It seems strange to call this "new" since a few decades ago, it seems like there were lots of people like this in tech, including my high school buddy who never went to college yet did quite well designing computer printers.
" A label which captures this concept is 'Goodhart's Law' -- after economist Charles Goodhart, who posited in essence that 'when a measure becomes a target, it becomes useless.'"
I've seen a similar effect in places where I've worked. A poorly defined metric that is used to rate employee performance will suddenly become the primary focus of the job, instead of actually doing the job.
I've seen a similar effect in places where I've worked as well, that is, public schools. Since the nineties, both school and pupil evaluations have been based on achieving questionable targets using questionable metrics. It's nice to know that even if the metrics weren't questionable, using a target like that would make them so. And not only that, a term, Goodhart's Law, exists to describe the phenomenon. I'll place it up there on the shelf right next to Godwin. Thanks!
"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case"
He complains about wages, and then lists the reasons he'll automate no matter what the minimum wage is, no matter what the regulations are. Sounds about right.
The TFA is an excellent example of that fraction of the population who has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails, but somehow thinks they understand it completely. As one of the respondents in this thread (who did understand it) put it, real teaching jobs will be one of the last to go, as they entail interaction between human beings. It's in the interaction that the best teaching happens. That's why K12 classes need to be smaller, and not like my 200+ member Biology 1 lecture at university forty years ago.
Yeah, here in China, people can be jailed for "spreading rumours" online. Such measures are necessary to preserve harmony in society. It's nice to see the UK catching up. (/snark)
This idea of instruction bears much resemblance to that depicted in the movie (and television series) The Paper Chase. That is, "you learn the law, and I'll train your minds."
I agree. Hyperbole much. I use GPS all the time, and never look at the screen. I just listen to the voice. One reason I don't look at the screen while moving is that it doesn't seem like a safe thing to do. The other is that it's totally unnecessary
Stories like this are kind of like saying, "Pencils - are they really good for writing? Look what those junior high school kids did with their pencils !!!!!! Can they possibly be any good for anything?"
This reminds me ever so much of the *great* grammar checker in the old Microsoft Word. So now not only do they want to homogenize English writing styles, they also want to extract all the humanity from social interaction. So glad I'm retired at this point.
For one thing, paying off the national debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds, a pillar of the global economy. Treasury securities are crucially important to the world financial system in a number of ways: banks buy them as low-risk assets, the Fed uses them for executing monetary policy, and mortgage interest rates vary based on Treasury rates. 'It was a huge issue... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,' says Diane Lim Rogers
So, isn't this basically saying that the US taxpayer is propping up the world's economy?
I know the answer to this must be no, at least in the short term, but I would think that the same engine might some day be used for that purpose, which I would use a lot, as I often save web pages, and I usually save them in that awful format with the text separated from the directory of resources, because that's what every browser, even old models, can read. It would be nice to save web pages or even web sites from the browser into pdf, like I used to do with Adobe Acrobat, back when I could afford to buy such things.
Speaking as someone who very casually uses an ipod touch, which I obtained on a special deal, and bought mainly because I just wanted to know what the device was like:
It's not easy to browse for apps or discover new ones. Sure, you can search, but search for what? I'm more likely to discover new apps when they're described on forums and bulletin boards than I am from cruising the Apple Store. Yeah, you can easily find the most popular ones in a list, but then, that's the point, isn't it? Once you're on that list, you're pretty much guaranteed to stay there, and remaining one of the small percent who gain the lion's percent of the income.
Well, I'm not wild about the device, anyway. Can't even simply transfer pictures to it without it reducing the resolution.
I've thought for a while that the ejection of Facebook, the probably ejection of Google, etc., is all part of a face-saving Kabuki to give Chinese companies room to grow, now that Facebook and Google have proved the utility of their respective functions to large groups of people.
For example, without Facebook as competition, such functional facebook clones like 51.com, xiaonei.com, and chinaren.com are growing quickly, keeping both the service and the economic benefits of the Facebook idea within China's borders in a classic case of economic protectionism. Yes, the government can exert more direct control over them than they could over facebook, but at this point, that's kind of the icing on the cake.
Without Google as competition, Baidu (www.baidu.com) has that much more room to grow and take more tech jobs from the Indian economy and give them to Chinese. Yes, the government can censor more, but again, that's icing on the cake, since there are many other ways to maintain censorship and manage the population. Simply keeping things in the Chinese language and managing the traditional media go a long ways towards maintaining such control anyway, automatically excluding foreign ideas while keeping the frames (and therefore the conclusions) of major debates under control. Such a condition is not "censorship" in the strict use of that word, but this is the system used by Western governments to control discourse, even though they lack the self-isolating features of the Chinese language, so there's no reason why it shouldn't work here in China.
Examples of Western "censorship" can be found at sites like www.projectcensored.org, by the way. My point, then, is that, while censorship is important to the government, there's more than one way to accomplish it. There is only one way to provide economic protectionism, which is to divert more economic activity to local businesses, whether that be through tariffs, governmental spending, or what have you. Therefore, economic protectionism seems to me a primary reason for this kerfluffle, even though censorship may, of course, remain as a secondary reason.
This Google exclusion is all of a piece with the general economic protectionism with which China has been irritating ideologically "free market" types for a long time.
The current arguments over principle, then, can be viewed as a dramatically-colored veneer allowing both sides to save ideological face when the inevitable market protectionism takes place.
I agree with you about geography and math and that religious issues aren't the huge factor that they're made out to be by some critics.
I also think that private schools can do a great job of educating, but I think that in most cases their performance roughly parallels the public schools in their neighborhoods.
And I think many private schools have other means of cash in order to charge less in tuition than some public schools spend in tuition. For example, many are religious schools that use religious facilities. Also, teacher pay in private schools is usually about half that of public schools, at least in California, which mainly limits the available pool of teachers to those with spouses that have better-paying jobs. Head Royce, a well-known private school in Oakland, charges about $27,000 tuition per year in its high school, three times the figure you cite, probably almost four times the local rate, since California has among the poorest school funding in the nation. Every school is not Head Royce, but I mention it because such schools are often pointed out to illustrate the superiority of private solutions.
On the other hand, I don't discount your intuitions about government. The whole school board system is problematical, I feel. There should be some other way to provide local control without putting any old Tom Dick and Mary in charge of the schools. I also feel that one of the biggest barriers to progress in this country is a sort-of collusion between government and textbook publishers and test publishers, neither or whom has any interest in changing the system.
Witness what happened at the hands of politicians when real reform gained a toehold in California back during the eighties.
Most teachers I know and also the teacher's unions I've had contact with, are very heavily into reform based on research. It's the intractable resistance from the government, again, at the behest of entrenched publishers, that is the conservative force here.
Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"
I don't care about the order of the athletes so much as the fact that they didn't broadcast it live at all. I had hoped to have watched it at the same time as my friends in Beijing, but was unable to do this. As far as I know, the USA is the only country who failed to broadcast the opening when it really happened. (some, like Canada, broadcast it twice - in real time and later a repeat in the evening.)
In the old days (don't call me geezer!) they did lots of live broadcasting, and, while it was a strain to get up in the middle of the night to see it, there's something about that experience that brings home a real sense of the world, and how big it is. In this case, there's a sense of wonder to the idea that you're watching something at the same time as people all around the world. NBC, unsurprisingly but no less disgustingly, prefers profit over human fellowship.
Of course, if you disagree with my point of view, that's no problem - you can just record it if it's broadcast live in the middle of the night.
What's even more frustrating is that I was unable to find an unblocked stream in another country so I could watch it on my computer. I found out later that some German stations hadn't blocked it. There was an article in the New York times today how NBC kept playing internet "whack a mole" with those who knew how to find a way around their blocking. Well, so much for the idea that the Internet is free. Kind of feels like the West must have felt when they fenced it all in.
actually I'm going to China soon, and I was going to start studying methods of circumventing China's great firewall. I wish I'd started already. Maybe I could (ironically) have used those methods to circumvent the great NBC firewall and watched the feeds from China or Canada.
.....aren't qualified enough. You also need to understand education. Those who can, do, but those who teach, do and do more.
As a long-time teacher in public schools, I actually find very little to disagree with in the article. I do think that another added factor should be that we need public schools to graduate kids who love science and feel that they can understand it and perform scientific tasks.
Though I agree with the general thrust of the original article, I take exception to this comment in the introduction:
"Can someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is - - flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
The science education system already works for such people whose history is described in this comment. No change is needed. Furthermore, such a history is in no way a qualification for figuring out how to change a system and reach the kids that have so far not been reached. And believe me, it's not by doing the same old same old and expecting to get a different result (there's a name for that sort of thinking...)
That said, the particular set of ideas presented in the article seems worth exploring. And in fact, we in the public schools have been working along similar lines (and also other, even more "radical" lines) for decades that are proven to work. And by "we" I also include those bureaucratic teachers unions and other such people continually treated as scapegoats to avoid facing up to the actual obstructionists in the system.
In California, for example, teachers and educators, working through the university system, but including K12 teachers, developed some extremely effective ideas in the seventies and eighties (sometimes it takes ten or twenty years to fully flesh out new ideas and get them tested, by the way), not only for science but for other curricular areas as well.
In 1990, California published a fabulous set of science standards based on the educational research that had been done in the previous two decades, and for a few years, kids were not only getting good at thinking scientifically, but consistently loved science and going to science class. Then the obstructionists set in.
These obstructionists were not the educational bureaucrats alluded to above, nor the teachers with their bureaucratic unions. They were (first of all) the politicians, who raised the spectre of fear in the public that school subjects were no longer being taught the same way, and that therefore their kids will be worse off, despite the fact that for eighty years or longer, science education really only worked for a select few.
The politician's motivation was, of course, to whip up fear in order to become elected. However, the real power behind them were the textbook companies, in whose pockets those politicians lay.
Textbook companies, after all, have no incentive to reform education, particularly because many of the most effective reforms have to do with less reliance on textbooks. And there are probably many people at Slashdot who can appreciate how much money those textbook companies can make on even a single textbook.
Anyway, by the mid nineties, the corporate backlash was in full swing, and though one could see tentative progress, you need more than just a few years to see real change. They succeeded in blocking progress before the results were irrefutable.
In the area of science, the 1990 standards were withdrawn, and replaced with standards that were drawn up with little or no input from teachers or university departments of education, but a lot of input from Nobel prize winners (at least, that was what was trumpeted at the time)
So instead of kids learning to think scientifically, they spend most of their time learning disparate factoids, like the composition of the sun (and knowing it is not a quasar), memor
Interesting. Thanks for your comment. Next time I'm chatting to somebody in China maybe I'll try a few hot button words and see what happens. "June 4th," maybe?
I was in China a few years ago, and there was somewhat of a controversy whether or not China would allow Skype or block it. Then, all of a sudden, the Chinese had no problem with Skype. The only way for the Chinese government not to have a problem with Skype is if they are somehow able to monitor it. China is the ultimate surveillance society, after all.
Therefore, if the Chinese have no problem with Skype, Skype must have a back door.
Since he's from the Northwest, it seems to me appropriate that instead of getting him a retirement gift, he should hold a potlatch.
Just make sure and let me know when and where....;^)
I think that humans interact with their tools and it changes humans, often making them less "tough" or "rigorous" for the natural world. Unlike my ancient forebears, for example, I cannot easily run around the countryside barefoot. I am a tenderfoot. However, I see no reason to agonize over the fact that over-reliance on shoes has made me that way.
Similarly, I remember talking to an older Native American (Indian, that is), who told me that in his grandfather's time, before writing, person A would go to visit with person B for a couple hours, come home and then, for two hours, tell person C word-for-word exactly what was said. However, I see no reason to agonize over the fact that over-reliance on writing has left me with a tenderfoot memory.
The Internet, and Google, are the same way.
I agree with your points. If you can find The Phantom Edit versions of episodes one and two (I don't think he ever did a phantom edit of episode 3) you'll see how much the movies can be improved by leaving out the irrelevant stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I see banks, energy companies and other industries" but no mention of voting infrastructure, the only one that has actually been attacked already.
no, he was designing daisy-wheel printers
It seems strange to call this "new" since a few decades ago, it seems like there were lots of people like this in tech, including my high school buddy who never went to college yet did quite well designing computer printers.
" A label which captures this concept is 'Goodhart's Law' -- after economist Charles Goodhart, who posited in essence that 'when a measure becomes a target, it becomes useless.'"
I've seen a similar effect in places where I've worked. A poorly defined metric that is used to rate employee performance will suddenly become the primary focus of the job, instead of actually doing the job.
I've seen a similar effect in places where I've worked as well, that is, public schools. Since the nineties, both school and pupil evaluations have been based on achieving questionable targets using questionable metrics. It's nice to know that even if the metrics weren't questionable, using a target like that would make them so. And not only that, a term, Goodhart's Law, exists to describe the phenomenon. I'll place it up there on the shelf right next to Godwin. Thanks!
"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case"
He complains about wages, and then lists the reasons he'll automate no matter what the minimum wage is, no matter what the regulations are. Sounds about right.
The TFA is an excellent example of that fraction of the population who has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails, but somehow thinks they understand it completely. As one of the respondents in this thread (who did understand it) put it, real teaching jobs will be one of the last to go, as they entail interaction between human beings. It's in the interaction that the best teaching happens. That's why K12 classes need to be smaller, and not like my 200+ member Biology 1 lecture at university forty years ago.
Yeah, here in China, people can be jailed for "spreading rumours" online. Such measures are necessary to preserve harmony in society. It's nice to see the UK catching up.
(/snark)
This idea of instruction bears much resemblance to that depicted in the movie (and television series) The Paper Chase. That is, "you learn the law, and I'll train your minds."
Yes, sometimes the old ways are best.
I agree. Hyperbole much. I use GPS all the time, and never look at the screen. I just listen to the voice. One reason I don't look at the screen while moving is that it doesn't seem like a safe thing to do. The other is that it's totally unnecessary
Stories like this are kind of like saying, "Pencils - are they really good for writing? Look what those junior high school kids did with their pencils !!!!!! Can they possibly be any good for anything?"
Sheesh
This reminds me ever so much of the *great* grammar checker in the old Microsoft Word. So now not only do they want to homogenize English writing styles, they also want to extract all the humanity from social interaction. So glad I'm retired at this point.
Most shopping malls I know prohibit any picture-taking inside, let alone something to be broadcast to the webiverse.
On the other hand, the last time I was actually inside a mall was before telephones had cameras, so maybe they've given that up in the meantime.
So, isn't this basically saying that the US taxpayer is propping up the world's economy?
I know the answer to this must be no, at least in the short term, but I would think that the same engine might some day be used for that purpose, which I would use a lot, as I often save web pages, and I usually save them in that awful format with the text separated from the directory of resources, because that's what every browser, even old models, can read. It would be nice to save web pages or even web sites from the browser into pdf, like I used to do with Adobe Acrobat, back when I could afford to buy such things.
Speaking as someone who very casually uses an ipod touch, which I obtained on a special deal, and bought mainly because I just wanted to know what the device was like:
It's not easy to browse for apps or discover new ones. Sure, you can search, but search for what? I'm more likely to discover new apps when they're described on forums and bulletin boards than I am from cruising the Apple Store. Yeah, you can easily find the most popular ones in a list, but then, that's the point, isn't it? Once you're on that list, you're pretty much guaranteed to stay there, and remaining one of the small percent who gain the lion's percent of the income.
Well, I'm not wild about the device, anyway. Can't even simply transfer pictures to it without it reducing the resolution.
Nice Summary! I'm going to cut and paste this into a text file to keep handy for future reference.
I've thought for a while that the ejection of Facebook, the probably ejection of Google, etc., is all part of a face-saving Kabuki to give Chinese companies room to grow, now that Facebook and Google have proved the utility of their respective functions to large groups of people.
For example, without Facebook as competition, such functional facebook clones like 51.com, xiaonei.com, and chinaren.com are growing quickly, keeping both the service and the economic benefits of the Facebook idea within China's borders in a classic case of economic protectionism. Yes, the government can exert more direct control over them than they could over facebook, but at this point, that's kind of the icing on the cake.
Without Google as competition, Baidu (www.baidu.com) has that much more room to grow and take more tech jobs from the Indian economy and give them to Chinese. Yes, the government can censor more, but again, that's icing on the cake, since there are many other ways to maintain censorship and manage the population. Simply keeping things in the Chinese language and managing the traditional media go a long ways towards maintaining such control anyway, automatically excluding foreign ideas while keeping the frames (and therefore the conclusions) of major debates under control. Such a condition is not "censorship" in the strict use of that word, but this is the system used by Western governments to control discourse, even though they lack the self-isolating features of the Chinese language, so there's no reason why it shouldn't work here in China.
Examples of Western "censorship" can be found at sites like www.projectcensored.org, by the way. My point, then, is that, while censorship is important to the government, there's more than one way to accomplish it. There is only one way to provide economic protectionism, which is to divert more economic activity to local businesses, whether that be through tariffs, governmental spending, or what have you. Therefore, economic protectionism seems to me a primary reason for this kerfluffle, even though censorship may, of course, remain as a secondary reason.
This Google exclusion is all of a piece with the general economic protectionism with which China has been irritating ideologically "free market" types for a long time.
The current arguments over principle, then, can be viewed as a dramatically-colored veneer allowing both sides to save ideological face when the inevitable market protectionism takes place.
I also think that private schools can do a great job of educating, but I think that in most cases their performance roughly parallels the public schools in their neighborhoods.
And I think many private schools have other means of cash in order to charge less in tuition than some public schools spend in tuition. For example, many are religious schools that use religious facilities. Also, teacher pay in private schools is usually about half that of public schools, at least in California, which mainly limits the available pool of teachers to those with spouses that have better-paying jobs. Head Royce, a well-known private school in Oakland, charges about $27,000 tuition per year in its high school, three times the figure you cite, probably almost four times the local rate, since California has among the poorest school funding in the nation. Every school is not Head Royce, but I mention it because such schools are often pointed out to illustrate the superiority of private solutions.
On the other hand, I don't discount your intuitions about government. The whole school board system is problematical, I feel. There should be some other way to provide local control without putting any old Tom Dick and Mary in charge of the schools. I also feel that one of the biggest barriers to progress in this country is a sort-of collusion between government and textbook publishers and test publishers, neither or whom has any interest in changing the system.
Witness what happened at the hands of politicians when real reform gained a toehold in California back during the eighties.
Most teachers I know and also the teacher's unions I've had contact with, are very heavily into reform based on research. It's the intractable resistance from the government, again, at the behest of entrenched publishers, that is the conservative force here.
I don't care about the order of the athletes so much as the fact that they didn't broadcast it live at all. I had hoped to have watched it at the same time as my friends in Beijing, but was unable to do this. As far as I know, the USA is the only country who failed to broadcast the opening when it really happened. (some, like Canada, broadcast it twice - in real time and later a repeat in the evening.)
In the old days (don't call me geezer!) they did lots of live broadcasting, and, while it was a strain to get up in the middle of the night to see it, there's something about that experience that brings home a real sense of the world, and how big it is. In this case, there's a sense of wonder to the idea that you're watching something at the same time as people all around the world. NBC, unsurprisingly but no less disgustingly, prefers profit over human fellowship.
Of course, if you disagree with my point of view, that's no problem - you can just record it if it's broadcast live in the middle of the night.
What's even more frustrating is that I was unable to find an unblocked stream in another country so I could watch it on my computer. I found out later that some German stations hadn't blocked it. There was an article in the New York times today how NBC kept playing internet "whack a mole" with those who knew how to find a way around their blocking. Well, so much for the idea that the Internet is free. Kind of feels like the West must have felt when they fenced it all in.
actually I'm going to China soon, and I was going to start studying methods of circumventing China's great firewall. I wish I'd started already. Maybe I could (ironically) have used those methods to circumvent the great NBC firewall and watched the feeds from China or Canada.
.....aren't qualified enough. You also need to understand education. Those who can, do, but those who teach, do and do more.
As a long-time teacher in public schools, I actually find very little to disagree with in the article. I do think that another added factor should be that we need public schools to graduate kids who love science and feel that they can understand it and perform scientific tasks.
Though I agree with the general thrust of the original article, I take exception to this comment in the introduction:
The science education system already works for such people whose history is described in this comment. No change is needed. Furthermore, such a history is in no way a qualification for figuring out how to change a system and reach the kids that have so far not been reached. And believe me, it's not by doing the same old same old and expecting to get a different result (there's a name for that sort of thinking...)
That said, the particular set of ideas presented in the article seems worth exploring. And in fact, we in the public schools have been working along similar lines (and also other, even more "radical" lines) for decades that are proven to work. And by "we" I also include those bureaucratic teachers unions and other such people continually treated as scapegoats to avoid facing up to the actual obstructionists in the system.
In California, for example, teachers and educators, working through the university system, but including K12 teachers, developed some extremely effective ideas in the seventies and eighties (sometimes it takes ten or twenty years to fully flesh out new ideas and get them tested, by the way), not only for science but for other curricular areas as well.
In 1990, California published a fabulous set of science standards based on the educational research that had been done in the previous two decades, and for a few years, kids were not only getting good at thinking scientifically, but consistently loved science and going to science class. Then the obstructionists set in.
These obstructionists were not the educational bureaucrats alluded to above, nor the teachers with their bureaucratic unions. They were (first of all) the politicians, who raised the spectre of fear in the public that school subjects were no longer being taught the same way, and that therefore their kids will be worse off, despite the fact that for eighty years or longer, science education really only worked for a select few.
The politician's motivation was, of course, to whip up fear in order to become elected. However, the real power behind them were the textbook companies, in whose pockets those politicians lay.
Textbook companies, after all, have no incentive to reform education, particularly because many of the most effective reforms have to do with less reliance on textbooks. And there are probably many people at Slashdot who can appreciate how much money those textbook companies can make on even a single textbook.
Anyway, by the mid nineties, the corporate backlash was in full swing, and though one could see tentative progress, you need more than just a few years to see real change. They succeeded in blocking progress before the results were irrefutable.
In the area of science, the 1990 standards were withdrawn, and replaced with standards that were drawn up with little or no input from teachers or university departments of education, but a lot of input from Nobel prize winners (at least, that was what was trumpeted at the time)
So instead of kids learning to think scientifically, they spend most of their time learning disparate factoids, like the composition of the sun (and knowing it is not a quasar), memor
Thanks again.
Therefore, if the Chinese have no problem with Skype, Skype must have a back door.
Since he's from the Northwest, it seems to me appropriate that instead of getting him a retirement gift, he should hold a potlatch. Just make sure and let me know when and where.... ;^)
Similarly, I remember talking to an older Native American (Indian, that is), who told me that in his grandfather's time, before writing, person A would go to visit with person B for a couple hours, come home and then, for two hours, tell person C word-for-word exactly what was said. However, I see no reason to agonize over the fact that over-reliance on writing has left me with a tenderfoot memory. The Internet, and Google, are the same way.
I agree with your points. If you can find The Phantom Edit versions of episodes one and two (I don't think he ever did a phantom edit of episode 3) you'll see how much the movies can be improved by leaving out the irrelevant stuff.