Did he throw the chair at someone, or was it theatrics (yes, Steve Ballmer, I know)? But yes, if an employee filed a complaint that could easily go very badly very quickly.
They are both illegal, and both covered underwork place rules. I chose it for a reason. Sexual harassment will get you in just as much trouble as physical abuse around here.
Physicists *try* and come up with good names for things, hence 'atoms' as my example, but well, they get it wrong occasionally too.
Probably the most egregious example is spin in quantum mechanics. Which isn't actually spin, but they thought it was spin because it was kind of like spin. But it isn't. That drove a lot of my 3rd year classmates a bit nuts.
Physics does require you have very precisely chosen language for different things, and it's where confusing 'force' 'momentum' and 'energy' the way a jargon free article can really messes you up. But sometimes their language leads you astray (black holes emit xrays apparently, despite the implication that black holes never emitted anything, x rays aren't in any way related to the letter x, we just use 'x' because that happened to be a convenient unknown kind of thing).
They've already indicated that they aren't interested in any degree of austerity
actually the evidence is that austerity is making the situation worse, and that's why they are in this mess, and the fact that it's wrong policy is why they have a lot of people who don't want to go along with it. Austerity isn't a viable option, but it's the one germany has been pushing on them.
And yes, those concepts might have simple explanations, but if you bury a document in 1000 explanations it becomes unintelligible, hence the debate over the value of jargon.
Making up a humourus punishment is acknowledging that something potentially illegal happened, and trying to institutionally laugh it off. You absolutely cannot do that. Not once. Not ever.
Imagine if this was physical abuse. And I have some personal experience with this, where an employee at our organization threw a phone at another employee. The *only* thing you do in that situation is call security and possibly for medical care to verify the extent of any injuries for insurance and legal purposes. You may also have to call the police if your security doesn't do that automatically. That employee was immediately terminated and no longer allowed on the premises.
if zwei2stein is the manager/supervisor anything like that he should be immediately replaced from that position. Before the female employee starts. Even suggesting that you might laugh off sexual harassment could itself be construed as a form of harassment depending on where you are.
It sucks when rules have to be written by lawyers, but company rules about dealing with sexual harassment have to be if not written by lawyers, approved by them, and basically all boil down to '0 tolerance'.
In this day and age all decent engines have an abstraction layer so your game will work on DirectX or OpenGl and you don't have re-invent the wheel to accomplish that.
The only reason to do it is backwards compatibility.
No, unfortunately. That's probably the most common reason, but if the Xbox 3 is based on directx 12 doing something awesome then PC games will need to support directx 12 to do the same awesome thing, and then
It's chasing a moving target
Also, I think Mr Newell is jumping the gun a little. Vista was a trainwreck too and it didn't destroy the industry. Windows 8 will probably be a disaster, whether or not Windows 9 is any good will matter a lot. Now Valve, and Steam in particular, ya, they might get screwed hard by the Windows App store, but that won't necessarily be a bad thing for the average consumer, especially not if that is because the App store simply does everything relevant that steam does. But it probably won't, because Steam is first and foremost a DRM and Matchmaking service, and while windows will do the DRM to prevent copying thing, they won't even try and do DRM to prevent cheating or matchmaking.
As though the US is the only place in the world with reactors?
In fact it's a US company building the next generation of reactors for China (PRC). Lots of progress has been made, but if you want to cut government spending (which is a stupid plan right now, but that's the one we're going with) building nuclear reactors isn't going to fly because they do cost a lot of money.
That's more financial sector than economic. What (if anything) should the government be doing to get us out of this economic crisis now that it's here is a huge question. And the moment you start using nonsense jargon like saltwater vs freshwater economics people (probably rightfully) tune you out, but then if you can't talk about nominal vs PPP debt, real versus nominal interest rates and so on you can't even start to have a discussion.
If you look at the serious economic problem of the day, which is greek and spanish debt, concepts like nominal wage rigidity and internal devaluation are central to understanding why austerity is a disaster for them (it's bad and wrong for everyone else right now too, but when they're trapped in the EURO without a fiscal union they're in particularly bad shape).
That's a great example of where trying to use plain language does more harm than good. On the other hand 'black hole' rather than 'completely gravitationally collapsed object' probably conveys the concept reasonably well.
Unfortunately science has a habit of using language, and then finding out it does a bad job of describing something, e.g. atoms, and neural networks, which are, despite the names not indivisible and not actually all that similar to neuron connections in the brain respectively.
Trying to reduce everything to a 6th grade reading level makes people think problems can actually be explained at a 6th grade level, and they can't. That this has crept into economic discourse has caused us no end of grief in trying to have honest fact based discussions about the current economic crisis for example.
The point is that it's better than coal, there's no such thing as clean coal, and if you can't get people on nuclear, and solar and wind aren't economically viable the natural gas is at least less bad than whatever else we're doing.
The big thing missing from this discussion is that there *are* government investments in alternative energy, not so much US investment (some though), but it doesn't matter if the tech is developed in Finland or Philadelphia it can still be used, and that matters a lot. Once you figure out how to build 1 commercially viable solar panel the private sector will happily run all the way to the bank with it. BP had several years of investing in green tech, and even within the US research establishment there's research in green tech, but a lot of it wasn't 'extra' research money it was just refocusing what was there.
But yes, shale fracking can release methane, of course if you can capture methane you can do something with it, so having it escape is probably not ideal for anyone.
Depends how much those programmes usually cost. If you can get airline mechanic training for 3200 dollars one place and 32000 another down the road amazon is making clear it wants you in the 3200 dollar one.
And why do you give a shit about hardware acceleration on a desktop computer in business? Do your Office fonts not load up fast enough? Is that 336% faster going to help you? From my experience, the only thing that matters for speed in business settings is antiquated hardware, database settings, and network speeds.
Well this has been microsofts great conundrum for a decade. Windows XP works, so what can they offer that is actually an improvement. Given that every computer sold will have a kind of decent on chip GPU at a minimum you may as well use that, but sure, the difference between wasting 3 seconds and 10 seconds isn't going to hugely improve office productivity.
I think though, it's just one of those things that will reduce the frustration of users. Some of it is 'why not, you have the hardware you may as well use it' and some of it is 'the quicker this task the less likely it is that the employee with tab over to/. and spend 15 minutes goofing off while waiting for a 10 second load screen'.
MS changed the driver model with windows vista. With linux the driver model has been the same for quite some time and developers have had time to learn to use it. For vista it was half MS not doing as good a job as it could have explaining how to write drivers, and half companies not giving a shit because Vista was terrible.
Academia and grad school is fundamentally different than a job interview. It's not a 'reference' in the way the job is, it's a question of whether or not this person can contribute to the academic discipline in question (not to the school, to the discipline). The letters are actually asking you to evaluate the person based on the target institutions criteria. So for example you have boxes like 'What quartile of your graduates is this person in' 'would they qualify for admissions to your own graduate programme' how do they perform on a list of 5 or 6 topics, and then a generic written section where you see everything from 'this person had a batshit crazy girlfriend and his now free, he'll do fine' to 'despite this persons good grades they lack the intellectual curiosity to be a _________ and would be unsuitable for graduate studies' and so on.
I even saw one letter where the professor wrote something to the effect of "I don't actually know this student personally, they were in a class of mine with several dozen others, and while I can see from the work submitted they have good grades in that class I do not have any further insight into their character". If a student asks you to fill out the form you do, that's part of your job. If a student walks into your office and asks "would you recommend me to a graduate programme?" you can honestly say yes or no, and should, but if you get an e-mail asking for a recommendation you need to fill it out honestly. That's part of academia, if the student isn't smart enough to ask first well that's their problem.
Although usually the student arranges with the target future supervisor first and your feedback can be depressingly bland and have no impact.
Teachers work hard, but they don't typically have to pull the 60+ hour week/no lunch marches that other professional industries do.
yes. They do. The young ones anyway, once you've taught the same class for a couple of years it's a lot less work. Well, other than the no lunch part, because kids need lunches so teachers get lunches, but a lot of them are spending lunches stuffing their faces and prepping for the second half of the day.
Which is why business wants them OUT! Teachers are one of the last unions left holding on to the level of benefits and raises EVERYBODY expected from a good job 40 years ago... Can't have that, can we?
that seems to be the running theory. Ironically teacher and healthcare pay are two of the things buffeting the US economy from worse downturns because they're hard to cut. If you contracted the public sector to match revenue you'd be even worse off. People are (probably rightfully) a bit jealous of the fact that teachers have job security in a relatively uncertain world.
Well how about hiring teachers. Since you can, from the links I gave, pay them 60k a year + ~20% in benefits? Or at least not lay them off. 200k per job is, by the way, not far off. A front line employee that gets 75K a year probably costs about 200K total, between salary, benefits, office space/equipment, potentially sub contracted personnel etc.
I'll just add that I haven't been impressed by the recent developed world attempts to create new jobs.
the developed world hasn't made any serious attempt at creating new jobs. that's the problem. Corporations are sitting on large piles of cash, they aren't spending it because there's no demand. Governments that can borrow (which is everyone not in the Eurozone, and Germany and France and a couple of others within the Eurozone) at next to nothing rates, and aren't. Right now the developed world has been cutting jobs like crazy, largely at sub national levels, which is dragging down employment.
If OTOH the job market grows
except that it won't grow to accommodate 65+ workers. Far too many people in that age group (even 60+) have lost their connection to modern technology/practices etc and they have much more limited capacity to learn, try teaching a 67 year old to use their TV remote, unless you can also improve mental capabilities they aren't going to be a useful part of the workforce.
The paradox of more productivity is that you need less people for more stuff, and people who aren't as productive simply aren't as valuable, and as you get older your productivity drops off significantly. The US especially is at the point where they can afford to start offering more vacation times and earlier retirements, and they should follow the Franco/German model and do so.
Lists aviation maintenance technology as a total cost of 3200 dollars including tuition and tools. Which presumably you could do in 1 year straight out of school, or in 2 or 3 if you're working at amazon, but hey, it's better than minimum wage at the end of it, and if you can't get student loans, or don't want to have them or whatever it's a better than nothing option.
You have to consider what 2000 dollars is relative to their existing pay. Amazon claims their fulfillment centres pay '30% more than a retail job', which are, apparently (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes412031.htm) 25k. So an employee making ~ 32k is getting offered 2k (tax free? not sure how that's like in the US), so 6% of your pay for a chance to get out of it. And at 32k you can at least live, not live well, but live, and not be in debt at the end of it. It's not spectacular, but it's still a lot of money.
No, but it's a very serious economic problem, and too many old people working is presenting real problems to getting jobs for young people. Of course old people are working because they need the money too.
I should add, the goal is education, if time taken to test teachers is detracting from education then you're sacrificing education in one area in the hopes that you can improve it in another. There's nothing wrong with that particularly, but you don't want teaching to end up like government accounting where you spend as much time accounting for what you were doing as actually doing your job.
e. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
No, I mean seriously, how do you evaluate good teachers? Suggesting there *should* be a measure of a good teacher, and knowing what it one actually is is the problem - this is a problem people have been wondering about for decades, and a few months long study isn't likely to solve it. Philosophically there should be some way to gauge teacher effectiveness that isn't easy to game, but unfortunately, no one has come up with one yet. So we're kind of stuck with trying the common approach of ask kids, ask parents, have the principle sit in on classes, that sort of thing. Whether or not my mother filed her lesson plans properly doesn't make her a good or bad teacher, I'm not sure which she was - but using things like that to benchmark doesn't help.
You *could* have a situation where classrooms are bigger but you have multiple teachers, when I was a graduate student teaching assistant we had labs with 100 or so students and 3 or 4 TA's and everyone just went wherever, there wasn't a 'Sir_sri's rows' so when we had 1 really good TA (we used to call him "The Egyptian" until we discovered that was Al Zawahiri's nickname, so this is a while ago) and one really bad TA (a chinese guy who didn't ever seem to actually try and help anyone) you kind of mitigated the damage. But that format would require significantly changing how schools are laid out, and I'm not sure it doesn't tend to just reduce everyone to 'well at least you're not that chinese guy'.
The latest theory is to use standardized testing every year, and then you identify good teachers by when their students perform better than they did in the past (so if every year they score an average of 70 on standardized tests, and then after this teacher they start scoring 80 while the average of everyone else is still 70 then you're onto something), and that's not bad, but you waste a huge amount of time on standardized testing, and you're showing the teacher is good at prepping kids for standardized tests, not necessarily good at teaching connections beyond standardized tests.
every single other profession is able to measure performance,
How do you measure the performance of a programmer? Quantitatively, and accurately. Lines of code is notoriously bad. It's not like teaching is the only profession to have the problem of 'there are metrics we use that aren't really very good', every other profession has the same problem, just teaching is relatively rare in that you are mostly alone and unobserved when working.
The problem is that pensions have to last for more like 20 years than 10. If you're going to live to 85, however that happens, you have to basically save enough money to sustain you indefinitely. Which is what rich people have, enough yearly gains from investments to live indefinitely, and to keep their savings growing consistent with inflation.
You either need people to save a huge amount during your working life, or you need a huge cohort of young people who are productive to pay for the retirees to live.
the latter, not the former. One of the major problems in the labour market right now is that old people aren't leaving. We've done away with mandatory retirement (in canada at least) and because everyones investments tanked old people aren't getting out of the work force, leaving less jobs for new people.
Either you're stuck bailing out mum and dad when they're 75 and you're working, or you me, and everyone else spread the risk and responsibility of bailing out mum and dad around, but the net effect is the same, and bigger pools of risk are always preferable to smaller ones.
This problem hit the private sector earlier
other way around, this problem created by the private sector getting rid of pensions is now hitting the public sector, and it's a disaster. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a safe investment that will pay a return, except theoretically government bonds if you aren't in greece or spain or ireland or portugal or... you get the idea. But old people need stable incomes, because otherwise their spending fluctuates like the rest of us, and that would make existing economic shocks even worse. If it wasn't for social security still paying the same amount florida would have gone bankrupt already essentially (add in medicare to that too since that covers a lot of expenses for older persons).
When retirement was on average 5 - 10 years you didn't have this problem. But now, with medicare being so successful at keeping people alive who make it to 65 that if you make it to 65 odds are you'll make it to 80 or so, and that's going to get older and older, but the amount needed to sustain that is significant. Raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 or whatever could be seriously counter productive because you're forcing people to work who aren't capable of it. Where I am in canada you can't force someone to leave when they get old, the problem is that for years we banked on mandatory retirement to get rid of people who were counter productive, but you don't really want to fire a jovial 63 year old who put in 35 good years, and 3 terrible ones, but now those people cling on and suck jobs away from young people and productivity away from everyone else.
Oh, as point of interest, in canada we've been having the same discussion as you're having, and the recommendation here has been to actually increase the benefit paid to retirees from taxes, to provide more economic stability and to get old people out of the work force faster, despite the conservative government planning to do what you are essentially advocating (raise the retirement age).
Why did you believe that Skype couldn't record calls before? Because they said so?
That has been one of the major theories surrounding skype for a while, they had a distributed architecture, and without a central database to link up to monitoring calls would have been very difficult (not impossible, but it didn't seem like it was an easy problem to solve). Then supposedly the NSA offered up $$$ for someone to come up with a way to monitor skype, and look who steps up to the plate with billions in cash to take them over.
I'm not entirely sure I buy that argument. But skypes architecture would have made generic intelligence monitoring difficult, targeted wiretapping you could probably manage easily enough though. Where I think the big value to skype is moving voice traffic off cellular voice networks and onto data networks, which could make MS phones very competitive if they could make phone calls without needing a voice plan out of the box and with no effort and that was an advertised selling feature.
Those traditional teachers say that as though they take an actual interest in their students and take the time to fully answer their questions in a thorough, instructive manner.... Traditional teachers have canned lectures they give over and over for 30 years.
Are you confusing university teaching with lower tier teaching? Because they are completely different problems. Well that, and professors get no formal education in teaching, so of course they're terrible at it. That's probably the biggest oversight in the profession, we offer professional development courses and training seminars for professors at my university but it's not the same as a degree in education.
At lower levels... you need time. Limit classrooms to 20 kids and see how much time is available.
They have non-English speaking TA's for that.
Yes. They're called graduate students, which means they will have masters and PhD's and you are fleeing at a bachelors level. They will be your boss, so you may as well get used to taking direction and instruction from people who are ESL sooner rather than later.
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
How do you propose you quantify 'good' teachers exactly? Parent or student recommendations? Doesn't that create and awkward incentive for hot_starting_teacher_01 to give a blow job to little johnny's daddy to make sure she gets a good recommendation?
Teachers and schools do have automatic raises, and they have teacher evaluations and disciplinary procedures, but you have to be very careful with disciplining teachers. If you don't file your daily lesson plans (something my mother was notoriously bad at back when that was supposed to happen) and you discipline them it's very different than accused of throwing a kid in a garbage can (which happened at my school). But parents don't like teachers who've had any disciplinary action against them, even if they are otherwise good teachers, and you have to be careful with dealing with an excitable public that you don't make a fuss about things which really aren't that important.
Teachers who can't handle a classroom usually have to leave anyway, and those are the worst teachers of all. Firing them gets you less than letting them flee on their own.
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Did he throw the chair at someone, or was it theatrics (yes, Steve Ballmer, I know)? But yes, if an employee filed a complaint that could easily go very badly very quickly.
They are both illegal, and both covered underwork place rules. I chose it for a reason. Sexual harassment will get you in just as much trouble as physical abuse around here.
probably conveys the concept reasonably well.
which is why we use it in science.
Physicists *try* and come up with good names for things, hence 'atoms' as my example, but well, they get it wrong occasionally too.
Probably the most egregious example is spin in quantum mechanics. Which isn't actually spin, but they thought it was spin because it was kind of like spin. But it isn't. That drove a lot of my 3rd year classmates a bit nuts.
Physics does require you have very precisely chosen language for different things, and it's where confusing 'force' 'momentum' and 'energy' the way a jargon free article can really messes you up. But sometimes their language leads you astray (black holes emit xrays apparently, despite the implication that black holes never emitted anything, x rays aren't in any way related to the letter x, we just use 'x' because that happened to be a convenient unknown kind of thing).
They've already indicated that they aren't interested in any degree of austerity
actually the evidence is that austerity is making the situation worse, and that's why they are in this mess, and the fact that it's wrong policy is why they have a lot of people who don't want to go along with it. Austerity isn't a viable option, but it's the one germany has been pushing on them.
And yes, those concepts might have simple explanations, but if you bury a document in 1000 explanations it becomes unintelligible, hence the debate over the value of jargon.
This, 1000x this.
Making up a humourus punishment is acknowledging that something potentially illegal happened, and trying to institutionally laugh it off. You absolutely cannot do that. Not once. Not ever.
Imagine if this was physical abuse. And I have some personal experience with this, where an employee at our organization threw a phone at another employee. The *only* thing you do in that situation is call security and possibly for medical care to verify the extent of any injuries for insurance and legal purposes. You may also have to call the police if your security doesn't do that automatically. That employee was immediately terminated and no longer allowed on the premises.
if zwei2stein is the manager/supervisor anything like that he should be immediately replaced from that position. Before the female employee starts. Even suggesting that you might laugh off sexual harassment could itself be construed as a form of harassment depending on where you are.
It sucks when rules have to be written by lawyers, but company rules about dealing with sexual harassment have to be if not written by lawyers, approved by them, and basically all boil down to '0 tolerance'.
Better to use openGL
In this day and age all decent engines have an abstraction layer so your game will work on DirectX or OpenGl and you don't have re-invent the wheel to accomplish that.
The only reason to do it is backwards compatibility.
No, unfortunately. That's probably the most common reason, but if the Xbox 3 is based on directx 12 doing something awesome then PC games will need to support directx 12 to do the same awesome thing, and then
It's chasing a moving target
Also, I think Mr Newell is jumping the gun a little. Vista was a trainwreck too and it didn't destroy the industry. Windows 8 will probably be a disaster, whether or not Windows 9 is any good will matter a lot. Now Valve, and Steam in particular, ya, they might get screwed hard by the Windows App store, but that won't necessarily be a bad thing for the average consumer, especially not if that is because the App store simply does everything relevant that steam does. But it probably won't, because Steam is first and foremost a DRM and Matchmaking service, and while windows will do the DRM to prevent copying thing, they won't even try and do DRM to prevent cheating or matchmaking.
As though the US is the only place in the world with reactors?
In fact it's a US company building the next generation of reactors for China (PRC). Lots of progress has been made, but if you want to cut government spending (which is a stupid plan right now, but that's the one we're going with) building nuclear reactors isn't going to fly because they do cost a lot of money.
That's more financial sector than economic. What (if anything) should the government be doing to get us out of this economic crisis now that it's here is a huge question. And the moment you start using nonsense jargon like saltwater vs freshwater economics people (probably rightfully) tune you out, but then if you can't talk about nominal vs PPP debt, real versus nominal interest rates and so on you can't even start to have a discussion.
If you look at the serious economic problem of the day, which is greek and spanish debt, concepts like nominal wage rigidity and internal devaluation are central to understanding why austerity is a disaster for them (it's bad and wrong for everyone else right now too, but when they're trapped in the EURO without a fiscal union they're in particularly bad shape).
That's a great example of where trying to use plain language does more harm than good. On the other hand 'black hole' rather than 'completely gravitationally collapsed object' probably conveys the concept reasonably well.
Unfortunately science has a habit of using language, and then finding out it does a bad job of describing something, e.g. atoms, and neural networks, which are, despite the names not indivisible and not actually all that similar to neuron connections in the brain respectively.
Trying to reduce everything to a 6th grade reading level makes people think problems can actually be explained at a 6th grade level, and they can't. That this has crept into economic discourse has caused us no end of grief in trying to have honest fact based discussions about the current economic crisis for example.
Natural gas is not clean energy.
The point is that it's better than coal, there's no such thing as clean coal, and if you can't get people on nuclear, and solar and wind aren't economically viable the natural gas is at least less bad than whatever else we're doing.
The big thing missing from this discussion is that there *are* government investments in alternative energy, not so much US investment (some though), but it doesn't matter if the tech is developed in Finland or Philadelphia it can still be used, and that matters a lot. Once you figure out how to build 1 commercially viable solar panel the private sector will happily run all the way to the bank with it. BP had several years of investing in green tech, and even within the US research establishment there's research in green tech, but a lot of it wasn't 'extra' research money it was just refocusing what was there.
But yes, shale fracking can release methane, of course if you can capture methane you can do something with it, so having it escape is probably not ideal for anyone.
Depends how much those programmes usually cost. If you can get airline mechanic training for 3200 dollars one place and 32000 another down the road amazon is making clear it wants you in the 3200 dollar one.
when you only make 30k 15% of 2000 = 300 bucks is a lot of money.
And why do you give a shit about hardware acceleration on a desktop computer in business? Do your Office fonts not load up fast enough? Is that 336% faster going to help you? From my experience, the only thing that matters for speed in business settings is antiquated hardware, database settings, and network speeds.
Well this has been microsofts great conundrum for a decade. Windows XP works, so what can they offer that is actually an improvement. Given that every computer sold will have a kind of decent on chip GPU at a minimum you may as well use that, but sure, the difference between wasting 3 seconds and 10 seconds isn't going to hugely improve office productivity.
I think though, it's just one of those things that will reduce the frustration of users. Some of it is 'why not, you have the hardware you may as well use it' and some of it is 'the quicker this task the less likely it is that the employee with tab over to /. and spend 15 minutes goofing off while waiting for a 10 second load screen'.
how inept Microsoft is
MS changed the driver model with windows vista. With linux the driver model has been the same for quite some time and developers have had time to learn to use it. For vista it was half MS not doing as good a job as it could have explaining how to write drivers, and half companies not giving a shit because Vista was terrible.
I would question the integrity of the referee
then you're not really familiar with the process.
Academia and grad school is fundamentally different than a job interview. It's not a 'reference' in the way the job is, it's a question of whether or not this person can contribute to the academic discipline in question (not to the school, to the discipline). The letters are actually asking you to evaluate the person based on the target institutions criteria. So for example you have boxes like 'What quartile of your graduates is this person in' 'would they qualify for admissions to your own graduate programme' how do they perform on a list of 5 or 6 topics, and then a generic written section where you see everything from 'this person had a batshit crazy girlfriend and his now free, he'll do fine' to 'despite this persons good grades they lack the intellectual curiosity to be a _________ and would be unsuitable for graduate studies' and so on.
I even saw one letter where the professor wrote something to the effect of "I don't actually know this student personally, they were in a class of mine with several dozen others, and while I can see from the work submitted they have good grades in that class I do not have any further insight into their character". If a student asks you to fill out the form you do, that's part of your job. If a student walks into your office and asks "would you recommend me to a graduate programme?" you can honestly say yes or no, and should, but if you get an e-mail asking for a recommendation you need to fill it out honestly. That's part of academia, if the student isn't smart enough to ask first well that's their problem.
Although usually the student arranges with the target future supervisor first and your feedback can be depressingly bland and have no impact.
Teachers work hard, but they don't typically have to pull the 60+ hour week/no lunch marches that other professional industries do.
yes. They do. The young ones anyway, once you've taught the same class for a couple of years it's a lot less work. Well, other than the no lunch part, because kids need lunches so teachers get lunches, but a lot of them are spending lunches stuffing their faces and prepping for the second half of the day.
Which is why business wants them OUT! Teachers are one of the last unions left holding on to the level of benefits and raises EVERYBODY expected from a good job 40 years ago... Can't have that, can we?
that seems to be the running theory. Ironically teacher and healthcare pay are two of the things buffeting the US economy from worse downturns because they're hard to cut. If you contracted the public sector to match revenue you'd be even worse off. People are (probably rightfully) a bit jealous of the fact that teachers have job security in a relatively uncertain world.
Well how about hiring teachers. Since you can, from the links I gave, pay them 60k a year + ~20% in benefits? Or at least not lay them off. 200k per job is, by the way, not far off. A front line employee that gets 75K a year probably costs about 200K total, between salary, benefits, office space/equipment, potentially sub contracted personnel etc.
I'll just add that I haven't been impressed by the recent developed world attempts to create new jobs.
the developed world hasn't made any serious attempt at creating new jobs. that's the problem. Corporations are sitting on large piles of cash, they aren't spending it because there's no demand. Governments that can borrow (which is everyone not in the Eurozone, and Germany and France and a couple of others within the Eurozone) at next to nothing rates, and aren't. Right now the developed world has been cutting jobs like crazy, largely at sub national levels, which is dragging down employment.
If OTOH the job market grows
except that it won't grow to accommodate 65+ workers. Far too many people in that age group (even 60+) have lost their connection to modern technology/practices etc and they have much more limited capacity to learn, try teaching a 67 year old to use their TV remote, unless you can also improve mental capabilities they aren't going to be a useful part of the workforce.
The paradox of more productivity is that you need less people for more stuff, and people who aren't as productive simply aren't as valuable, and as you get older your productivity drops off significantly. The US especially is at the point where they can afford to start offering more vacation times and earlier retirements, and they should follow the Franco/German model and do so.
For some community college programmes that might be reasonable.
http://www.alameda.peralta.edu/apps/comm.asp?$1=20092
Lists aviation maintenance technology as a total cost of 3200 dollars including tuition and tools. Which presumably you could do in 1 year straight out of school, or in 2 or 3 if you're working at amazon, but hey, it's better than minimum wage at the end of it, and if you can't get student loans, or don't want to have them or whatever it's a better than nothing option.
You have to consider what 2000 dollars is relative to their existing pay. Amazon claims their fulfillment centres pay '30% more than a retail job', which are, apparently (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes412031.htm) 25k. So an employee making ~ 32k is getting offered 2k (tax free? not sure how that's like in the US), so 6% of your pay for a chance to get out of it. And at 32k you can at least live, not live well, but live, and not be in debt at the end of it. It's not spectacular, but it's still a lot of money.
"too many old folks are working" problem.
No, but it's a very serious economic problem, and too many old people working is presenting real problems to getting jobs for young people. Of course old people are working because they need the money too.
I should add, the goal is education, if time taken to test teachers is detracting from education then you're sacrificing education in one area in the hopes that you can improve it in another. There's nothing wrong with that particularly, but you don't want teaching to end up like government accounting where you spend as much time accounting for what you were doing as actually doing your job.
e. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
No, I mean seriously, how do you evaluate good teachers? Suggesting there *should* be a measure of a good teacher, and knowing what it one actually is is the problem - this is a problem people have been wondering about for decades, and a few months long study isn't likely to solve it. Philosophically there should be some way to gauge teacher effectiveness that isn't easy to game, but unfortunately, no one has come up with one yet. So we're kind of stuck with trying the common approach of ask kids, ask parents, have the principle sit in on classes, that sort of thing. Whether or not my mother filed her lesson plans properly doesn't make her a good or bad teacher, I'm not sure which she was - but using things like that to benchmark doesn't help.
You *could* have a situation where classrooms are bigger but you have multiple teachers, when I was a graduate student teaching assistant we had labs with 100 or so students and 3 or 4 TA's and everyone just went wherever, there wasn't a 'Sir_sri's rows' so when we had 1 really good TA (we used to call him "The Egyptian" until we discovered that was Al Zawahiri's nickname, so this is a while ago) and one really bad TA (a chinese guy who didn't ever seem to actually try and help anyone) you kind of mitigated the damage. But that format would require significantly changing how schools are laid out, and I'm not sure it doesn't tend to just reduce everyone to 'well at least you're not that chinese guy'.
The latest theory is to use standardized testing every year, and then you identify good teachers by when their students perform better than they did in the past (so if every year they score an average of 70 on standardized tests, and then after this teacher they start scoring 80 while the average of everyone else is still 70 then you're onto something), and that's not bad, but you waste a huge amount of time on standardized testing, and you're showing the teacher is good at prepping kids for standardized tests, not necessarily good at teaching connections beyond standardized tests.
every single other profession is able to measure performance,
How do you measure the performance of a programmer? Quantitatively, and accurately. Lines of code is notoriously bad. It's not like teaching is the only profession to have the problem of 'there are metrics we use that aren't really very good', every other profession has the same problem, just teaching is relatively rare in that you are mostly alone and unobserved when working.
The problem is that pensions have to last for more like 20 years than 10. If you're going to live to 85, however that happens, you have to basically save enough money to sustain you indefinitely. Which is what rich people have, enough yearly gains from investments to live indefinitely, and to keep their savings growing consistent with inflation.
You either need people to save a huge amount during your working life, or you need a huge cohort of young people who are productive to pay for the retirees to live.
the latter, not the former. One of the major problems in the labour market right now is that old people aren't leaving. We've done away with mandatory retirement (in canada at least) and because everyones investments tanked old people aren't getting out of the work force, leaving less jobs for new people.
Either you're stuck bailing out mum and dad when they're 75 and you're working, or you me, and everyone else spread the risk and responsibility of bailing out mum and dad around, but the net effect is the same, and bigger pools of risk are always preferable to smaller ones.
This problem hit the private sector earlier
other way around, this problem created by the private sector getting rid of pensions is now hitting the public sector, and it's a disaster. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a safe investment that will pay a return, except theoretically government bonds if you aren't in greece or spain or ireland or portugal or... you get the idea. But old people need stable incomes, because otherwise their spending fluctuates like the rest of us, and that would make existing economic shocks even worse. If it wasn't for social security still paying the same amount florida would have gone bankrupt already essentially (add in medicare to that too since that covers a lot of expenses for older persons).
When retirement was on average 5 - 10 years you didn't have this problem. But now, with medicare being so successful at keeping people alive who make it to 65 that if you make it to 65 odds are you'll make it to 80 or so, and that's going to get older and older, but the amount needed to sustain that is significant. Raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 or whatever could be seriously counter productive because you're forcing people to work who aren't capable of it. Where I am in canada you can't force someone to leave when they get old, the problem is that for years we banked on mandatory retirement to get rid of people who were counter productive, but you don't really want to fire a jovial 63 year old who put in 35 good years, and 3 terrible ones, but now those people cling on and suck jobs away from young people and productivity away from everyone else.
Oh, as point of interest, in canada we've been having the same discussion as you're having, and the recommendation here has been to actually increase the benefit paid to retirees from taxes, to provide more economic stability and to get old people out of the work force faster, despite the conservative government planning to do what you are essentially advocating (raise the retirement age).
Why did you believe that Skype couldn't record calls before? Because they said so?
That has been one of the major theories surrounding skype for a while, they had a distributed architecture, and without a central database to link up to monitoring calls would have been very difficult (not impossible, but it didn't seem like it was an easy problem to solve). Then supposedly the NSA offered up $$$ for someone to come up with a way to monitor skype, and look who steps up to the plate with billions in cash to take them over.
I'm not entirely sure I buy that argument. But skypes architecture would have made generic intelligence monitoring difficult, targeted wiretapping you could probably manage easily enough though. Where I think the big value to skype is moving voice traffic off cellular voice networks and onto data networks, which could make MS phones very competitive if they could make phone calls without needing a voice plan out of the box and with no effort and that was an advertised selling feature.
Those traditional teachers say that as though they take an actual interest in their students and take the time to fully answer their questions in a thorough, instructive manner. ... Traditional teachers have canned lectures they give over and over for 30 years.
Are you confusing university teaching with lower tier teaching? Because they are completely different problems. Well that, and professors get no formal education in teaching, so of course they're terrible at it. That's probably the biggest oversight in the profession, we offer professional development courses and training seminars for professors at my university but it's not the same as a degree in education.
At lower levels... you need time. Limit classrooms to 20 kids and see how much time is available.
They have non-English speaking TA's for that.
Yes. They're called graduate students, which means they will have masters and PhD's and you are fleeing at a bachelors level. They will be your boss, so you may as well get used to taking direction and instruction from people who are ESL sooner rather than later.
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
How do you propose you quantify 'good' teachers exactly? Parent or student recommendations? Doesn't that create and awkward incentive for hot_starting_teacher_01 to give a blow job to little johnny's daddy to make sure she gets a good recommendation?
Teachers and schools do have automatic raises, and they have teacher evaluations and disciplinary procedures, but you have to be very careful with disciplining teachers. If you don't file your daily lesson plans (something my mother was notoriously bad at back when that was supposed to happen) and you discipline them it's very different than accused of throwing a kid in a garbage can (which happened at my school). But parents don't like teachers who've had any disciplinary action against them, even if they are otherwise good teachers, and you have to be careful with dealing with an excitable public that you don't make a fuss about things which really aren't that important.
Teachers who can't handle a classroom usually have to leave anyway, and those are the worst teachers of all. Firing them gets you less than letting them flee on their own.