I agree that there are numerous problems with our school system. However, this comment needs to be expanded upon:
It stems from numerous factors, the least of which do not include, low teacher salaries inspiring more competent people to avoid teaching
Even with current salaries, there is an overabundance of bright, qualified school teachers competing for existing jobs.
The problem with salaries isn't in attracting new talent, it's in compensating the existing teachers for the incredible workload they have to manage. My observation is that for every hour a teacher spends in the classroom, there is another hours worth of work to be done in grading papers, developing lesson plans, self education, and administrative duties.
Current salaries do not compensate teachers for the workload they are managing, and I believe it's leading to a great deal of burnout and stress - issues that are not conductive to a good classroom experience.
Improving salaries would go a long way towards helping this situation, but what's really needed is an increase in the number of schools, classrooms, and administrators so that the individual workload of each teacher is reduced, and more time can be spent on each student.
A single teacher can provide a great deal of individual attention to 10-20 students, depending on the subject, curriculum, and the amount of time the students spend with the teacher. Above 20 students, the teaching approach changes - individual instruction becomes impossible, and the teacher must change their group approach to target generalized education for the entire class. Lessons are taught to the middle of the group - the best students never reach their potential (and become bored) and the worst students are left behind. Students cannot be individually instructed, so all that is left is individualized feedback.
'No child left behind' policies are even worse. Now, rather than simply letting the worst students fail, you let down the entire group.
Anyway... I'm getting off topic. While I believe individual salaries need to increase, I think it's more important to increase the number of teachers and classrooms, even if that means maintaining current salary levels.
I used to teach professionally (abet, not generalized education.) I've managed classes as large as 200, and as small as 1. I would subjectively estimate that a class size of 10 50% better instruction than a class size of 20.
Yes. That's the problem. It isn't that teachers are so overloaded with students that they can't provide any kind of individualized attention . It isn't that the workload isn't so heavy that the instructors are limited in their time and energy for lesson planning. It isn't that teachers constantly walk a tightrope between developing engaging lessons and potentially upsetting one of the 80 parents of their class of 40. It isn't that the the best and brightest teachers are leaving for other carriers.
It's clearly the incompetence, and the unions.
Seriously - one of my closest friends was a teacher who left the system to become a bus driver. I dated a teacher for several months, and was a guest instructor for her on a number of occasions. My mother used to teach and now drives a taxi. When I was in grade school, I was fortunate enough to be a member of a class with a reasonable student body. I personally used to teach martial arts professionally.
Fascinating stuff. If nothing else, it'll teach you to never spend more than $2 on lottery tickets, if you spend anything at all.
I'd hope it would teach you not to spend money on lottery tickets at all.:)
Seriously though, that's no surprise. I used to set retail pricing in a Martial Arts school. My favorite items to sell were the weapons, which we could buy at $5-$10 a pop, and sell for $20-$30.
Small ticket items with a good markup usually brought in more profit than big-ticket items with a small markup. Even if the per-unit profit was the same, parents were generally as happy to buy 2-3 $20 items as they were a single $50 item.
Besides that, there's really no benefit in it for the publisher.
If you bring in $30 gross selling online, or through a retailer, it doesn't matter where you get your sales.
But consumers are used to paying $59.95 for games. So, why not sell them for $49.95 online? Consumers don't pay manufacturing costs, so they save a little money. The publishers can cut the retailers out of the picture, and make nearly 60% more gross income, which can significantly improve their per unit profit. From the publisher and consumer perspective, it's win/win.
I had the opportunity to do something I would consider a 'dream job' for a couple of years. I was living at home, and accepted a job as a Martial Arts instructor, something I had been doing in my spare time for a while, anyway.
What I learned in the process is that when you take on your hobby as a job, you find that you end up doing a lot of work you wouldn't have originally considered fun. Teaching was great, and I'm proud of it. It could also be tiring. But sales, and accounting? You don't think of that when you accept a job at a martial arts school.
The same is true of open source projects. How many guys really want to run the entire project themselves -- writing documentation, offering customer support. Even when you're just a coder, you're eventually put in the position of taking on responsibilities that you might not want.
Personally, I like to work on cars. There's no way in hell I'd do it professionally.
Conversely... I'd like to be the billionaire, but I absolutely could not stand having an eternal weekend. I'd need pursuits. The money would free me to choose my own work, and hire people to do the stuff I wasn't particularly interested in.
True, but there have been numerous reports in recent months of digital sales rising as the sales of CDs fall. I think Apple's response should be to stop providing free 30 second commercials for the songs they sell, and charge copyright holders for this advertising, just as television, radio and print media charge for ads
False comparison. When the Ford dealership airs an ad about the F150s they have in stock, Ford does not pay them any money.
Distributors market products to drive sales. Manufacturers market products to drive distribution. The only people who get money for ads are media outlets.
Yes, but asking for a bailout is hardly being forced to accept money at gunpoint. And the money was spent in order to protect American jobs, for the good of our economy -- with the expectation that there would be a return on the money invested, in terms of job opportunities and economic stability.
I like how more people are up in arms about financial bailouts and 'socialized medicine' than NSA wiretapping, denial of Habius Corpus, 'Free Speach Zones' and what not.
I'm a motorcyclist. I wear a helmet on my way to the bank, and for the colder half of the year, I wear a ski mask underneath that.
Banks are pretty touchy about masks. I've never tried to wear one into the bank, but they've actually stopped me from putting on my helmet on the way out, even after they had my face on camera.
I find that it tends to make (mall) security officers a little tense as well.
Interestingly, people tend to be more nervous about the mask than the helmet. I installed a nose guard which effectively covers the ski mask - you can't easily tell I'm wearing one by looking through the visor. People seem a little more relaxed.
All the banks I go to have ATMs on the outside. I never take my helmet off when I use them, and I've never had any trouble because of it.
I strongly suspect that if you walked into a bank wearing a ski mask for no obvious reason, an officer would be called by the time you got to the teller, and you'd be arrested on your way out.
Fundamentally, the issue is very simple: Given some sort of identifier, and a series of properties about that identifier, if you have enough dimensions of detail, you end up narrowing down your sample so much that you end up with a population of one, that being the person the identifier "hides". It's just that simple.
We go through the same basic process to find information through a search engine -- we attempt to find ways to narrow down the data in such a way that the information we are looking for exist within a sufficiently limited set.
I'm sure we both have experience searching for relatively generic information, where the number of possible matches unrelated to our target is so great that the information is effectively unavailable. Anonymization is the same basic principle - genericize the data to the point that it is useful in aggregate, but valueless for targeting individual users, based on a preponderance of possible matches.
Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this statement. While it's tecnically correct, I believe it's misleading...
It's perfectly possible to hash personally identifiable information into an MD5 sum, to ensure that your records are unique, and then to generate useful statistics based on the resulting aggregate data without releasing significant personal information.
For instance:
Key = Hash(Your name + Your Zip + Your Birthday) Zipcode Birth Decade Hobbies Household income (Averaged to the nearest $20K increment.)
This information is significantly anonymous, and still highly valuable market research. If you happen to submit your information twice, it will be caught by the unique hash.
Of course, the author describes 'perfect' anonymity. It's technically possible that you're the only person in your zip who is between the ages of 21 - 30, enjoys playing video games, and makes $60K-$80K a year... However, it's generalized enough to provide a great deal of plausible deniability.
The same basic statement about anonymity could be made for a person standing in a crowd: given enough detail, you could identify that person by their appearance, without knowing any unique identifying information about them.
What should you get from this? You aren't as anonymous online as you might expect. Who's really surprised?
Speaking of System Shock 2... Did you ever use the Psionic power "Enhanced Motion Sensitivity?" I picked it up one play-through after missing one of those damned red eggs on the Rickenbacker.
"Enhanced Motion Sensitivity" gives you a sort of "radar" image of all nearby enemies. It's incredible how easily that psionic ability kills the tension and sense of immersion in the game.
What premise do you have to suggest this is evolutionary trait of any sort?
The answer is you don't have any evidence other than suddenly being able to figure out (intellectually) that we CAN do without most meat products, but this is hardly evolutionary, except if you account for brains.
I think you made my point nicely.
I don't believe that a less evolved human would assume a vegetarian diet by choice. As our brains evolved, our intellect improved, which lead to advances in society and technology. Those advances have made vegetarianism an diet that people are willing to voluntarily assume.
I believe that those same advances have brought about a lot of the excesses of the modern diet.
For what it's worth, I believe that meat is a healthy part of a diet, in moderation.
Computers are not biological in nature, but humans had to evolve to the point that we could create such complex machines. Is that an incorrect statement?
If evolution had stopped a million years ago, would homo erectus be building bombs today?
By the way, I never said vegetarianism or clubbing was an 'evolutionary trait,' I suggested that they were possible because of traits that we had evolved. I suspect that very little of our modern society would exist without traits that evolved in the last million years.
Trivia: Dollars per second, autocross (racing around cones) is the most expensive form of amateur racing.
Speaking as someone who's done it, it's a lot more fun than most people might imagine. If you've ever wanted to go racing, take your family sedan out to the autocross track for a day. You won't make the fastest lap time in the world, but you'll have a lot of fun.
Don't blame the game makers because of this, blame the GAMERS. The article was quite a good read, and I never knew how much failure the guys went through before landing on Guitar Hero. Next time you might want to read the article before posting such a useless comment.
Keep in mind that their concept wasn't to develop creative tools for creative people to be creative. Their concept was to develop tools for non-creative people to be creative. That has much of the appeal of designing jet-packs for the blind, or a special PETA edition meat grinder.
The target market would be creative people who haven't yet developed an outlet for their creativity. That seems like a pretty niche market to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that there are numerous problems with our school system. However, this comment needs to be expanded upon:
Even with current salaries, there is an overabundance of bright, qualified school teachers competing for existing jobs.
The problem with salaries isn't in attracting new talent, it's in compensating the existing teachers for the incredible workload they have to manage. My observation is that for every hour a teacher spends in the classroom, there is another hours worth of work to be done in grading papers, developing lesson plans, self education, and administrative duties.
Current salaries do not compensate teachers for the workload they are managing, and I believe it's leading to a great deal of burnout and stress - issues that are not conductive to a good classroom experience.
Improving salaries would go a long way towards helping this situation, but what's really needed is an increase in the number of schools, classrooms, and administrators so that the individual workload of each teacher is reduced, and more time can be spent on each student.
A single teacher can provide a great deal of individual attention to 10-20 students, depending on the subject, curriculum, and the amount of time the students spend with the teacher. Above 20 students, the teaching approach changes - individual instruction becomes impossible, and the teacher must change their group approach to target generalized education for the entire class. Lessons are taught to the middle of the group - the best students never reach their potential (and become bored) and the worst students are left behind. Students cannot be individually instructed, so all that is left is individualized feedback.
'No child left behind' policies are even worse. Now, rather than simply letting the worst students fail, you let down the entire group.
Anyway... I'm getting off topic. While I believe individual salaries need to increase, I think it's more important to increase the number of teachers and classrooms, even if that means maintaining current salary levels.
I used to teach professionally (abet, not generalized education.) I've managed classes as large as 200, and as small as 1. I would subjectively estimate that a class size of 10 50% better instruction than a class size of 20.
Yes. That's the problem. It isn't that teachers are so overloaded with students that they can't provide any kind of individualized attention . It isn't that the workload isn't so heavy that the instructors are limited in their time and energy for lesson planning. It isn't that teachers constantly walk a tightrope between developing engaging lessons and potentially upsetting one of the 80 parents of their class of 40. It isn't that the the best and brightest teachers are leaving for other carriers.
It's clearly the incompetence, and the unions.
Seriously - one of my closest friends was a teacher who left the system to become a bus driver. I dated a teacher for several months, and was a guest instructor for her on a number of occasions. My mother used to teach and now drives a taxi. When I was in grade school, I was fortunate enough to be a member of a class with a reasonable student body. I personally used to teach martial arts professionally.
I think you may be a little out of touch.
Ask them to guarantee a quantified improvement in picture quality over a generic cable.
That will shut them up fast.
I'd hope it would teach you not to spend money on lottery tickets at all. :)
Seriously though, that's no surprise. I used to set retail pricing in a Martial Arts school. My favorite items to sell were the weapons, which we could buy at $5-$10 a pop, and sell for $20-$30.
Small ticket items with a good markup usually brought in more profit than big-ticket items with a small markup. Even if the per-unit profit was the same, parents were generally as happy to buy 2-3 $20 items as they were a single $50 item.
Besides that, there's really no benefit in it for the publisher.
If you bring in $30 gross selling online, or through a retailer, it doesn't matter where you get your sales.
But consumers are used to paying $59.95 for games. So, why not sell them for $49.95 online? Consumers don't pay manufacturing costs, so they save a little money. The publishers can cut the retailers out of the picture, and make nearly 60% more gross income, which can significantly improve their per unit profit. From the publisher and consumer perspective, it's win/win.
I had the opportunity to do something I would consider a 'dream job' for a couple of years. I was living at home, and accepted a job as a Martial Arts instructor, something I had been doing in my spare time for a while, anyway.
What I learned in the process is that when you take on your hobby as a job, you find that you end up doing a lot of work you wouldn't have originally considered fun. Teaching was great, and I'm proud of it. It could also be tiring. But sales, and accounting? You don't think of that when you accept a job at a martial arts school.
The same is true of open source projects. How many guys really want to run the entire project themselves -- writing documentation, offering customer support. Even when you're just a coder, you're eventually put in the position of taking on responsibilities that you might not want.
Personally, I like to work on cars. There's no way in hell I'd do it professionally.
Conversely... I'd like to be the billionaire, but I absolutely could not stand having an eternal weekend. I'd need pursuits. The money would free me to choose my own work, and hire people to do the stuff I wasn't particularly interested in.
[blockquote]It's not and it never has been a backup solution. RAID is high availability and nothing more.[/blockquote]
Raid is fault tolerance, high availability, performance, capacity, managment, and in many cases, monitoring.
False comparison. When the Ford dealership airs an ad about the F150s they have in stock, Ford does not pay them any money.
Distributors market products to drive sales. Manufacturers market products to drive distribution. The only people who get money for ads are media outlets.
Yes, but asking for a bailout is hardly being forced to accept money at gunpoint. And the money was spent in order to protect American jobs, for the good of our economy -- with the expectation that there would be a return on the money invested, in terms of job opportunities and economic stability.
I like how more people are up in arms about financial bailouts and 'socialized medicine' than NSA wiretapping, denial of Habius Corpus, 'Free Speach Zones' and what not.
We invested in them. They do owe us something.
I was thinking about that this morning. It reminds me of the old Stalin quite:
"If you kill one man, it is a tragedy. But if you kill 1 million, it is a statistic."
I'm a motorcyclist. I wear a helmet on my way to the bank, and for the colder half of the year, I wear a ski mask underneath that.
Banks are pretty touchy about masks. I've never tried to wear one into the bank, but they've actually stopped me from putting on my helmet on the way out, even after they had my face on camera.
I find that it tends to make (mall) security officers a little tense as well.
Interestingly, people tend to be more nervous about the mask than the helmet. I installed a nose guard which effectively covers the ski mask - you can't easily tell I'm wearing one by looking through the visor. People seem a little more relaxed.
All the banks I go to have ATMs on the outside. I never take my helmet off when I use them, and I've never had any trouble because of it.
I strongly suspect that if you walked into a bank wearing a ski mask for no obvious reason, an officer would be called by the time you got to the teller, and you'd be arrested on your way out.
I appear to have made the classic mistake of reading the inflammatory summary, but not the article.
The summary implies that nice people are incompetent.
I'm having trouble understanding why 'smart' and 'nice' (whatever that means in this context) are mutually exclusive.
Being smart doesn't mean you have to be a self absorbed ass. Standing up for the correct technical decision doesn't mean you have to be rude.
At what point is it cheaper and more effective to hire a PI to follow me around and root through my garbage?
We go through the same basic process to find information through a search engine -- we attempt to find ways to narrow down the data in such a way that the information we are looking for exist within a sufficiently limited set.
I'm sure we both have experience searching for relatively generic information, where the number of possible matches unrelated to our target is so great that the information is effectively unavailable. Anonymization is the same basic principle - genericize the data to the point that it is useful in aggregate, but valueless for targeting individual users, based on a preponderance of possible matches.
Our hearts go out to all the dead motorcycle couriers littering Highway 17.
Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this statement. While it's tecnically correct, I believe it's misleading...
It's perfectly possible to hash personally identifiable information into an MD5 sum, to ensure that your records are unique, and then to generate useful statistics based on the resulting aggregate data without releasing significant personal information.
For instance:
Key = Hash(Your name + Your Zip + Your Birthday)
Zipcode
Birth Decade
Hobbies
Household income (Averaged to the nearest $20K increment.)
This information is significantly anonymous, and still highly valuable market research. If you happen to submit your information twice, it will be caught by the unique hash.
Of course, the author describes 'perfect' anonymity. It's technically possible that you're the only person in your zip who is between the ages of 21 - 30, enjoys playing video games, and makes $60K-$80K a year... However, it's generalized enough to provide a great deal of plausible deniability.
The same basic statement about anonymity could be made for a person standing in a crowd: given enough detail, you could identify that person by their appearance, without knowing any unique identifying information about them.
What should you get from this? You aren't as anonymous online as you might expect. Who's really surprised?
Speaking of System Shock 2... Did you ever use the Psionic power "Enhanced Motion Sensitivity?" I picked it up one play-through after missing one of those damned red eggs on the Rickenbacker.
"Enhanced Motion Sensitivity" gives you a sort of "radar" image of all nearby enemies. It's incredible how easily that psionic ability kills the tension and sense of immersion in the game.
I think you made my point nicely.
I don't believe that a less evolved human would assume a vegetarian diet by choice. As our brains evolved, our intellect improved, which lead to advances in society and technology. Those advances have made vegetarianism an diet that people are willing to voluntarily assume.
I believe that those same advances have brought about a lot of the excesses of the modern diet.
For what it's worth, I believe that meat is a healthy part of a diet, in moderation.
And yes, I know someone is going to give me shit for using 'Homo Erectus' rather than 'Homo antecessor.'
Computers are not biological in nature, but humans had to evolve to the point that we could create such complex machines. Is that an incorrect statement?
If evolution had stopped a million years ago, would homo erectus be building bombs today?
By the way, I never said vegetarianism or clubbing was an 'evolutionary trait,' I suggested that they were possible because of traits that we had evolved. I suspect that very little of our modern society would exist without traits that evolved in the last million years.
You shouldn't have joined a 'Last man Standing' game.
Trivia: Dollars per second, autocross (racing around cones) is the most expensive form of amateur racing.
Speaking as someone who's done it, it's a lot more fun than most people might imagine. If you've ever wanted to go racing, take your family sedan out to the autocross track for a day. You won't make the fastest lap time in the world, but you'll have a lot of fun.
Keep in mind that their concept wasn't to develop creative tools for creative people to be creative. Their concept was to develop tools for non-creative people to be creative. That has much of the appeal of designing jet-packs for the blind, or a special PETA edition meat grinder.
The target market would be creative people who haven't yet developed an outlet for their creativity. That seems like a pretty niche market to me.