you don't really know anything about these disciplines, or about the science of learning (Peak is a good book to read). Getting a good piano teacher will absolutely accelerate your progress and being talented at piano as a kid is a pretty bad predictor of how good you'll be as an adult. Every outstanding Piano "talent" you see on stage today has been nurtured and nurtured themselves through practice, to hell and back.
None taken but you don't know about my (adult) piano adventure with good teachers over 15+ years, either. I didn't say practice was not important. You can't squeeze blood from a stone.
For me personally using a translator app just adds an additional layer of awkward to every interaction. Where you have to fiddle with it and the other person might not understand how to interact with it right away. It's not a huge problem, but if your not super confident already, it might be enough to discourage you.
When I went to japan, lots of people where very hesitant to use their english. Like they didn't want to embarass themselves. I'd never really experienced that before, everywhere else I had gone to previously, people's drive to communicate was usually a lot stronger than their drive to hide weak language skills.
I believe it is common with some nationalities (S Korea, for example) to study to the point of perfection but be very reluctant to speak another language outside of a classroom situation.
The Danube running through Vienna is safe to swim in: https://www.wien.gv.at/forschung/laboratorien/umweltmedizin/...
The water quality doesn't protect you from the current or the heavy boat traffic through. So most swimming is done in a disconnected side channel called "Alte Donau".
I studied quite a bit of latin in high school (not in the USA through) and I have to say I'm not overly impressed by the test. It certainly doesn't test for fluency in Latin or Greek, most of the exercises are purely about grammar. The exercises that do require translation skills, don't require any vocabulary either. The sentences themselves are quite long, but latin grammar lends itself to complex run-on-sentences.
I think the better students in my class would have done quite well on this test even through latin wasn't one of their main subjects.
The Greek portion seems fairly similar if not a bit easier.
Every single history question is about ancient Rome or Greece.
Every single geography question is about the location of rivers.
How does this constitute an "exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world"?
The maths section does seem to have some difficult parts, we didn't do any proofs in the regular high school curriculum for example. The other math sections just show how much the requirements have shifted, a lot of the exercises in the arithmatic section got replaced by calculators, but I don't see any calculus on this test.
Looking at this, I think today's Harvard students are more educated overall than the ones in 1869. Our priorities just shifted.
