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2003 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners Announced
ccnull writes "This year's list of 24 MacArthur Fellows has been released. Each winner of the so-called 'Genius Grant' receives $500,000, no strings attached. 2003's winners include a blacksmith, a biomedical engineer, a computation geometer, a biophysicist, a nurse, and a short story writer 'crafting witty, experimental prose.'"
So I guess my shell-script "thinkgeek fortune grabber" wouldn't cut it.
Esoteric reference.
a short story writer celebrating the complexity of life's most ordinary moments (Lydia Davis
A blog like any other.
Why not me? I am not going to make it in my profession.
In my area, the teachers are badly overpaid. The union thugs force the district to give them more and more money, and the district has to cut bus service and increase class sizes to make up for the greed.
The big part of the problem is the NEA. The teachers are forced to join, and then are forced to give money to the organization which then fights against education reform and accountability. There are dedicated professionals who put teaching ahead of greed who are forced to join this anti-education group.
" a short story writer celebrating the complexity of life's most ordinary moments (Lydia Davis)"
Up next. A short-story writer celebrates the complexities of spending 500,000.00
What exactly does "a blacksmith exploring the expressive qualities of metal" mean? Does he hammer the iron until it cries?
There is no spoon or sig.
It's not a grant if there are no strings attached, it's an entitlement.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach teachers.
Those who can't teach teachers, administrate
Those who can't administrate are on the school board.
Personally, I dislike Sarah Sze's work, but damn is she pretty.
Just think how much iron $500,000 will buy!
You don't apply ?? I still don't know how the people are found for the grant ?
Bit of Article.....
Several hundred nominators assist the Foundation in identifying people who should be considered for a MacArthur Fellowship. Nominators, who are appointed each year and serve anonymously, are chosen from many fields of endeavor and challenged to identify people who demonstrate exceptional creativity and promise. A 12-member Selection Committee, whose members also serve anonymously, meets regularly throughout the year to review nominee files, narrow the list, and make final recommendations to the Foundation's Board of Directors. Typically, between 20 and 25 Fellows are selected each year.
This grant sounds to me like some people that have no clue of what to do with their money.
There are probably real researchers studying cancer or some biotech that need the money.
I don't get it.
They turn me down for a Nobel.
Then they turn me down for an Ig Nobel.
Now, the Genius Grant passes me over.
Why don't I get some recognition for my first-hand studies on the effects of sleep deprivation due to intense Slashdot reading? Dear Lord, WHY???
One of the winners, Erik Demaine, is 22 and is already a CS professor at MIT with a gigantic publication list. I find this both inspiring and profoundly demoralizing. He'd better not be getting laid more than me too.
I, for one, welcome our genius overlords.
goes to [insert name here] for figuring out the comment scoring system on slashdot.org by creatively typing with their toes.
I think someone could make some kind of cgi/php based generator for these topics.
Which makes me think of how much subjectivity there is to the notion of "worthwhile pursuits" versus "worthless pursuits."
Sometimes useful things come out of "useless" research.
And sometimes the "crackpots" like Velikovsky serve an important function: to make us reflect on how we've arrived at our current models of the universe, how to make those models more detailed and thorough, and how to articulate them to fellow scientists and laypeople alike.
.....crazy. must win before i die.
An entitlement at least has some pretense of being deserving.
Erik Demaine is also a recipient. He is the one who showed Tetris is an NP-complete problem.
Not giving a person 5000000 for something like that?
How about giving 50 people who are smart.. but can't afford university a chance? How about giving them a life that they wouldn't have been able to afford?
Or donating it to help the kids in Africa.. or anything that's mildly useful?
Seems to me like this is just the recursive pattern in our society "Let's make the rich, richer" Sure.. some of these people aren't rich, but they sure aren't starving. I'm sure if they've been noticed by this foundation that they are preety well off.
Whoever runs this.. think of what your money could do in the hands of people who really need it.
It always kills me when people with interesting, fun jobs get money and awards. Like this and the Academy Awards. To qualify for these awards you first have to have a great job that you love. In that case do you really need more award.
Where's the award for the programmer who refactored 500K lines of hopeless spaghetti code left over by some idiot who hard no idea about structured programing?!
The MacArthur Fellows Program is designed to emphasize the importance of the creative individual in society. Fellows are selected for the originality and creativity of their work and the potential to do more in the future
Next year's recipient: Darl McBride for inventing a new business model : making huge obnoxious noises and outrageous claims to divert attention from his insider's trading and stock pumping activities.
It's creative and he has the potential to do more in the future.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Interestingly, among the academics given the MacArthur grants, the Ivy league schools Harvard, MIT and Yale appear to be producing a number of these folks whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level or the faculty level. Many of the recipients appear to have done at least some time at those institutions.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...my check arriving...
Karma: Bad. Mostly because the only moderators that notice me are conservatives.
Nice gimmick account. You'll make the +1 bonus in no time!!!
This sort of philanthropy is very rare in Australia. Does this happen elsewhere in the world?
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
Look, you knew what teachers made when you chose the profession. (If you didn't, you have an even bigger problem, but we're going to assume that you did.) You chose to become a teacher and you chose to accept the salary. Why is it that teachers are about the only group in this society who are constantly whining about being underpaid, as though their pay is some sort of moral issue? You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher. It's YOUR choice.
And another thing. Teacher unions have led the whining for years that we need lower student/teacher ratios (so the unions can have more jobs for their members). In my state, the current ratio is 15-1. When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, it was typical to have 25 to 30 kids in each class, yet the quality of instruction continues to go DOWN, in spite of the lower student/teacher ratios. If teachers would do a better job of educating kids in classes of the old size, that WOULD leave more money to pay the decent teachers better.
My mother was a teacher for her entire career and my father started as a teacher, so I have respect for many of the people who choose to do it. But the truth is that the profession is LOADED with many, many incompetent boobs (being administrered by other incompetent boobs) who would rather whine than figure out how to do the job they're being paid to do.
I mean, the guy has a Tetris Award, for fucks sake--you know how that drives the ladies wild. Plus, his beard is pretty far onto the "eww, gross" side of the facial-hair spectrum; no woman can resist jowl-pubes.
I cant believe they overlooked me again....ahh well, i will hold out for my rightful recognition by the swedish academy of science.
I forget what 8 was for.
JUMP OUT THE WINDOW!
I see your point about the unions. They are a problem BUT without the unions, the teachers would be getting screwed and you'd only attract the least qualified. There's got to be a better middle ground between unions and the administration.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
figures(PDF)
This would include special interest programs and the university budgets.
I would put some of the special interest money under a welfare title. I would put colleges under a different title. If you would rather have ignorant people, don't educate. Don't worry about, you already got your education, forget about the saps with kids.
California is such a great state to teach in...oh wait there is a teacher shortage in California. I guess the teachers can't buy enough mansions from the poor record executives.
...is that the decision making process for these awards includes a swimsuit competition.
Which still doesn't help me. Blech.
Wouldn't it be nice if one of these big philanthopists had not been a nasty evil old man who wanted to make up for his life taking advantage of others?
Actually the Lowe Foundation is an example of one of the good guys' legacies. But John D MacArthur was a real character, the stories abound. I only heard one good one to three bad ones. And I do mean bad.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Government support of the arts is an ancient practice.
Mozart, Schubert, Emily Bronte and John Keats died young and poor - who knows what more they could have done had they been given financial support?
"Yeah, show me where in the U.S. teachers are being overpaid. "
Every single place where the wage hikes are set by the union, instead of the real value of the work. In states where there is "right to work", the teachers are not overpaid.
" Only neo-con, big business puppets suggest that teachers are paid too much"
Some are, some are not. If they will still work for less money, they are clearly overpaid (especially when this wasted money could be spent on education)
"If we paid teachers well we'd attract more teachers that are truly talented"
We pay them more and more and get less and less results.
"Only [meaningless left-wing insult] suggest that teachers are paid too much"
"Teacher unions have led the whining for years that we need lower student/teacher ratios "
They are so inconsistent. They ask for a lower student/teacher ratio, and at the same time they demand wage hikes well in excess of COLA which force the school districts to not have as many teachers....which results in a higher student/teacher ratio.
I was primarily interested in addressing the issue from the point of view of the guy doing the complaining, as opposed to outlining how to fix American education. From the point of view of the teacher, the choice is pretty simple. Accept the pay or find something else to do.
If you want to address the overall problem, though, I'd say the problem lies primarily in management. Government-run schools have no incentive to become any better, because there's no market mechanism to force them to. The system squeezes out many of the really good teachers, because they don't want to put up with the garbage that goes on in most schools. Some of them end up doing other things and others end up in private schools with better management (where they make less money).
If you look at teacher salaries over the past 40 years or so (and the rate of increase), I think you'd have to conclude that low pay isn't the problem. Relative teacher salaries are higher now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. (I can't cite inflation-adjusted figures, but I think the facts would bear me out on that very readily.) I think there are plenty of decent people who would be willing to teach at the salaries that teachers make -- IF they were allowed to teach and not be made into babysitters AND if the incompetent boobs were weeded out. (One of the biggest frustrations among teachers I know is the quality level of many of the teachers around them. I'm currently dating a teacher who has very interesting stories about that.)
There are plenty of jobs that pay less than teachers are paid (and that also require college degrees). For instance, I used to be a newspaper editor. You'd be shocked how little reporters at small newspapers make. TV producers in many, many markets make less than teachers, too. These are just a couple of examples I'm familiar with. The point is that there are PLENTY of well-educated people who make less than teachers. It's the management structure that's destroyed education, IMO, not the salaries paid to teachers.
"They are a problem BUT without the unions, the teachers would be getting screwed and you'd only attract the least qualified."
No, you'd attract the best qualified. The unions oppose merit pay. Without the unions, you'd have education reform (the unions have opposed all meaningful efforts to improve education for years). Without unions, the teachers would have more money, actually, since they would be able to spend the massive dues amounts on something that meets their own interests.
"There's got to be a better middle ground between unions and the administration"
How about the interests of the students?
hehe
Exactly. Art fuels the imagination. Art gives us glimpses of the possible and the impossible. Art transcends reality. Its what seperates us from the monkeys!
He's obviously a neo-con in Dem's clothing. Look at Bill O-lielly's "No Spin" approach to things. He claims to be non-partisan and be on YOUR side, but he always preaches from the right. Welcome to the new politics of politics.
Un-news
How is this good? The same tenure system that protects the teacher who speaks out also protects the teacher who is just plain lousy.
Given the crumbling situation of education, I think we should risk muzzling the "disagreers" in order to get rid of the bad ones.
It is not as if they disagreeers don't get fired another way. In states without right-to-work protections, workers who disagree with the union (and refuse to join it) get fired.
The major problem shows two faces; the National Education Association and the professional education teachers get. Case in point. My girlfriend (yes, I have a girlfriend) is a high school math teacher (yes, that's why she's dating a geek. And I have shown her my slide rule). She's working on her master's degree, and she's functionally illiterate. I love her to death, but she can't write for shit. She had never outlined a paper since junior high. If the teaching colleges focused on teaching or education, then the teachers would have a chance. However, as the NEA and their counterpart, the teachign colleges
10+ years ago, there was a short-lied show on Fox named "Flying Blind". The girlfriend of the min character had a roommate who just wandered around in a bathrobe, apparently unemployed, but always had money for stuff...
About halfway through the second season, the main characted asked, "Just what do you DO, anyway?"
Bathrobe guy: "I have a Genius Grant..."
Main Character: "You? But you're not a genius!"
Bathrobe guy: "I was the night I slept with the lady who gives out the grants..."
It's because morons who want an easy degree and summers off go for a career in teaching.
The smart people become professors or work in industry, the lazy bums teach 5th grade.
I'm about as anti-bush as one can be. I can't wait until he's voted out and replaced by a Democrat.
How can you be a Democrat...
He didn't actually say he's a Democrat. That's an inference -- maybe a good guess, but not a fact.
What he said was, he can't wait until Bush is replaced by a Democrat. Maybe he's a third-party voter (or even a non-voter) who believes that only a Democrat can defeat Bush.
-kgj
"Look at Bill O-lielly's "No Spin" approach to things. He claims to be non-partisan and be on YOUR side, but he always preaches from the right."
"No-Spin" merely means that if you lie on the show, you will get called for it. O'Reilly preachers from the center. He gets called right-wing by those like Franken who thinks that everyone who is not a good leftist is a right-wing kook. He also flusters the Limbaughs and others who claim that moderates are wishy-washy and have no opinion: O'Reilly is moderate and mad as hell. It's enough to drive a talk-show host to drugs....oops.
I would hope it is not just neocons who recognize the danger of depriving workers of their rights by forcing them into unions which work against their will and then steal their money for political causes that go against their interests. It is not a "radical right-wing notion" that each person should have a choice in which political organizations they belong to.
I read most of the biographies and, to be honest, it seems kind of random. There are tens of thousands of equally deserving people in the world.
"Random acts of kindness" can be a noble thing, but I think this goes too far. The awarders of these "grants" have such deep pockets that they have the power to detract from and demoralize all the more specific and better informed grant givers out there.
gee...my reactionary neighbor claims the same thing as you EXCEPT he says they O'Reily is a Flaming Liberal.
go figure...I would say that BOTH you and my neighbor are stupid extremest assholes.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The problem with the Union is that they tend want pay based on seniority rather than how well you perform your job, so an ace teacher makes the same as the dead wood who has been teaching just as long.
Basically any Union exists for these reasons:
1) To get Better Pay and Benefits for its members
2) Better Working conditions, including getting reduced workloads
3) Better Job Security, including protecting the jobs of incompetant boobs.
I'm not anti-union, but most of the items on the list are not really in-sync with improving the quality of education. It just annoys me when the NEA runs ads bragging about how they care about the quality of our kids education. No... you are for the teachers, not the kids, let's be honest here. Just because the NEA or other union opposes certain reforms does not mean the reform is bad for education, if the union opposes it, it's most likely because they perceive it to be increasing the workload for teachers, or weakening their (the union's) power. Which is fine, that's what they are supposed to do. I just wish more people would see that for what it is, and not some noble act of fighting FOR their kids' best educational interest.
Paying the good teachers extra would be a good start, it would give other teachers incentive to perform better. But the unions are against it, basically because it's too arbitrary for them. Unions need clearly defined workplace rules and pay scales, when the administration can start making arbitrary decisions, the Union loses some of its power.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Geeze, nobody remembers that our own beloved RMS was a recipient of this fine award in 1990?
PS: That metal worker makes some awesome stuff. I saw him in a magazine once and thought it was some fine work.
It isn't a deal. Seinfeld's salary was based on the advertising revenue he drew which was based on his ratings. The market priced him. This woman's short story was also priced, and so far people don't seem to think that her creations are with as much (or course, this can always change).
I have a friend that was recognized as teacher of the year in his populous county. There may have been some qualifiers, like "high school teacher of the year" , but no matter what qualifer it's still pretty amazing.
He had an asswipe principal try to run him out. Not only didn't support him vs. abusive parents, the chancre sore was abusive himself. Absolutely no concept that the mission of the school was to educate its students. In his view, it was to further his career.
In a way, it worked. The asswipe was promoted to a district level job where he could only abuse other administrators.
My friend is contemptuous of the union, which has consistently o.k.'d larger class sizes to get more money in salary. But the salaries are not enough for a comfortable middle class existence in Southern California.
Overall, I'd say we need to scrap the public school system and start over. It was never meant to educate, merely warehouse and indoctrinate. That's why the unions representing teachers and prison guards sound so similar. If public schools were really about education, they'd be set up differently. Really, the lessons we are to take from them are meta-lessons in not standing out, in obedience, subservience. The U.S. adopted a Prussian model of education that was explicitly designed to produce generations of cannon fodder. The elite went (and go) to different schools, and learn different things.
Look at W. He did not learn anything from his educational opportunities except that he's entitled to things. He has a certain amount of charm, and the politicians knack for remembering individual names and faces, but other than that, he's a zero. He is a stranger to reason, unafflicted with curiosity, but at every step of his educational progress he saw that, despite manifest lack of merit, who he was opened doors.
That's a different lesson the first graders in a packed classroom are learning in their platoons. They're learning to sit in the right place. That who they are does not matter, but whether they do as they are told does matter.
RMS was awarded the MacArthur award in 1990 for his contributions to the software field.
This quote is interesting:
"According to The Boston Globe, Stallman supports himself by working for two months a year as a $260-an-hour computer consultant."
this was in 1990! I'd give him an award just for getting that rate! It just goes to show you how much RMS gave up to bring the world Free Software. Most people have no idea.
"And their day lasts longer, as they do not arrive and go home when the kids do, but stay around to help with after school activities, grading homework, and coming up with the next day's lesson plans"
Only if they want to. Thanks to tenure, they lay back on the hammock and coast a lot of the time. They develop lesson plans early on (or borrow some other's plan) so they do not have to spend any time on prep (using the same tired plans year after year after year), and they have the students grade the papers during class time. It becomes a strictly 8 to 3 matter.
Is it possible to become a genius. Your brain is a muscle, could you exercise it and improve it's performance?
then I missed out on this.
Now I'm really depressed.
Funny.
Do you think we really give a monkey's about 'slurs' like that?
just over 499,999 dollars worth.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Probably more out of skew is 2 awards going to New Mexico residents (8.3% of the awards going to an area with 0.75% of the population).
Closer to skew is 4 awards (16.67%) going to California residents (10-11% of the population) and even more so if you count that as "West Coast" instead of just California.
When you deduct the two awards to international residents, that leaves 5 awards (20.83%) to be spread among the other 44 states. Those went to residents of Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Does that mean the remaining 39 states do not contain sufficient genius to warrant an award? Does that mean that we have an abnormally high concentration of genius in New York and Boston? While New York and Boston residents would probably like to think so, maybe put on big foam fingers and drunkenly shout "We're Number One", the rest of the nation would likely disagree.
Going through a portion of the historical listing of winners (last names starting with A-F), we find that out of 164 winners, 70 (42.7%) resided in the states of New York or Massachusets, and 30 (18.3% of total recipients, 62.5% of all New York state recipients) were in New York City. An additional 56 (34.1%) were in California, but those were more evenly spread out with only 11 (6.7% of total, 19.6% of state) being in Los Angeles.
So historically, based on that list, you have nearly 77% of all recipients being concentrated in 3 states and over 18% of them in just one city.
I'm sure the recipients of these grants are deserving, hard-working, geniuses in their own right. I just wonder if their geographic location is giving them an unfair advantage over geniuses in the rest of the U.S.
- Greg , though that still weights Cali's share of the awards above its share of the , just short of half of the recipients (11) are on the East Coast, 9 of them in New York or Massachusets (the other 2 are in Connecticut and Georgia).
Start a happiness pandemic
Hell, the folks at the Ford Foundation are proud of the fact that they call Henry Ford "the grave spinner".
Seastead this.
Uh, Try Staten Island, NY (Ramones)
..........FULL STOP.
If families were given government vouchers to go to any school that they wanted (including private institutions), this would improve things by introducing competition and eliminating the current monopolies - poor underperforming schools (and teachers/administrators) and allowing middle class and poorer children attend better institutions. Granted this still need affirmative action to work...
Teachers are not underpaid. They are paid about middle of the pack when compared against other non-technical careers with a 4 year degree. When teachers complain about being underpaid, they always compare themselves against scientists and engineers. They should compare with journalists, economists, historians, linquists, and accountants, which pay worse than teaching.
the darwin award.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Her and her husband are the dream geek couple.
Here is her site.
MineralArts
Her drawings are great.
There appears to be some truth to this, at least subjectively. When I was in college, the least intelligent students I knew tended to be the ones in elementary education. That's not to say that ALL of them were that way, but a LOT of them were (in disproportionate numbers).
Blinn, James F.
Demaine, Erik
Holland, John H.
Jurafsky, Daniel
Rus, Daniela
Shor, Peter
Sims, Karl
Stallman, Richard
Winfree, Erik
Wolfram, Stephen
The MacArthur Foundation site has the fellows sorted by field. These eleven were the ones they classed under "Computer Science".
The MacArthur Genius awards are an example of a rich, eccentric family giving money to other eccentrics. When you come right down to it, it doesn't have much to do with genius. They've given money to people with some truly useful ideas in the past, but there have also been plenty of stinkers in this list. My favorite was the woman that got an award for her new theory that sperm was an invasive infection in a woman's vaginal tract. By the way, she wasn't in the medical field. Her source for this new theory that blazed bold trails in medicine?
She saw the infection "in a dream".
There's a reason they get a lot of people from the Ivy Leagues for these awards. The Ivy's nurture that kind of nonsense, many times at public expense. Call me when the Nobel's are announced. I might care then.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It isn't just that the winners come from rich-kid schools. Look at the gender split: 50/50.
/., IMHO.
The awards are a political statement, nothing more.
This shit has no place on
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I hope they didn't give it to that fraud and boy sodomizer James "The Amazing" Randi.
Face it - grammar is dying. Or is it dieing? Or is it dieieieieieieieing?
Anyway, remember reading about kids using Internet shorthand in school and teachers getting mad? Well, guess what my teacher wrote on one of my essays.
She wrote "LOL."
They regularly get 200+ users in the channel, and around important Apple events that spikes to 400+ easily. They also have several dozen gigs of warez offered on their bots. What criteria are you using to say that it's dead?
Given that you're happy on this level of discourse, perhaps this will make some sense: you're a dumb shit.
Happy? Now everyone's conversing on the same level.
Um, what was it that you had to say?
If you have more scorn with which to trash a cool artist whom happened to be awarded a private grant, go nuts. I'm sure you'd feel so much anger if you were awarded such an honor. Oh, wait, you never will be, because you're nothing but a sniper. So, you can happily feel scorn for the people you never can be.
I'd feel sad for you, but damn, you make it hard to be charitable. Fucking do something. Don't be a jerk.
I forget what 8 was for.
yup
Yeah, when I was in college, I knew some girls in elementary ed, and their Math homework was stuff like 45 x 12 = ? .
I guess to teach 3rd grade math, one only needs to understand 6th grade math.
I also have a (intelligent) friend who is a teacher, and he fully admits to the fact that it's a great job because you only need to work about half time. (6 hours a day for 2/3 of the year).
The "Ivy League" is just an athletic conference.
http://www.ivysport.com/
No... you are for the teachers, not the kids,
I can't tell you how many of my very smart friends have decided not to teach because of the low pay and sucky working conditions. A lot of them want very badly to teach but can't justify shortchanging their own families to help out everyone else's.
And regarding merit pay, perhaps you've never had to deal with a school bureaucracy before. School administrators are politicians plain and simple, and they value conformity over creativity, football over forensics and test scores over true learning almost every single time. The merit pay wouldn't go where you think it would. Teacher's unions are a political force too, no doubt, but they serve as a check on the power of schoolboard politicians.
So when you say they're 'for the teachers not the kids', I feel the need to correct you - they're for the teachers, therefore they're for the kids. You're not going to get better teachers by asking teachers to make more sacrifices.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
First you say: If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher.
Then you complain about teacher quality. Well if you pay people poorly, it is no wonder good people leave.
You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
Actually, you also hear it from military people and other government workers. In countries with socialized medicine you hear it alot from nurses The reason is simple: people who work for the government do not have salaries that are set by the market. Rather they are set through negotiations with their "bosses", the public at large. Their whining is more or less the same as you asking your boss for a raise (just that the process is very indirect). If the public comes to believe that teachers are underpaid, they will vote for politicians who promise to pay them more.
Unlike, say, janitors, teachers can also make a plausible argument that poor pay leads to poor education which will lead to a poor economy down the road.
Richard Stallman is a genius.
With $500,000 in the bank, he wants YOU to code for FREE.
And many of you DO.
That's why he's a genius.
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~edemaine/papers/CCCG20
There's no contradiction in what I'm saying. The guy who made the post has two choices. He can accept what the profession pays or he can get another job. In another post in this thread, I addressed the overall issue of education quality just a bit, although that wasn't really my intention in my first post. The choice faced by an individual teacher is one thing. The choice faced by society is an entirely different thing.
As to your other comment, I think the "self-righteous indignation" is worse with teachers. You don't generally see illogical bumper stickers for other professions on the order of, "If you can read this, thank a teacher."
Overall, I suspect we would agree about the cause of problem (based on some of what you said). As I said in another post, government schools don't have a market mechanism to force them to change. Personally, I wish there was no such thing as government schools (euphemistically called "public schools"). If we had grocery stores that were operated as government monopolies and we had to buy from wherever we were "zoned" for, we would have the same lousy quality and lousy service and lousy results that we get from government schools. Nobody would put up with that, but most people are willing to put up with lousy schools because it's become something like religious dogma in this country that government schools are sacred.
Los Alamos, New Mexico has the highest concetration of Ph.D's of any city in the world. The east coast hosts over half the U.S. population.
Besides, this isn't about finding the top brains around, just enough that qualify to receive however many awards they're giving out that year.
If teachers would do a better job of educating kids in classes of the old size, that WOULD leave more money to pay the decent teachers better.
No, that would leave more money for tax cuts!
+2 karma points, not to mention you should start a blob, if you have the intestinal fortitiude.
... did you mean blog? and if not, what is a blob? If you meant blog, check out my blog-like web site @ karljones.com.
Just doing my part for reason and clear thinking. A well-ordered commonwealth begins with well-orered debate.
Re: starting a blob
-kgj
I wonder how many of these people have slashdot userID_s...
We all depend on each other, whether you like it or not. There is no such thing as independence of an individual. The sooner you internalize this fact, the better off our society will be.
Shame you had to post this "gem" as anonymous coward.
A truely free-market approach to education is the internet. Most of the information is free and the quality is variable. Applying information theory to the free market, the most unique information would become the most expensive. However, this information is a moving target, and human teachers are far too inefficient to disseminate information to the 7 billion people around the world.
A few educators might be snapped up by the extremely wealthy. The remainder of the population pouldn't know where to start, and would continue in their ignorance. Governments might hire instructors to teach young people some basic information technology concepts like reading, writing, typing and SQL. These people would be paid whatever the State deems adequate, because the State is trying to gain a local advantage by increasing the local education.
Smart people who can't afford college can easily find the money through grants, scholarships and loans. A bigger problem is for bright to average people who can't afford college.
This is paid over the 5 years, in quarterly installments of $25K .... surely this is just chump change ... all these people are already successful and in moderately lucrative employment. They should get a mill in one crack-cocaine like hit at the very least.
That Bellwether by Connie Willis was fiction. It turns out that there _are_ fairy godmothers after all!
... I have to say that this kind of prize is what sets the two worlds appart. It is truly a remarkable thing that some people will just sponsor promising individuals so that they can develop their skills without having to worry about the rent.
I wish we had something like this here. Or that I would become rich enough to sponsor this kind of thing myself.
"Maybe you haven't noticed, but unions are weaker now than they've been since the 1930's
Even now they are too powerful, as roughly 30% of union members are forced to join and don't even want to be in the union.
"they're for the teachers, therefore they're for the kids
No, they are for the teachers first, the kids last. This is proven in the situation of teacher's strikes, where they hold education of children hostage to their greed.
Alas that she's also too agressively opinionated to effectively manage a discussion session.
Still, a good class overall. Orientalism is thought-provoking stuff.
35 to 40 years ago the United States suffered from a couple little idiosyncrasies called we liked to call Sexism and Racism. The two "Isms" made it difficult for talented intelligent women and minorities to achieve much in most walks of life. What was an acceptable outlet for these highly educated motivated individuals?
TEACHING!!
These teachers are retiring. It we want to replace them with similar talent, we must either regress socially to "The Good Old Days", or pay our new teachers the wages they deserve!
Being for the teachers is not the same as for the kids. The teachers' unions are for the former. That does not automatically make them for the latter. Their foremost objective is more teachers. A close second is more union members. Certainly the first is worthwhile goal, but notice that I didn't say anything about quality.
Around here there's a debate swirling over school vouchers to support sending underpriveleged kids to private schools. The union is against the notion entirely. The union frames the issue as taking money away from public schools. Perhaps, but they deny the proposition that vouchers mean that you don't have to be rich to attend a good school, and that kids shouldn't be forced to attend what may be a sucky local school. If they were truly for the kids, wouldn't they at least consider such measures plausible?
Then again, why should I be surprised that the union is against students and money going to largely non-union institutions? If you vehemently rule out any proposition that is not union-controlled regardless of the potential benefit to the kids, does that make you pro-kids? I don't think so.
I'm not on there either.
Anyone really smart moves to one of those places.
:-)
I live in Colorado - where do YOU live?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I couldn't agree more. What would happen if all the kids moved to private schools? For starters, the next time the teachers went out on stike everyone would just yawn...
The whole system is set up to reward the status quo. There is no incentive to actually educate students. If parents could choose to award institutions with their money there would be great competition. This happens in colleges - if you don't educate your admissions drop. Colleges aren't perfect, but they're doing better than a lot of school districts these days...
If this guy IS getting laid more then you..I'm glad I beat you up in high school.
Although in theory I like the idea of starting a blob, I'm not quite sure what is involved in doing so or what the eventual outcome would be, so I can't really enjoin you to start one.
... destroyed by Steve McQueen, as I recall.
In database terminology, "blob" stands for "Binary Large Object" -- a datatype representing an image, program, or other binary file.
Alternately, "The Blob" is an amorphous monster
-kgj
"or pay our new teachers the wages they deserve!"
I agree. The wages they deserve, not way more than what is deserved (something which many are demanding here)
Yes. 'clob' and 'texta' are other fun variants.
... you mean like a blog, but organic? ... perhaps a disembodied brain, modified to serve as a storage medium.
... after all, if I bring (and consume) lots of beer, I become very blob-like ....
I wasn't familiar with those.
I was thinking of more organic behaviours. "Wetware", the scifi book, came to mind.
Hmmm
Also, perhaps "blob" could serve as an amusing acronym for "bring lots of beer"
-kgj
Richard Stallman, eh? ...Now thats nifty.
Foundations are one of the most overlooked forces for good in the country. The MacArthur Foundation makes great use of that money they have invested. These awards are a great positive thing to have in our society..even if one might not completely agree with each and every one. Who cares. Overall they are doing very good works with their money.
Iggy Popp, the zeus of punk, started in Ann Arbor.
Those who think punk rock was invented in the UK probably also think that the Beatles invented rock and roll.
invisible hand
read your Adam Smith
Oh yeah I got somein'you can "internalize"
Perhaps you have your causality reversed. First, he became a great programmer and developer by writing free software. The big money came later.
Nurses.
Wah wah! The doctors are pricks. Wah wah! We're doing too much of doctors' work. Wah wah! Pay us more money.
As if they didn't know how much nursing paid and what the duties were.
I hope someone pisses in your IV next time you're at the hospital, you fucking cocksucker cunt.
really!!!