But standardized tests are not the way to judge a teacher's performance.
I hear this all the time, but have no idea what it means. So, we choose some other metric to judge a teacher's performance. If we are measuring what students learned, isn't this some kind of test? If all students take the same test to make comparisons, isn't this a standardized test?
Should we judge teacher's based on something other than student learning? Popularity? Hygiene?
While it is not easy to fire poor performing teachers, it's possible, and done.
Why not let's be honest and just bill the kids for how much their "education" will cost them and have the kids actually have some say in there own education now rather than only in their kids education 20-30 years from now?
Explain to me exactly how a kindergartener is supposed to decide what to be educated in.
Peace be with you, -jimbo
Re:Why this is a corrupt and BAD ideas.
on
More A's, More Pay
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Most likely, this isn't some absolute number of high grades, but improvement relative to previous years.
So if last year five kids got high grades and this year 10 do, you get a bonus, or something like that.
I think teachers deserve SOME kind of incentive pay for improving learning outcomes.
In the Fine Article, Mr. Cringely notes that he is working with a cofounder of Syqest, which made a system that competed with the Bernoulli disks (made by Iomega and others).
So it's not surprising that there would be similarities between the Bernoulli/Syquest technologies and what Cringely's group is working on now.
Apple's BOM costs aren't meaningfully higher than any of their competitors.
Significantly LOWER BOM costs than their competitors. They got such a good deal from Samsung for chips that the Korean government considered leveling anti-competition charges.
This is because, with the volume of iPod sales Apple has, they are one of, if not the, largest bulk purchasers of Flash RAM in the world.
Peace be with you, -jimbo
Re:Hypothesis: people get married far too young.
on
IT and Divorce?
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gay and lesbian couples have been holding public commitment ceremonies for years
The hairs you are splitting are getting infinitisemally smaller.
Public commitment ceremonies good, marriage bad? Marriage is pretty much just public commitment ceremony plus legal rights and obligations, with an optional sacred element attached if the couple so chooses.
And you seem to be for the legal rights and obligations part (unless you only support that part for gay people, I don't want to put words in your mouth).
It is stupid for a couple to stay together for the "sake" of an institution.
I'm ignoring it because it's banal. What about staying together for each other? Because of a promise they made to each other? Because what price can you place on being on your death bed with a person you've loved for most of a lifetime beside you (or however much time you are given together)? Because what price can you put on being on your beloved's death bed, knowing you made it through a lot of hard times together and loved each other through it all, knowing you really, truly loved someone to the best of your ability?
If you remember back to the post you originally responded to, the argument made there is that many people value marriage lightly today compared to many other things, like jobs and children. Instead of addressing that basic point, you're rattling on about the Pope. If everyone is being told what to do by the Pope, why is it that about half of all marriages end with a divorce (in my country, the U.S.A., at least)? If you really, truly think there's still a significant stigma associated with divorce today, the world has certainly passed by you and your antiquated ideas.
-jimbo
Re:Hypothesis: people get married far too young.
on
IT and Divorce?
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Not because a preacher said "no divorces," not because divorces give the pope indigestion, and certainly not because some nutball believes that divorce "violates" the text of an internally-inconsistent, poorly-written book written before the dawn of modern civilization.
And you accuse me of straw man arguments?
Marriage is not a prerequisite for commitment, love or compromise. Therefore, divorce does not invalidate their existence.
Divorce does not signify an end to commitment, a lack of love, or a decision that an issue is beyond compromise? There may be very good reasons for those things, but surely you can't deny that divorce is precisely a declaration that commitment, and likely love and compromise, have gone out of existence in that particular relationship?
I'm sure you're going to tell me I've misunderstood you again. Which is not surprising, because up to this point you've been steadily qualifying what you initially said further and further. Which is a good sign, because it indicates you now realize what you originally said doesn't make much sense.
Also, allow me go back to an earlier comment of yours.
That said, consider the universe of relationships outside of the institution of marriage -- people are regularly intimate, loving and caring with one another without the need for a sacrament or legal framework to bind them.
Are you against gay marriage? Have you paused to ask yourself why many gay people are so upset that this sacrament and legal framework are being denied to them? Maybe they're just nuts?
Or maybe, like other people, they see the value to themselves and to society of a public commitment with public rights and responsibilities tied to it. That's pretty much what marriage is.
You seem to have a bug up your butt about the fact that many people also want a sacrament associated with their commitment, also, but what business is that of yours? If two people feel strongly about expressing their commitment with a spiritual sacrament, why are you obligated to care one way or another?
-jimbo
Re:Hypothesis: people get married far too young.
on
IT and Divorce?
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I didn't say that couples should split up "every time" they had problems.
Every other time? Every third time? You said couples should split up if they had "fundamental" problems. So if you're not saying every time, then how many? Give me a number.
We would all be much happier if we allowed our relationships to form, develop and -- if necessary -- dissolve without penalty or social stigma, in order to meet our intellectual, sexual, and social needs.
What a weaselly construction. "Relationships" are not animate beings. They don't just "form, develop,...,dissolve" like a chemical solution. To be worth anything, people must actively invest in them, sacrifice for them, work at them. No social need for commitment? No social need for unconditional love? No social need to learn compromise instead of giving up after your encounter a "fundamental" problem? Oh, sorry, forgot, we still need to attach a number to qualify that. Get back to me with that number when you get a minute.
-jimbo
Re:Hypothesis: people get married far too young.
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 1
If two people want a divorce because they're no longer attracted to one another, or because they have disagreements about money, or family, or any number of other very fundamental things, it's incredibly stupid to suggest that they should stay together "for the marriage."
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes Hell (or maybe Purgatory; it's never fully explained) as a place where people can build whatever they want just by thinking about it.
The natural result is that soon, people are living literally thousands or millions of miles away from each other, because every time there is a disagreement or one person is irritated by another, they construct something bigger and far away so they don't need to deal with that person.
I think the U.S. is striving to create this kind of society. We live in bigger and bigger houses, farther and farther away from each other, watch television and play video games instead of talking to each other, masturbate to porn instead of making love to other people who may not be liposuctioned or enhanced just the way we like or might not feel like it when we do or even might possibly reject us.
If you leave someone every time you don't happen to feel attracted to them, or have a disagreement about money, or family, or something else fundamental, how can you ever be intimate with someone, love someone, know someone beyond a superficial level?
Maybe sometimes, a relationship, love, is worth sacrificing for?
A signification proportion? Let's be realistic here - we're talking about taxing emissions at the level of a sales tax. That's what we've always been talking about.
1. So then give me a number. How much, roughly, will it cost to avert the consequences of global warming? Does anyone have a realistic idea?
2. Will taxing emissions avert the serious consequences of global warming? To what degree? With how much certainty? At what level of taxation?
Without reasonably confident answers to those questions, I think the original poster still has a point.
Why should you wear a seat belt? After all, there's no evidence you're going to get in a crash today, and you're a safe driver.
What if studies showed you were just as likely to die or suffer serious injury in a car crash whether you wore a seatbelt or not? With respect to global warming, we have yet to demonstrate that there are reasonable steps we can take to avert its consequences.
I bet you have some dearly held belief that, to the majority of the population in your country, seems a "silly dogma".
So, while your statement seems noble, pragmatically, it doesn't go very far towards a workable model for society. In order to prevent the transmission of "silly dogmas" from parent to child, you need to have the state decide what does or does not constitute a "silly dogma" and to actively intervene in the every day relationship between parent and child.
If you implement that in a democracy, you end up deciding core beliefs for everyone the same way we select winners on American Idol. If you implement that in a more totalitarian system, you pretty quickly end up with children convinced to rat out their parents as disloyal to The Party.
So be careful about glibly throwing about comments calling the things some parents teach their children "child abuse". In real life, one always must consider unintended consequences and implementation details.
You acknowledge and uphold people's rights because we (supposedly) live in a free society, and it is immoral to do otherwise.
And what is your empirical, scientific basis for believing that people have rights?
This is not directed at you so much as at the surrounding context of this thread. There seems to be this idea that science encompasses all knowledge. But rights, morality, ethics, are not observable through the scientific method.
That is why the United States Constitution says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.h tml
You can delete the "endowed by their Creator" part if you like, but the remaining statment is not in any way scientific. There is no hypothesis testable by observable evidence. It is given as a premise for what follows, not as a theory demonstrated through experiment.
So what drives me nuts about the atheist position is that they spend so much time telling us what they DON'T believe in. OK, so you don't believe in God, congratualations. But once you start saying people have absolute, unalienable rights, you believe in something equally unscientific and unprovable.
And of course, people DO have unalienable rights, I truly believe that. But it does not follow as an immediate consequence of being an atheist. Atheism does not predispose one towards any kind of moral or ethical beliefs whatsoever.
Which is why, I think, there is a deep suspicion of atheists by theists. Theists see atheists defining themselves based on what they don't believe, rather than what they do believe. "What do you believe in?" "Oh, I'm an atheist." is pretty much a non-sequitur.
If my mother had done this to me, I'd have shouted at her until she stopped it, or never paid a penny on school lunches again.
(Yes, I'm a brat. Deal with it.)
Not at all. Corporations should do what is in their best interests. If you, as a supplier of labor, are not mobile, that makes you less valuable to a company, and deservedly so.
So it's gotten to the point where the reason for real human beings to exist is to benefit the fictional persons known as corporations?
What you claim about the new testament being retranslated, and transcribed over the years is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#Date
Most scholars contrast would be hesitant to assign a date later than AD 70-73...
That's the LATEST that scholars are willing to date Mark, considered to be the first gospel written (and 70 is chosen because it's taken on faith that Jesus COULDN'T POSSIBLY have prophesied the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem).
So, if by "over the years", you mean "over the first few decades after Jesus died" you can make an argument. But if you're arguing that the gospels have changed since then and we have no way of knowing what those changes are, you're just being silly.
Not to seem stupid, but what on earth is a 'natural-material dogmatist'?
Well, natural-materialist in the sense of starting with the philosophical assumption that there is nothing beyond the natural universe, and rejecting any attempt to inquire into whether there might exist anything more than that.
Dogmatist was just to emphasize that such persons, by definition, would be accurately described as dogmatic.
This is an extremely reasonable question, and one evolutionary science is obligated to answer.
This sentence sets you apart from many of the natural-material dogmatists out there.
Many opponents of theism act as if this was not a reasonable question at all, and any question that gives possible support to theistic arguments is an evil question to ask.
You make a good, un-ad-hominem case that Behe continues to change the IC goal posts in the face of new evidence. I applaud you for sticking to the substance of the arguments and refraining from impugning the perceived motives of those who disagree with you. Finding such arguments are becoming a rare, precious thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Show the hard-up kids that education is worth it and that they don't have to sling drugs or whatever to get decent money.
Now THIS is interesting. Incentive pay for students. Has anyone formally suggested this anywhere?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
But standardized tests are not the way to judge a teacher's performance.
I hear this all the time, but have no idea what it means. So, we choose some other metric to judge a teacher's performance. If we are measuring what students learned, isn't this some kind of test? If all students take the same test to make comparisons, isn't this a standardized test?
Should we judge teacher's based on something other than student learning? Popularity? Hygiene?
While it is not easy to fire poor performing teachers, it's possible, and done.
"Not easy" might be an understatement.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/36802.html
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Why not let's be honest and just bill the kids for how much their "education" will cost them and have the kids actually have some say in there own education now rather than only in their kids education 20-30 years from now?
Explain to me exactly how a kindergartener is supposed to decide what to be educated in.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Most likely, this isn't some absolute number of high grades, but improvement relative to previous years.
So if last year five kids got high grades and this year 10 do, you get a bonus, or something like that.
I think teachers deserve SOME kind of incentive pay for improving learning outcomes.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
In the Fine Article, Mr. Cringely notes that he is working with a cofounder of Syqest, which made a system that competed with the Bernoulli disks (made by Iomega and others).
So it's not surprising that there would be similarities between the Bernoulli/Syquest technologies and what Cringely's group is working on now.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
And you better believe Microsoft would weep with joy if people started using "Zune" as a verb.
The correct verb form of "Zune" is "squirt".
Usage:
I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/o ct2006/tc20061011_940241.htm
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Apple's BOM costs aren't meaningfully higher than any of their competitors.
Significantly LOWER BOM costs than their competitors. They got such a good deal from Samsung for chips that the Korean government considered leveling anti-competition charges.
This is because, with the volume of iPod sales Apple has, they are one of, if not the, largest bulk purchasers of Flash RAM in the world.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
gay and lesbian couples have been holding public commitment ceremonies for years
The hairs you are splitting are getting infinitisemally smaller.
Public commitment ceremonies good, marriage bad? Marriage is pretty much just public commitment ceremony plus legal rights and obligations, with an optional sacred element attached if the couple so chooses.
And you seem to be for the legal rights and obligations part (unless you only support that part for gay people, I don't want to put words in your mouth).
It is stupid for a couple to stay together for the "sake" of an institution.
I'm ignoring it because it's banal. What about staying together for each other? Because of a promise they made to each other? Because what price can you place on being on your death bed with a person you've loved for most of a lifetime beside you (or however much time you are given together)? Because what price can you put on being on your beloved's death bed, knowing you made it through a lot of hard times together and loved each other through it all, knowing you really, truly loved someone to the best of your ability?
If you remember back to the post you originally responded to, the argument made there is that many people value marriage lightly today compared to many other things, like jobs and children. Instead of addressing that basic point, you're rattling on about the Pope. If everyone is being told what to do by the Pope, why is it that about half of all marriages end with a divorce (in my country, the U.S.A., at least)? If you really, truly think there's still a significant stigma associated with divorce today, the world has certainly passed by you and your antiquated ideas.
-jimbo
Not because a preacher said "no divorces," not because divorces give the pope indigestion, and certainly not because some nutball believes that divorce "violates" the text of an internally-inconsistent, poorly-written book written before the dawn of modern civilization.
And you accuse me of straw man arguments?
Marriage is not a prerequisite for commitment, love or compromise. Therefore, divorce does not invalidate their existence.
Divorce does not signify an end to commitment, a lack of love, or a decision that an issue is beyond compromise? There may be very good reasons for those things, but surely you can't deny that divorce is precisely a declaration that commitment, and likely love and compromise, have gone out of existence in that particular relationship?
I'm sure you're going to tell me I've misunderstood you again. Which is not surprising, because up to this point you've been steadily qualifying what you initially said further and further. Which is a good sign, because it indicates you now realize what you originally said doesn't make much sense.
Also, allow me go back to an earlier comment of yours.
That said, consider the universe of relationships outside of the institution of marriage -- people are regularly intimate, loving and caring with one another without the need for a sacrament or legal framework to bind them.
Are you against gay marriage? Have you paused to ask yourself why many gay people are so upset that this sacrament and legal framework are being denied to them? Maybe they're just nuts?
Or maybe, like other people, they see the value to themselves and to society of a public commitment with public rights and responsibilities tied to it. That's pretty much what marriage is.
You seem to have a bug up your butt about the fact that many people also want a sacrament associated with their commitment, also, but what business is that of yours? If two people feel strongly about expressing their commitment with a spiritual sacrament, why are you obligated to care one way or another?
-jimbo
I didn't say that couples should split up "every time" they had problems.
Every other time? Every third time? You said couples should split up if they had "fundamental" problems. So if you're not saying every time, then how many? Give me a number.
We would all be much happier if we allowed our relationships to form, develop and -- if necessary -- dissolve without penalty or social stigma, in order to meet our intellectual, sexual, and social needs.
What a weaselly construction. "Relationships" are not animate beings. They don't just "form, develop,...,dissolve" like a chemical solution. To be worth anything, people must actively invest in them, sacrifice for them, work at them. No social need for commitment? No social need for unconditional love? No social need to learn compromise instead of giving up after your encounter a "fundamental" problem? Oh, sorry, forgot, we still need to attach a number to qualify that. Get back to me with that number when you get a minute.
-jimbo
If two people want a divorce because they're no longer attracted to one another, or because they have disagreements about money, or family, or any number of other very fundamental things, it's incredibly stupid to suggest that they should stay together "for the marriage."
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes Hell (or maybe Purgatory; it's never fully explained) as a place where people can build whatever they want just by thinking about it.
The natural result is that soon, people are living literally thousands or millions of miles away from each other, because every time there is a disagreement or one person is irritated by another, they construct something bigger and far away so they don't need to deal with that person.
I think the U.S. is striving to create this kind of society. We live in bigger and bigger houses, farther and farther away from each other, watch television and play video games instead of talking to each other, masturbate to porn instead of making love to other people who may not be liposuctioned or enhanced just the way we like or might not feel like it when we do or even might possibly reject us.
If you leave someone every time you don't happen to feel attracted to them, or have a disagreement about money, or family, or something else fundamental, how can you ever be intimate with someone, love someone, know someone beyond a superficial level?
Maybe sometimes, a relationship, love, is worth sacrificing for?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
You may not be sucking up other nations' resources in this regard, but you are destroying their ability to be economically profitable and competitive.
So, the U.S. is not consuming ENOUGH of the rest of the world's resources. Got it.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
you still need to be able to understand your problem well enough to cogently explain it to your computer.
...which is a pretty servicable definition of programming.
Peace be with you,
-jimbokun
A signification proportion? Let's be realistic here - we're talking about taxing emissions at the level of a sales tax. That's what we've always been talking about.
1. So then give me a number. How much, roughly, will it cost to avert the consequences of global warming? Does anyone have a realistic idea?
2. Will taxing emissions avert the serious consequences of global warming? To what degree? With how much certainty? At what level of taxation?
Without reasonably confident answers to those questions, I think the original poster still has a point.
Why should you wear a seat belt? After all, there's no evidence you're going to get in a crash today, and you're a safe driver.
What if studies showed you were just as likely to die or suffer serious injury in a car crash whether you wore a seatbelt or not? With respect to global warming, we have yet to demonstrate that there are reasonable steps we can take to avert its consequences.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
I consider that to be a form of child abuse.
I bet you have some dearly held belief that, to the majority of the population in your country, seems a "silly dogma".
So, while your statement seems noble, pragmatically, it doesn't go very far towards a workable model for society. In order to prevent the transmission of "silly dogmas" from parent to child, you need to have the state decide what does or does not constitute a "silly dogma" and to actively intervene in the every day relationship between parent and child.
If you implement that in a democracy, you end up deciding core beliefs for everyone the same way we select winners on American Idol. If you implement that in a more totalitarian system, you pretty quickly end up with children convinced to rat out their parents as disloyal to The Party.
So be careful about glibly throwing about comments calling the things some parents teach their children "child abuse". In real life, one always must consider unintended consequences and implementation details.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
You acknowledge and uphold people's rights because we (supposedly) live in a free society, and it is immoral to do otherwise.
And what is your empirical, scientific basis for believing that people have rights?
This is not directed at you so much as at the surrounding context of this thread. There seems to be this idea that science encompasses all knowledge. But rights, morality, ethics, are not observable through the scientific method.
That is why the United States Constitution says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.h tml
You can delete the "endowed by their Creator" part if you like, but the remaining statment is not in any way scientific. There is no hypothesis testable by observable evidence. It is given as a premise for what follows, not as a theory demonstrated through experiment.
So what drives me nuts about the atheist position is that they spend so much time telling us what they DON'T believe in. OK, so you don't believe in God, congratualations. But once you start saying people have absolute, unalienable rights, you believe in something equally unscientific and unprovable.
And of course, people DO have unalienable rights, I truly believe that. But it does not follow as an immediate consequence of being an atheist. Atheism does not predispose one towards any kind of moral or ethical beliefs whatsoever.
Which is why, I think, there is a deep suspicion of atheists by theists. Theists see atheists defining themselves based on what they don't believe, rather than what they do believe. "What do you believe in?" "Oh, I'm an atheist." is pretty much a non-sequitur.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
If my mother had done this to me, I'd have shouted at her until she stopped it, or never paid a penny on school lunches again. (Yes, I'm a brat. Deal with it.)
Pathetic, indeed.
-jimbo
Not at all. Corporations should do what is in their best interests. If you, as a supplier of labor, are not mobile, that makes you less valuable to a company, and deservedly so.
So it's gotten to the point where the reason for real human beings to exist is to benefit the fictional persons known as corporations?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
You write that as if it's a joke. Sub-Saharan Africa is a big emerging supplier of tech labor, in the position that India was 20 years ago.
I just pictured some guy in India cursing (in Hindi?) because he can't understand the Nigerian accented English of his tech support person.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
hand-eye coordination probably wouldn't help him much playing rest-of-the-world-football.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Tell me about it. Just like the Americans dominate in basketball
Or baseball.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Here for example in the UK about 10% of people are self-employed.
While reading the article, I thought the omission of the U.K. was curious. Interesting that yours is the first response I saw.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
What you claim about the new testament being retranslated, and transcribed over the years is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#Date
Most scholars contrast would be hesitant to assign a date later than AD 70-73...
That's the LATEST that scholars are willing to date Mark, considered to be the first gospel written (and 70 is chosen because it's taken on faith that Jesus COULDN'T POSSIBLY have prophesied the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem).
So, if by "over the years", you mean "over the first few decades after Jesus died" you can make an argument. But if you're arguing that the gospels have changed since then and we have no way of knowing what those changes are, you're just being silly.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Not to seem stupid, but what on earth is a 'natural-material dogmatist'?
Well, natural-materialist in the sense of starting with the philosophical assumption that there is nothing beyond the natural universe, and rejecting any attempt to inquire into whether there might exist anything more than that.
Dogmatist was just to emphasize that such persons, by definition, would be accurately described as dogmatic.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
This is an extremely reasonable question, and one evolutionary science is obligated to answer.
This sentence sets you apart from many of the natural-material dogmatists out there.
Many opponents of theism act as if this was not a reasonable question at all, and any question that gives possible support to theistic arguments is an evil question to ask.
You make a good, un-ad-hominem case that Behe continues to change the IC goal posts in the face of new evidence. I applaud you for sticking to the substance of the arguments and refraining from impugning the perceived motives of those who disagree with you. Finding such arguments are becoming a rare, precious thing.
Thank you.
-jimbo