If you really believe that your vote in the primaries doesn't count, then you should certainly vote your conscience. What have you got to lose in the primaries? Unless you get embarrassed when your favored candidate loses. The results of the primaries matter, but the actual votes are thrown away when the general election happens. There's also no value in backing the same candidate from start to finish. Hell, even the candidates who don't get nominated don't back themselves after the primaries.
That's also not what populist means. John Edwards is populist or at least rhetorically populist. For Hillary Clinton I'd call her mercenary.
Homeboy sounds like Ray Romano or someone maybe doing an impression of Ray Romano. I bet that could be worked into a marketing strategy, considering who's playing Wii these days:)
This alarms me personally because our Superintendent of Schools here has latched onto this book as part of guiding our school reform. I think our system's concept is to be the best at remediating kids who don't pass the NCLB tests. Everything seems to be geared towards that these days. He's restructured the departments in schools (i.e. the Math department and English department, not things like HR) around this, he's constantly saying things like "students begin preparing for the high school assessments as soon as they enter kindergarten," and his personnel changes seem to revolve around it too. That's the only reason I read that book is to get some insight into wtf was going on. The sad part is that people actually use test scores to measure the greatness of a school system, and so while those probably will rise steadily, other important features of a school (e.g. the arts) suffer at their expense.
Circuit City's "concept" was very much a top-down thing. Collins described it as the ability to stamp out a Circuit City in a desired location in short order. Like using a rubber stamp on a map and then the store appears. Because of this, I suspect that once the personnel were in place to physically run the store, less attention was paid to the people who would be hiring and firing at that store. You're right about treating your employees well. I would extend their failure in customer service to the people hiring the company's most visible representatives: the sales staff. If they don't care that much about their job, then the bad hires will certainly outnumber the good. Maybe they took the laissez faire route of just promoting people from sales to manager. Just watch The Office to see an example of that gone wrong.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins cites Circuit City as an example of a company that made the transition to greatness, bypassing its comparison company Silo. For each GTG company, Collins identified the company's core purpose, which in his theory must be identified as the one thing that company can do better than anyone in the world. Circuit City's concept was the creation of a large number of stores that provided a consistent experience for the customer. I can say from my own experience at Circuit City stores that they seem to have gotten that part right. I always get bad or no service. Does everyone? I don't know. I'm from India and nonwhite - my sister gets the same treatment with the added derision afforded to girls in that setting. Things like customer service can be hit or miss depending on where we travel. Now, maybe the same people who led the company to "greatness" aren't there anymore. It seems more likely to me that Collins' metric of return on money invested is the wrong way to measure greatness in a company.
The telecoms and their advocates in Congress like Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and apparently Harry Reid (D-NV) argue that they're not changing anything from illegal to legal, rather they're filling a legal vacuum and the telecoms benefit as a result. How convenient and timely. Also as I understand the term, ex post facto usually refers to laws that make something newly illegal, subjecting people who had committed no crime to criminal penalties.
The most egregious senatorial hijinks of this affair has been Reid's ignoring Dodd's "hold" on the bill. He doesn't ignore holds on bills requested by republicans, but someone from his own party can't expect to have his honored. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been documenting this case for a while. That link goes to today's installment, but when the hold was first requested weeks (months?) ago, Greenwald had that story too.
One time I tried to show one of the other teachers Firefox because it was the answer to some question she asked me about her home computer. I think it was basically along the lines of her was bloated (as happens) and I suggested that if she cleaned out the spyware and used Firefox she might have an easier time keeping the crap out of her computer. She refused, opting to live with the slowdowns and crashing, because she "liked her MSN better." This without even seeing Firefox. It boggled my mind. She's quite effective as a teacher too because teaching of mathematics has been reduced to teaching a series of discrete unrelated processes. Sigh.
Anyway to the point, are you sure it's got anything to do with the union? Here in Calvert County, Maryland, the school system prides itself on having qualified teachers, but this is because of:
Maryland laws about certification and high school diplomas
Status in relation to other school systems who have a harder time getting and keeping teachers (CCPS pays a lot in Maryland)
Emphasis on "highly qualified teachers" per NCLB
which is not to mention that teachers looking for continuing education credits in Maryland have to take classes that meet some certain standards set by the state board of ed. The same state board will bend over backwards with "alternative certification" programs which means certificating people who didn't study education as an undergraduate in college. Maybe the union where you live is indeed full of itself, but that hasn't been my experience as re: hiring and allocating personnel.
The only actual problem I see (as opposed to some imagined challenge to authority) in using a different browser is when students run into technical problems and the teacher cannot support it. For example we use TI-83 calculators for the most part and when someone has a different (yet equally capable) graphing calculator, I can't always figure out how to do the same tasks on it. Or if students use a method they learned earlier in their math career and we are covering new material where their old method doesn't apply, they basically have to start the problem over without necessarily understanding why.
The OP was not true, but both the teacher and the student in that hypothetical could have handled things better.
I guess MS is used to having hardware developers and vendors respond to their needs. They've had a very advantageous position with OEM system builders for a long time, not to mention makers of addin cards and external peripherals. I think we only heard about this request because of how silly it is given the OLPC concept. I think in the past this kind of request was either
unnecessary because hardware people were already developing around Windows, or
unnecessary because the platforms were not in a space where MS could to operate e.g. supercomputing, or
welcomed
I agree with whoever posted "hey MS make your own."
I realize the tagging is in beta, but why censorship?
Anyway, I'm interested in fiber optic internet too but it's not available in my area and no one seems to have any more information than that. Their price seems pretty competitive (at least against Comcast) and you'd think they'd be interested in rolling it out as widely and quickly as possible. What kind of infrastructure needs to be developed for this? I thought there was already a ton of fiber in the ground that no one was using.
I recommend Quarter To Three, and I would recommend Old Man Murray and fatbabies.com but those two no longer post new material. It's worth reading Old Man Murray anyway, especially their interview with Croteam, developers of Serious Sam.
These days I tend to pirate everything to decide who deserves my money. Then I try and skip as many layers of retailing as I can to buy it. Somehow I think the developers get a bigger cut that way. I'm probably wrong.
In other words, new findings may establish limits to the utility of old findings, but do not invalidate the old findings. It's like quadratic equations. Suppose that we only knew they could be solved by factoring them, and no other method. Then someone discovers the quadratic formula. This doesn't mean that factoring is wrong, because it still works as far as it goes. The quadratic formula simply gives us another more widely useful method.
In this case, anyone who contended that non-factorable quadratics had no solutions would be shown to be wrong, but the underlying math isn't invalidated./p.
Kids absolutely need to be told this. I work with kids every day and sometimes the answer to a mental block is a simple expression of confidence. As in "I know you can get it if you keep trying." Some kids have never heard this before, and I think the message from not hearing it is "well if you've given up then I guess I should give up on you too."
I think the lesson you learn from competitive sports is that losing isn't failure if it's an honorable loss. When my kids at school tell me about games they won or lost I always ask them what they did (or the other team did) better in order to win. The answers get better and better as the year progresses, which is a good sign.
There's a difference between identifying with your child and empathizing. I think empathy is a great thing, because we shouldn't forget our own experiences as children when dealing with children. Identifying with your child is something else - a projection of yourself into your child's current shoes. Parents have a great deal of influence over their children, but they are not in fact their children. Such parents take everything you say about their child personally. Say their child has been late to class three times in a row, and has no reasonable explanation. That is, I ask why and no response is given. It would be one thing if their locker got stuck, or they had to take a circuitous route for some reason (and there are reasons) or if the schedule was weird due to a delayed opening - there are valid reasons for tardiness, but usually not 3 days in a row. It's something parents need to know but not anything they should feel personally responsible for. Feeling accused because their child was late interferes with them dealing with the actual issue of lateness.
...will bring up issues from before I even started working there to explain why I don't like her son, and why he has below 60%.
How could something that happened before you started make you dislike a student? That's just stupid. However, you have the kid's record, yet you act as if you are impartial. If a kid has a history of behavioral problems you wil OF COURSE not look at him the same way as a student who has no disciplinary problems.
I'm not sure if I made enough sense the first time so I'll explain more. The first part of that quote is also relevant. I've had parents bring up issues that occurred with one of their children to explain why their other child is having a hard time in my classroom. The older of the two children (in cases like this) no longer attends my school, and has never met me. This is the craziness I referred to later, and which you correctly identified as stupid.
That's not to mention that I actually don't have any child's records unless I go to guidance and ask about them. I don't do that unless I think the child has been placed incorrectly (too high or too low of a math class) or something extraordinary happens early in the school year. There actually was one kid who was surly and rude on the first day of school. That's unusual so I asked around and apparently this kid was in a lot of trouble last year, and got expelled from summer school to boot. Last year he apparently stuck a paper clip in an electrical outlet, shorting out a few rooms and burning himself. Then he lied about it for a few days and his mom came in and lied about it even after seeing pictures of the paper-clip-shaped burn on his finger. This is all hearsay. Anyway, I decided that I was going to be that one teacher who demonstrated to him that he didn't have to resort to rudeness, namecalling (of other students,) and stunts to get attention and now he's one of my best students in that class. Usually I look at past behavior problems as just that - problems to solve, not extra work for me. I feel good when I can help a kid in a way that others could not.
It's interesting that you bring up college. If anything I found my college professors to be lacking in knowledge of pedagogy, even the ones in the education department. People reach those positions through a different path than elementary and secondary school teachers, meaning that they may never have studied child psychology, methods of instruction and assessment, methods of testing, etc. Knowing your field is necessary but not sufficient to be a good teacher.
I apologize for all the personal anecdotes to refute your points, but really the number of difficult children I teach is small enough to be covered by a few stories. I had one student earlier this year who came in every day and just sat there. No homoework was completed ever (and I don't give a ton of homework at the beginning of the year - at most 7-8 problems) and when he
these different types of students not only explain their failures differently
In education we call this "failure attribution" and the article misses another possibility: The Teacher Just Doesn't Like Me. My context is high school. Unfortunately I've met numerous parents who perpetuate the idea that low performance stems from personal feelings of the teacher. This is usually the result of:
bad experiences in school as children themselves - these parents (quite separately) identify with their children. They find it very easy to believe that teachers are still up to the same old dirty tricks they dealt with when they were in school. Bonus points if their child has the same teacher they did.
bad experiences with another one of their children at the same school - these parents see the school as a monolith and will bring up issues from before I even started working there to explain why I don't like her son, and why he has below 60%.
denial - some parents are crazy and think their children are perfect, should never be penalized when they do something wrong (not a math mistake, but wrong in the moral sense), and are being singled out.
The point is that it's possible to attribute your failure to others, and that this behavior is learned. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's entirely learned. Parents go so far out of their way to protect their child's self esteem that it becomes completely divorced from reality. So you get kids who do bad things and feel great about themselves. Or you get very lazy children who want (and expect) you to pick up their slack. To the point, you get children who have no interest in self-improvement because they think they couldn't possibly be improved upon. Call me old fashioned, but things can always be done better.
The article is so short that I can't help but be confused by the OP subject line. Does this law restrict ISPs from selling teens' demographic information to advertisers, or does it restrict all websites from hosting (and displaying) any personal information about teens? If it's a restriction on ISPs, then don't we have some similar child protection laws in the US with the age being 13? I don't see the problem with a law that limits marketing to children, or marketing of children. If it's a restriction on the kids themselves posting their information, I think that's a bad idea.
I read some of the patent and I didn't see it anywhere that their fulfillment method would be tied to a customer. Instead of using your order history to choose how fast to ship, they're using everyone's order history to decide how fast to ship certain items. You know how each page has items at the bottom that say "other people who bought this also bought..."? They're using that information that they've been gathering for a long time to decide what it means when you buy x. I'm almost positive that this is not only a tool to keep their most profitable customers. It has to also be about that first order and what it means in terms of future orders. It's like upsell with delayed gratification. The fact of who is ordering is probably less important than most people here are thinking.
Or did I read it wrong? Is there a section of the patent that refutes this?
This is a staggering creature, taller than a man and boasting six limbs, it resembles nothing more than an aquatic Demon. The similarities between this creature and the Earth lobster have earned it the nickname of Lobsterman with the X-Com troops. This is a behemoth of the deep. A carefully designed fighting creature of incredible strength and practically invulnerable to missile fire. Its pincers alone can crush steel.
I think the clientele of these boot camps might have some kind of predisposition to addiction. Depending on how "addictive" your personality is, one may need to replace one addiction with another, at least as a first step. I find myself to behave in binges. So there are some activities I would never try because I would never want to be addicted. It could be silly of me, but I guess everyone handles risk their own way.
So I think the answer is that some lives are a series of addictions, or at least have the potential to be.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really believe that your vote in the primaries doesn't count, then you should certainly vote your conscience. What have you got to lose in the primaries? Unless you get embarrassed when your favored candidate loses. The results of the primaries matter, but the actual votes are thrown away when the general election happens. There's also no value in backing the same candidate from start to finish. Hell, even the candidates who don't get nominated don't back themselves after the primaries.
That's also not what populist means. John Edwards is populist or at least rhetorically populist. For Hillary Clinton I'd call her mercenary.
Homeboy sounds like Ray Romano or someone maybe doing an impression of Ray Romano. I bet that could be worked into a marketing strategy, considering who's playing Wii these days :)
This alarms me personally because our Superintendent of Schools here has latched onto this book as part of guiding our school reform. I think our system's concept is to be the best at remediating kids who don't pass the NCLB tests. Everything seems to be geared towards that these days. He's restructured the departments in schools (i.e. the Math department and English department, not things like HR) around this, he's constantly saying things like "students begin preparing for the high school assessments as soon as they enter kindergarten," and his personnel changes seem to revolve around it too. That's the only reason I read that book is to get some insight into wtf was going on. The sad part is that people actually use test scores to measure the greatness of a school system, and so while those probably will rise steadily, other important features of a school (e.g. the arts) suffer at their expense.
Circuit City's "concept" was very much a top-down thing. Collins described it as the ability to stamp out a Circuit City in a desired location in short order. Like using a rubber stamp on a map and then the store appears. Because of this, I suspect that once the personnel were in place to physically run the store, less attention was paid to the people who would be hiring and firing at that store. You're right about treating your employees well. I would extend their failure in customer service to the people hiring the company's most visible representatives: the sales staff. If they don't care that much about their job, then the bad hires will certainly outnumber the good. Maybe they took the laissez faire route of just promoting people from sales to manager. Just watch The Office to see an example of that gone wrong.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins cites Circuit City as an example of a company that made the transition to greatness, bypassing its comparison company Silo. For each GTG company, Collins identified the company's core purpose, which in his theory must be identified as the one thing that company can do better than anyone in the world. Circuit City's concept was the creation of a large number of stores that provided a consistent experience for the customer. I can say from my own experience at Circuit City stores that they seem to have gotten that part right. I always get bad or no service. Does everyone? I don't know. I'm from India and nonwhite - my sister gets the same treatment with the added derision afforded to girls in that setting. Things like customer service can be hit or miss depending on where we travel. Now, maybe the same people who led the company to "greatness" aren't there anymore. It seems more likely to me that Collins' metric of return on money invested is the wrong way to measure greatness in a company.
midichlorians
Give Shogo: MAD a try if you can find it.
The telecoms and their advocates in Congress like Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and apparently Harry Reid (D-NV) argue that they're not changing anything from illegal to legal, rather they're filling a legal vacuum and the telecoms benefit as a result. How convenient and timely. Also as I understand the term, ex post facto usually refers to laws that make something newly illegal, subjecting people who had committed no crime to criminal penalties.
The most egregious senatorial hijinks of this affair has been Reid's ignoring Dodd's "hold" on the bill. He doesn't ignore holds on bills requested by republicans, but someone from his own party can't expect to have his honored. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been documenting this case for a while. That link goes to today's installment, but when the hold was first requested weeks (months?) ago, Greenwald had that story too.
One time I tried to show one of the other teachers Firefox because it was the answer to some question she asked me about her home computer. I think it was basically along the lines of her was bloated (as happens) and I suggested that if she cleaned out the spyware and used Firefox she might have an easier time keeping the crap out of her computer. She refused, opting to live with the slowdowns and crashing, because she "liked her MSN better." This without even seeing Firefox. It boggled my mind. She's quite effective as a teacher too because teaching of mathematics has been reduced to teaching a series of discrete unrelated processes. Sigh.
Anyway to the point, are you sure it's got anything to do with the union? Here in Calvert County, Maryland, the school system prides itself on having qualified teachers, but this is because of:
- Maryland laws about certification and high school diplomas
- Status in relation to other school systems who have a harder time getting and keeping teachers (CCPS pays a lot in Maryland)
- Emphasis on "highly qualified teachers" per NCLB
which is not to mention that teachers looking for continuing education credits in Maryland have to take classes that meet some certain standards set by the state board of ed. The same state board will bend over backwards with "alternative certification" programs which means certificating people who didn't study education as an undergraduate in college. Maybe the union where you live is indeed full of itself, but that hasn't been my experience as re: hiring and allocating personnel.The only actual problem I see (as opposed to some imagined challenge to authority) in using a different browser is when students run into technical problems and the teacher cannot support it. For example we use TI-83 calculators for the most part and when someone has a different (yet equally capable) graphing calculator, I can't always figure out how to do the same tasks on it. Or if students use a method they learned earlier in their math career and we are covering new material where their old method doesn't apply, they basically have to start the problem over without necessarily understanding why.
The OP was not true, but both the teacher and the student in that hypothetical could have handled things better.
If I were you I would look into some of those zip-up CD binders. They store a lot of CDs in a tiny space too.
I guess MS is used to having hardware developers and vendors respond to their needs. They've had a very advantageous position with OEM system builders for a long time, not to mention makers of addin cards and external peripherals. I think we only heard about this request because of how silly it is given the OLPC concept. I think in the past this kind of request was either
- unnecessary because hardware people were already developing around Windows, or
- unnecessary because the platforms were not in a space where MS could to operate e.g. supercomputing, or
- welcomed
I agree with whoever posted "hey MS make your own."I might pay good money for World of XCom
I realize the tagging is in beta, but why censorship?
Anyway, I'm interested in fiber optic internet too but it's not available in my area and no one seems to have any more information than that. Their price seems pretty competitive (at least against Comcast) and you'd think they'd be interested in rolling it out as widely and quickly as possible. What kind of infrastructure needs to be developed for this? I thought there was already a ton of fiber in the ground that no one was using.
I recommend Quarter To Three, and I would recommend Old Man Murray and fatbabies.com but those two no longer post new material. It's worth reading Old Man Murray anyway, especially their interview with Croteam, developers of Serious Sam.
These days I tend to pirate everything to decide who deserves my money. Then I try and skip as many layers of retailing as I can to buy it. Somehow I think the developers get a bigger cut that way. I'm probably wrong.
In other words, new findings may establish limits to the utility of old findings, but do not invalidate the old findings. It's like quadratic equations. Suppose that we only knew they could be solved by factoring them, and no other method. Then someone discovers the quadratic formula. This doesn't mean that factoring is wrong, because it still works as far as it goes. The quadratic formula simply gives us another more widely useful method.
In this case, anyone who contended that non-factorable quadratics had no solutions would be shown to be wrong, but the underlying math isn't invalidated./p.
Kids absolutely need to be told this. I work with kids every day and sometimes the answer to a mental block is a simple expression of confidence. As in "I know you can get it if you keep trying." Some kids have never heard this before, and I think the message from not hearing it is "well if you've given up then I guess I should give up on you too."
I think the lesson you learn from competitive sports is that losing isn't failure if it's an honorable loss. When my kids at school tell me about games they won or lost I always ask them what they did (or the other team did) better in order to win. The answers get better and better as the year progresses, which is a good sign.
Oh and for the record I'm on sick leave today, I'm not reading slashdot during class :)
There's a difference between identifying with your child and empathizing. I think empathy is a great thing, because we shouldn't forget our own experiences as children when dealing with children. Identifying with your child is something else - a projection of yourself into your child's current shoes. Parents have a great deal of influence over their children, but they are not in fact their children. Such parents take everything you say about their child personally. Say their child has been late to class three times in a row, and has no reasonable explanation. That is, I ask why and no response is given. It would be one thing if their locker got stuck, or they had to take a circuitous route for some reason (and there are reasons) or if the schedule was weird due to a delayed opening - there are valid reasons for tardiness, but usually not 3 days in a row. It's something parents need to know but not anything they should feel personally responsible for. Feeling accused because their child was late interferes with them dealing with the actual issue of lateness.
I'm not sure if I made enough sense the first time so I'll explain more. The first part of that quote is also relevant. I've had parents bring up issues that occurred with one of their children to explain why their other child is having a hard time in my classroom. The older of the two children (in cases like this) no longer attends my school, and has never met me. This is the craziness I referred to later, and which you correctly identified as stupid.
That's not to mention that I actually don't have any child's records unless I go to guidance and ask about them. I don't do that unless I think the child has been placed incorrectly (too high or too low of a math class) or something extraordinary happens early in the school year. There actually was one kid who was surly and rude on the first day of school. That's unusual so I asked around and apparently this kid was in a lot of trouble last year, and got expelled from summer school to boot. Last year he apparently stuck a paper clip in an electrical outlet, shorting out a few rooms and burning himself. Then he lied about it for a few days and his mom came in and lied about it even after seeing pictures of the paper-clip-shaped burn on his finger. This is all hearsay. Anyway, I decided that I was going to be that one teacher who demonstrated to him that he didn't have to resort to rudeness, namecalling (of other students,) and stunts to get attention and now he's one of my best students in that class. Usually I look at past behavior problems as just that - problems to solve, not extra work for me. I feel good when I can help a kid in a way that others could not.
It's interesting that you bring up college. If anything I found my college professors to be lacking in knowledge of pedagogy, even the ones in the education department. People reach those positions through a different path than elementary and secondary school teachers, meaning that they may never have studied child psychology, methods of instruction and assessment, methods of testing, etc. Knowing your field is necessary but not sufficient to be a good teacher.
I apologize for all the personal anecdotes to refute your points, but really the number of difficult children I teach is small enough to be covered by a few stories. I had one student earlier this year who came in every day and just sat there. No homoework was completed ever (and I don't give a ton of homework at the beginning of the year - at most 7-8 problems) and when he
In education we call this "failure attribution" and the article misses another possibility: The Teacher Just Doesn't Like Me. My context is high school. Unfortunately I've met numerous parents who perpetuate the idea that low performance stems from personal feelings of the teacher. This is usually the result of:
The point is that it's possible to attribute your failure to others, and that this behavior is learned. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's entirely learned. Parents go so far out of their way to protect their child's self esteem that it becomes completely divorced from reality. So you get kids who do bad things and feel great about themselves. Or you get very lazy children who want (and expect) you to pick up their slack. To the point, you get children who have no interest in self-improvement because they think they couldn't possibly be improved upon. Call me old fashioned, but things can always be done better.
The article is so short that I can't help but be confused by the OP subject line. Does this law restrict ISPs from selling teens' demographic information to advertisers, or does it restrict all websites from hosting (and displaying) any personal information about teens? If it's a restriction on ISPs, then don't we have some similar child protection laws in the US with the age being 13? I don't see the problem with a law that limits marketing to children, or marketing of children. If it's a restriction on the kids themselves posting their information, I think that's a bad idea.
I read some of the patent and I didn't see it anywhere that their fulfillment method would be tied to a customer. Instead of using your order history to choose how fast to ship, they're using everyone's order history to decide how fast to ship certain items. You know how each page has items at the bottom that say "other people who bought this also bought..."? They're using that information that they've been gathering for a long time to decide what it means when you buy x. I'm almost positive that this is not only a tool to keep their most profitable customers. It has to also be about that first order and what it means in terms of future orders. It's like upsell with delayed gratification. The fact of who is ordering is probably less important than most people here are thinking.
Or did I read it wrong? Is there a section of the patent that refutes this?
I think the clientele of these boot camps might have some kind of predisposition to addiction. Depending on how "addictive" your personality is, one may need to replace one addiction with another, at least as a first step. I find myself to behave in binges. So there are some activities I would never try because I would never want to be addicted. It could be silly of me, but I guess everyone handles risk their own way.
So I think the answer is that some lives are a series of addictions, or at least have the potential to be.
I hope no one's figured out a way to factor any primes. I've gotten used to the job security of being a math teacher :)