I know MANY people who have worked very hard to become great at their field, and are actually amazingly competent. The difference between them and the ones who are making $150k is that somebody is willing to pay $150k for the other person's work.
I did say "because so few people actually put in that kind of effort into career paths that make that kind of money." Just working harder isn't enough, you have to make sure you are working smart as well. If high salary is important to you, instead of other rewards like loving your job, then you need to be smart when managing your career. I have made some decisions because of money, and I have made many more because I don't like the career paths that lead to more money. I have certainly left money on the table, but I don't regret it.
Not making $150k+ because you are happier in a field where that salary is rare or non-existent is not failing, it is just prioritizing other things. But if you set out in your 20s on a career path with the intention of a high salary, you don't need very much luck to get there (obviously you always need some luck).
The agreement was not to reach out and poach others' workers. It wasn't to refuse to hire them. You still had the option of getting a 25% raise to go to Google, all you have to do is apply to Google.
The agreement didn't reduce the options available to people, it just made it so the engineer had to take the first step, the recruiter wouldn't call you to entice you.
With the exception of my first job and one time that I relocated, every job I have ever had was offered to me when I wasn't even looking for work. I am confident that my next job will probably be offered to me by an ex-coworker, a friend of a friend, or someone else who knows I will be an asset their company and has enough money or interesting enough work to entice me away from my current employer. My current employer did the exact same thing so it wouldn't catch them by surprise. If you aren't constantly worried that your employees are going to jump ship, it is either because you are compensating them very well or you have crap employees.
If you are doing things right, by your 30s employers will be coming to you not the other way around. If there are agreements out there stopping companies from reaching out to me with job offers that would certainly reduce my opportunities.
It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.
What other purpose could "no poaching" agreements possibly have? Their only purpose is so a company does not have to pay a salary high enough and/or create a work environment good enough to keep the employee from leaving.
We can tell that based on your first sentence. What percentage of people do you estimate are able to pull that off, realistically? You live in a bubble world surrounded by the success stories, and thinking that because there are a few hundred thousand of you, that the tens of millions who have not enjoyed that success simply did something wrong. The fact is that you won one of the lottery seats on the magic carpet. Hard work made you eligible, but it didn't get you there on its own.
Making $150k+ by your 50s is not some incredibly rare thing for those who actually work for it. They may be the top 2% or so of wage earners, but in my opinion that is only because so few people actually put in that kind of effort into career paths that make that kind of money. I don't know any high quality developers (with people skills) over the age of 50 that don't make at least low six figure salaries. (this is an estimate based on their spending and savings habits since I don't know the actual salaries of most of them)
And part of the reason these salaries are so rare is the vast majority of people do not live in areas with cost of living high enough to require those kinds of salaries for top performers. I wonder what the top 1% of salaries would be if you adjusted for cost of living. I wouldn't be surprised if $150k/year in Silicon Valley or Manhattan was more like the top 5% of earners if adjusted for cost living, not the top 2%.
Well, except better tests cost more money to administer and score. A lot more. Simply adding one free response question to a standardized test increases the information about a student's knowledge and understanding by a lot, but increases the cost by a huge amount as well. It takes experienced graders and developed rubrics, training on those rubrics, etc. Politicians and policymakers like multiple choice because it's cheaper and gives the appearance of authoritative data.
I agree on all of this, except possibly the comment "A lot more" when put into context. Adding a single free response question to a standardized test does make it take longer, considering standardized tests are almost effortless. But how long does it take to grade that one question?
When put to scale the development of the tests and rubrics approaches $0. Even $50 million per year spent on improving tests only increases our expenses by $1 per student per year (a 0.01% increase). So anything that scales for every test administered will not significantly increase costs.
The training of test graders and the actual test grading are what don't scale. I used to do grading in college, and I guess that grading one short answer question takes about 5 minutes. This is averaged out over the ones that are obviously correct with a short glance and the ones where you have to figure out what they are talking about. A full 500 word essay is more like a half hour (once you get the hang of grading).
If 20% of a tester's time is spent training, that leaves about 1450 hours of grading per year, or close to 30,000 short answer questions per year. Even if you use a $100k per year cost (including training and administration costs) that leaves you with around $4 per short answer question graded. Considering we already spend $10,000 per student I think it would well worth an extra $100 for our standardized tests to have 25 short answer questions each. Or 10 short answer and 2 essays. Or spend an extra $500 and get an entire test of short answer and essay questions (10 essays and 60 short answer).
I think better quality control is well worth another 5% increase in educational spending, considering our entire economy is based upon how well educated our workforce is.
This version of Windows is guaranteed to be great. Windows has been going back and forth between one crap version and one great version for over a decade.
It is kind of like some IQ test pattern matching questions: Win 95 - crap Win 98 - great Win ME - crap Win XP - great Vista - crap Win 7 - great Win 8 - crap Win 9 - (see the pattern?)
Two things, this type of proper adjustment to look at the actual effect teachers have isn't always done well, and your underlying assumption is that the standardized test accurately measures what a student knows. From assessment theory and observation it is known that a single standardized test in purely multiple choice format cannot accurately measure what a student knows.
These are obstacles to overcome, not excuses to stop attempts at improvement. We absolutely need to update our testing procedures as part of a comprehensive attempt to improve quality standards in education. There is no need to constrain ourselves to just multiple choice tests. There is also no need to constrain ourselves to just testing.
Anyone could come up with hundreds of reasons why student testing and teacher evaluation is hard. But you could say the same for curing diseases or fighting against recessions. But it seems that people rarely use hardships as an excuse to quit trying unless they are talking about education.
there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.
No, because the tests themselves are currently fundamentally flawed. They test for rote memorization, not understanding. These simplistic tests only fool people into believing they're worth a damn thing.
That again assumes that it is impossible to create good tests. Some of the tests being used in multi-national testing are getting much better at asking questions to test actual understanding instead of just memorization.
If we actually cared about education we could create better tests. Even if we created tests that took an hour to grade it would increase costs by $50 per student per year per test (about a half a percent increase). And that is using a $100,000 yearly cost per test grader for the calculation (including overhead and administration costs).
There is no doubt that our current standardized tests are very poor. But once again we use that as an excuse for not even trying to improve.
You would figure most people on Slashdot would have a good enough understanding of math and statistics to know that just because testing scores may not be perfect, there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.
We can do pre-tests and post-tests so teachers aren't penalized for having students that were already poor performers. A teacher could be rated as outstanding even if his students are testing under the standards as long as their improvement was above expectations. The government has access to enough information to adjust test scores based on socio-economic factors. If 75% of a teacher's students are on food stamps, and the data shows students on food stamps generally underperform, then the performance metrics can take that into account.
The statistics world already has wonderful tools like standard deviations to determine if results are either expected deviations or are actually meaningful. And while the simple ones taught in STAT 101 aren't good enough for most uses, there are far better techniques that governments could pay very qualified statistics Phds to perform on teacher metrics.
And even though these metrics will still not be perfect, does that stop the private world from trying to rate employee performance? Sometimes a person is put on a doomed project and it is too hard to determine if they did a great job while everyone around them failed. But when people actually care about performance they understand that sometimes life can be unfair and that should not be an excuse for a shoddy product.
And our schools are certainly a shoddy product as they stand today.
Just saying you could buy a lot of Dover books on statistics, stochastic analysis, linear programming, and so on for $500 and learn a LOT about Big Data. You'd have enough money left over to get O'Reilly's Hadoop book.
Then you can spend $1000 and have all of the books plus some more guided instruction. I learned far more from reading books than I did from either my bachelors or masters degrees, but that doesn't make them a waste of money. I still know more today because I did all three (well, the bachelors was pretty much a waste, but it allowed me to go to graduate school).
Judging by your reasoning, I'd say you graduated from... what, Yale?
It doesn't matter that you're only paying a "fraction of what it costs to attend as any other student" -- which is also false, unless current MIT students aren't allowed to take the course. Otherwise it costs exactly the same. -- since current students get things like... well, course credit is the big one. GP was looking at the return for the cost which, honestly, I agree is a bit steep for a 1-off.
$499 for a class that ends in a certification backed by a reputable organization is definitely not steep. Many certifications cost about that much for just the exam itself, while training material is usually in the thousands even for online classes.
Operating systems have only just recently started to make very large screens as useful as multiple smaller screens. For me to use a 39" 4k monitor, I would need to be able to easily snap a screen to each 4 quadrants of the screen. If it takes me more than a couple seconds per quadrant I will most likely stick with multiple 27" monitors. I already have problems with sizing windows on 27" monitors, especially on my Mac.
There will come a time when very large 4k displays are very useful for developers, but for right now get them two 27" ones any day.
If we don't want an even worse repeat of the 80s, when Germany and Japan were taking over the auto industry, our laws will have to be made friendly to autonomous cars. The countries with more inviting laws will be the ones who perform the most development in the early years of this technology. Then once the technology is "solved" and the entire world is open to autonomous cars, those countries who were early adopters will be the ones running the industry. They will already have the expertise that other countries don't have because there wasn't a local market for the cars yet.
"An even more encouraging statistic is China’s position in the top four of countries whose scientists’ research was the most cited between 2003 and 2013. This suggests that the research produced in China is as good as any in the world."
why do you hate chinese so much? you're a joke.
The paper goes on to give the numbers I mentioned in my post, that their citation rate is 65% of the world average. And note that this is a comparison with the world average, not the top countries.
I wasn't hating on the Chinese, as I even linked to a post that gave praise to Chinese research. But I did want to point out that the country still has a long way to go. The top researchers in China are apparently doing very well, but there must be a huge amount of very questionable research for their average to be so low. The good news is that China is making a very strong push to improve their research, which has obviously paid large dividends over just the past 5 years. It will almost certainly just continue to improve from here.
They might spend more, but considering all the false papers that come out of China, they're not getting much for their money. They'll continue to pirate our research for the considerable future.
It would be an interesting to do research on just how influential the research coming out of China is. One pretty simple method would be to find out the ratio of Chinese research papers that are cited by European research, and vise versa. That would be a pretty good metric of how much research is just fluff, and how much is useful enough to be used by others.
This article seems to back up the assertion that the quality of research coming out of China is rising, but still isn't as good as research coming out of the west (and Japan). Both Germany and the United Kingdom by themselves have more citations than China, so China must be far behind the European Union as a whole. China's average citation rate is 6.92 compared to the world average of 10.69, so they are well below average.
Until a large portion of the world starts performing population control, our opinions about the harm of growing populations is not relevant to topics related to feeding more people. As long as we as a society let people have as many kids as they want, and do not wish to punish children for the sins of their parents, we need to find ways of feeding all of these people.
How do you figure that concern over population growth is not relevant to feeding people? I smell in this statement some kind of ethical concept which needs to be more clearly elucidated. I'm willing to accept that it's a Machiavellian notion, but if you don't feed people, they find it harder to reproduce.
Like I said, once society is ready to start performing population control on a global scale, then we no longer have to worry about feeding growing population. I did not talk about the morality of population control, just that as long as we both let people have the freedom to reproduce and do not condone letting people starve, it is irrelevant what our opinions on growing population are when talking about finding ways of feeding them.
I think that analogous concept you might be looking for is DDT. It was originally a godsend -- it kills pests!
No, that would be a good analogy if we were just talking about Roundup Ready seeds. That is a more reasonable thing to ban if there are good (non-tin foil hat) reasons to ban it. But any problems with roundup ready seeds would be a problem with that particular use of genetic modification, not genetic medication in general. That seemed to me what the original post was saying about this rulings similarity to banning screw drivers. Banning all GMOs because of a few brands of GMOs would be like banning all pesticides because of DDT.
Almost all technologies that have been developed in the past 100 years or so to feed the world's expanding population have the chance of being harmful to our health in ways we don't know yet. There will be times when new advances will have unintended consequences, but we can't just be scared of every new technology that comes along. It is only because of these technologies that our lives are so good that we spend time on 1st world problems like worrying about the health problems of GMOs.
The benefits of these advances are staggering. In 1900 average people spent 43% of their budget on food, compared to 13% today. I am very glad that my food expenditures are only about $800 per month (I am above the 13% number) instead of probably $2500 if not for the green revolution. If you want to not eat GMOs, just eat organic food. Its price is more in line with what food costs would be when we discard some of the the last century's advances in tech.
I for one don't buy the argument that the world needs more food to support a growing population. There are more than enough people in the world.
Until a large portion of the world starts performing population control, our opinions about the harm of growing populations is not relevant to topics related to feeding more people. As long as we as a society let people have as many kids as they want, and do not wish to punish children for the sins of their parents, we need to find ways of feeding all of these people.
So a better analogy for GMOs might not be with screwdrivers, but with concentration camps and gas chambers, which by themselves did no harm.
That is a horribe analogy. A better analogy would be comparing GMOs to Hydrogen Cyanide. GMOs can be used poorly, just like hydrogen cyanide can be used in gas chambers. But both are used for good far more than for evil.
Actually, even mine is a bad analogy. An even better one would be comparing genetically modifying foods with chemical synthesis in general. Both are simply scientific techniques. We can use genetics to change the color of food, make it resistant to pesticides, or create deadly bacteria. Just like we can use chemical synthesis to create table salt, carbonic acid, or hydrogen cyanide.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what. A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file. B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
I wasn't too clear (since another poster misinterpreted me in the same way), but when I talked about standardizing the books I meant that the provider had to do it, not the consumer. My point was that once the provider did that, the book is just as ready to be an e-book as it is a POD. And when you compare the pros/cons of these two formats, I personally think that e-books win out big. I think that POD is a great idea, I simply think that e-books are making the idea irrelevant. There are still some hurdles, such as people still preferring paper over an e-ink screen, but advances in technology and simply the changing of generations will take care of that.
They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on).
All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but... that's the point of a book!
That was all completely true up until a few years ago. If I wanted to learn statistics just five years ago, I would want to read a Statistics textbook first and only enhance my learning with online sites. But today I am going to sign up for a MOOC or watch Youtube videos. This is a very new thing for me, and it is a big transition because I still have about 300 books in my office that I rarely read anymore (every other month my wife tries to get me to donate most of them). I needed to learn some basic compiler skills (mostly scanning and parsing) for a personal project, and immediately bought a book on the subject out of habit. But I have barely looked at it at all, since I was able to learn far more from a MOOC and Google searching.
Just looking at how much change there has been in just the past few years, I have little doubt that the highly specialized information that still makes me buy books today will be in better online formats in the near future. So if we are talking about the next 5-10 years, I see books being even less important when compared to online videos and tutorials. These will be carefully created by an author to flow and demonstrate a larger premise, but the format won't be a book.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is... Print On Demand.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
I didn't mean to say that the internet is a better source for all information. My rationalle for calling it a better source was simply that it is a better source for most of the information people need. I am easily in the top 5% of physical book purchasers for personal consumption in the developed world (probably top 1%), but even I realize that most of the time I need to learn something I do not turn to books (either physical or e-books). They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on). And for novels, if you are into that kind of thing, but those transition to e-books even better than the non-fiction books I read.
A library which focuses primarily on books is... almost pointless.
Libraries are there to help improve the general level of education of the nearby population. Storing and lending books were by far the most important functions of libraries when books were the primary source of information in our culture. That is not even close to true anymore. I spend over $200 per month on books at Amazon each month, so I am a heavy reader, but I still consume most information online. And I was a holdout when it came to getting an e-reader, but over half of my book reading is now done on my iPad. In fact the reason I finally bought an iPad last year is because I found myself reading books from my phone far more often than reading paper books, and I wanted a better form factor.
Like it or not, the Internet is a better source of most information now. So libraries need to adapt to that in order to perform their function as education centers. That means more real estate for computers and less for books. With less emphasis on books libraries can also focus on more personal relationships with the community. I go to about five lectures at my local library per year and find them very interesting. I think other services like tutoring and job skill training make a lot of sense in modern libraries as well. I know my local library has many classes each season such as basic accounting, how to appeal your real estate assessment, computer training, etc. These are all far more important than renting out books IMHO.
You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them. People want country of origin labeling for meat for GOOD reason- because some nations practice poor CJD defense and some don't. People want dolphin free tuna because it MEANS something to them and their value system. Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
I'm confused. Are you advocating that all food should be labeled "Non-kosher" if it isn't kosher? And that all seafood should be labeled "May have dolphin" if it may have dolphin?
I am perfectly fine with kosher shops labeling their food kosher, and for EarthTrust and the Earth Island Institute creating dolphin free labeling. I am also perfectly fine with food producers using GMO-free labeling if they wish. Forcing people to put a big GMO label on all food that uses it is where I draw the line. Just like I draw the line at labeling all foods Non-kosher.
You postulate that people who believe __________ are responsible, at least "partially culpable" for everyone that does harm in the name of that cause. In your case, you state that those that believe Abortion is murder.
Yes, I do believe that the opinion of Abortion is Murder is an irresponsible opinion and that anyone who believes it shares responsibility for creating an atmosphere where such a large number of people believe it. Believing that a fetus is a human being is perfectly fine, but disregarding the opinion of others and declaring that anyone aborting a fetus is murdering someone is when someone has crossed into dangerous territory.
Do you not know that there are Atheists that have killed (also via atheist government decree) people because they had religion? THAT makes you, according to your own "rational thought" at least partially culpable. (see Reign of Terror, France)
The is a big difference here that I have been trying to articulate. Any atheist that openly says being religious is immoral is making the same dangerous mistake as someone who says abortion is murder. Any atheist that believes this and takes part in proliferating this opinion to the public is partially to blame for the actions of nuts who kill just because their victim is religious.
But an atheist who believes religious people are simply misguided is no more complicit than a religious person who only denounces abortion because it is not God's will (and would openly say that not following God's will is perfectly acceptable behavior).
I would also like to state that I understand religious people often feel obligated to share their interpretation of God's will to help enlighten or "save" others. As long as they believe the good they are doing outweighs the damage of a few nuts (which is very minor if put in perspective), that is a perfectly fine opinion to have. I disagree with it strongly and advocate against the opinion, but it is not an immoral opinion to hold. I drive fast even though I know that I may encourage others to do the same, which makes me complicit in our culture of overly aggressive drivers. I simply find that to be acceptable to me.
As you have stated, people do things in the name of religion that are horrible, but you have failed to say that religion itself is bad, or makes most of the followers of religion bad or even a small number of them is equal to the whole.
I failed to say that because I don't believe it. I don't believe it because it is not held up by the evidence. I didn't even imply that. I even outright refuted that idea in my post.
I do believe that religion is an overall bad thing, because it gets people used to the idea of believing strongly in spite of its implausibility, But it is benign enough that I think the best route is to just let religion flame out as time passes. The US is possibly the only advanced society that hasn't marginalized religion yet, which is probably because a major political movement has been taking advantage of it for a few decades now. But whatever the reason for the religious backlash in the US today, I believe it will pass with time. I even attribute the war against science to have more to do with a backlash of human ignorance and is not very related to religious beliefs.
n logical fallacy terms you're using "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" (correlation = causation fallacy), because you're equating all the evils committed in the name of religion, to ALL religions and religious people, which is clearly not the case.
I didn't say that at all. In fact I went out of my way to express that what you mention is an incorrect way to look at the problem. One of the examples I gave was that you cannot blame religion if someone is killing for fun just because he happens to be religious. But it is not a logical fallacy to say that some people do commit horrible acts primarily because of their religious beliefs. It is exceptionally rare, but it does happen.
The dangerous thing that rational members of any ideology commit is labeling those who do not share the same ideology as immoral or inhuman. This is not rare at all. This can be done in the name of religion, such as in the abortion debate, or in the name of nationalism, such as in the third Reich or communist Russia. Once you label something as immoral based only on a difference in opinion (caused by ideological belief, not rational belief), you invite crazy people to act on that warped sense of morality.
A religious person who labels abortion as murder is partially culpable for the actions of an abortion clinic bombing. It is not because they share the same beliefs, it is because they help foster a community where their ideological beliefs dictate morality instead of a more rational debate within society. A religious person who simply states they believe that God has a plan for every human fetus, so they would never abort their own child, shares no such blame because they have not demonized those who disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
I know MANY people who have worked very hard to become great at their field, and are actually amazingly competent. The difference between them and the ones who are making $150k is that somebody is willing to pay $150k for the other person's work.
I did say "because so few people actually put in that kind of effort into career paths that make that kind of money." Just working harder isn't enough, you have to make sure you are working smart as well. If high salary is important to you, instead of other rewards like loving your job, then you need to be smart when managing your career. I have made some decisions because of money, and I have made many more because I don't like the career paths that lead to more money. I have certainly left money on the table, but I don't regret it.
Not making $150k+ because you are happier in a field where that salary is rare or non-existent is not failing, it is just prioritizing other things. But if you set out in your 20s on a career path with the intention of a high salary, you don't need very much luck to get there (obviously you always need some luck).
The agreement was not to reach out and poach others' workers. It wasn't to refuse to hire them. You still had the option of getting a 25% raise to go to Google, all you have to do is apply to Google.
The agreement didn't reduce the options available to people, it just made it so the engineer had to take the first step, the recruiter wouldn't call you to entice you.
With the exception of my first job and one time that I relocated, every job I have ever had was offered to me when I wasn't even looking for work. I am confident that my next job will probably be offered to me by an ex-coworker, a friend of a friend, or someone else who knows I will be an asset their company and has enough money or interesting enough work to entice me away from my current employer. My current employer did the exact same thing so it wouldn't catch them by surprise. If you aren't constantly worried that your employees are going to jump ship, it is either because you are compensating them very well or you have crap employees.
If you are doing things right, by your 30s employers will be coming to you not the other way around. If there are agreements out there stopping companies from reaching out to me with job offers that would certainly reduce my opportunities.
It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.
What other purpose could "no poaching" agreements possibly have? Their only purpose is so a company does not have to pay a salary high enough and/or create a work environment good enough to keep the employee from leaving.
We can tell that based on your first sentence. What percentage of people do you estimate are able to pull that off, realistically? You live in a bubble world surrounded by the success stories, and thinking that because there are a few hundred thousand of you, that the tens of millions who have not enjoyed that success simply did something wrong. The fact is that you won one of the lottery seats on the magic carpet. Hard work made you eligible, but it didn't get you there on its own.
Making $150k+ by your 50s is not some incredibly rare thing for those who actually work for it. They may be the top 2% or so of wage earners, but in my opinion that is only because so few people actually put in that kind of effort into career paths that make that kind of money. I don't know any high quality developers (with people skills) over the age of 50 that don't make at least low six figure salaries. (this is an estimate based on their spending and savings habits since I don't know the actual salaries of most of them)
And part of the reason these salaries are so rare is the vast majority of people do not live in areas with cost of living high enough to require those kinds of salaries for top performers. I wonder what the top 1% of salaries would be if you adjusted for cost of living. I wouldn't be surprised if $150k/year in Silicon Valley or Manhattan was more like the top 5% of earners if adjusted for cost living, not the top 2%.
Well, except better tests cost more money to administer and score. A lot more. Simply adding one free response question to a standardized test increases the information about a student's knowledge and understanding by a lot, but increases the cost by a huge amount as well. It takes experienced graders and developed rubrics, training on those rubrics, etc. Politicians and policymakers like multiple choice because it's cheaper and gives the appearance of authoritative data.
I agree on all of this, except possibly the comment "A lot more" when put into context. Adding a single free response question to a standardized test does make it take longer, considering standardized tests are almost effortless. But how long does it take to grade that one question?
When put to scale the development of the tests and rubrics approaches $0. Even $50 million per year spent on improving tests only increases our expenses by $1 per student per year (a 0.01% increase). So anything that scales for every test administered will not significantly increase costs.
The training of test graders and the actual test grading are what don't scale. I used to do grading in college, and I guess that grading one short answer question takes about 5 minutes. This is averaged out over the ones that are obviously correct with a short glance and the ones where you have to figure out what they are talking about. A full 500 word essay is more like a half hour (once you get the hang of grading).
If 20% of a tester's time is spent training, that leaves about 1450 hours of grading per year, or close to 30,000 short answer questions per year. Even if you use a $100k per year cost (including training and administration costs) that leaves you with around $4 per short answer question graded. Considering we already spend $10,000 per student I think it would well worth an extra $100 for our standardized tests to have 25 short answer questions each. Or 10 short answer and 2 essays. Or spend an extra $500 and get an entire test of short answer and essay questions (10 essays and 60 short answer).
I think better quality control is well worth another 5% increase in educational spending, considering our entire economy is based upon how well educated our workforce is.
This version of Windows is guaranteed to be great. Windows has been going back and forth between one crap version and one great version for over a decade.
It is kind of like some IQ test pattern matching questions:
Win 95 - crap
Win 98 - great
Win ME - crap
Win XP - great
Vista - crap
Win 7 - great
Win 8 - crap
Win 9 - (see the pattern?)
Two things, this type of proper adjustment to look at the actual effect teachers have isn't always done well, and your underlying assumption is that the standardized test accurately measures what a student knows. From assessment theory and observation it is known that a single standardized test in purely multiple choice format cannot accurately measure what a student knows.
These are obstacles to overcome, not excuses to stop attempts at improvement. We absolutely need to update our testing procedures as part of a comprehensive attempt to improve quality standards in education. There is no need to constrain ourselves to just multiple choice tests. There is also no need to constrain ourselves to just testing.
Anyone could come up with hundreds of reasons why student testing and teacher evaluation is hard. But you could say the same for curing diseases or fighting against recessions. But it seems that people rarely use hardships as an excuse to quit trying unless they are talking about education.
there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.
No, because the tests themselves are currently fundamentally flawed. They test for rote memorization, not understanding. These simplistic tests only fool people into believing they're worth a damn thing.
That again assumes that it is impossible to create good tests. Some of the tests being used in multi-national testing are getting much better at asking questions to test actual understanding instead of just memorization.
If we actually cared about education we could create better tests. Even if we created tests that took an hour to grade it would increase costs by $50 per student per year per test (about a half a percent increase). And that is using a $100,000 yearly cost per test grader for the calculation (including overhead and administration costs).
There is no doubt that our current standardized tests are very poor. But once again we use that as an excuse for not even trying to improve.
You would figure most people on Slashdot would have a good enough understanding of math and statistics to know that just because testing scores may not be perfect, there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.
We can do pre-tests and post-tests so teachers aren't penalized for having students that were already poor performers. A teacher could be rated as outstanding even if his students are testing under the standards as long as their improvement was above expectations. The government has access to enough information to adjust test scores based on socio-economic factors. If 75% of a teacher's students are on food stamps, and the data shows students on food stamps generally underperform, then the performance metrics can take that into account.
The statistics world already has wonderful tools like standard deviations to determine if results are either expected deviations or are actually meaningful. And while the simple ones taught in STAT 101 aren't good enough for most uses, there are far better techniques that governments could pay very qualified statistics Phds to perform on teacher metrics.
And even though these metrics will still not be perfect, does that stop the private world from trying to rate employee performance? Sometimes a person is put on a doomed project and it is too hard to determine if they did a great job while everyone around them failed. But when people actually care about performance they understand that sometimes life can be unfair and that should not be an excuse for a shoddy product.
And our schools are certainly a shoddy product as they stand today.
Just saying you could buy a lot of Dover books on statistics, stochastic analysis, linear programming, and so on for $500 and learn a LOT about Big Data. You'd have enough money left over to get O'Reilly's Hadoop book.
Then you can spend $1000 and have all of the books plus some more guided instruction. I learned far more from reading books than I did from either my bachelors or masters degrees, but that doesn't make them a waste of money. I still know more today because I did all three (well, the bachelors was pretty much a waste, but it allowed me to go to graduate school).
Judging by your reasoning, I'd say you graduated from... what, Yale?
It doesn't matter that you're only paying a "fraction of what it costs to attend as any other student" -- which is also false, unless current MIT students aren't allowed to take the course. Otherwise it costs exactly the same. -- since current students get things like... well, course credit is the big one. GP was looking at the return for the cost which, honestly, I agree is a bit steep for a 1-off.
$499 for a class that ends in a certification backed by a reputable organization is definitely not steep. Many certifications cost about that much for just the exam itself, while training material is usually in the thousands even for online classes.
Operating systems have only just recently started to make very large screens as useful as multiple smaller screens. For me to use a 39" 4k monitor, I would need to be able to easily snap a screen to each 4 quadrants of the screen. If it takes me more than a couple seconds per quadrant I will most likely stick with multiple 27" monitors. I already have problems with sizing windows on 27" monitors, especially on my Mac.
There will come a time when very large 4k displays are very useful for developers, but for right now get them two 27" ones any day.
When Toyota's gas pedals were getting stuck and causing deaths,
Except that didn't happen.
This is the Internet. You just have to keep repeating things in casual conversation until it becomes true.
If we don't want an even worse repeat of the 80s, when Germany and Japan were taking over the auto industry, our laws will have to be made friendly to autonomous cars. The countries with more inviting laws will be the ones who perform the most development in the early years of this technology. Then once the technology is "solved" and the entire world is open to autonomous cars, those countries who were early adopters will be the ones running the industry. They will already have the expertise that other countries don't have because there wasn't a local market for the cars yet.
lol, did you even read the article?
"An even more encouraging statistic is China’s position in the top four of countries whose scientists’ research was the most cited between 2003 and 2013. This suggests that the research produced in China is as good as any in the world."
why do you hate chinese so much? you're a joke.
The paper goes on to give the numbers I mentioned in my post, that their citation rate is 65% of the world average. And note that this is a comparison with the world average, not the top countries.
I wasn't hating on the Chinese, as I even linked to a post that gave praise to Chinese research. But I did want to point out that the country still has a long way to go. The top researchers in China are apparently doing very well, but there must be a huge amount of very questionable research for their average to be so low. The good news is that China is making a very strong push to improve their research, which has obviously paid large dividends over just the past 5 years. It will almost certainly just continue to improve from here.
They might spend more, but considering all the false papers that come out of China, they're not getting much for their money. They'll continue to pirate our research for the considerable future.
It would be an interesting to do research on just how influential the research coming out of China is. One pretty simple method would be to find out the ratio of Chinese research papers that are cited by European research, and vise versa. That would be a pretty good metric of how much research is just fluff, and how much is useful enough to be used by others.
This article seems to back up the assertion that the quality of research coming out of China is rising, but still isn't as good as research coming out of the west (and Japan). Both Germany and the United Kingdom by themselves have more citations than China, so China must be far behind the European Union as a whole. China's average citation rate is 6.92 compared to the world average of 10.69, so they are well below average.
Until a large portion of the world starts performing population control, our opinions about the harm of growing populations is not relevant to topics related to feeding more people. As long as we as a society let people have as many kids as they want, and do not wish to punish children for the sins of their parents, we need to find ways of feeding all of these people.
How do you figure that concern over population growth is not relevant to feeding people? I smell in this statement some kind of ethical concept which needs to be more clearly elucidated. I'm willing to accept that it's a Machiavellian notion, but if you don't feed people, they find it harder to reproduce.
Like I said, once society is ready to start performing population control on a global scale, then we no longer have to worry about feeding growing population. I did not talk about the morality of population control, just that as long as we both let people have the freedom to reproduce and do not condone letting people starve, it is irrelevant what our opinions on growing population are when talking about finding ways of feeding them.
I think that analogous concept you might be looking for is DDT. It was originally a godsend -- it kills pests!
No, that would be a good analogy if we were just talking about Roundup Ready seeds. That is a more reasonable thing to ban if there are good (non-tin foil hat) reasons to ban it. But any problems with roundup ready seeds would be a problem with that particular use of genetic modification, not genetic medication in general. That seemed to me what the original post was saying about this rulings similarity to banning screw drivers. Banning all GMOs because of a few brands of GMOs would be like banning all pesticides because of DDT.
Almost all technologies that have been developed in the past 100 years or so to feed the world's expanding population have the chance of being harmful to our health in ways we don't know yet. There will be times when new advances will have unintended consequences, but we can't just be scared of every new technology that comes along. It is only because of these technologies that our lives are so good that we spend time on 1st world problems like worrying about the health problems of GMOs.
The benefits of these advances are staggering. In 1900 average people spent 43% of their budget on food, compared to 13% today. I am very glad that my food expenditures are only about $800 per month (I am above the 13% number) instead of probably $2500 if not for the green revolution. If you want to not eat GMOs, just eat organic food. Its price is more in line with what food costs would be when we discard some of the the last century's advances in tech.
I for one don't buy the argument that the world needs more food to support a growing population. There are more than enough people in the world.
Until a large portion of the world starts performing population control, our opinions about the harm of growing populations is not relevant to topics related to feeding more people. As long as we as a society let people have as many kids as they want, and do not wish to punish children for the sins of their parents, we need to find ways of feeding all of these people.
So a better analogy for GMOs might not be with screwdrivers, but with concentration camps and gas chambers, which by themselves did no harm.
That is a horribe analogy. A better analogy would be comparing GMOs to Hydrogen Cyanide. GMOs can be used poorly, just like hydrogen cyanide can be used in gas chambers. But both are used for good far more than for evil.
Actually, even mine is a bad analogy. An even better one would be comparing genetically modifying foods with chemical synthesis in general. Both are simply scientific techniques. We can use genetics to change the color of food, make it resistant to pesticides, or create deadly bacteria. Just like we can use chemical synthesis to create table salt, carbonic acid, or hydrogen cyanide.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what.
A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.
B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
I wasn't too clear (since another poster misinterpreted me in the same way), but when I talked about standardizing the books I meant that the provider had to do it, not the consumer. My point was that once the provider did that, the book is just as ready to be an e-book as it is a POD. And when you compare the pros/cons of these two formats, I personally think that e-books win out big. I think that POD is a great idea, I simply think that e-books are making the idea irrelevant. There are still some hurdles, such as people still preferring paper over an e-ink screen, but advances in technology and simply the changing of generations will take care of that.
They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on).
All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but ... that's the point of a book!
That was all completely true up until a few years ago. If I wanted to learn statistics just five years ago, I would want to read a Statistics textbook first and only enhance my learning with online sites. But today I am going to sign up for a MOOC or watch Youtube videos. This is a very new thing for me, and it is a big transition because I still have about 300 books in my office that I rarely read anymore (every other month my wife tries to get me to donate most of them). I needed to learn some basic compiler skills (mostly scanning and parsing) for a personal project, and immediately bought a book on the subject out of habit. But I have barely looked at it at all, since I was able to learn far more from a MOOC and Google searching.
Just looking at how much change there has been in just the past few years, I have little doubt that the highly specialized information that still makes me buy books today will be in better online formats in the near future. So if we are talking about the next 5-10 years, I see books being even less important when compared to online videos and tutorials. These will be carefully created by an author to flow and demonstrate a larger premise, but the format won't be a book.
This is all obviously just my opinion.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
I didn't mean to say that the internet is a better source for all information. My rationalle for calling it a better source was simply that it is a better source for most of the information people need. I am easily in the top 5% of physical book purchasers for personal consumption in the developed world (probably top 1%), but even I realize that most of the time I need to learn something I do not turn to books (either physical or e-books). They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on). And for novels, if you are into that kind of thing, but those transition to e-books even better than the non-fiction books I read.
A library without books is... pointless.
A library which focuses primarily on books is ... almost pointless.
Libraries are there to help improve the general level of education of the nearby population. Storing and lending books were by far the most important functions of libraries when books were the primary source of information in our culture. That is not even close to true anymore. I spend over $200 per month on books at Amazon each month, so I am a heavy reader, but I still consume most information online. And I was a holdout when it came to getting an e-reader, but over half of my book reading is now done on my iPad. In fact the reason I finally bought an iPad last year is because I found myself reading books from my phone far more often than reading paper books, and I wanted a better form factor.
Like it or not, the Internet is a better source of most information now. So libraries need to adapt to that in order to perform their function as education centers. That means more real estate for computers and less for books. With less emphasis on books libraries can also focus on more personal relationships with the community. I go to about five lectures at my local library per year and find them very interesting. I think other services like tutoring and job skill training make a lot of sense in modern libraries as well. I know my local library has many classes each season such as basic accounting, how to appeal your real estate assessment, computer training, etc. These are all far more important than renting out books IMHO.
You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them. People want country of origin labeling for meat for GOOD reason- because some nations practice poor CJD defense and some don't. People want dolphin free tuna because it MEANS something to them and their value system. Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
I'm confused. Are you advocating that all food should be labeled "Non-kosher" if it isn't kosher? And that all seafood should be labeled "May have dolphin" if it may have dolphin?
I am perfectly fine with kosher shops labeling their food kosher, and for EarthTrust and the Earth Island Institute creating dolphin free labeling. I am also perfectly fine with food producers using GMO-free labeling if they wish. Forcing people to put a big GMO label on all food that uses it is where I draw the line. Just like I draw the line at labeling all foods Non-kosher.
You postulate that people who believe __________ are responsible, at least "partially culpable" for everyone that does harm in the name of that cause. In your case, you state that those that believe Abortion is murder.
Yes, I do believe that the opinion of Abortion is Murder is an irresponsible opinion and that anyone who believes it shares responsibility for creating an atmosphere where such a large number of people believe it. Believing that a fetus is a human being is perfectly fine, but disregarding the opinion of others and declaring that anyone aborting a fetus is murdering someone is when someone has crossed into dangerous territory.
Do you not know that there are Atheists that have killed (also via atheist government decree) people because they had religion? THAT makes you, according to your own "rational thought" at least partially culpable. (see Reign of Terror, France)
The is a big difference here that I have been trying to articulate. Any atheist that openly says being religious is immoral is making the same dangerous mistake as someone who says abortion is murder. Any atheist that believes this and takes part in proliferating this opinion to the public is partially to blame for the actions of nuts who kill just because their victim is religious.
But an atheist who believes religious people are simply misguided is no more complicit than a religious person who only denounces abortion because it is not God's will (and would openly say that not following God's will is perfectly acceptable behavior).
I would also like to state that I understand religious people often feel obligated to share their interpretation of God's will to help enlighten or "save" others. As long as they believe the good they are doing outweighs the damage of a few nuts (which is very minor if put in perspective), that is a perfectly fine opinion to have. I disagree with it strongly and advocate against the opinion, but it is not an immoral opinion to hold. I drive fast even though I know that I may encourage others to do the same, which makes me complicit in our culture of overly aggressive drivers. I simply find that to be acceptable to me.
As you have stated, people do things in the name of religion that are horrible, but you have failed to say that religion itself is bad, or makes most of the followers of religion bad or even a small number of them is equal to the whole.
I failed to say that because I don't believe it. I don't believe it because it is not held up by the evidence. I didn't even imply that. I even outright refuted that idea in my post.
I do believe that religion is an overall bad thing, because it gets people used to the idea of believing strongly in spite of its implausibility, But it is benign enough that I think the best route is to just let religion flame out as time passes. The US is possibly the only advanced society that hasn't marginalized religion yet, which is probably because a major political movement has been taking advantage of it for a few decades now. But whatever the reason for the religious backlash in the US today, I believe it will pass with time. I even attribute the war against science to have more to do with a backlash of human ignorance and is not very related to religious beliefs.
n logical fallacy terms you're using "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" (correlation = causation fallacy), because you're equating all the evils committed in the name of religion, to ALL religions and religious people, which is clearly not the case.
I didn't say that at all. In fact I went out of my way to express that what you mention is an incorrect way to look at the problem. One of the examples I gave was that you cannot blame religion if someone is killing for fun just because he happens to be religious. But it is not a logical fallacy to say that some people do commit horrible acts primarily because of their religious beliefs. It is exceptionally rare, but it does happen.
The dangerous thing that rational members of any ideology commit is labeling those who do not share the same ideology as immoral or inhuman. This is not rare at all. This can be done in the name of religion, such as in the abortion debate, or in the name of nationalism, such as in the third Reich or communist Russia. Once you label something as immoral based only on a difference in opinion (caused by ideological belief, not rational belief), you invite crazy people to act on that warped sense of morality.
A religious person who labels abortion as murder is partially culpable for the actions of an abortion clinic bombing. It is not because they share the same beliefs, it is because they help foster a community where their ideological beliefs dictate morality instead of a more rational debate within society. A religious person who simply states they believe that God has a plan for every human fetus, so they would never abort their own child, shares no such blame because they have not demonized those who disagree.