Has College Become Too Easy?

You can lead a student to knowledge, according to an old academic saying, but you can’t make him or her think.

I recently wrote about the possibility of testing and certification for what I called a “college-level GED.” Like the current GED test for high school equivalency, it would award certification to bright, hardworking job applicants who want to show potential employers how much they know, even though they never graduated from college.

I heard from a number of readers who supported the idea. Some were eager to take the test now, if they could. But the most thoughtful question I received went like this: What about the “critical thinking” skills that we traditionally expect campus academic life to teach and encourage?

I agree. Critical thinking is the brain’s investigative reporter. It questions assumptions and requires more than the memory to pass most standardized tests.

But we do have tests for that. For example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, launched in 2000, gives a 90-minute essay test to freshmen and seniors that aims to measure gains in critical thinking and communication skills.

However, recent studies of CLA results reveal another major problem, not so much in the testing of critical thinking as in how little critical thinking is being taught.

One new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, questions whether a large chunk of today’s college students are learning much on campus that they didn’t already know.

Following CLA results and other data for 2,300 students at 24 public and private colleges, Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: “I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.”

Among the jaw-dropping examples Levy related in her email to me and a later phone call was a senior who reacted with memorable resentment to a two-week take-home assignment to critically evaluate a scientific journal article.

The professor specifically requested a hard-eyed assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the article’s sources, methods and conclusions. She did not, repeat, not want students simply to summarize the contents. She stipulated that last part in capital letters.

Yet when the students returned their papers, she recalled, one offered nothing but what Levy said she didn’t want: “a content summary, without a single evaluative statement.” When the student complained about her zero grade, Levy explained the goose egg. The student argued back indignantly, “But that would have required THINKING!”

It was the winter quarter of her senior year, the young woman explained, and she could memorize as much as any professor gave her and earn As and Bs but, until this course, she had “never been required to think!”

“If students can get a degree from the University of Chicago without having either the will or capacity to think,” Levy said, “then it is certainly true of less selective universities and colleges.”

Read the rest here.

* Magnitude 7.1 quake struck north west of Talca

* Quake not expected to cause tsunami

* Codelco says Andina and El Teniente mines operating normally

Read the rest here.

• Biometric camera stores details of everyone who walks past it
• Stores ‘library’ of face info
• Can scan through 36 million faces per second searching for people
• Will be on sale to governments within next year

By Rob Waugh

PUBLISHED: 11:41 EST, 23 March 2012 | UPDATED: 11:45 EST, 23 March 2012

A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it.

Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second.

The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to ‘find’ anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile.

Timothy B. Lee — Writer with Ars Technica and the Cato Institute

Farhad Manjoo gives Slate readers advice on “how to stop investing your money like an idiot.” He lucidly explains the principles of good investing, but then says that “for people who have extra money but not a lot of time or facility with investing, there has never been a simple way to invest in the rigorous, disciplined way that experts advise.” Manjoo is far from the first writer to make this claim (and I’m kind of a broken record on the subject), but this isn’t true. Vanguard has had funds that do exactly that since 2003, and they’re significantly cheaper than the options Manjoo discusses in his article.

Manjoo reviews three options, and the one option Manjoo ultimately recommends, called Betterment, is pretty good. You tell Betterment how you want to allocate your money between relatively risky assets (like stocks) and relatively safe ones (like Treasury bonds). Betterment then automatically buys a mix of assets that fit your criteria and automatically adjusts them over time.

Read the rest here.

By Jonathon Braden
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

It might be his best deal yet.

Warren Buffett got a bottle of Scotch, a loaf of traditional Jewish bread, a bag of Cheetos and the rights to the food in three large drums and a box.

All for free.

For thousands of years, Jewish people have sold their leavened goods — anything containing grain that rises when baked — to non-Jewish friends before the eight-day observance of Passover begins. Any unsold leavened products are donated to charity.

Jewish law forbids eating or having leavened goods during Passover, which celebrates the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt after being freed from slavery.

Rabbi Jonathan Gross of the Beth Israel Synagogue in west Omaha had an idea. He would ask Omaha investor Buffett — an 81-year-old agnostic and the third-richest man in the world — to take part in the “Sale of Chametz.”

Gross typed up a letter.

He included a little background on how the sale would work: Buffett would buy the goods, Gross would buy them back later.

“Price is low before Passover. Price is high afterward,” Gross said. “It’s a great short-term investment. So who would really appreciate this better than Warren Buffett?”

Gross also included the name of his friend Rabbi Myer Kripke, for whom the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion & Society at Creighton University is named. Kripke has been friends with Buffett for 50 years, since they were neighbors in Dundee.

A few days later, Gross got an email from Debbie Bosanek, Buffett’s longtime secretary, saying Buffett liked the idea.

“The beauty of being an agnostic is that you are in no position to make any judgment about anything,” Buffett said in an interview. “You can join in on anything.”

Read the rest here.

 View Enlarged Image

College students and their families have struggled to pay for the rising cost of tuition, a cost that has been driven in part by swelling administrative expenses.

Over a 20-year period, the growth in administrative personnel at institutions of higher education has outpaced the growth in both faculty and student enrollment.

Critics refer to this as administrative bloat and contend it shows that universities and colleges are inefficient institutions.

Defenders say colleges are adding administrative staff to meet student needs.

An IBD analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1989-2009 the number of administrative personnel at four- and two-year institutions grew 84%, from about 543,000 to over 1 million.

By contrast, the number of faculty increased 75%, from 824,000 to 1.4 million, while student enrollment grew 51%, from 13.5 million to 20.4 million.

The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases.

Administrative personnel are employees who are not engaged in instruction and research. The jobs range from university president and provost to accountants, social workers, computer analysts and music directors.

One reason administration at public institutions has grown faster may be that bureaucracies tend to expand their staff and programs over time, regardless of need.

“The increase has a lot to do with all the money these institutions pull in from third parties, like state funds and student financial aid,” said Daniel Bennett, a research fellow at the conservative Center for College Affordability & Productivity. “They’re using it to grow their staff rather than on students.”

Since students are insulated from the full cost of tuition, administrators feel less pressure to spend more on faculty to teach students.

Bennett has also written that an onerous regulatory environment that higher education faces may be partially to blame.

“In order to comply with the government’s requirements, colleges need to employ a staff that is responsible for providing the multiple state and federal agencies with compliance reports and data,” he wrote.

Acknowledging that some of the increase may be due to administrators wanting “to re-create themselves,” Dan King, executive director at the American Association of University Administrators, claims it’s also due to changing needs.

“Students are coming in less prepared, needing more remedial assistance,” he said. “If they need help from a writing lab or math lab, that’s usually done by administrators. That’s something that universities didn’t have to provide as much even 10 years ago.”

Source

Matthew Philips
10/27/2011 | 9:37 am

The numbers are in on how much it costs to go to college this year, and (surprise) they’re up again, thanks largely to decreases in state funding and increasing enrollments. The biggest price hikes came in the public sector: An 8.7 percent increase for in-state tuition at public two-year schools, and an 8.3 percent jump in the price of four-year public institutions, for in-state students.

Read the rest here.

By David C. Levy, Published: March 23

No public expenditure has a more productive impact on a nation’s health than its investment in education. But college costs have risen faster than inflation for three decades and, at roughly 25 percent of the average household’s income, now strain the budgets of most middle-class families. They impose an unprecedented debt burden on graduates and place college out of reach for many. This makes President Obama’s recent statementthat college is “an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford” an especially urgent message.As a career-long academic and former university chancellor, I support this position. But I disagree with the next assumption, that the answer to rising college costs is to throw more public money into the system. In fact, increased public support has probably facilitated rising tuitions. Overlooked in the debate are reforms for outmoded employment policies that overcompensate faculty for inefficient teaching schedules.

Through the first half of the 20th century, faculties in academic institutions were generally underpaid relative to other comparably educated members of the workforce. Teaching was viewed as a “calling” in the tradition of tweed jackets, pipe tobacco and avuncular campus life. Trade-offs for modest salaries were found in the relaxed atmospheres of academic communities, often retreats from the pressures of the real world, and reflected in such benefits as tenure, light teaching loads, long vacations and sabbaticals.With the 1970s advent of collective bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result has been more equitable circumstances for college faculty, who deserve salaries comparable to those of other educated professionals. Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees.Not changed, however, are the accommodations designed to compensate for low pay in earlier times. Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.

Such a schedule may be appropriate in research universities where standards for faculty employment are exceptionally high — and are based on the premise that critically important work, along with research-driven teaching, can best be performed outside the classroom. The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules. In fact, they often work hours well beyond those of average non-academic professionals.

Unfortunately, the salaries and the workloads applied to the highest echelons of faculty have been grafted onto colleges whose primary mission is teaching, not research. These include many state colleges, virtually all community colleges and hundreds of private institutions. For example, Maryland’s Montgomery College (an excellent two-year community college) reports its average full professor’s salary as $88,000, based on a workload of 15 hours of teaching for 30 weeks. Faculty members are also expected to keep office hours for three hours a week. The faculty handbook states: “Teaching and closely related activities are the primary responsibilities of instructional faculty.” While the handbook suggests other responsibilities such as curriculum development, service on committees and community outreach, notably absent from this list are research and scholarship.

I take no issue with faculty at teaching-oriented institutions focusing on instructional skills rather than research and receiving a fair, upper-middle-class wage. Like good teachers everywhere, they are dedicated professionals with high levels of education and deserve salaries commensurate with their hard-earned credentials. But we all should object when they receive these salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers.

The cost for such sinecures is particularly galling when it is passed on to the rest of the middle class and to taxpayers in states that are struggling to support higher education. Since faculty salaries make up the largest single cost in virtually all college and university budgets (39 percent at Montgomery College), think what it would mean if the public got full value for these dollars.

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.

If the higher education community were to adjust its schedules and semester structure so that teaching faculty clocked a 40-hour week (roughly 20 hours of class time and equal time spent on grading, preparation and related duties) for 11 months, the enhanced efficiency could be the equivalent of a dramatic budget increase. Many colleges would not need tuition raises or adjustments to public budget priorities in the near future. The vacancies created by attrition would be filled by the existing faculty’s expanded teaching loads — from 12 to 15 hours a week to 20, and from 30 weeks to 48; increasing teachers’ overall classroom impact by 113 percent to 167 percent.

Read the rest here.

Stock returns by month are not as variable and unpredictable as one might think, over the long run.

I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Well, what does some rinky-dink ’roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the last decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.

I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still — from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen and a half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the treasury secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Nor do some of Ryan’s fellow conservatives. Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding the Ryan plan’s timidity. They’re not wrong on that: The alleged terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget of the government of the United States until the year 2040. That would be 27 years after Congressman Ryan’s current term of office expires. Who knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily. But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war — the home team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the interest payments on the debt. (We’ll be bankrolling the entire People’s Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing–Taipei conflict would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the Straits of Taiwan. Which is why plans for mid-century are of limited value. When the most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee the government living within its means within the next three decades, you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there’ll be a 2040, not for anything recognizable as “the United States.”

Yet it’s widely agreed that Ryan’s plan is about as far as you can push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this point, it’s traditional for pundits to warn that if we don’t change course we’re going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it’s worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland, and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America’s current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece’s, although it’s worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.

But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent — or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.

Read the rest here.

Here’s a weird little observation:

About a month ago, I included this Bloomberg article — S&P 500 Gets 9% Cheaper — in a linkfest.  Normally, something I cull off Bloomberg’s most popular list slips off after a day or two.

But yesterday marked a full month that this has remained on the top of the Most Popular list. As you can see from the graphic below, its #3 — a month after its Feb 23, 2012 4:39 PM publication list.

Which makes me ask the question: Why?

Read the rest here.

Australian Bullion Dealer ABC Bullion has contacted SD to advise that one of its suppliers has provided them photographic evidence of a tungsten filled 1 kilo gold bar discovered this week.  The bar passed a hand-held xrf scan which showed 99.98% pure AU.  The tungsten was only discovered when the bar was physically cut in half.

 

After numerous reports of 400oz tungsten filled bars being discovered in Hong Kong, this is the first documented and verified report with photographic evidence that has been made public.

Source

PeterLBrandt

Continuation H&S pattern would have target of $2,042

The daily Gold market chart has been forming a possible continuation inverted H&S pattern. If this interpretation is correct the only question is if the right shoulder low has been established or if further right shoulder construction is needed.

The decline on Thursday appeared to wash out weak longs. An advance and close above the Mar. 21 high would complete a  candlestick hikkake buy signal. This would give some credance to the change a right shoulder low is in place.

A decisive close above the Feb. 28 high is required to complete this H&S pattern and establish a target at $2,042.

Go here to read the rest of the analysis and see some nice charts.

David Glovin and Bob Van Voris

After several drinks at a Greek restaurant on Manhattan’s Third Avenue in the summer of 2006, two computer programmers at Bernard Madoff’s investment firm asked their supervisor whether the boss’s business was a scam.

Chief Financial Officer Frank DiPascali laughed off the question, telling George Perez and Jerome O’Hara that Madoff was honest. DiPascali would later tell the FBI he wondered why they took so long to ask.

His chronicle of the dinner, and the lengths to which Madoff went to convince employees that his massive fraud was a legitimate business, were revealed for the first time in FBI reports made public last week. Attached to court filings by ex- Madoff employees facing fraud charges, they contain interviews with DiPascali — Madoff’s chief aide — who in 2009 pleaded guilty to his role in the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history.

Once, when Perez and O’Hara confronted Madoff and asked why there was no sign of stock trades, Madoff exploded, DiPascali told the FBI.

“You are not going to tell me how to run my business,” Madoff insisted during a meeting in the office of the firm’s operations chief, Daniel Bonventre, according to DiPascali. “Trades occur overseas.”

Read the rest here.

Dan Hart

The value of U.S. tax breaks exceeds $1 trillion, which may give both parties potential areas to cut costs and alleviate the cost of changing the tax code, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a study.

The Congressional Research Service report found the biggest tax break is likely to be valued at $164 billion annually in 2014 and is on employer-provided health insurance, while employer-provided pensions are the second-biggest exclusion at about $163 billion, the newspaper said.

The study said the most that might be gained in additional tax revenue from eliminating tax breaks was $150 billion, because of political opposition and technical hurdles, the newspaper said.

Lawmakers might only be able to reduce tax rates by one or two percentage points for the top individual rate, the Journal said, citing the report.

Source

ORLANDO – A witness we haven’t heard from before paints a much different picture than we’ve seen so far of what happened the night 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed.

The night of that shooting, police say there was a witness who saw it all.

Our sister station, FOX 35 in Orlando, has spoken to that witness.

What Sanford Police investigators have in the folder, they put together on the killing of Trayvon Martin few know about.

The file now sits in the hands of the state attorney. Now that file is just weeks away from being opened to a grand jury.

It shows more now about why police believed that night that George Zimmerman shouldn’t have gone to jail.

Zimmerman called 911 and told dispatchers he was following a teen. The dispatcher told Zimmerman not to.

And from that moment to the shooting, details are few.

But one man’s testimony could be key for the police.

“The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,” he said.

Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.

The witness only wanted to be identified as “John,” and didn’t not want to be shown on camera.

His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman’s claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.

“When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point,” John said.

Zimmerman says the shooting was self defense. According to information released on the Sanford city website, Zimmerman said he was going back to his SUV when he was attacked by the teen.

Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.

Source

Yowser. Was that something or what? Due t0 its popularity, the Velocity Shares VIX product (TVIX) had halted creation of new shares a few weeks back. That is where the trouble started. With that move, there was an ever growing premium as investors continued to buy shares in an attempt to hedge out some portfolio risk. Needless to say, that plan did not work out so well.

Even with 30% drop today, there continues to be whopping premium still embedded this particular ETF.

To read some great analysis and see some nice chart porn, go here.

Justin Fox

Jean-Claude Trichet, now a few months into retirement, has no regrets about his eight-year tenure as president of the European Central Bank. At least, that’s what he said at Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday night when a student asked him point blank. “I don’t regret anything,” was the response.

But listening to the full talk (when there’s video, it will be available here), it was clear that Trichet did regret something about the last few years. He regrets that economists didn’t give him better advice.

What Trichet said was that state-of-the-art macroeconomic theory was almost entirely useless in dealing with the crisis that began in 2007. Yeah, he tried to be polite about it: “This doesn’t mean we have to abandon DSGE,” he said, referring to the dynamic-stochastic general equilibrium models — in which an economy of rational, far-seeing actors struggles with the occasional friction or shock, but generally gets along okay — that dominated the work of economists at central banks. Buuut “atomistic rational agents [the figures that populate DSGE models] don’t capture behavior during a crisis.” Another quote: “Rational expectations theory has brought macroeconomics a long way … but there is a clear case to reexamine the assumptions.” And neither of these approaches leaves room for the possibility that financial market fluctuations could be the source of problems for the real economy.

Trichet finally reached for the last refuge of the frustrated economic policymaker: John Maynard Keynes. He quoted (at length) a famous story from Keynes’ General Theory. It describes a beauty contest in a newspaper where the goal is to pick the face that the most readers will vote for.

It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

“It captures what’s happening when a systemic crisis is unfolding,” Trichet said. At the height of the 2008 crisis, he went on, “it was clear that an immensely large number of [market] participants were thinking that if there was not a game change, the system would collapse.”

Now, none of this is exactly news. Lots of people have said similar things over the past couple of years. But it was very interesting hearing them from someone who until recently was one of the most powerful economic policymakers on the planet — and one who has been criticized mainly (at least among English-speakers; the Germans have their own unique view) for being too conservative, and too unwilling to jettison faulty models of how the world works. Not that he has any regrets or anything.

Trichet’s analysis nicely parallels the chapter on postwar macroeconomics in a fascinating new book I’ve been reading, The Assumptions Economists Make, by Jonathan Schlefer. Schlefer is a former alt-weekly columnist and editor of MIT’s Technology Review who quit journalism to get a Ph.D in political science, and is now a research associate at Harvard Business School. His book is a tough critique of economics, but a deeply informed and sympathetic one. And his basic attitude is pretty much the same as Milton Friedman’s in the famous essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” It’s okay if an economic theory is unrealistic and oversimplified. All that matters is whether it delivers useful predictions.

By that standard, here are Schlefer’s judgments on the succession of theories that have dominated academic macroeconomics since the 1970s:

Read the rest here.

Jason Gilbert

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

It’s an unmanned drone helicopter shooting a taco from space down at you and your colleagues during lunchtime!

The Internet is going wild for Tacocopter, perhaps the next great startup out of Silicon Valley, which boasts a business plan that combines four of the most prominent touchstones of modern America: tacos, helicopters, robots and laziness.

Indeed, the concept behind Tacocopter is very simple, and very American: You order tacos on your smartphone and also beam in your GPS location information. Your order — and your location — are transmitted to an unmanned drone helicopter (grounded, near the kitchen where the tacos are made), and the tacocopter is then sent out with your food to find you and deliver your tacos to wherever you’re standing.

You pay online, so the tacos are simply dropped off at your feet by the drone helicopter, which then flies back to the restaurant to pick up its next order.

Read the rest here.