Higher tech for the sake of higher tech is the worst thing you can do with technology. It's a scam. Examples:
(1) My home state of Maine gives every kid in school in the state a laptop. It's a scam so someone can say "look, we're hi tech". Teachers waste time on discipline problems, tech breakdown, being forced unnecessarily into using tech-driven instruction so as to not waste the laptops. I'm told that every day there has to be a UPS delivery to every school in the state from Apple with replacement laptops.
(2) Dean at prior college (non-union-strong) had a meeting where he demanded instructors use overhead projectors because of the expense of installing them, so we could show off how high-tech we are. If I put it up to a student vote ("Do you like PowerPoint instruction, or not?" -- "Do you like group projects, or not?") they usually decline. Scam.
Unfortunately, higher education is plagued by the need of education experts/PHDs to make careers/publication by "some new thing", anything whatsoever. That's why you get ridiculous churn in methods, teaching styles, group work, hands-on, technology, etc., etc. And it works hand-in-hand with book publishers who use the same as a reason to churn new book editions every so years, so that old editions can't be re-used.
Here's a completely crazy idea -- base decisions like these on research as to whether it helps students (and not on just whether it makes some salesman/budget-administrator cream in their pants). Does such research exist? Consider this article in the last issue of the AFT's American Educator:
Can research provide any guidelines as to which classroom applications are most effective?... The studies on these point to two conclusions. First, the mere presence of technology in the classroom does not necessarily mean that students learn more. Second -- and, perhaps, a corollary of the first conclusion -- using these technologies effectively is not as obvious as it might seem at first. [American Educator, Summer 2010, Daniel T. Willingham, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?", p. 26]
In short: The "hi-tech uber alles" fetish is, mostly, another in a long series of time & money-wasting scams perpetrated on the education system. There's little or no evidence that it helps student learning, and there is evidence that the time required to manage/prepare/leverage technology resources is directly lost from the educator's other existing duties of teaching, assessment, and feedback.
FTA: "Rosenfeld is a leading scholar in the study of P300 testing to reveal concealed information. Basically, electrodes are attached to the scalp to record P300 brain activity -- or brief electrical patterns in the cortex -- that occur, according to the research, when meaningful information is presented to a person with 'guilty knowledge.'"
"Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family."
If you are running a small business, marketing, and supporting a family -- then at this point you don't remotely have the time to learn programming from the ground up. (All of HTML, CSS, SQL/MySQL, PHP/Python on a business-critical project?)
Learning programming to that extent takes several years of alone time.
"In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University."
Not for the university, no. Football funds generally go to the athletic department, which still runs at an overall loss to the university. This is according to the NCAA.
Those funds are typically used to support the rest of a university's athletic department budget. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most departments operate at a yearly multimillion-dollar deficit. [PBS Nightly Business Report: The Business of College Football, Part 1]
"Yes, I agree, we're being idiots. So let's stop being stupid and SAVE HUMAN CIVILIZATION! The tech already exists, we did it in the past*--all that's stopping us is stupid policy decisions, not any technical hurdles."
Fine, first show me that accomplished (active, long-term storage solution) and then we can have a discussion about opening new nuclear plants.
* [Citation needed.] To my understanding, no long-term repositories for nuclear waste have actually been used anywhere in the world.
"Here we have a bunch of jerks whining about the 6-figure salaries they earn. I wish I were earning what these guys earn.[1] If they have a problem they can go find a job elsewhere.[2] Or do what everyone else has to do, rise through the ranks of the company and get promoted to the point where you're earning the kind of salary you want to see.[3]"
I've annotated your post above so I can reply in detail. FTA: [1] You now can, because they vacated their jobs. [2] They already did that. [3] Bullshit.
These claims baffle me. I make $25K teaching part-time (so as to do music/art on the side) with health insurance, and live comfortably in a big apartment with my girlfriend (splitting costs 50/50) in a nice part of Brooklyn.
"If being an 'idiot stock trader' who makes millions is so easy, why aren't you doing it? You can push a few buttons, right?"
As others have pointed out, in high-frequency trading, everything is indeed fully automated, and there are no buttons to push.
Furthermore, read the article: As one example, "If a programmer brings money with him, and puts up at least $250,000 to become an HTG partner, Hehmeyer hikes his percentage of the take." So many of these positions are based on either large capital investments, or who-you-know-networking. You can't just "decide" to get a position paying millions, that's not how it works.
"The lesson here is: negotiate well on the way in. Do your homework, find out what the job entails and what responsibilities/liabilities you will have and determine for yourself if the compensation being offered is worth it. Once you cut the deal, that's it..."
No, I would think the lesson is: Salaried employment is mostly a dead-end deal. I would recommend that anyone really ambitious work a salaried job in their chosen field for about 2 years (just like these guys did) and then strike out with their own company, ownership of IP and profits, etc. (just like these guys did).
"Of course you shouldn't be doing Gaussian curve grading when the distribution is very non-Gaussian. But if you've got a bathtub curve, that's a strong sign that your course is too easy."
Replying to my own comment, but having meditated on it more... more important than anything else, my expectation is that the above claim is simply not true. My hypothesis is that for science/math courses the tendency is for raw scores to be far from normal.
Do you have evidence/experience to the contrary? What do you think most people mean by "grade to the curve" anyway, that they're just doing a linear shift? My experience is it inherently means they're taking non-normal data and adjusting it to look normal.
"The question is: does the industrial revolution just correlate well with it, Or can you prove causation?... Personally my business model would be screwed up..."
Total proof of causation is not possible for a phenomenon such as this, unless you've got a couple other Earth-like planets to run a double-blind control-and-experiment comparison on.
In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can reveal only association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation. [Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22]
Not terrible points, but: (1) Most dropouts already do occur quickly (in the first 1-3 weeks), and (2) It's not politically feasible for me to wash out more than the 25-30% of each class that I already do.
My guess is that ratcheting up the difficulty would switch some "B" students directly to "F". There's a tipping point where students fundamentally either get the main ideas, or they don't. "Partly getting" the central limit theorem, for example, seems to be not an option.
"The remaining low-level crap can be glassified and dropped into a Yucca Mountain like storage depot (except that people's ignorance regarding nuclear waste and radioactivity makes them panic about that)."
So we agree that there's no actually-being-done way to deal with the waste.
"Do people not understand that a normal distribution would be a bell-curve?"
If you mean "normal distribution" in the technical sense (y = e^(-(x-mu)^2/(2*sigma^2))/(sqrt(2*pi)*sigma)) then that's simply a redundant, circular definition.
But if you mean it in the sense of "the usual thing to have happen" (which you make it sound like), then I'll assert that for class grades this is absolutely not, in general, the case. In fact, in my statistics classes I characterize "grading to a curve" as an act of fraud.
Biological processes and mechanical error (additive/averaging processes) tend to follow a bell-shaped curve (as per the central limit theorem). But learning processes tend be more a chain of knowledge prerequisites (multiplicative/conjunctive processes), and I find that they are significantly more likely to be "bathtub distributions" than anything else (people either get it or they don't -- most common results in my college math classes are to get an A, B, or drop out).
My position is that thinking grades should follow a normal (bell-shaped) curve is a fundamental misunderstanding of what normal curves are for.
"THats [sic] at least what these educators seem to be getting to."
I'll say it again: School systems have two camps, (1) teachers, (2) administrators, and those camps are generally in opposition.
Note that this particular change comes from Superintendent Larrie Reynolds ("I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it") -- someone who is not actually an educator (teacher).
I call horseshit. My college programs (double B.A. in very different fields at a state university) were almost always interesting and mind-expanding. I took lots of electives, in anything I found intriguing (speech, folklore, creative writing, theater, computer science, etc.). If a class looked uninteresting or mean-spirited in the first session, then I dropped it.
Maybe you just picked the wrong path and couldn't fix the problem.
"Adams concludes that social networking applications are a 'crude approximation' of real-life social networks. 'People don't have one group of friends"
There's a hidden assumption here that I don't subscribe to: If real-life networks differ from online networks, then real-life ones are better. I mean, try that hat on with respect to other communications and data-processing systems.
Personally, there's no way in hell I'd want the complexity of managing N different defined social groups and who's in each, who's in multiple, who sees every step or picture or comment I put on a given site. It would be egregiously overwhelming. I'd rather focus on integrating my different contacts together, honestly. There's lots of cases where I might say "A and B would totally have a blast, if it weren't for the fact that A is at work and B is back home". It seems ridiculous to put up a Tower-of-Babel-like amount of effort just to keep friends walled off from each other in a simulation of real-life geography.
Moreover, the Adams presentation has even more, much bigger bad ideas than that -- like salivating all over the idea of unavoidable identity-linkage to every website and interaction on the web (Facebook keyed to every site you visit, etc.)
"It's only censorship when the government does it."
Common mistake. Here's the argument that you're trying to have:
Party A: "Apple is violating my 1st Amendment rights by censoring me!" Party B: "The 1st Amendment only protects you from government censorship, not censorship by Apple."
Anyone can engage in censorship, not just the government. For example, all television networks have staff positions referred to as "network censors".
"Logic is also a limitation. Are you original just because you deny logic? Sometimes yes (in these cases you end up with an augmented logic), but most of the times, no."
Slashdot Mirror
Higher tech for the sake of higher tech is the worst thing you can do with technology. It's a scam. Examples:
(1) My home state of Maine gives every kid in school in the state a laptop. It's a scam so someone can say "look, we're hi tech". Teachers waste time on discipline problems, tech breakdown, being forced unnecessarily into using tech-driven instruction so as to not waste the laptops. I'm told that every day there has to be a UPS delivery to every school in the state from Apple with replacement laptops.
(2) Dean at prior college (non-union-strong) had a meeting where he demanded instructors use overhead projectors because of the expense of installing them, so we could show off how high-tech we are. If I put it up to a student vote ("Do you like PowerPoint instruction, or not?" -- "Do you like group projects, or not?") they usually decline. Scam.
Unfortunately, higher education is plagued by the need of education experts/PHDs to make careers/publication by "some new thing", anything whatsoever. That's why you get ridiculous churn in methods, teaching styles, group work, hands-on, technology, etc., etc. And it works hand-in-hand with book publishers who use the same as a reason to churn new book editions every so years, so that old editions can't be re-used.
Here's a completely crazy idea -- base decisions like these on research as to whether it helps students (and not on just whether it makes some salesman/budget-administrator cream in their pants). Does such research exist? Consider this article in the last issue of the AFT's American Educator:
Can research provide any guidelines as to which classroom applications are most effective?... The studies on these point to two conclusions. First, the mere presence of technology in the classroom does not necessarily mean that students learn more. Second -- and, perhaps, a corollary of the first conclusion -- using these technologies effectively is not as obvious as it might seem at first. [American Educator, Summer 2010, Daniel T. Willingham, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?", p. 26]
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2010/Willingham.pdf
In short: The "hi-tech uber alles" fetish is, mostly, another in a long series of time & money-wasting scams perpetrated on the education system. There's little or no evidence that it helps student learning, and there is evidence that the time required to manage/prepare/leverage technology resources is directly lost from the educator's other existing duties of teaching, assessment, and feedback.
FTA: "Rosenfeld is a leading scholar in the study of P300 testing to reveal concealed information. Basically, electrodes are attached to the scalp to record P300 brain activity -- or brief electrical patterns in the cortex -- that occur, according to the research, when meaningful information is presented to a person with 'guilty knowledge.'"
"Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family."
If you are running a small business, marketing, and supporting a family -- then at this point you don't remotely have the time to learn programming from the ground up. (All of HTML, CSS, SQL/MySQL, PHP/Python on a business-critical project?)
Learning programming to that extent takes several years of alone time.
"In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University."
Not for the university, no. Football funds generally go to the athletic department, which still runs at an overall loss to the university. This is according to the NCAA.
Those funds are typically used to support the rest of a university's athletic department budget. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most departments operate at a yearly multimillion-dollar deficit. [PBS Nightly Business Report: The Business of College Football, Part 1]
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/onair/transcripts/071112c/
"Yes, I agree, we're being idiots. So let's stop being stupid and SAVE HUMAN CIVILIZATION! The tech already exists, we did it in the past*--all that's stopping us is stupid policy decisions, not any technical hurdles."
Fine, first show me that accomplished (active, long-term storage solution) and then we can have a discussion about opening new nuclear plants.
* [Citation needed.] To my understanding, no long-term repositories for nuclear waste have actually been used anywhere in the world.
"Here we have a bunch of jerks whining about the 6-figure salaries they earn. I wish I were earning what these guys earn.[1] If they have a problem they can go find a job elsewhere.[2] Or do what everyone else has to do, rise through the ranks of the company and get promoted to the point where you're earning the kind of salary you want to see.[3]"
I've annotated your post above so I can reply in detail. FTA:
[1] You now can, because they vacated their jobs.
[2] They already did that.
[3] Bullshit.
These claims baffle me. I make $25K teaching part-time (so as to do music/art on the side) with health insurance, and live comfortably in a big apartment with my girlfriend (splitting costs 50/50) in a nice part of Brooklyn.
Great post.
"If being an 'idiot stock trader' who makes millions is so easy, why aren't you doing it? You can push a few buttons, right?"
As others have pointed out, in high-frequency trading, everything is indeed fully automated, and there are no buttons to push.
Furthermore, read the article: As one example, "If a programmer brings money with him, and puts up at least $250,000 to become an HTG partner, Hehmeyer hikes his percentage of the take." So many of these positions are based on either large capital investments, or who-you-know-networking. You can't just "decide" to get a position paying millions, that's not how it works.
"The lesson here is: negotiate well on the way in. Do your homework, find out what the job entails and what responsibilities/liabilities you will have and determine for yourself if the compensation being offered is worth it. Once you cut the deal, that's it..."
No, I would think the lesson is: Salaried employment is mostly a dead-end deal. I would recommend that anyone really ambitious work a salaried job in their chosen field for about 2 years (just like these guys did) and then strike out with their own company, ownership of IP and profits, etc. (just like these guys did).
"Of course you shouldn't be doing Gaussian curve grading when the distribution is very non-Gaussian. But if you've got a bathtub curve, that's a strong sign that your course is too easy."
Replying to my own comment, but having meditated on it more... more important than anything else, my expectation is that the above claim is simply not true. My hypothesis is that for science/math courses the tendency is for raw scores to be far from normal.
Do you have evidence/experience to the contrary? What do you think most people mean by "grade to the curve" anyway, that they're just doing a linear shift? My experience is it inherently means they're taking non-normal data and adjusting it to look normal.
"The question is: does the industrial revolution just correlate well with it, Or can you prove causation?... Personally my business model would be screwed up..."
Total proof of causation is not possible for a phenomenon such as this, unless you've got a couple other Earth-like planets to run a double-blind control-and-experiment comparison on.
In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can reveal only association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation. [Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22]
Not terrible points, but: (1) Most dropouts already do occur quickly (in the first 1-3 weeks), and (2) It's not politically feasible for me to wash out more than the 25-30% of each class that I already do.
My guess is that ratcheting up the difficulty would switch some "B" students directly to "F". There's a tipping point where students fundamentally either get the main ideas, or they don't. "Partly getting" the central limit theorem, for example, seems to be not an option.
"The remaining low-level crap can be glassified and dropped into a Yucca Mountain like storage depot (except that people's ignorance regarding nuclear waste and radioactivity makes them panic about that)."
So we agree that there's no actually-being-done way to deal with the waste.
"Do people not understand that a normal distribution would be a bell-curve?"
If you mean "normal distribution" in the technical sense (y = e^(-(x-mu)^2/(2*sigma^2))/(sqrt(2*pi)*sigma)) then that's simply a redundant, circular definition.
But if you mean it in the sense of "the usual thing to have happen" (which you make it sound like), then I'll assert that for class grades this is absolutely not, in general, the case. In fact, in my statistics classes I characterize "grading to a curve" as an act of fraud.
Biological processes and mechanical error (additive/averaging processes) tend to follow a bell-shaped curve (as per the central limit theorem). But learning processes tend be more a chain of knowledge prerequisites (multiplicative/conjunctive processes), and I find that they are significantly more likely to be "bathtub distributions" than anything else (people either get it or they don't -- most common results in my college math classes are to get an A, B, or drop out).
My position is that thinking grades should follow a normal (bell-shaped) curve is a fundamental misunderstanding of what normal curves are for.
"THats [sic] at least what these educators seem to be getting to."
I'll say it again: School systems have two camps, (1) teachers, (2) administrators, and those camps are generally in opposition.
Note that this particular change comes from Superintendent Larrie Reynolds ("I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it") -- someone who is not actually an educator (teacher).
I call horseshit. My college programs (double B.A. in very different fields at a state university) were almost always interesting and mind-expanding. I took lots of electives, in anything I found intriguing (speech, folklore, creative writing, theater, computer science, etc.). If a class looked uninteresting or mean-spirited in the first session, then I dropped it.
Maybe you just picked the wrong path and couldn't fix the problem.
Of course, this overlooks organizations or fraternities that purposefully use a non-median handshake as a method of identification.
Like, maybe I'm a professional wrestler or something.
"Ever felt pressured by your better half to buy a small piece of metal (jewelery) for $1000 dollars or a tiny bottle of water (perfume) for $100?"
Nope (and we've been together 13 years). Get a better better half.
"If 235 months was the maximum sentence, then wasn't the judge breaking the law by sentencing him to 285?"
Read carefully, from the article: "50 months more than the maximum under sentencing guidelines".
They're guidelines. The guidelines have a minimum and a maximum recommendation. The judge is free to bypass those guidelines when it seems warranted.
Dinosaurs laid eggs long before chickens existed. Done.
"Adams concludes that social networking applications are a 'crude approximation' of real-life social networks. 'People don't have one group of friends"
There's a hidden assumption here that I don't subscribe to: If real-life networks differ from online networks, then real-life ones are better. I mean, try that hat on with respect to other communications and data-processing systems.
Personally, there's no way in hell I'd want the complexity of managing N different defined social groups and who's in each, who's in multiple, who sees every step or picture or comment I put on a given site. It would be egregiously overwhelming. I'd rather focus on integrating my different contacts together, honestly. There's lots of cases where I might say "A and B would totally have a blast, if it weren't for the fact that A is at work and B is back home". It seems ridiculous to put up a Tower-of-Babel-like amount of effort just to keep friends walled off from each other in a simulation of real-life geography.
Moreover, the Adams presentation has even more, much bigger bad ideas than that -- like salivating all over the idea of unavoidable identity-linkage to every website and interaction on the web (Facebook keyed to every site you visit, etc.)
Thank you for that inspiring story, Abraham LinkedIn.
"It's only censorship when the government does it."
Common mistake. Here's the argument that you're trying to have:
Party A: "Apple is violating my 1st Amendment rights by censoring me!" Party B: "The 1st Amendment only protects you from government censorship, not censorship by Apple."
Anyone can engage in censorship, not just the government. For example, all television networks have staff positions referred to as "network censors".
"Logic is also a limitation. Are you original just because you deny logic? Sometimes yes (in these cases you end up with an augmented logic), but most of the times, no."
I would say: yes AND no.