The only problem is that there are no "similar demographics" for these schools. I have 4 elementary schools within a mile of my house; each has a unique demographic because each has a different focus. The schools themselves are small and typically only have 1 or 2 classes per grade. So you are comparing against other kids elsewhere in other places, or other schools, or some such and the comparison is not valid. Kids aren't widgets.
OK, so let's compare 2 schools in my neighborhood. One is very stable, with about 80% of the incoming first graders staying on until 5th grade. The other sees a 40% turnover in students *every year*. To make things more complicated, the second school serves mostly Mexican migrant children who have a poor command of English. They have a strong drive to learn but most classroom time is spent teaching English, and not necessarily the subject at hand.
In another case here a Korean company opened a large factory; the local school near the factory got flooded with Korean kids who spoke little English.
Now take your "yearly improvement metric" and tell me it's not completely bogus - as there are no similar demographics and kids change from year to year. Kids aren't widgets and teachers aren't robots. Measuring success is not simple.
No, but chronically underpaying while at the same time heaping disdain on the profession and on the individual, and expecting them to perform miracles with snotty Johnny is not a recipe for success.
Show me a profession that has as high a threshold to entry while at the same time being as low-paid and held in such public disdain, and I'll show you a profession where smart entry level people are leaving after a few years, leaving only the deadwood. You get what you pay for.
How would that work? I took over a dysfunctional engineering department at a public utility a year ago. In the year I've been here, our time to design a project has ballooned by a factor of 3, we have added a person, we have gone tens of thousands of dollars over budget, our vehicle fleet has gone from 1 to 4. By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.
The fact is that because we now spend the time to do engineering right, our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production due to just-in-time delivery and accurate estimating of raw materials, but those metrics are for other departments and they would be seen as great successes - even though they had little to do with their own success.
So how do you evaluate a single person that's part of a team? I take big hits to my department because overall we are a success as a company. How do you measure success?
The bible says that man has dominion over the earth, and it is ours to do with as we please. And it is immutable, so nothing we do can affect God's work:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
What a crock of shit. Santorum's "science" is nothing but avarice and ignorance.
I went to school when calculators were first starting to be available. That meant the rich kids could drop $400 for the Bowmar Brain with all the scientific functions and the rest of us had to made do with the TI-11 (or whatever it was...)
So the engineering school designed all the tests without numerical answers. You had to set up the problem and explain the solution, and devise a test to see if your solution was correct. All without using numbers....
Those were some of the hardest tests I ever took. 3 hours, 3 problems, and you sweated blood. I remember one of the problems:
"Calculate the heating of the skin of a rocket as it lifts off through the atmosphere. Assume the engines put out constant thrust. Account for fuel consumption and thinning of the earth's atmosphere."
I would bet that even today Google would be at a loss to provide an answer.
That's what I'd do.... Devise a test that required you to think through the answer.
OK to some extent. However, the Challenger deaths were pointless; the decision was made to favor publicity over engineering. So people died because NASA PHBs and political hacks didn't want to delay a highly publicized launch.
When a military pilot gets in an experimental plane, s/he knows it's experimental and knows s/he is wagering their life for the excitement of doing something no one has ever done.
That's very different from getting killed because a political hack didn't want a minor inconvenience of scrubbing a launch due to bad weather.
We do a weekly meeting. In between we do a lot of informal meetings; one off two-three person hallway get-togethers. Lots of times those are standups; if they longer than a few minutes we'll grab some chairs.
This lets me keep tabs on what's going on, keep in touch with how people are doing (yes I'm management) and also gauge where people are in their lives.
I know a lot about my employees through these meetings; projects, clients, co-workers, kids, wives, husbands, relatives, so I know if someone's child is sick I can't press them for a deadline...
Anyway, standups are like every other buzzword; a part of my toolkit but not a cure all.
I live in the real world, where I realize that neither corporations nor government is perfect. Where there need to be checks and balances. Where corporate greed needs to be checked by government regulations. Where government bureaucracy needs to be limited. Where corporate power needs to be limited. Where people on all sides make mistakes.
I don't live in a fantasy where government = BAD, corporations = GOOD, and there is no middle ground.
The "free of government interference" part is pure fantasy. Virtually every fire department is funded in large part by the federal government. Are you willing to do away with fire protection, police protection, clean water, clean air, vehicle safety, airline safety, basic work safety rules? Are all those "government interference"? And no, they can't be funded at the local level. Too much of America is too sparsely populated to fund its own infrastructure.
If government regulations are relaxed, powerful corporations will work in concert to lower work standards, lower pay, and increase work hours. Study the labor movement at the turn of the last century. In particular, read the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Do you have any idea that those "powerful corporations" used to have private armies that beat and killed workers who dared to protest against poor working conditions?
Unfortunately the Tea Part also showed its utter lack of understanding of government with the debt ceiling fiasco. It's one thing to say you HATE HATE HATE and want LESS government but it's another thing to argue from a point of total ignorance of realpolitik and global economics and just simply HATE and act like a 2 year old in the middle of a temper tantrum.
Also, if the tea party wants LESS government, why is it so interested in using government to shove their religious/moral beliefs down my throat?
Face it, the tea party is just another political party interested in using government to establish its own agenda and impose it on the rest of us.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?
And how will it make the sort of money needed to pay the investors?
I guess I'm sort of stumped at the "business opportunity" offered here. At a guess, Z and 499 other shareholders are going to come out of this with a wad of cash and everyone else will be holding a deflated balloon in a few years....
None of the AWACS/JSTARS/etc planes are "made to be shot at". They're civilian airframes stuffed to the gills with super-secret electronics. They rely on fighters and ECM to stay up; they don't do any fighting themselves. Heck, they're unarmed.
T-Mobile has has the Lumia on sale since the turn of the year or so....
What's interesting is that *all* the "review" comments for the Lumia are glowing, all praise the technical features, and all seem to be quite well informed about the features and have correct spelling and grammar. While the review comments on the LG and other phones are more typical bitching and griping about how the phone quit working because the screen broke when the user dropped it....
Some time ago I contacted the RIAA to get permission to play music in public in a specific setting. I got sent off on a 6 week long wild goose chase with no-one able to tell me how to get permission and how much it would cost. The bears repeating: no one at RIAA or any of the labels could tell me how to get permission to play music in my setting.
What this means is that in spite of all their noise making, the *IAA is not set up to let people do what they want; they still want to control not only the distribution but also the who, when, and where. They just tell you that if you don't have permission, you can't play. But they don't have a mechanism, at any price, to let you play when and where you want.
He works for a non-profit. As such ethics and morals and beliefs weigh a lot more than in a for-profit corporation. Non profits do things because they believe in them, not necessarily because they make the most money.
Also, if you hope to attract a following and contributors, then MSSQL is the death knell.
As a non-profit, I'd hope your business model would be something like openstreetmap or some such; you aggregate the data, provide a portal, and allow others to build on it. Proprietary software is not the basis for sharing info.....
So the banking and financial market de-regulation we've seen in the last 10 years has led to "highest innovation, best products, and most wealth creation" - which is where we are now. If you're in the 1%, it has. If you're in the 99%, you got screwed or at best flatlined. So if you have enough wealth to have parity, the system works for you. If you don't you don't. I guess you see what you want to see.
That sort of backyard capitalism only works when there's relative parity between the parties. In our current "big business is good, regulation is bad, consumer protection is bad" there is no parity.
A health insurance company doesn't care if they lose you as a customer. They only want you if you are a net profit to them. And because the companies can legally collude and share information, no other company will want you either. So there's no parity.
There's parity if you buy a soda; you can always buy Coke, or Pepsi, or RC, or the local brand. But the things that are really critical to us as a society have no parity between the parties.
Don't you ever want to know anything about the world outside of your mom's basement?
I'm doing the Bataan Death March http://www.bataanmarch.com/ - me and a few thousand other people doing something utterly pointless. Just because we want to.
My thoughts exactly. The school my kids go to allowed them to use calculators to do homework. I saw all sorts of GIGO errors in their work; fundamental simple errors. They were frustrated with math. So I took their calculators away and made them do math long hand. Before long they understood numbers and how the answer should look like - before they use the calculator.
Kids also think "research" is sticking a phrase into google and copying and pasting the result into a paper. The last thing we need is more mindless computer drones who can't do anything but punch stuff into a search box and mindlessly repeat the drivel that shows up on screen.
Adding computers to the classroom does nothing if it's not a part of a curriculum built around computers. That means teachers have to be trained to use the technology in an effective way, the textbooks (or course materials) have to include computers, and lastly, there has to be support for computers.
There's some of that, and then there's the gross stereotyping on TV. The best thing that parents can do is keep their kids away from kids' shows (or any shows) on TV. Think about it - dads are always portrayed as bumbling nincompoops, attractive girls are either bitchy or bubbleheads, smart kids are always pencil necked geeks, and the cool people are the stupid rebels without a clue.
No wonder our kids adopt those attitudes. You want to be attractive to boys? Be a bubblehead. Want to be cool? Ditch school. GAH!
Depends on the management. 7 months ago I inherited a dysfunctional department with morale in the crapper and a seeming inability to do anything. The organization brought in a new director (my boss) and new department manager (me). I got a lot of funding and a lot of resources to fix things. Net result is that we are now ahead of the game for the first time in 5 years, people like being here, and we're having a blast.
So if management is providing support and resources, I'd say go for it. If they're saying we like it the way it is, then leave.
You don't need a driver's license, nor is it forced on you. You probably need a license a lot less than you do a clean credit report these days, seeing as you can't get a job or an apartment without a clean credit check - even if you don't have a loan or credit card to your name.
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The only problem is that there are no "similar demographics" for these schools. I have 4 elementary schools within a mile of my house; each has a unique demographic because each has a different focus. The schools themselves are small and typically only have 1 or 2 classes per grade. So you are comparing against other kids elsewhere in other places, or other schools, or some such and the comparison is not valid. Kids aren't widgets.
OK, so let's compare 2 schools in my neighborhood. One is very stable, with about 80% of the incoming first graders staying on until 5th grade. The other sees a 40% turnover in students *every year*. To make things more complicated, the second school serves mostly Mexican migrant children who have a poor command of English. They have a strong drive to learn but most classroom time is spent teaching English, and not necessarily the subject at hand.
In another case here a Korean company opened a large factory; the local school near the factory got flooded with Korean kids who spoke little English.
Now take your "yearly improvement metric" and tell me it's not completely bogus - as there are no similar demographics and kids change from year to year. Kids aren't widgets and teachers aren't robots. Measuring success is not simple.
No, but chronically underpaying while at the same time heaping disdain on the profession and on the individual, and expecting them to perform miracles with snotty Johnny is not a recipe for success.
Show me a profession that has as high a threshold to entry while at the same time being as low-paid and held in such public disdain, and I'll show you a profession where smart entry level people are leaving after a few years, leaving only the deadwood. You get what you pay for.
How would that work? I took over a dysfunctional engineering department at a public utility a year ago. In the year I've been here, our time to design a project has ballooned by a factor of 3, we have added a person, we have gone tens of thousands of dollars over budget, our vehicle fleet has gone from 1 to 4. By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.
The fact is that because we now spend the time to do engineering right, our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production due to just-in-time delivery and accurate estimating of raw materials, but those metrics are for other departments and they would be seen as great successes - even though they had little to do with their own success.
So how do you evaluate a single person that's part of a team? I take big hits to my department because overall we are a success as a company. How do you measure success?
The bible says that man has dominion over the earth, and it is ours to do with as we please. And it is immutable, so nothing we do can affect God's work:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
What a crock of shit. Santorum's "science" is nothing but avarice and ignorance.
I went to school when calculators were first starting to be available. That meant the rich kids could drop $400 for the Bowmar Brain with all the scientific functions and the rest of us had to made do with the TI-11 (or whatever it was...)
So the engineering school designed all the tests without numerical answers. You had to set up the problem and explain the solution, and devise a test to see if your solution was correct. All without using numbers....
Those were some of the hardest tests I ever took. 3 hours, 3 problems, and you sweated blood. I remember one of the problems:
"Calculate the heating of the skin of a rocket as it lifts off through the atmosphere. Assume the engines put out constant thrust. Account for fuel consumption and thinning of the earth's atmosphere."
I would bet that even today Google would be at a loss to provide an answer.
That's what I'd do.... Devise a test that required you to think through the answer.
OK to some extent. However, the Challenger deaths were pointless; the decision was made to favor publicity over engineering. So people died because NASA PHBs and political hacks didn't want to delay a highly publicized launch.
When a military pilot gets in an experimental plane, s/he knows it's experimental and knows s/he is wagering their life for the excitement of doing something no one has ever done.
That's very different from getting killed because a political hack didn't want a minor inconvenience of scrubbing a launch due to bad weather.
We do a weekly meeting. In between we do a lot of informal meetings; one off two-three person hallway get-togethers. Lots of times those are standups; if they longer than a few minutes we'll grab some chairs.
This lets me keep tabs on what's going on, keep in touch with how people are doing (yes I'm management) and also gauge where people are in their lives.
I know a lot about my employees through these meetings; projects, clients, co-workers, kids, wives, husbands, relatives, so I know if someone's child is sick I can't press them for a deadline...
Anyway, standups are like every other buzzword; a part of my toolkit but not a cure all.
I live in the real world, where I realize that neither corporations nor government is perfect. Where there need to be checks and balances. Where corporate greed needs to be checked by government regulations. Where government bureaucracy needs to be limited. Where corporate power needs to be limited. Where people on all sides make mistakes.
I don't live in a fantasy where government = BAD, corporations = GOOD, and there is no middle ground.
The "free of government interference" part is pure fantasy. Virtually every fire department is funded in large part by the federal government. Are you willing to do away with fire protection, police protection, clean water, clean air, vehicle safety, airline safety, basic work safety rules? Are all those "government interference"? And no, they can't be funded at the local level. Too much of America is too sparsely populated to fund its own infrastructure.
If government regulations are relaxed, powerful corporations will work in concert to lower work standards, lower pay, and increase work hours. Study the labor movement at the turn of the last century. In particular, read the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Do you have any idea that those "powerful corporations" used to have private armies that beat and killed workers who dared to protest against poor working conditions?
What fantasy world do you live in?
Unfortunately the Tea Part also showed its utter lack of understanding of government with the debt ceiling fiasco. It's one thing to say you HATE HATE HATE and want LESS government but it's another thing to argue from a point of total ignorance of realpolitik and global economics and just simply HATE and act like a 2 year old in the middle of a temper tantrum.
Also, if the tea party wants LESS government, why is it so interested in using government to shove their religious/moral beliefs down my throat?
Face it, the tea party is just another political party interested in using government to establish its own agenda and impose it on the rest of us.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?
And how will it make the sort of money needed to pay the investors?
I guess I'm sort of stumped at the "business opportunity" offered here. At a guess, Z and 499 other shareholders are going to come out of this with a wad of cash and everyone else will be holding a deflated balloon in a few years....
None of the AWACS/JSTARS/etc planes are "made to be shot at". They're civilian airframes stuffed to the gills with super-secret electronics. They rely on fighters and ECM to stay up; they don't do any fighting themselves. Heck, they're unarmed.
T-Mobile has has the Lumia on sale since the turn of the year or so....
What's interesting is that *all* the "review" comments for the Lumia are glowing, all praise the technical features, and all seem to be quite well informed about the features and have correct spelling and grammar. While the review comments on the LG and other phones are more typical bitching and griping about how the phone quit working because the screen broke when the user dropped it....
The mind reels.
Some time ago I contacted the RIAA to get permission to play music in public in a specific setting. I got sent off on a 6 week long wild goose chase with no-one able to tell me how to get permission and how much it would cost. The bears repeating: no one at RIAA or any of the labels could tell me how to get permission to play music in my setting.
What this means is that in spite of all their noise making, the *IAA is not set up to let people do what they want; they still want to control not only the distribution but also the who, when, and where. They just tell you that if you don't have permission, you can't play. But they don't have a mechanism, at any price, to let you play when and where you want.
He works for a non-profit. As such ethics and morals and beliefs weigh a lot more than in a for-profit corporation. Non profits do things because they believe in them, not necessarily because they make the most money.
+1
Also, if you hope to attract a following and contributors, then MSSQL is the death knell.
As a non-profit, I'd hope your business model would be something like openstreetmap or some such; you aggregate the data, provide a portal, and allow others to build on it. Proprietary software is not the basis for sharing info.....
So the banking and financial market de-regulation we've seen in the last 10 years has led to "highest innovation, best products, and most wealth creation" - which is where we are now. If you're in the 1%, it has. If you're in the 99%, you got screwed or at best flatlined. So if you have enough wealth to have parity, the system works for you. If you don't you don't. I guess you see what you want to see.
That sort of backyard capitalism only works when there's relative parity between the parties. In our current "big business is good, regulation is bad, consumer protection is bad" there is no parity.
A health insurance company doesn't care if they lose you as a customer. They only want you if you are a net profit to them. And because the companies can legally collude and share information, no other company will want you either. So there's no parity.
There's parity if you buy a soda; you can always buy Coke, or Pepsi, or RC, or the local brand. But the things that are really critical to us as a society have no parity between the parties.
Without knowing her preparations and physical ability, and the equipment she has with her it's hard to assess if it's "idiotic" or "inspiring".
However, given that she's starting with a significant amount of resources she may be OK. We'll see in 20 days. Best of luck to her.
Huh?! "Because it's there."
Don't you ever want to know anything about the world outside of your mom's basement?
I'm doing the Bataan Death March http://www.bataanmarch.com/ - me and a few thousand other people doing something utterly pointless. Just because we want to.
Wish I had mod points.
My thoughts exactly. The school my kids go to allowed them to use calculators to do homework. I saw all sorts of GIGO errors in their work; fundamental simple errors. They were frustrated with math. So I took their calculators away and made them do math long hand. Before long they understood numbers and how the answer should look like - before they use the calculator.
Kids also think "research" is sticking a phrase into google and copying and pasting the result into a paper. The last thing we need is more mindless computer drones who can't do anything but punch stuff into a search box and mindlessly repeat the drivel that shows up on screen.
Adding computers to the classroom does nothing if it's not a part of a curriculum built around computers. That means teachers have to be trained to use the technology in an effective way, the textbooks (or course materials) have to include computers, and lastly, there has to be support for computers.
There's some of that, and then there's the gross stereotyping on TV. The best thing that parents can do is keep their kids away from kids' shows (or any shows) on TV. Think about it - dads are always portrayed as bumbling nincompoops, attractive girls are either bitchy or bubbleheads, smart kids are always pencil necked geeks, and the cool people are the stupid rebels without a clue.
No wonder our kids adopt those attitudes. You want to be attractive to boys? Be a bubblehead. Want to be cool? Ditch school. GAH!
Depends on the management. 7 months ago I inherited a dysfunctional department with morale in the crapper and a seeming inability to do anything. The organization brought in a new director (my boss) and new department manager (me). I got a lot of funding and a lot of resources to fix things. Net result is that we are now ahead of the game for the first time in 5 years, people like being here, and we're having a blast.
So if management is providing support and resources, I'd say go for it. If they're saying we like it the way it is, then leave.
You don't need a driver's license, nor is it forced on you. You probably need a license a lot less than you do a clean credit report these days, seeing as you can't get a job or an apartment without a clean credit check - even if you don't have a loan or credit card to your name.