And it's your kind that makes police behave as badly as they did in this case. Huge asshats with a hard on for getting away with being asshats based on freedoms which assume that most people in fact will not be asshats. And you'll never bother to look in the mirror for the reason, it'll be someone else's fault.
The reasons for police illegal actions might possibly be a factor in sentencing, but they usually don't alter the legality of the act. If an officer makes an arrest on grounds that they know to be inaccurate, that just ain't right, no matter what the asshattery level of the arestee.
I think he should be allowed to make the car, but he can't put a Batman logo on it without a license...
That would depend on where he got the logo from, and if the logo's production was licensed. If he bought a licensed logo from a store and slapped it on then I don't see a violation. It would also depend on if the show has fallen into the public domain. I had heard, for example, that at least the first season Star Trek had fallen into the public domain because its copyright wasn't renewed, but currently I can't find any evidence of that, but if it's true then it would possibly be legal to use elements from Star Trek in other things without royalties.
I doubt that that is true. Taking a clip from one of the out-of-copyright Superman cartoons and plastering it on a T-Shirt for sale is going to run you into Warner's Trademark lawyers.
I guess I find the year info useful, and have no problem ignoring it at the front of the string when visually parsing things, while at the end of the string it serves no useful sorting purposes, so I stick it at the front. mm-dd-yyyy seems to have no real advantage over yyyy-mm-dd, and a number of disadvantages in all of my usages.
I prefer MM/DD/YYYY because it seems to be easiest to sort. Year is so broad it often doesn't eliminate anything, so you want it on the end so that the year bits are the last you have to sort. Day is too specific and doesn't sort related possibilities together. Month gives a balance and is also used as the key for many real world systems that care about date like many legal and financial instruments. So you lead with month, fall back to day, then finally year. Best balance of search-ability and sort-ability.
When do you ever want all of your February things from multiple years grouped together? More often than you want things from the same year grouped together? If you for example through all of your charitable receipts together, would you ever be interested in them being sorted by month-day-year? It seems much more common to want things with dates close to each other *in a single year* to be sorted close to each other. I can maybe think up some rare reasons when it might be convenient, but many many many more when it would be less useful than sorting by year-month-day.
I personally think that it is convenient to have a fairly authoritative website to point people to who have concerns due to the woo-woos raising a fuss. Nothing is ever going to change the minds of the "true believers" but it is useful for those not yet completely bamboozled to have the opportunity to see a more reasonable world-view. I doubt very much that this cost NASA much in terms of resources.
Usually the thrown-away food statistics include food which never even reaches the consumer. For example, your shop stocks too much of a certain food, and it doesn't get sold, and the shop throws it away after it got too old.
The largest percentages do seem to get lost at the consumer end though. All of the producers and shippers have clear economic incentives to decrease losses, while few households track their wastage well enough to realize how big it is.
The fact that USA food consumption makes up for less than 10% of household income (5.5 percent at home and 3.9 percent eating out) means that as a fraction of total expenses, the wastage might not be that important to people.
THIS! How is it even possible that 40% is thrown away in America?
Partial explanation: People feel guilty about not "eating healthy". Then they buy a bunch of fruit and veggies, which sit in the produce drawers of their fridges until they rot.
I'd still like to see the data/math behind the 40% though.
"What are we doing with all that if we aren't eating it? About two-thirds of consumer food waste is due to spoilage, according to a recent survey of British citizens. Cooking too much food was largely responsible for the remaining third. In the United States, households toss out roughly a quarter of all the food they buy.
The proportions are mostly flipped when it comes to dining out. Restaurants have an economic interest in minimizing spoilage, so they've evolved very sophisticated ways of predicting how much they'll need to buy. But they can't speak to how much an individual diner is liable to eat at a meal, which is why on average, 17 percent of meals are left on the table. Inexplicably, more than half of these "potential leftovers" aren't boxed up; they're just thrown out."
....The only place I ever saw dollar coins in actual use was the Miami metrorail system.
Denver light rail uses them for change from their ticket vending machines, too. Got stuck with only a $20 and needed a ticket. Took me forever to get rid of all the $1 coins I got in change.
I have never had any difficulty spending US $1 coins, Susan/Saq/or presidential. No more difficulty than in spending $1 bills in any case. At the very-very-very least, you bank would take them you know?
Thought of that Planet Money episode as soon as I saw the title. The TL;DL (too long; didn't listen) of the podcast is coins aren't continually circulated like paper bills. People throw them in jars and leave them there for months, years. So *more* coins than bills are actually needed in order to keep the normal supply circulating.
Even if true though, that is a transition issue, eventually you reach a point where the coins start to come out of the jars - even if that takes months or a few years. The value of the coin has a huge impact on this. A roll of pennies is worth $1 while a roll of dollar coins is worth $25. A handful of dollar coins is useful, and does not stay locked away in a jar the way pennies, nickles and dimes might.
For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.
LocalWiki is the outgrowth of the amazingly successful http://daviswiki.org/ which spawned http://wikispot.org/ Encouraging and supporting this type of local non-commercial wiki is great for any community.
I've always thought that the IRS (or other tax collection agency) should be supplying this type of software. They are the ones who know what the rules are supposed to be, they should be the ones to implement it. If they can write the text rules for how to implement the system, they should be able to write the computing rules too. Then make the whole thing open source and/or free software, so anyone interested can double check that the calcs are being done correctly.
Actually, that isn't true for any smartphone if you do the math. Even the iPhone, which carries a higher premium and deductible, costs about 200 USD less on insurance claims than full retail. You save over 200$ worst case.
But most people won't ever make a claim, so particularly if you are amortizing this expense over multiple devices (ie in a family or over a few years as you go through multiple devices) the odds are in your favour if you do not purchase insurance. Insurers make their money by charging enough so that on average their claims are less than the collected premiums. Unless you are significantly more likely to make a claim than average, buying insurance for a device that you can actually afford to replace yourself is not a good financial decision. House insurance is probably a good financial choice - due to the large price. Appliance insurance is a much less valuable commodity.
If you deal with large numbers (a company with a bunch of phones or cars or buildings for example) then "self insuring" is virtually always less expensive in the long run - you budget some replacement/repair costs into the system and save on sending money to some external insurance company. Yes, you might carry some overall insurance with a huge deductible for those truly catastrophic events, but for the smaller stuff it is cheaper to absorb the costs yourself.
The advantage of the contract is that it provides a clear declaration of the partnership
Can be done without marriage.
Perhaps, but the concept and meaning of marriage is already embedded in society (albeit with a wide variety of understanding) with existing legal and social rights and responsibilities. Any non-marriage construct does not come with that pre-existing weight, seriousness, and history. Of course to many, this can be viewed as an advantage.
as well as a not insignificant barrier to dissolution of the partnership.
I'd say that's more of a disadvantage when you consider the possibility that you may end up miserable.
Sure, it cuts both ways. That's the whole point of barriers to action - they create a disadvantage for you in the potential future to a behaviour that is undesired by you in the present. They are not uncommon in any partnership agreement - the trick is in making them large enough to prevent casual dissolution of the partnership while not so great as to prevent dysfunctional partnerships from being called off. Having no such barriers runs the real risk of making this type of partnership too brittle to provide lasting benefits.
Hey - I'm not saying the current institution of marriage is the best possible arrangement, but rather that it is not without its benefits. It has existed in various forms for quite a large time - it cannot be all bad.
I don't think anyone is questioning the advantages of the relationship. What's being questioned is the advantage of the contract.
In my relationship we have all those advantages, and don't miss any of the few additional ones which would come from a marriage contract. The only intrinsic one is medical decisions, and that's solved with a living will and advanced directives.
The advantage of the contract is that it provides a clear declaration of the partnership as well as a not insignificant barrier to dissolution of the partnership. Thus (in theory at least) members of the partnership can have a higher confidence in the commitment of their partner to the partnership and increased confidence in the longevity of the arrangement.
The amount of value this adds to the partnership of course is highly personal, but for some it is clearly fairly important, and certainly historically most societies have thought that this was a pretty valuable contract to support and promote and enforce.
However, love does not automatically make a relationship happy. The question is, should you stay married if you are not happy? I have chosen to stay married (faithfully, I might add) even though I am miserable because I'm seeing that our children are thriving and I want to keep it that way.
But parent happiness is also important for the kids. It is very positive for the children to see responsible adults (ie their parents) recognizing difficulties and setting priorities in trying to address them. If you are in fact miserable, then I encourage you to try to work with your spouse (and hopefully some outside resource like a counselor) to try to address that. Demonstrating to kids that everyone has troubles, but that it is worthwhile to try to address them rather than just giving up or silently suffering, is a very important guard against them feeling trapped in a similar situation in their own future.
Great! If you weren't married, would you have stuck together? If so, why get married, minor tax advantages aside? Sure it served a purpose once as far as child support goes, but the law has pretty much caught up in most developed countries.
In theory at least, there can be tremendous advantages to having a partner that you can depend on to share various tasks and responsibilities, and making that partnership somewhat difficult to dissolve on a whim can make the partnership more valuable. There are a variety of tasks that can be done more efficiently in such a partnership than singly - making meals for example can be done by one person and consumed by two (or more) with only marginal increase in the labour of the meal-maker. Pooled resources can result in a better home, more expensive neighbourhood, etc. compared to going it alone. Finding a compatible partner may not be particularly easy however.
Regardless of the underlying theoretical limitations of the science, there are also operational limits to the process - there are non-zero chances of people mislabeling samples, mistyping data and misreading results. Presumably one runs multiple tests on any positive match, but knowledge of the expected results has also been shown to influence the conclusions that DNA analysis technicians make.
Filling your database (fingerprint, ear print, tattoo, DNA, etc.) with info from people unlikely to be guilty does increase the odds of a false positive, which of course wastes investigation resources and potentially can convict the wrong person and allow the guilty to stay at large.
At $500 each, $1.5M is only 3000 devices. An extra 3000 iPads on the "second-hand" market is not going to have significant effect over the average selling price, and unless you personally know one of the thieves, it seems unlikely you'll be able to pick up one for a particularly low price.
The Natural gas company is already doing this based on the supposed energy content value which allows them to charge not because of how much you use, but the energy content.
The natural gas company changed from the number of cubic feet to the number of 'therms'. This unit-of-measure isn't in any math book table of conversion units that I remember. Thus, I think it's made up.
A "therm" is equal to 100,000 BTU. Your memory may be bad or your just may never have encountered it, but the first Google hit is the wikipedia article:
Record transgressors and use the policies of your institution to at the very least get it into their institutional record if they commit any accredited dishonesty so that if they have a pattern of that type of behaviour they can be tracked.
I meant to say "academic dishonesty" rather than "accredited dishonesty", though if you can get their dishonesty "accredited", more power to you.
Or require students to also hand in the intermediate steps for the homework just like old school math.
At the start of the course have a discussion about ethics and expectations. Have a class discussion of the purpose of the exercises. Have the class participate in designing the evaluation scheme (percentages for HW, tests, etc.) Get them to buy into the course so they view it as something they are participating in because they see value in their participation. Have them turn in some intermediate steps, and maybe some commentary on things they found challenging or interesting about the activities.
Record transgressors and use the policies of your institution to at the very least get it into their institutional record if they commit any accredited dishonesty so that if they have a pattern of that type of behaviour they can be tracked.
The methodology of comparing this year's 3rd graders vs. last year's 3rd graders has always struck me as badly flawed. I've never understood why progress isn't measured for individual students, year-over-year, and then aggregated. That actually gives you an accurate measure of student progress. And it removes any need for demographic grouping of students--if a group of students (regardless of race) have a lower starting point (in the aggregate), then that's baked in to the measurement process.
I think that typically that type of thing is done - the 3rd graders are then remeasured in the 6th grade, and that performance difference is an important factor in planning decisions. Or the 3rd graders are measured at the start and the end of the year.
At least that is what is done in systems that are trying to improve student outcomes. In systems where people are trying to find a scapegoat for why Johnny can't read, it is easier to measure some co-horts and then burn down the schools that do poorly and salt the earth so that some other "bad" school won't accidentally grow there in the future.
In one sense I could almost see schools competing for black enrollment so that their score goes up, but that is about the only positive thing about this law. And not likely to happen.
Ideally, the system should work to give attention and resources to those schools that need it the most, and rewarding those that can show the best student gains. In a perfect world, the poor performing kids would be a "valuable" commodity for a school with the ability to help them - it might even be "easier" to get a bunch of failing students to pass than it is to get a bunch of passing students to "excel" - certainly from an aggregate point of view, bringing the low end of the curve up to the middle has more impact than bringing it top end of the curve up to the max - there is more room for improvement from a score of 40% than from a score of 80%.
Unfortunately, low school scores generally result in "punishment" for the school rather than increased resources to improve their task.
The new standards still require every student, regardless of background, to correctly answer the same number of questions to pass SOL tests.
For example, every student who takes the third-grade math exam must answer correctly 23 of 35 questions to pass, no matter their race or background.... The state did set new pass rates, or goals for how many students in each group pass each exam.
Using the same example of the third-grade math test: the state goal is for 45 percent of black students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly and for 82 percent of Asian students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly.
It's still stupid, ignorant, and racist as all get-out (redundancy noted), but black students won't be getting "C" grades for 45% scores.
The overall idea of setting achievable goals (we will be "doing well" if x% of our worst scoring students in year 1 reach a certain goal in year 2) is probably a good one. Tracking where your students are staring from and comparing it to where they end up is useful. Using racial information as a proxy for measurements of starting level might be simple, quick, and heck, it could even be statistically accurate, but as a policy it is pretty short sighted.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's your kind that makes police behave as badly as they did in this case. Huge asshats with a hard on for getting away with being asshats based on freedoms which assume that most people in fact will not be asshats. And you'll never bother to look in the mirror for the reason, it'll be someone else's fault.
The reasons for police illegal actions might possibly be a factor in sentencing, but they usually don't alter the legality of the act. If an officer makes an arrest on grounds that they know to be inaccurate, that just ain't right, no matter what the asshattery level of the arestee.
That would depend on where he got the logo from, and if the logo's production was licensed. If he bought a licensed logo from a store and slapped it on then I don't see a violation. It would also depend on if the show has fallen into the public domain. I had heard, for example, that at least the first season Star Trek had fallen into the public domain because its copyright wasn't renewed, but currently I can't find any evidence of that, but if it's true then it would possibly be legal to use elements from Star Trek in other things without royalties.
I doubt that that is true. Taking a clip from one of the out-of-copyright Superman cartoons and plastering it on a T-Shirt for sale is going to run you into Warner's Trademark lawyers.
I guess I find the year info useful, and have no problem ignoring it at the front of the string when visually parsing things, while at the end of the string it serves no useful sorting purposes, so I stick it at the front. mm-dd-yyyy seems to have no real advantage over yyyy-mm-dd, and a number of disadvantages in all of my usages.
If people are going to call Dec 21 the "Mayan Apocalypse," I'm going to start calling Dec 31 the "Gregorian Apocalypse" ... every year.
I like that one.
I prefer MM/DD/YYYY because it seems to be easiest to sort. Year is so broad it often doesn't eliminate anything, so you want it on the end so that the year bits are the last you have to sort. Day is too specific and doesn't sort related possibilities together. Month gives a balance and is also used as the key for many real world systems that care about date like many legal and financial instruments. So you lead with month, fall back to day, then finally year. Best balance of search-ability and sort-ability.
When do you ever want all of your February things from multiple years grouped together? More often than you want things from the same year grouped together? If you for example through all of your charitable receipts together, would you ever be interested in them being sorted by month-day-year? It seems much more common to want things with dates close to each other *in a single year* to be sorted close to each other. I can maybe think up some rare reasons when it might be convenient, but many many many more when it would be less useful than sorting by year-month-day.
I personally think that it is convenient to have a fairly authoritative website to point people to who have concerns due to the woo-woos raising a fuss. Nothing is ever going to change the minds of the "true believers" but it is useful for those not yet completely bamboozled to have the opportunity to see a more reasonable world-view. I doubt very much that this cost NASA much in terms of resources.
Usually the thrown-away food statistics include food which never even reaches the consumer. For example, your shop stocks too much of a certain food, and it doesn't get sold, and the shop throws it away after it got too old.
The largest percentages do seem to get lost at the consumer end though. All of the producers and shippers have clear economic incentives to decrease losses, while few households track their wastage well enough to realize how big it is.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/how-40-of-our-food-goes-to-waste/261498/
The fact that USA food consumption makes up for less than 10% of household income (5.5 percent at home and 3.9 percent eating out) means that as a fraction of total expenses, the wastage might not be that important to people.
http://www.treehugger.com/health/americans-eat-the-cheapest-food-in-the-world-but-what-is-it-really-costing-us.html
THIS! How is it even possible that 40% is thrown away in America?
Partial explanation: People feel guilty about not "eating healthy". Then they buy a bunch of fruit and veggies, which sit in the produce drawers of their fridges until they rot.
I'd still like to see the data/math behind the 40% though.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/how-40-of-our-food-goes-to-waste/261498/
"What are we doing with all that if we aren't eating it? About two-thirds of consumer food waste is due to spoilage, according to a recent survey of British citizens. Cooking too much food was largely responsible for the remaining third. In the United States, households toss out roughly a quarter of all the food they buy.
The proportions are mostly flipped when it comes to dining out. Restaurants have an economic interest in minimizing spoilage, so they've evolved very sophisticated ways of predicting how much they'll need to buy. But they can't speak to how much an individual diner is liable to eat at a meal, which is why on average, 17 percent of meals are left on the table. Inexplicably, more than half of these "potential leftovers" aren't boxed up; they're just thrown out."
....The only place I ever saw dollar coins in actual use was the Miami metrorail system.
Denver light rail uses them for change from their ticket vending machines, too. Got stuck with only a $20 and needed a ticket. Took me forever to get rid of all the $1 coins I got in change.
I have never had any difficulty spending US $1 coins, Susan/Saq/or presidential. No more difficulty than in spending $1 bills in any case. At the very-very-very least, you bank would take them you know?
Thought of that Planet Money episode as soon as I saw the title. The TL;DL (too long; didn't listen) of the podcast is coins aren't continually circulated like paper bills. People throw them in jars and leave them there for months, years. So *more* coins than bills are actually needed in order to keep the normal supply circulating.
Even if true though, that is a transition issue, eventually you reach a point where the coins start to come out of the jars - even if that takes months or a few years. The value of the coin has a huge impact on this. A roll of pennies is worth $1 while a roll of dollar coins is worth $25. A handful of dollar coins is useful, and does not stay locked away in a jar the way pennies, nickles and dimes might.
For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.
LocalWiki is the outgrowth of the amazingly successful http://daviswiki.org/ which spawned http://wikispot.org/ Encouraging and supporting this type of local non-commercial wiki is great for any community.
I've always thought that the IRS (or other tax collection agency) should be supplying this type of software. They are the ones who know what the rules are supposed to be, they should be the ones to implement it. If they can write the text rules for how to implement the system, they should be able to write the computing rules too. Then make the whole thing open source and/or free software, so anyone interested can double check that the calcs are being done correctly.
Actually, that isn't true for any smartphone if you do the math. Even the iPhone, which carries a higher premium and deductible, costs about 200 USD less on insurance claims than full retail. You save over 200$ worst case.
But most people won't ever make a claim, so particularly if you are amortizing this expense over multiple devices (ie in a family or over a few years as you go through multiple devices) the odds are in your favour if you do not purchase insurance. Insurers make their money by charging enough so that on average their claims are less than the collected premiums. Unless you are significantly more likely to make a claim than average, buying insurance for a device that you can actually afford to replace yourself is not a good financial decision. House insurance is probably a good financial choice - due to the large price. Appliance insurance is a much less valuable commodity.
If you deal with large numbers (a company with a bunch of phones or cars or buildings for example) then "self insuring" is virtually always less expensive in the long run - you budget some replacement/repair costs into the system and save on sending money to some external insurance company. Yes, you might carry some overall insurance with a huge deductible for those truly catastrophic events, but for the smaller stuff it is cheaper to absorb the costs yourself.
The advantage of the contract is that it provides a clear declaration of the partnership
Can be done without marriage.
Perhaps, but the concept and meaning of marriage is already embedded in society (albeit with a wide variety of understanding) with existing legal and social rights and responsibilities. Any non-marriage construct does not come with that pre-existing weight, seriousness, and history. Of course to many, this can be viewed as an advantage.
as well as a not insignificant barrier to dissolution of the partnership.
I'd say that's more of a disadvantage when you consider the possibility that you may end up miserable.
Sure, it cuts both ways. That's the whole point of barriers to action - they create a disadvantage for you in the potential future to a behaviour that is undesired by you in the present. They are not uncommon in any partnership agreement - the trick is in making them large enough to prevent casual dissolution of the partnership while not so great as to prevent dysfunctional partnerships from being called off. Having no such barriers runs the real risk of making this type of partnership too brittle to provide lasting benefits.
Hey - I'm not saying the current institution of marriage is the best possible arrangement, but rather that it is not without its benefits. It has existed in various forms for quite a large time - it cannot be all bad.
I don't think anyone is questioning the advantages of the relationship. What's being questioned is the advantage of the contract.
In my relationship we have all those advantages, and don't miss any of the few additional ones which would come from a marriage contract. The only intrinsic one is medical decisions, and that's solved with a living will and advanced directives.
The advantage of the contract is that it provides a clear declaration of the partnership as well as a not insignificant barrier to dissolution of the partnership. Thus (in theory at least) members of the partnership can have a higher confidence in the commitment of their partner to the partnership and increased confidence in the longevity of the arrangement.
The amount of value this adds to the partnership of course is highly personal, but for some it is clearly fairly important, and certainly historically most societies have thought that this was a pretty valuable contract to support and promote and enforce.
However, love does not automatically make a relationship happy. The question is, should you stay married if you are not happy? I have chosen to stay married (faithfully, I might add) even though I am miserable because I'm seeing that our children are thriving and I want to keep it that way.
But parent happiness is also important for the kids. It is very positive for the children to see responsible adults (ie their parents) recognizing difficulties and setting priorities in trying to address them. If you are in fact miserable, then I encourage you to try to work with your spouse (and hopefully some outside resource like a counselor) to try to address that. Demonstrating to kids that everyone has troubles, but that it is worthwhile to try to address them rather than just giving up or silently suffering, is a very important guard against them feeling trapped in a similar situation in their own future.
Good luck.
Great! If you weren't married, would you have stuck together? If so, why get married, minor tax advantages aside? Sure it served a purpose once as far as child support goes, but the law has pretty much caught up in most developed countries.
In theory at least, there can be tremendous advantages to having a partner that you can depend on to share various tasks and responsibilities, and making that partnership somewhat difficult to dissolve on a whim can make the partnership more valuable. There are a variety of tasks that can be done more efficiently in such a partnership than singly - making meals for example can be done by one person and consumed by two (or more) with only marginal increase in the labour of the meal-maker. Pooled resources can result in a better home, more expensive neighbourhood, etc. compared to going it alone. Finding a compatible partner may not be particularly easy however.
Regardless of the underlying theoretical limitations of the science, there are also operational limits to the process - there are non-zero chances of people mislabeling samples, mistyping data and misreading results. Presumably one runs multiple tests on any positive match, but knowledge of the expected results has also been shown to influence the conclusions that DNA analysis technicians make.
Filling your database (fingerprint, ear print, tattoo, DNA, etc.) with info from people unlikely to be guilty does increase the odds of a false positive, which of course wastes investigation resources and potentially can convict the wrong person and allow the guilty to stay at large.
At $500 each, $1.5M is only 3000 devices. An extra 3000 iPads on the "second-hand" market is not going to have significant effect over the average selling price, and unless you personally know one of the thieves, it seems unlikely you'll be able to pick up one for a particularly low price.
The Natural gas company is already doing this based on the supposed energy content value which allows them to charge not because of how much you use, but the energy content.
The natural gas company changed from the number of cubic feet to the number of 'therms'. This unit-of-measure isn't in any math book table of conversion units that I remember. Thus, I think it's made up.
A "therm" is equal to 100,000 BTU. Your memory may be bad or your just may never have encountered it, but the first Google hit is the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therm
Record transgressors and use the policies of your institution to at the very least get it into their institutional record if they commit any accredited dishonesty so that if they have a pattern of that type of behaviour they can be tracked.
I meant to say "academic dishonesty" rather than "accredited dishonesty", though if you can get their dishonesty "accredited", more power to you.
Or require students to also hand in the intermediate steps for the homework just like old school math.
At the start of the course have a discussion about ethics and expectations. Have a class discussion of the purpose of the exercises. Have the class participate in designing the evaluation scheme (percentages for HW, tests, etc.) Get them to buy into the course so they view it as something they are participating in because they see value in their participation. Have them turn in some intermediate steps, and maybe some commentary on things they found challenging or interesting about the activities.
Record transgressors and use the policies of your institution to at the very least get it into their institutional record if they commit any accredited dishonesty so that if they have a pattern of that type of behaviour they can be tracked.
The methodology of comparing this year's 3rd graders vs. last year's 3rd graders has always struck me as badly flawed. I've never understood why progress isn't measured for individual students, year-over-year, and then aggregated. That actually gives you an accurate measure of student progress. And it removes any need for demographic grouping of students--if a group of students (regardless of race) have a lower starting point (in the aggregate), then that's baked in to the measurement process.
I think that typically that type of thing is done - the 3rd graders are then remeasured in the 6th grade, and that performance difference is an important factor in planning decisions. Or the 3rd graders are measured at the start and the end of the year.
At least that is what is done in systems that are trying to improve student outcomes. In systems where people are trying to find a scapegoat for why Johnny can't read, it is easier to measure some co-horts and then burn down the schools that do poorly and salt the earth so that some other "bad" school won't accidentally grow there in the future.
In one sense I could almost see schools competing for black enrollment so that their score goes up, but that is about the only positive thing about this law. And not likely to happen.
Ideally, the system should work to give attention and resources to those schools that need it the most, and rewarding those that can show the best student gains. In a perfect world, the poor performing kids would be a "valuable" commodity for a school with the ability to help them - it might even be "easier" to get a bunch of failing students to pass than it is to get a bunch of passing students to "excel" - certainly from an aggregate point of view, bringing the low end of the curve up to the middle has more impact than bringing it top end of the curve up to the max - there is more room for improvement from a score of 40% than from a score of 80%.
Unfortunately, low school scores generally result in "punishment" for the school rather than increased resources to improve their task.
Florida appears to have set the passing rate (and not the passing scores) differently (per TFA); while VA simple set different passing scores.
No, Virginia didn't. The shitty summary just made it look like they did.
Another ref, besides TFA: [Citation]
The new standards still require every student, regardless of background, to correctly answer the same number of questions to pass SOL tests.
For example, every student who takes the third-grade math exam must answer correctly 23 of 35 questions to pass, no matter their race or background. ...
The state did set new pass rates, or goals for how many students in each group pass each exam.
Using the same example of the third-grade math test: the state goal is for 45 percent of black students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly and for 82 percent of Asian students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly.
It's still stupid, ignorant, and racist as all get-out (redundancy noted), but black students won't be getting "C" grades for 45% scores.
The overall idea of setting achievable goals (we will be "doing well" if x% of our worst scoring students in year 1 reach a certain goal in year 2) is probably a good one. Tracking where your students are staring from and comparing it to where they end up is useful. Using racial information as a proxy for measurements of starting level might be simple, quick, and heck, it could even be statistically accurate, but as a policy it is pretty short sighted.