You haven't done a shred of research on this, have you?
Vaccines work 85% of the time. If only 15% of the populace is susceptible, the vast majority of diseases will lack the concentration needed to spread across large geographic areas, thus limiting the scope of the outbreak and drastically reducing the number of people involved. For instance: Without humans to spread a disease, most viruses would be a single locale and only get a chance to infect 15% of the people in Sacramento, instead of 15% of people in North America.
Then, if you were thinking logically... or just thinking... then you'd realize that at the beginning, the vaccine would give the first person an 85% chance of immunity. The "herd" immunity would be unchanged, because it's just one guy. As that number went from 1 person to 99% of people, the overall "herd" immunity would reach 85%. I don't know how this is at all illogical to you. Unless you never even tried to understand.
The parents aren't actually using any form of critical thinking. For whatever reason (emotional distress, religion) the parents want to believe that they shouldn't get vaccines, or that getting vaccines is the cause of something bad that happened. Or in some cases, something bad happened, and they are looking for a cause. Those people don't care about probability or nuances of genetics and immunity. They want someone to give them a simple answer. They want someone to blame. They want someone to tell them that they are right. They want to feel like they are in control. A million scientists telling them that their child got autism because of random chance, or that no vaccine can be 100% effective, or that strain mutations occur without any prior signs are not even remotely as convincing as one guy --regardless of what degree he might have-- telling them that they are right and vaccines really are bad. You don't even have to support it with experiments, just a folksey-wisdom argument and you're golden.
Never underestimate the power of one person telling someone else what they want to hear.
The Flu vaccine is actually pretty effective. After all, they pretty much make a new one each year. They've had quite a bit of practice by now. However, getting a vaccine is not a full protection against the flu. The problem is twofold:
First, the flu virus mutates very quickly, and likes to mutate in ways that change its antigen "signature". Though there are some interesting attempts at more general vaccines, currently, you can't even make a vaccine for H1N1 flu strains. You have to pick a specific subgroup of H1N1 strains, because even within the H1N1 type, there are variations that appear differently to our immune system. The same holds for the "old" H3N2 flu, and the even older H2N2 flu. It's not uncommon for a strain to mutate enough over a single season that last year's vaccine no longer works.
Second, because there are so many different strains in the wild and they shift so quickly, you can't create a vaccine that is targeted against all of them. Why not? That wasn't part of my specialty. I think it has something to do with confusing the immune system with too many similar things. Anyway, the point here is simpler: Vaccine makers don't even try to protect against all the strains. They use clinical samples to determine which strains are looking to be the most common, pick the top four or five, and make a vaccine that protects against those.
So, what happens if they guess wrong, and a rare strain from the previous year suddenly spreads wildly? Well, you don't get vaccine effectiveness. What if one of the popular strains goes through some mutations early in the season? Well, same effect. You've probably got a vaccine that won't help much. Is this the fault of the vaccine? No. It's the fault of the virus that mutates faster than vaccines can be created and tested. They are trying to find ways to make them faster, but that would only work if you were willing to get multiple shots per year. The better solution is to find a way to make vaccines that apply to larger groups of strains, but it takes time and lots of data.
Of course, this all gets thrown out the window if you're a fan of Intelligent Design (aka: Creationism). In that case, vaccines don't work because God hates you and chose to use his powers to fiddle with a Germ Spirit and make it immune to the poisons created by the Unbelievers. He's punishing you for not having more faith in him. Of course, there's nothing you can do in this case, so there's no point in trying to understand exactly why it happened.
That sounds great and all, but how can you quantify "learning how to learn", thinking skills, and abstract analysis?
And without quantifying them, how do you make Powerpoint presentations about education with bar charts that don't need thinking skills or abstract analysis to understand?
And without those bar charts, how do prove that America really is far superior to every single country in the world? Obviously we need the bar charts. And in order to make those bar charts to justify our chest-beating and egotism, we need them to show things that are easily quantified. So, we should only teach our children things that can be easily quantified.
Thus: We shouldn't teach our children to think, because it doesn't serve our egos. Luckily, since they won't be able to think properly, they'll come to the same conclusion when they grow up. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether or not we're on the first iteration of this.
Free Speech doesn't mean that you can say whatever you want without consequence.
It simply means that the act of speaking ideas cannot be restricted or made illegal. For specific cases of ideas, it can.
If you want to say: "I am going to go get my shotgun and kill Bob", the government can't stop you. However, it can charge you with assault or other possible crimes (attempted murder?) as the words you spoke are the expression of a crime. See also: Slander and the release of information directly leading to the harming of others.
More to the point: Calling the police on this guy is a service to society and the guy himself, as the most likely person to be hurt in the near future, was him. His detainment is probably a good thing for him and his family, as he clearly needs help.
Unless you're another conspiracy theorist who feels he was wrongly detained for speaking the truth. Er... You don't actually believe that, right? Is there anyone near you who might be willing to call the police for the rest of us who don't want to be caught in the crossfire as some idiot CT crazy tries to topple the government by attacking a local police station.
It's not the axe that is the part that's threatening.
It's the fact that he's clearly unhinged. Axe, 9/11, whatever. He sees himself as the vanguard of a revolution, and he's already got specific targets for how that revolution will start.
Yeah, I expect the axe was a metaphor. I expect that he did still have enough sense to use some operational security and not say exactly what plans were going through his mind. But it seems at least likely that he actually had plans. That's certainly enough to detain him. Has he committed a crime yet? Not that I can see, but depending on the threats he tossed out and just how public they were, I'd say its a grey area. I'm certainly happy that he's being looked at by professionals.
That said, it disgusts me that this gets lumped under Anti-Terrorist Activity. I don't think for a second he was a terrorist. He's just a crazy. However, he's a crazy with delusions of starting a violent revolution and the training to actually hurt people in his failed attempt at it. We should try to protect ourselves against crazy, but labeling them as terrorists because its scarier or easier is highly irritating to me.
Tom never fit in. He is the largest of a list of throwbacks to a different writing style (namely: the style used in The Hobbit) that end up turning into jarring inconsistencies in the book. Yeah, I know a lot of people love the mystery and like to speculate on how he was actually God (ie: Eru) and how the chapter set up the idea of Ents and Ringwraiths. That's fine, academically, but the reality is that it simply injected confusion and nonsense into the narrative. The Hobbit fed on things like this, proving that the world was a strange and sometimes deceptively powerful place. But the rest of LoTR doesn't continue this. Yes, the world has powerful things in it... and the story is about those powerful things striving against each other.
Tossing in an omnicient, omnipresent, and omnipotent weirdo who defeats trees with prose doesn't strengthen the book. However, it seems it was left in because it introduced a larger world to readers who had not read The Hobbit.
Well, perhaps. I see it as different parts of the same struggle.
It's a bit more explicit than that
The Aragorn/Arwen story is a adapted form of the Beren/Luthien story. B/L supposedly existed first (in JRRT's mind) but it first hit paper as A/A. I mean, it even includes the male suitor being taken in by a king of a forest realm (who is actually out-shone by his more mystical wife). The parallel should be obvious. That said, when translated to movie form, I'd think that the style and situation would be sufficiently different that most people would not notice.
And then the case can be made that the Elves in LoTR are a stand-in for the Valar of the First Age Silmarillion.
And if you don't see a parallel between Morgoth and Sauron, then you're not reading the same books I am.
I get the feeling that Silmarillion was the story that JRRT wanted to create, but knew that it was far too disjoint to make a proper novel. LoTR was a book that managed to stitch together a bunch of those prototypes into something the rest of the world might enjoy.
Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
It does if the book you bought was stolen from the rightful owner
But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revoked/whatever on a whim later.
Figure it out: You didn't buy the book. You bought stolen information. By copyright law, you're only allowed to have a copy of the art if you legally obtain the right to a copy (a license, more or less). In that case, you did not. You obtained a false license from a retailer who did not have the legal authority to sell you access to the book. As such, your access to the book was removed as it was never legally given to you.
However, if that was the stated intent, why make it expressly illegal (a capital offense, even) to protest or protect yourself against the federal government?
Point here: There is inherent contradiction. The second amendment is a sword that cuts both ways, and if we are to assume that the founders were super-clever bastards, we might come to the conclusion that they purposefully wanted it to be that way.
However, the point stands that the supposed "protect yourself from the government" reason for the 2nd Amendment is implict at best, and probably more likely simply "assumed". The actual application of that assumption would require a situation where the Constitution is no longer in effect, thus, the meaning of the 2nd Amendment becomes a question of philosophical history rather than law.
Put more simply: If you ever have need to take up arms against the federal government, then you wouldn't care what the 2nd Amendment --or any amendment-- actually said. Until that time, you're pretty much just making excuses (because guns are fun, because they make you feel like more of a man than you are, because you want an object that guarantees you to have more power than someone else, etc).
As worded in the Constitution, the cited motivator for ensuring that all citizens have the right to own weapons was so that they could protect the country and the government, not fight against it. More to the point, citizens do not have the right to raise arms against the federal government: that's called treason.
It's always going to come down to an argument of opinions, but the "protect ourselves from the oppression of the British" motivation was based more in the idea that the colonies at the time had already formed their own collective identity, one that they felt they had the right to protect. Nowhere in the Constitution or any court ruling is there any protection given for citizens to rise up in armed protest against the federal government.
What I'm saying is that the error rates, biases, natural fluctuations, and margin of error are greater than the shown variations based on teacher/school quality when all other variables are isolated.
So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for. Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students? It's not even a joke here. I know of schools that actually employ the implied method for raising their standardized test scores: If the scores get too low, they start looking for ways to ship non-white students to other schools. Yay for Standardized Test Scores! You were looking for a way to find effective teachers, but got something you wanted even more: A way to desegregate schools and ensure that only white people get good education!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence, and that the real problem is that your desire for some solution is blinding you to bad logic involved. You see, people like to look at numbers like 1000 and say, "Sure, you can make conclusions on this..." but the reality of what standardized tests are and what they are used for is patently stupid. Using standardized tests to judge the abilities of students is... not great, to be honest. The world isn't a multiple choice test. However, it's still a decent correlation. The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too. So, if you have a test that is biased to native English speakers with a European background, then that's likely to taint all results. And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%. Now, since a teacher/school's test scores are harvested from a completely different set of students each year, the variance from year to year is far more likely to be due to the change in students, than any changes in the quality of the teacher/school. Similarly, the difference in large populations from one geographic area to another is far more likely to be affected by race/bias, socioeconomic status, and ethnic history than by the quality of teachers or schools.
To illustrate: You're clearly drunk or brain dead if you think that the teachers in North Dakota are across-the-board better than the teachers in California or DC. I lived in North Dakota. While the schools there might be pretty decent, the teachers there simply cannot match the level of training, expertise or availability of resources in the Virginia-DC-Maryland area. Comparing the two is just silly. And then there is a nice reversal: The school I attended cannot possibly ever match the scores of the schools I live next to now. Do you think that is because the teachers at the nearby school are of better quality, or that 60-70% of the adults in the area have bachelor's degrees (or higher) and on average have incomes that double or triple the incomes of the families I grew up with? You still think that those test scores are pointing out the areas of the country with good teachers?
No. The idea is stupid. It might be based in good intentions, but test scores are so horribly biased (with respect to the ways they are used) that the desire to make decisions based on them is an excellent marker for people who either don't actually care about finding a solution, are just looking for a way to justify their own prejudices, or cannot comprehend statistics. Often, it's all three.
I'd be all for grounding teacher evaluation in data...
...if there was any valid data to be had.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data, or that a 5% change in those scores between two different sample groups holds any statistical value... then you either lack more knowledge in statistics than me, or are doing more drugs than me.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant. Remember: Bad data is worse than no data at all
From what I understand: No, they weren't owned by the customers.
In order to own the book, it needs to be obtained legally from a seller who had a legal right to sell it. If Amazon didn't have the right to sell it, they didn't have the right to make a copy to sell to a customer, and the customer never purchased a license to use that copyrighted work. Since Kindles on a service model where you can distribute multiple copies to different devices, allowing the book to exist on the customer's account is a continual violation of the author's copyright.
Now, this does mean that those customers should absolutely be refunded the cost of the book that was taken away.
If we can just duplicate the education system of the 1920's we can finally get the the misogynistic, racist, and aristocratic society we've all been dreaming of.
Granted, our scores would see a big bump. The secret, you see, is preventing anyone poor, non-white, or disadvantaged from actually getting an education. Bonus points if you successfully segregate women into "women-only" subjects.
This sort of non-interactive learning works fantastic for about 10-15% of the population.
I suppose we just ignore the rest, yeah?
Seriously, if this was all teaching was, we wouldn't have any problems at all. Even the most simple-minded bureaucrat would have figured it out a long time ago. Sadly (for those people pushing such simplistic ideas), this is a naive view, to be kind. Reciting facts and stories is the easiest part of teaching. Actual quality teachers (in the K-12 range) do everything you describe but monitor the students in real time to try to get everyone --not just the 10-15% who can learn by hearing something once-- to understand.
Furthermore, straight lectures are a poor mechanism for teaching a wide variety of things. Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place to try and get this message across because, despite the high average IQ here, most people have very little experience with people who think about the world in fundamentally different ways. Some of the very best lessons are interactive in nature, challenging students understanding and perceptions at the very moment that it begins to develop. Your pre-recorded lectures just can't do that.
So yeah... your ideas would be fantastic... at creating a broken education system that only serves a small number of students.
Note that its not the union that's forcing these them to stay employed. That's the rules of their contract that say they can't be fired without documented reasons. Most of them there will probably be fired as soon as the city figures itself out and finished the hearing. The others are being forced to not work while false/fraudulent accusations are leveled against them.
Those rules (requiring termination have a substantial basis) are there to protect tax payers just as much as they protect teachers.
The problem is a screwed up court/mediation system that cannot process them fast enough.
You'll find that teachers (the ones who are actually teaching) hate the teachers in those rubber rooms just as much as you do. Yet, you're quick to paint them all as scheming and lazy.
For example, in California, a teacher gets tenure after two years. How do you fire a bad teacher after that?
The same way you fire anyone else: By firing them.
The "tenure" everyone talks about isn't "tenure". The only difference is that after two years, the school has to document a reason for the firing. Before that, they can fire the teacher at any time, for no reason at all.
Starting pay for a full-time teacher: $36,000
Monthly Pay: $2,500 (after taxes)
Average Apartment Rent: $1,300
Average Mortgage on Condo: $1,600
Average Car costs, monthly (small sedan): $230
Average Utility costs, monthly (electric, water, phone, cell phone, internet): $310
Extra money per month: $660
That's just over $600 a month for food and other living supplies like soap, paper towels, and clothes. Meanwhile, my salary as a coder was $62,000. And I have less education than most starting teachers. And I work 8 hour days, unlike teachers who commonly put in 10 hour days. And I don't have my customers calling me and emailing me at night to explain why their computer is broken and can't run my code.
And sadly there is no "time off". It's a two month furlough. During that time, you still have work that needs to be done, you just aren't paid for it and are given no resources to help. Additionally, its your best time to do the classes and training required for the continuation of your license. But yes, I suppose you might be able to find some fast-food joint that would hire you to drop fries for two months. And that's a totally reasonable thing to expect someone with a college degree to need to do on a regular basis.
The problem here is that this burns out the best teachers faster, and limits the amount of collaboration and mentoring that the high quality teachers (who are now handling the lowest performing kids) can do for the new teachers.
At some point we have to start asking what all of this is accomplishing. As someone who's been watching the internal interactions of schools for twenty years, No Child Left Behind has done nothing to change how bad teachers are removed. Nothing. In many ways, its made it worse, as crappy teachers can hide behind decent scores, which are based on the quality of the student's parents, not their teaching.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't done a shred of research on this, have you?
Vaccines work 85% of the time. If only 15% of the populace is susceptible, the vast majority of diseases will lack the concentration needed to spread across large geographic areas, thus limiting the scope of the outbreak and drastically reducing the number of people involved. For instance: Without humans to spread a disease, most viruses would be a single locale and only get a chance to infect 15% of the people in Sacramento, instead of 15% of people in North America.
Then, if you were thinking logically... or just thinking... then you'd realize that at the beginning, the vaccine would give the first person an 85% chance of immunity. The "herd" immunity would be unchanged, because it's just one guy. As that number went from 1 person to 99% of people, the overall "herd" immunity would reach 85%. I don't know how this is at all illogical to you. Unless you never even tried to understand.
What part don't you get?
The parents aren't actually using any form of critical thinking. For whatever reason (emotional distress, religion) the parents want to believe that they shouldn't get vaccines, or that getting vaccines is the cause of something bad that happened. Or in some cases, something bad happened, and they are looking for a cause. Those people don't care about probability or nuances of genetics and immunity. They want someone to give them a simple answer. They want someone to blame. They want someone to tell them that they are right. They want to feel like they are in control. A million scientists telling them that their child got autism because of random chance, or that no vaccine can be 100% effective, or that strain mutations occur without any prior signs are not even remotely as convincing as one guy --regardless of what degree he might have-- telling them that they are right and vaccines really are bad. You don't even have to support it with experiments, just a folksey-wisdom argument and you're golden.
Never underestimate the power of one person telling someone else what they want to hear.
As someone who has some expertise in this:
The Flu vaccine is actually pretty effective. After all, they pretty much make a new one each year. They've had quite a bit of practice by now. However, getting a vaccine is not a full protection against the flu. The problem is twofold:
First, the flu virus mutates very quickly, and likes to mutate in ways that change its antigen "signature". Though there are some interesting attempts at more general vaccines, currently, you can't even make a vaccine for H1N1 flu strains. You have to pick a specific subgroup of H1N1 strains, because even within the H1N1 type, there are variations that appear differently to our immune system. The same holds for the "old" H3N2 flu, and the even older H2N2 flu. It's not uncommon for a strain to mutate enough over a single season that last year's vaccine no longer works.
Second, because there are so many different strains in the wild and they shift so quickly, you can't create a vaccine that is targeted against all of them. Why not? That wasn't part of my specialty. I think it has something to do with confusing the immune system with too many similar things. Anyway, the point here is simpler: Vaccine makers don't even try to protect against all the strains. They use clinical samples to determine which strains are looking to be the most common, pick the top four or five, and make a vaccine that protects against those.
So, what happens if they guess wrong, and a rare strain from the previous year suddenly spreads wildly? Well, you don't get vaccine effectiveness. What if one of the popular strains goes through some mutations early in the season? Well, same effect. You've probably got a vaccine that won't help much. Is this the fault of the vaccine? No. It's the fault of the virus that mutates faster than vaccines can be created and tested. They are trying to find ways to make them faster, but that would only work if you were willing to get multiple shots per year. The better solution is to find a way to make vaccines that apply to larger groups of strains, but it takes time and lots of data.
Of course, this all gets thrown out the window if you're a fan of Intelligent Design (aka: Creationism). In that case, vaccines don't work because God hates you and chose to use his powers to fiddle with a Germ Spirit and make it immune to the poisons created by the Unbelievers. He's punishing you for not having more faith in him. Of course, there's nothing you can do in this case, so there's no point in trying to understand exactly why it happened.
That sounds great and all, but how can you quantify "learning how to learn", thinking skills, and abstract analysis?
And without quantifying them, how do you make Powerpoint presentations about education with bar charts that don't need thinking skills or abstract analysis to understand?
And without those bar charts, how do prove that America really is far superior to every single country in the world? Obviously we need the bar charts. And in order to make those bar charts to justify our chest-beating and egotism, we need them to show things that are easily quantified. So, we should only teach our children things that can be easily quantified.
Thus: We shouldn't teach our children to think, because it doesn't serve our egos. Luckily, since they won't be able to think properly, they'll come to the same conclusion when they grow up. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether or not we're on the first iteration of this.
Free Speech doesn't mean that you can say whatever you want without consequence.
It simply means that the act of speaking ideas cannot be restricted or made illegal. For specific cases of ideas, it can.
If you want to say: "I am going to go get my shotgun and kill Bob", the government can't stop you. However, it can charge you with assault or other possible crimes (attempted murder?) as the words you spoke are the expression of a crime. See also: Slander and the release of information directly leading to the harming of others.
More to the point: Calling the police on this guy is a service to society and the guy himself, as the most likely person to be hurt in the near future, was him. His detainment is probably a good thing for him and his family, as he clearly needs help.
Unless you're another conspiracy theorist who feels he was wrongly detained for speaking the truth. Er... You don't actually believe that, right? Is there anyone near you who might be willing to call the police for the rest of us who don't want to be caught in the crossfire as some idiot CT crazy tries to topple the government by attacking a local police station.
It's not the axe that is the part that's threatening.
It's the fact that he's clearly unhinged. Axe, 9/11, whatever. He sees himself as the vanguard of a revolution, and he's already got specific targets for how that revolution will start.
Yeah, I expect the axe was a metaphor. I expect that he did still have enough sense to use some operational security and not say exactly what plans were going through his mind. But it seems at least likely that he actually had plans. That's certainly enough to detain him. Has he committed a crime yet? Not that I can see, but depending on the threats he tossed out and just how public they were, I'd say its a grey area. I'm certainly happy that he's being looked at by professionals.
That said, it disgusts me that this gets lumped under Anti-Terrorist Activity. I don't think for a second he was a terrorist. He's just a crazy. However, he's a crazy with delusions of starting a violent revolution and the training to actually hurt people in his failed attempt at it. We should try to protect ourselves against crazy, but labeling them as terrorists because its scarier or easier is highly irritating to me.
Remember Tom Bombadil?
Unfortunately.
Tom never fit in. He is the largest of a list of throwbacks to a different writing style (namely: the style used in The Hobbit) that end up turning into jarring inconsistencies in the book. Yeah, I know a lot of people love the mystery and like to speculate on how he was actually God (ie: Eru) and how the chapter set up the idea of Ents and Ringwraiths. That's fine, academically, but the reality is that it simply injected confusion and nonsense into the narrative. The Hobbit fed on things like this, proving that the world was a strange and sometimes deceptively powerful place. But the rest of LoTR doesn't continue this. Yes, the world has powerful things in it... and the story is about those powerful things striving against each other.
Tossing in an omnicient, omnipresent, and omnipotent weirdo who defeats trees with prose doesn't strengthen the book. However, it seems it was left in because it introduced a larger world to readers who had not read The Hobbit.
Well, perhaps. I see it as different parts of the same struggle.
It's a bit more explicit than that
The Aragorn/Arwen story is a adapted form of the Beren/Luthien story. B/L supposedly existed first (in JRRT's mind) but it first hit paper as A/A. I mean, it even includes the male suitor being taken in by a king of a forest realm (who is actually out-shone by his more mystical wife). The parallel should be obvious. That said, when translated to movie form, I'd think that the style and situation would be sufficiently different that most people would not notice.
And then the case can be made that the Elves in LoTR are a stand-in for the Valar of the First Age Silmarillion.
And if you don't see a parallel between Morgoth and Sauron, then you're not reading the same books I am.
I get the feeling that Silmarillion was the story that JRRT wanted to create, but knew that it was far too disjoint to make a proper novel. LoTR was a book that managed to stitch together a bunch of those prototypes into something the rest of the world might enjoy.
Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
It does if the book you bought was stolen from the rightful owner
But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revoked/whatever on a whim later.
Figure it out: You didn't buy the book. You bought stolen information. By copyright law, you're only allowed to have a copy of the art if you legally obtain the right to a copy (a license, more or less). In that case, you did not. You obtained a false license from a retailer who did not have the legal authority to sell you access to the book. As such, your access to the book was removed as it was never legally given to you.
The grandparent isn't concerned with truth.
They're just pushing their "The Man Is Keeping Me Down" and "The Police Are Out To Get Me" conspiracy theories.
Just file him/her away with the Flat Earthers, Hollow Earthers, and Moon Landing Deniers.
That's a reasonable counter-argument.
However, if that was the stated intent, why make it expressly illegal (a capital offense, even) to protest or protect yourself against the federal government?
Point here: There is inherent contradiction. The second amendment is a sword that cuts both ways, and if we are to assume that the founders were super-clever bastards, we might come to the conclusion that they purposefully wanted it to be that way.
However, the point stands that the supposed "protect yourself from the government" reason for the 2nd Amendment is implict at best, and probably more likely simply "assumed". The actual application of that assumption would require a situation where the Constitution is no longer in effect, thus, the meaning of the 2nd Amendment becomes a question of philosophical history rather than law.
Put more simply: If you ever have need to take up arms against the federal government, then you wouldn't care what the 2nd Amendment --or any amendment-- actually said. Until that time, you're pretty much just making excuses (because guns are fun, because they make you feel like more of a man than you are, because you want an object that guarantees you to have more power than someone else, etc).
Cite please.
As worded in the Constitution, the cited motivator for ensuring that all citizens have the right to own weapons was so that they could protect the country and the government, not fight against it. More to the point, citizens do not have the right to raise arms against the federal government: that's called treason.
It's always going to come down to an argument of opinions, but the "protect ourselves from the oppression of the British" motivation was based more in the idea that the colonies at the time had already formed their own collective identity, one that they felt they had the right to protect. Nowhere in the Constitution or any court ruling is there any protection given for citizens to rise up in armed protest against the federal government.
I'll toss in a guess: The one with higher unemployment, lower median income, and less education.
Yes, I think that's exactly what people are afraid of:
A person with a gun, firing in the general direction of a threat, disregarding anyone who might be behind that target.
Good thing they only cut Geek Squad people, then.
Is that because its an accurate analogy, or because you find it personally amusing?
What I'm saying is that the error rates, biases, natural fluctuations, and margin of error are greater than the shown variations based on teacher/school quality when all other variables are isolated.
So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for. Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students? It's not even a joke here. I know of schools that actually employ the implied method for raising their standardized test scores: If the scores get too low, they start looking for ways to ship non-white students to other schools. Yay for Standardized Test Scores! You were looking for a way to find effective teachers, but got something you wanted even more: A way to desegregate schools and ensure that only white people get good education!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence, and that the real problem is that your desire for some solution is blinding you to bad logic involved. You see, people like to look at numbers like 1000 and say, "Sure, you can make conclusions on this..." but the reality of what standardized tests are and what they are used for is patently stupid. Using standardized tests to judge the abilities of students is... not great, to be honest. The world isn't a multiple choice test. However, it's still a decent correlation. The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too. So, if you have a test that is biased to native English speakers with a European background, then that's likely to taint all results. And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%. Now, since a teacher/school's test scores are harvested from a completely different set of students each year, the variance from year to year is far more likely to be due to the change in students, than any changes in the quality of the teacher/school. Similarly, the difference in large populations from one geographic area to another is far more likely to be affected by race/bias, socioeconomic status, and ethnic history than by the quality of teachers or schools.
To illustrate: You're clearly drunk or brain dead if you think that the teachers in North Dakota are across-the-board better than the teachers in California or DC. I lived in North Dakota. While the schools there might be pretty decent, the teachers there simply cannot match the level of training, expertise or availability of resources in the Virginia-DC-Maryland area. Comparing the two is just silly. And then there is a nice reversal: The school I attended cannot possibly ever match the scores of the schools I live next to now. Do you think that is because the teachers at the nearby school are of better quality, or that 60-70% of the adults in the area have bachelor's degrees (or higher) and on average have incomes that double or triple the incomes of the families I grew up with? You still think that those test scores are pointing out the areas of the country with good teachers?
No. The idea is stupid. It might be based in good intentions, but test scores are so horribly biased (with respect to the ways they are used) that the desire to make decisions based on them is an excellent marker for people who either don't actually care about finding a solution, are just looking for a way to justify their own prejudices, or cannot comprehend statistics. Often, it's all three.
I'd be all for grounding teacher evaluation in data...
...if there was any valid data to be had.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data, or that a 5% change in those scores between two different sample groups holds any statistical value... then you either lack more knowledge in statistics than me, or are doing more drugs than me.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant. Remember: Bad data is worse than no data at all
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From what I understand: No, they weren't owned by the customers.
In order to own the book, it needs to be obtained legally from a seller who had a legal right to sell it. If Amazon didn't have the right to sell it, they didn't have the right to make a copy to sell to a customer, and the customer never purchased a license to use that copyrighted work. Since Kindles on a service model where you can distribute multiple copies to different devices, allowing the book to exist on the customer's account is a continual violation of the author's copyright.
Now, this does mean that those customers should absolutely be refunded the cost of the book that was taken away.
Yes... let's look at the past.
If we can just duplicate the education system of the 1920's we can finally get the the misogynistic, racist, and aristocratic society we've all been dreaming of.
Granted, our scores would see a big bump. The secret, you see, is preventing anyone poor, non-white, or disadvantaged from actually getting an education. Bonus points if you successfully segregate women into "women-only" subjects.
This sort of non-interactive learning works fantastic for about 10-15% of the population.
I suppose we just ignore the rest, yeah?
Seriously, if this was all teaching was, we wouldn't have any problems at all. Even the most simple-minded bureaucrat would have figured it out a long time ago. Sadly (for those people pushing such simplistic ideas), this is a naive view, to be kind. Reciting facts and stories is the easiest part of teaching. Actual quality teachers (in the K-12 range) do everything you describe but monitor the students in real time to try to get everyone --not just the 10-15% who can learn by hearing something once-- to understand.
Furthermore, straight lectures are a poor mechanism for teaching a wide variety of things. Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place to try and get this message across because, despite the high average IQ here, most people have very little experience with people who think about the world in fundamentally different ways. Some of the very best lessons are interactive in nature, challenging students understanding and perceptions at the very moment that it begins to develop. Your pre-recorded lectures just can't do that.
So yeah... your ideas would be fantastic... at creating a broken education system that only serves a small number of students.
Here's an example of how unions can be incredibly counter productive.
Note that its not the union that's forcing these them to stay employed. That's the rules of their contract that say they can't be fired without documented reasons. Most of them there will probably be fired as soon as the city figures itself out and finished the hearing. The others are being forced to not work while false/fraudulent accusations are leveled against them.
Those rules (requiring termination have a substantial basis) are there to protect tax payers just as much as they protect teachers.
The problem is a screwed up court/mediation system that cannot process them fast enough.
You'll find that teachers (the ones who are actually teaching) hate the teachers in those rubber rooms just as much as you do. Yet, you're quick to paint them all as scheming and lazy.
For example, in California, a teacher gets tenure after two years. How do you fire a bad teacher after that?
The same way you fire anyone else: By firing them. The "tenure" everyone talks about isn't "tenure". The only difference is that after two years, the school has to document a reason for the firing. Before that, they can fire the teacher at any time, for no reason at all.
Here's another example: Northern Virginia
Starting pay for a full-time teacher: $36,000
Monthly Pay: $2,500 (after taxes)
Average Apartment Rent: $1,300
Average Mortgage on Condo: $1,600
Average Car costs, monthly (small sedan): $230
Average Utility costs, monthly (electric, water, phone, cell phone, internet): $310
Extra money per month: $660
That's just over $600 a month for food and other living supplies like soap, paper towels, and clothes. Meanwhile, my salary as a coder was $62,000. And I have less education than most starting teachers. And I work 8 hour days, unlike teachers who commonly put in 10 hour days. And I don't have my customers calling me and emailing me at night to explain why their computer is broken and can't run my code.
And sadly there is no "time off". It's a two month furlough. During that time, you still have work that needs to be done, you just aren't paid for it and are given no resources to help. Additionally, its your best time to do the classes and training required for the continuation of your license. But yes, I suppose you might be able to find some fast-food joint that would hire you to drop fries for two months. And that's a totally reasonable thing to expect someone with a college degree to need to do on a regular basis.
Welcome to "No Child Gets Ahead"!
The problem here is that this burns out the best teachers faster, and limits the amount of collaboration and mentoring that the high quality teachers (who are now handling the lowest performing kids) can do for the new teachers.
At some point we have to start asking what all of this is accomplishing. As someone who's been watching the internal interactions of schools for twenty years, No Child Left Behind has done nothing to change how bad teachers are removed. Nothing. In many ways, its made it worse, as crappy teachers can hide behind decent scores, which are based on the quality of the student's parents, not their teaching.