A Common Choice: Hydroponic Drip SystemThere are different places where hydroponic system plans can be found, either for free (DIY) or for purchase at a retailer. There are companies that will sell hydroponic drip systems pre-made. These systems can be more simple than trying to follow a plan to build a drip system. Building a system from scratch, although fairly simple, still leaves the possibility of not doing something correctly which will make the system ineffective. Buying a pre-made system allows you to have a system that is up and running quickly and that is guaranteed to work for years to come.Wick versus DripThere are two systems that are most commonly made from scratch and those are the wick system and the drip hydroponic system. The wick system is very simply constructed. It uses a tray that holds the plants which sits on top of the reservoir that holds the water and nutrient solution. These two pieces are held together by a wick which allows the water solution to transmit these elements into the tray with the plants. The down side to this system is that there is not a way to regulate the amount of solution that is getting to the plants, which means that a small amount of plants can be grown at one time. This would make an ideal choice for someone wanting to grow a limited amount of plants or with very limited space.The drip hydroponic system is built in much the same way with the tray that sits on top of the reservoir. In this system, however, instead of using wicks to transmit the solution to the plants, there is a submerged pump system that transmits the solution to the plants at whatever rate the gardener sets on the meter. The solution goes into the tray a drip at a time so that there is a constant flow of nutrients without the plants becoming overly submerged like in other systems.There are benefits to using the drip hydroponic system, such as the fact that you do not have to monitor the system as often as other systems because the pump and timer handles everything automatically. Also, since the flow rate can be regulated, plants tend to grow larger, have a higher yield, and higher numbers of plants can be grown at one time in the system. One down side to using the drip hydroponic system is that it is more expensive than the wick system since the pump for the system has to be bought as well. However, this is a popular system, especially for use in greenhouses where larger numbers of plants are grown at a time.
Colleges and Education: Are Students Really Being Educated?
My associates in the financial service industry acknowledge that college graduates from United States universities are generally unprepared for entry-level professional positions. They have particularly noticed a drop in basic skills. Students who were once hired from accredited second-tier universities can no longer be relied upon to meet even minimal standards in many professional entry-level positions. (Note: I refer to top-tier as only one to two dozen colleges across the nation. These are Ivies and several select colleges such as MIT and Johns Hopkins.)A business executive may hire a graduate from what he believes is a top-performing business school that also boasts a nationally ranked football team into a marketing or customer service assignment. (Colleges that sport nationally ranked teams are characteristic of second-tier schools.) He must spend valuable time coaching and monitoring the new employee as the graduate lacks the most basic core skills. But executives today just do not have the time to do this in a time-stressed high-pressured corporate environment.Managers are shocked by poor writing and language skills of recent graduates.The situation is far worse than you might imagine. The results of my interviews with business people in many corporations conclude that students cannot function effectively in their chosen fields of study. Also, they often are severely deficient in written language and reasoning skills required to make incisive judgments and decisions. The standards have sunk so low that many students from second-tier universities cannot write a paragraph without making a major spelling or grammatical mistake.Yet the universities continue to accept the students in far greater numbers than in past decades, and offer little effective remedial help for students in need. And what is most distressing is that, as a result of grade inflation, almost every student can graduate from an accredited college today while receiving little or no help from their universities to rectify severe learning problems.Professors have little experience in their field and have no incentive to teach effectively.Full-time professors have their PhD but little real-life experience in their field of study. Consequently, at the end of four years, students have little acquired knowledge and cannot think critically in their chosen career field. Professors, especially those who have tenure and are almost impossible to relieve, show little concern with their own job performance and have relatively little incentive to instruct to high standards.It’s a fact!You don’t have to take my word alone for any of this. In one of the few honest and broad-based surveys of businesses conducted by an academic association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities in January of 2007 disclosed that two-thirds of the employers surveyed said that college graduates lack the skills to succeed in today’s economic environment. In fact, more than 70 percent said colleges just weren’t doing the job of emphasizing critical and analytical reasoning as well as creativity and innovation. These are just the things that colleges hang their hats on when trumpeting the value of a college education. Think of how really bad this is.If the education is so bad, who can we hire?So what can an executive do? She will hire only from top-tier schools that recruit their incoming freshmen from the very top of their high school classes. If her field is highly specialized, she may even go outside the country and recruit students from Asia, India or Argentina (hotbeds of Information Technology) where professors have experience in their fields. The students from these schools will have the knowledge, the tenacity, and, hopefully, the appetite to get the job done professionally.With few job prospects, most graduates are coming out of college with nothing to show for their four years. They don’t even receive an education.