I do hope you realise that you're addressing a bunch of ideologists and opportunists who frequently name their companies, kids, projects, etc., after Ayn Rand and titles and characters from her novels. They don't believe in big gubbermint, except for a source of very lucrative contracts, and so really don't believe they have to listen to you. Freeze their big gubbermint contracts and then ask them your questions. You'll get a much more sincere response from them then. Then again, they may just turn around and tell you to pry their computer keyboards from their cold dead hands:P
Ah, it looks like the financial sector are going to explore the limitations of automated p-hacking. With p-hacking, the larger the data set, the greater the probability of identifying background noise as significant patterns. Without knowing what specific, clearly defined questions you want to answer, you've got no idea of what kinds of data will hold the answers you're looking for and so you end up answering irrelevant questions but thinking that these answers are somehow significant.
I suspect that the algorithm itself isn't homophobic or antisemitic. What's more likely is that the data being fed into it is homophobic and antisemitic. An analysis is only as good as the data set it's based on. Just search around/. and you'll find plenty of examples of intolerant speech and portrayals of some groups of people in a very negative light with little or no balance or pushback the other way. I doubt that Facebook and Twitter are any different. If anything, that Google's algorithms detected biases in content of the WWW is an indictment of many of the kinds of things we use the internet to do. I'd like to see analyses broken down into countries, regions, subcultures, etc. to see where the strongest biases are. We might be surprised by it.
IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are committing to codes of conduct using subjectively ethical language. We already know that although corporation may be called "people," they still lack the common decency and self-awareness to be called responsible, reasonable people. In fact, these corporations behave more like psychopaths than the vast majority of people you and I know.
Decrypting the info on suspects' phones isn't necessary in most cases:
- Most organised criminals use simple burner phones that don't have encryption.
- The FBI has access to everyone's automatic backups on the "cloud."
- The FBI has access to phone metadata which tells them everything about the phones' locations, movements, times, who they called, etc. They use social network analysis software to construct elaborate and detailed maps of people's activities through from their phones' metadata. If anyone's dumb enough to use their phone during or for criminal activities, the FBI can easily identify and catch them.
It seems like there's an ulterior motive behind this constant pressure to ban or weaken encryption for citizens. Either that or the FBI are plain incompetent and want to blame/scapegoat something.
Yeah, and the ICOs even have their own theme song! https://youtu.be/UtKADQnjQmc?t... Buy! BUY!! BUY!!! Get 'em while they're hot! You don't want to feel left out, do you?
It sounds like you had some teachers you liked and some you didn't like. Did you not like some teachers because you didn't learn much from them, or did you not learn much from them because you didn't like them? Did all your classmates share your opinions about all your teachers?
And yes, there are clearly some teachers who may have a difficult time coping or managing the situation they're in: Teaching is difficult, stressful, and most pre-service teacher preparation programmes are sub-optimal and, as I said before, in-service CPD is mostly ineffective.
My argument is that rather than sacking teachers who are experiencing difficulties, find out why and what can be done to help them to overcome them. Often, this help can be little more than some observations, reflective feedback, and mentoring for the teacher in order to be effective. That's a whole lot quicker and cheaper than sacking teachers and trying to find new ones. This approach is also a good way to find systemic issues that may be preventing some, most, or all teachers from being able to teach at their best. Also, some of the better teachers are the ones who didn't get off to a good start; they had to learn on the job and made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Sacking teachers in order to improve learning outcomes has been tried. It's slow (takes decades to work its way through the system) and demoralises most teachers, making many of them under-perform and some to even leave the teaching profession. The ones who leave are often the conscientious ones who could become great teachers with the right professional climate and support.
First problem, the world's full of people, who've never taught a class in their lives, giving their poorly informed advice to teachers. And too many pundits berating teachers for issues that aren't caused by teachers.
Next, you can't sack "bad" teachers and hire "good" ones. Teachers aren't factory or office workers. Education isn't a service or product. Pupils/students learn in communities cultivated within schools and neighbourhoods. "Good" teachers are cultivated, mentored, and encouraged, not hired. "Good" teacher means a teacher who is sufficiently well supported and given the autonomy over curriculum and assessment so that s/he can do his/her job well. Give teachers shitty status (i.e. constantly under attack from govt. and the media) and working conditions (i.e. long hours, insufficient resources, bureaucratic overload, and held to account for things outside their control) and guess what you'll get. Most of the policies for 'improving education' are actually making it worse.
Want to know what's most effective at improving learning outcomes across the board? Formative assessment (AKA feedback & actually talking to pupils/students about their work). If teachers can get that right, learning outcomes improve. In order for teachers to learn how to get that right, they need effective in-service continuing professional development (CPD). It's also a lot faster and cheaper than trying to train and sack-and-hire your way to improvement, especially when it's not the teachers themselves who are the cause of the problems. Most CPD is ineffective because it's too short, not followed up on, misdirected, and so doesn't change what the vast majority of teachers do in their classrooms in any significant way.
Also, when govt. and the media stop parroting 80s Reagan adminsitration "A Nation at Risk" style "Education is broken" rhetoric and actually acknowledge that the USA has top-rate education systems and that much of the poor performance on the OECD PISA tests every 3 years is due to child poverty and social exclusion (Why study hard when it won't get you a good job?), then we can start having well-informed, constructive conversations about how to improve US education outcomes.
And finally, we have to stop this nonsense about 21st century skills. How often do the people who use this buzz-phrase actually define what 21st century skills are? When you look at the few definitions that there are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century B.C. skills... apart from the learning to use computers for studying and work part. I'll give them that.
In the short term, Google has changed they way people access information and news and made itself a powerful gate-keeper. In the longer term, their revenue model is killing off the very stuff that Google depends on; content that people want to read on a regular basis, i.e. high-quality. Google doesn't produce any high-quality content. They aren't writers or publishers and now they've publicly admitted the bind they're in. Their solution: Offering money back to the publishers they've been taking it away from but what about the strings Google are going to attach?
Was just about to post the same video, different uploader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Waaaayyyy more interesting than the slow, cumbersome robots. How about a rematch between Chinese loaders and those robots. Which do you think would win?
Why did the NSA and CIA start a cyber arms race when the USA is the most vulnerable to the kinds of attacks it's creating and therefore provoking from non-USA aligned countries?
Yeah, they'll promise amazing, interactive VR, resolution and details and infinite possibilities. When it comes time to actually implement the tech and deliver on the promises, it'll turn out to be 'Murica's speciality; minimum viable product from the lowest bidder. Sorely disappointing.
Given all the grandiose claims and superlative flying around about AI, whereabouts on the Gartner hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... do you think we are now?
Yep, Wall St. + Bitcoin is a match made in hell. Wall St. will gamble away everything they have, bankers will get their huge bonuses, executives will get stinking rich, and when they music stops, guess who's going to pay the bill?
Then please explain why these rankings of the most polluted regions of the US are mostly traditional "progressive" Democratic strongholds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Neither side of the political duopoly can or wants to take on the fossil fuel industry in any meaningful, progressive way. That's why it doesn't take much for heavily polluting countries, even China, to leap ahead of the US, even when heavy investment in renewables makes sense in economic and national security terms.
...that instead of spending taxpayer money on educating people, we should be spending it on training them with a very narrow skills-set that may well be becoming obsolete, at least in the US, by the time they graduate.
It's not surprising that US media is singling out anything Russian for criticism. Remember when the French wouldn't support the US' 2003 invasion of Iraq? All of a sudden we had "freedom fries" and the bad guys in Hollywood movies spoke with crappy French accents for a few years after. Now it's Russia's turn because the middle classes are pissed off at the working classes for voting in Trump. USA, grow up and take responsibility for your electoral choices. Russia didn't elect Trump, you did!
BTW, I remember looking into the efficacy of anti-virus software and finding out that in independent tests, the best one of the day only caught 85% of malware attacks. Then, there's the more recent stories of various well-known anti-virus software itself being vulnerable to attacks.
If that's so, then congratulations Silicon Valley, you've just invented a new ride-sharing service previously known as the bus! (Only without the friendly, personal touch that you get with a human driver).
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope you realise that you're addressing a bunch of ideologists and opportunists who frequently name their companies, kids, projects, etc., after Ayn Rand and titles and characters from her novels. They don't believe in big gubbermint, except for a source of very lucrative contracts, and so really don't believe they have to listen to you. Freeze their big gubbermint contracts and then ask them your questions. You'll get a much more sincere response from them then. Then again, they may just turn around and tell you to pry their computer keyboards from their cold dead hands :P
...it's only Skynet becoming sentient.
Ah, it looks like the financial sector are going to explore the limitations of automated p-hacking. With p-hacking, the larger the data set, the greater the probability of identifying background noise as significant patterns. Without knowing what specific, clearly defined questions you want to answer, you've got no idea of what kinds of data will hold the answers you're looking for and so you end up answering irrelevant questions but thinking that these answers are somehow significant.
I suspect that the algorithm itself isn't homophobic or antisemitic. What's more likely is that the data being fed into it is homophobic and antisemitic. An analysis is only as good as the data set it's based on. Just search around /. and you'll find plenty of examples of intolerant speech and portrayals of some groups of people in a very negative light with little or no balance or pushback the other way. I doubt that Facebook and Twitter are any different. If anything, that Google's algorithms detected biases in content of the WWW is an indictment of many of the kinds of things we use the internet to do. I'd like to see analyses broken down into countries, regions, subcultures, etc. to see where the strongest biases are. We might be surprised by it.
IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are committing to codes of conduct using subjectively ethical language. We already know that although corporation may be called "people," they still lack the common decency and self-awareness to be called responsible, reasonable people. In fact, these corporations behave more like psychopaths than the vast majority of people you and I know.
You appear to know less about education than I thought.
Decrypting the info on suspects' phones isn't necessary in most cases:
- Most organised criminals use simple burner phones that don't have encryption.
- The FBI has access to everyone's automatic backups on the "cloud."
- The FBI has access to phone metadata which tells them everything about the phones' locations, movements, times, who they called, etc. They use social network analysis software to construct elaborate and detailed maps of people's activities through from their phones' metadata. If anyone's dumb enough to use their phone during or for criminal activities, the FBI can easily identify and catch them.
It seems like there's an ulterior motive behind this constant pressure to ban or weaken encryption for citizens. Either that or the FBI are plain incompetent and want to blame/scapegoat something.
Yeah, and the ICOs even have their own theme song! https://youtu.be/UtKADQnjQmc?t... Buy! BUY!! BUY!!! Get 'em while they're hot! You don't want to feel left out, do you?
Hi drinkypoo,
It sounds like you had some teachers you liked and some you didn't like. Did you not like some teachers because you didn't learn much from them, or did you not learn much from them because you didn't like them? Did all your classmates share your opinions about all your teachers?
And yes, there are clearly some teachers who may have a difficult time coping or managing the situation they're in: Teaching is difficult, stressful, and most pre-service teacher preparation programmes are sub-optimal and, as I said before, in-service CPD is mostly ineffective.
My argument is that rather than sacking teachers who are experiencing difficulties, find out why and what can be done to help them to overcome them. Often, this help can be little more than some observations, reflective feedback, and mentoring for the teacher in order to be effective. That's a whole lot quicker and cheaper than sacking teachers and trying to find new ones. This approach is also a good way to find systemic issues that may be preventing some, most, or all teachers from being able to teach at their best. Also, some of the better teachers are the ones who didn't get off to a good start; they had to learn on the job and made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Sacking teachers in order to improve learning outcomes has been tried. It's slow (takes decades to work its way through the system) and demoralises most teachers, making many of them under-perform and some to even leave the teaching profession. The ones who leave are often the conscientious ones who could become great teachers with the right professional climate and support.
First problem, the world's full of people, who've never taught a class in their lives, giving their poorly informed advice to teachers. And too many pundits berating teachers for issues that aren't caused by teachers.
Next, you can't sack "bad" teachers and hire "good" ones. Teachers aren't factory or office workers. Education isn't a service or product. Pupils/students learn in communities cultivated within schools and neighbourhoods. "Good" teachers are cultivated, mentored, and encouraged, not hired. "Good" teacher means a teacher who is sufficiently well supported and given the autonomy over curriculum and assessment so that s/he can do his/her job well. Give teachers shitty status (i.e. constantly under attack from govt. and the media) and working conditions (i.e. long hours, insufficient resources, bureaucratic overload, and held to account for things outside their control) and guess what you'll get. Most of the policies for 'improving education' are actually making it worse.
Want to know what's most effective at improving learning outcomes across the board? Formative assessment (AKA feedback & actually talking to pupils/students about their work). If teachers can get that right, learning outcomes improve. In order for teachers to learn how to get that right, they need effective in-service continuing professional development (CPD). It's also a lot faster and cheaper than trying to train and sack-and-hire your way to improvement, especially when it's not the teachers themselves who are the cause of the problems. Most CPD is ineffective because it's too short, not followed up on, misdirected, and so doesn't change what the vast majority of teachers do in their classrooms in any significant way.
Also, when govt. and the media stop parroting 80s Reagan adminsitration "A Nation at Risk" style "Education is broken" rhetoric and actually acknowledge that the USA has top-rate education systems and that much of the poor performance on the OECD PISA tests every 3 years is due to child poverty and social exclusion (Why study hard when it won't get you a good job?), then we can start having well-informed, constructive conversations about how to improve US education outcomes.
And finally, we have to stop this nonsense about 21st century skills. How often do the people who use this buzz-phrase actually define what 21st century skills are? When you look at the few definitions that there are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century B.C. skills... apart from the learning to use computers for studying and work part. I'll give them that.
End of rant.
Like you should buy condoms before you start having sex, you should get a VPN before you start using the interwebs. Is that clear enough?
In the short term, Google has changed they way people access information and news and made itself a powerful gate-keeper. In the longer term, their revenue model is killing off the very stuff that Google depends on; content that people want to read on a regular basis, i.e. high-quality. Google doesn't produce any high-quality content. They aren't writers or publishers and now they've publicly admitted the bind they're in. Their solution: Offering money back to the publishers they've been taking it away from but what about the strings Google are going to attach?
For the more purist Mac devotees, Apple will also be releasing the more Apple Mac than an Apple Mac, Mac Tini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Was just about to post the same video, different uploader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Waaaayyyy more interesting than the slow, cumbersome robots. How about a rematch between Chinese loaders and those robots. Which do you think would win?
Why did the NSA and CIA start a cyber arms race when the USA is the most vulnerable to the kinds of attacks it's creating and therefore provoking from non-USA aligned countries?
Yeah, they'll promise amazing, interactive VR, resolution and details and infinite possibilities. When it comes time to actually implement the tech and deliver on the promises, it'll turn out to be 'Murica's speciality; minimum viable product from the lowest bidder. Sorely disappointing.
Given all the grandiose claims and superlative flying around about AI, whereabouts on the Gartner hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... do you think we are now?
Yep, Wall St. + Bitcoin is a match made in hell. Wall St. will gamble away everything they have, bankers will get their huge bonuses, executives will get stinking rich, and when they music stops, guess who's going to pay the bill?
Then please explain why these rankings of the most polluted regions of the US are mostly traditional "progressive" Democratic strongholds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Neither side of the political duopoly can or wants to take on the fossil fuel industry in any meaningful, progressive way. That's why it doesn't take much for heavily polluting countries, even China, to leap ahead of the US, even when heavy investment in renewables makes sense in economic and national security terms.
The agency does not believe that any data the IRS has shared with Equifax to date has been compromised...
Waiting for the next update on this topic.
...that instead of spending taxpayer money on educating people, we should be spending it on training them with a very narrow skills-set that may well be becoming obsolete, at least in the US, by the time they graduate.
Something tells me that the people at the NSA aren't cooperating very well with the current administration.
It's not surprising that US media is singling out anything Russian for criticism. Remember when the French wouldn't support the US' 2003 invasion of Iraq? All of a sudden we had "freedom fries" and the bad guys in Hollywood movies spoke with crappy French accents for a few years after. Now it's Russia's turn because the middle classes are pissed off at the working classes for voting in Trump. USA, grow up and take responsibility for your electoral choices. Russia didn't elect Trump, you did!
BTW, I remember looking into the efficacy of anti-virus software and finding out that in independent tests, the best one of the day only caught 85% of malware attacks. Then, there's the more recent stories of various well-known anti-virus software itself being vulnerable to attacks.
You haven't been out in the world much have you? Busses that are more like taxis = marshrutka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... share taxi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and if you want a proper integrated city transport system, Helsinki seems to be doing it right: https://www.theguardian.com/ci...
If that's so, then congratulations Silicon Valley, you've just invented a new ride-sharing service previously known as the bus! (Only without the friendly, personal touch that you get with a human driver).