Be very careful jumping on the "everything must be measured" bandwagon. When deciding on weather something should be measured you need to determine the impact it has on the final product, the accuracy of the measurements and how much it costs to measure.
I tend to think that teaching tends to fall into a category that makes it extremely difficult to measure.
That shows a number of things that seem to improve teacher quality. Experience is one, and is especially noticeable in the first 5 years, depth of subject knowledge is another. If we focus on things to help "season" teachers faster and increase their depth of knowledge we will get better teachers. Teacher mentoring is big trend right now (just google it when you have a few spare hours) and seems to be well worth it. I'm not a huge fan of No Child Left Behind, but it's attempts to require more "highly qualified" teachers is at least heading in the right direction. It might be the best part of that bill actually.
Sometimes instead of focusing on measuring quality, you just need to focus on doing the things that you know will increase quality.
You've gotta be a bit humble when focusing on teacher quality though. While it is a factor in education, home-quality still blows it out of the water in terms of overall impact. That includes nutrition as well. WIC/food stamps and the school lunch program do far more to increase the quality of our education than all the teacher quality you could ever get. The best teacher in the school may not be doing anywhere near as much good as the school lunch lady is!
The USDA has been setting guidelines for decades. Those % of your recommended daily intake charts on everything in the store: USDA. Food pyramid and whatever it's been replaced with now: USDA. The program in question: State 9NOT FEDERAL) program which is using the USDA guidelines to assist in making healthy meals.
Diet can certainly help you lose weight, but it won't make you fit. I'd rather be moderately overweight but still capable of taking several flights of steps without getting short of breath than at-weight but winded after a single flight of steps.
Actually plenty of legitimate offices won't see an uninsured patient, even if you state you have plenty of money to pay cash. Most medical practices don't lack for business and you simply aren't worth the risk to them. This is sometimes the sign of a good and popular doctor, but it can also be a simple case of demand outstripping supply.
It's also not uncommon for an office to not be accepting any new patients whatsoever because they simply have no more capacity unless they add more Doctor's or existing patients die or no longer need that specific specialty anymore (that's common in pediatrics and pediatric subspecialties). In larger practices it may just be the most well-known docs that aren't accepting new patients but you can still get in with the other docs.
While I find the ideal morally repugnant it would be perfectly legal. The only time a Doctor is legally required to treat patients is in an emergency room or if it's a pregnant woman in active labor (see EMTALA). The Civil Rights Act might apply as well, so they may not be able to refuse treatment based on race/religion/sex and so forth.
Typically Doctor's have contracts with hospitals which require them to see patients when they are on call for their specialty or lose privileges at that hospital. For their private practice they have much more freedom in accepting or rejecting patients.
Although exceptionally rare, a Hospital can even kick admitted patients out. It turns out some patients think they can sexually harass the nurses and they just have to put up with it. They don't and in extreme cases they will discharge you for it. They typically try to find a male nurse or transfer to another facility, but they don't have too.
While 90% of your typical hospital chart is both incomprehensible and useless after you've been discharged (you probably don't care how much you peed on a given day), the Discharge Summary, Operative Notes and most radiology reports should be reasonably comprehensible with a little help from a dictionary or Google. If a specialist is consulted the Consult Notes may be significantly more technical, but potentially very educational. Progress Notes are frequently still hand-written and may be illegible, but I still recommend people get copies of them. Labwork is just raw data that most people won't be able to do anything with, but in most cases the results that are outside 'normal' will be flagged for you.
I recommend everyone acquire everything I've listed above anytime they are in the hospital. If you have any questions bring it with you to your regular doctor and ask!
I'd have to say that the many variants on heart surgery are pretty major exceptions to that. From bypass to valve replacement to a full artificial heart. They are all pretty reliable and can add many years of very productive life and for the most part a "full recovery". Artificial joints are pretty great and quite reliable as well. Hearts and joints both perform simple mechanical functions that we can emulate pretty well. Other organs are much more difficult.
The main thing is to try to have a level-headed talk with your doctor and ask what the prospects are.
From reading the article it seems the biggest benefit was in construction time. The big reactors may create tons of profit once they get going, but they take 7+ years to build, with no guarantee that the economics will remain the same once it's built. Smaller reactors may not be as profitable as the big ones, but the ability to get money coming in far sooner may outweigh overall profit.
It's been said a few dozen times here already, but this isn't the test he took. The test he took was for 10th grade, the samples were from 4th and 8th grade tests.
What hasn't been mentioned is why the paper decided to use those. They had to know that a whole lot of people would make that mistake and it appears that they were intentionally trying to make him look like an idiot. That's not very good reporting if you ask me.
Melon covers a number of fruits in range of sizes. Considering they're trying to give a size comparison that's not terribly useful. I didn't realize they would be considered uncommon and I'm guessing the majority of the readership (remember, it's a local paper) would be quite familiar with the term.
Depending on how you and your city are set up recycling can save you time. How often do you have to take the trash out? How often would you have to take it out if only genuine trash was in it? In general the only time I take out the trash is the night before pick-up unless it's really starting to stink for some reason (diapers or rotten food since we don't have composting). Depending on how far your primary trash can is, this may save you a lot of time.
My city only has drive-thru recycling, but we didn't even have that option in our previous town so we decided to try it out. I was truly amazed by how much recycling we had, especially cardboard. They'll actually sort everything there, but we sort into plastics, metal/glass and cardboard. We let them sort the various plastics and the metal/glass there.
My city takes a pretty low-key approach to incentivizing recycling. They have 3 sizes of trash cans for your curbside pickup and the bigger ones cost a bit more per month than the smaller ones. I believe it's only $2/month difference. They are discussing offering curb-side recycling in the future.
This article isn't talking to scientists, it's talking to the public in hopes that we will put pressure on the scientists to do better. He's basically trying to shame the rest of the profession into doing better.
You say you can't wait to learn why the naked mole rat doesn't get cancer on it's own... well if NIH/NIA keeps it's current attitudes and gets it's budget cut then none of us may ever find out.
I don't think the author would disagree with you and they certainly aren't against animal testing. The point is that the only reason we test mice is because they are easy to raise in factory conditions, breed fast and we have a lot of data on them. Those are all very good things. The problem is that they are terrible stand-ins for human beings most of the time and especially as stand ins for cancer, since they don't even get the same cancers as we do. The author is encouraging us to find the best animal test subject for the test instead of just using the most convenient. That may vary depending on what is being tested. And yes, it may take much longer due to gestational cycles and such, but that's ok. Good, accurate research is worth the time and the wait.
No, I'm very pleased with his ability to communicate in a way that is perfectly understandable to normal people. I don't see you complaining about his using the term "octopus" which is just as much a nickname as "kraken" since neither of them is the scientific name of the animal in question.
If someone discovers a large dinosaur that matches any of the various representations of dragons through the ages I'd have absolutely no problem with them calling by that name.
To be less snarky about it: Communicating scientific information to the public and to the press is always a tricky endeavor and there is a balance to be found between speaking 90% latin and between super-sensationalism. I thought this article struck a decent balance between the two.
Most people with accents are very quickly understandable.
To an adult this is certainly true, but not necessarily for children. Children are not just small adults.
I can see the danger in this and it could be used improperly depending on how the decisions are made. It sounds like they are just sending people to the classrooms and having them make the call. That's clearly not a particularly good way of doing it. Ideally you'd want some sort of blind approach where you just play high-quality audio recordings of the teacher to some kids and ask them what was said.
It's hard to overcome my raw suspicion of anything that Arizona does lately, but if done properly (very minimal punishment for accent offenders and free and convenient classes) then this could have a lot of benefits for both students and teachers.
Yeah, I didn't say that. All I said was that we knew what downsides there are to our system and society has accepted them. This says nothing about the USSR or communism.
I wouldn't say that society has accepted the downsides. I'd say we found an alternate and less extreme solution than what Marx proposed. For the most part we've relied on increased government regulation and labor unions, basically setting up other entities with enough power to counter-balance the ultra-pure capitalists.
Nope, it's taking control away from the user. In the past I had my account setup so that people could not tag me in images at all, no exceptions.
Now anybody can tag me in an image on their profile. I can choose whether or not that get's listed on MY profile, but I cannot control where I'm tagged on other's profiles, and am not necessarily even aware of it.
Here's the actual text of the current options: Profile Review: Approve or reject posts you're tagged in before they go on your profile. Note: You can still be tagged. This controls whether tags go on to your profile.
Profile Visibility: Decide who sees posts you're tagged in on your profile after you approve them.
As soon as Google gets Google+ working with Apps accounts I'm outa here.
I believe the point is that it should be the states responsibility to prove that the guitar is made with illegally harvested wood, not my responsibility to prove that it isn't. For the most part, customs/immigration has never really operated on any kind of presumption of innocence and the current climate isn't likely to make that any better.
In recent decades perhaps, but throughout most of history theology has generally been the most intellectually rigorous pursuit there was. You may not agree with their foundational assumptions, but they were generally aware of what they were assuming and were following quite rigorous logic beyond that.
There are still some hard-core theologians out there, typically in the theology departments of the Ivy League. They don't make for very good entertainment though so few are very aware of them.
Finally! A legitimate complaint about the study. I was beginning to doubt we could do anything other than beat our chests and say "MS BAD!" Kudos to you!
You're looking at a different measurement. Yours is probably also worth looking at of course, but it's a different measurement.
It is commonly call the debt-to-income ration, but that could certainly be called a poor choice of terms. It's about the accumulation of debt, not the total debt load. It is what I said it was: for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one. This does accumulate into a debt load over time, just like it does in businesses.
If I had a point (and I'm not sure I did), it was that those seeking for the govt to be run more like a business might be in for a nasty shock if they got what they asked for. The budget of a sovereign nation is very different from that of a household or a business and approaching it from either direction will lead you astray if you aren't careful.
And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.
Slashdot Mirror
Be very careful jumping on the "everything must be measured" bandwagon. When deciding on weather something should be measured you need to determine the impact it has on the final product, the accuracy of the measurements and how much it costs to measure.
I tend to think that teaching tends to fall into a category that makes it extremely difficult to measure.
That doesn't mean that we completely give up however! Take a look at this article: http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/teacher-quality/
That shows a number of things that seem to improve teacher quality. Experience is one, and is especially noticeable in the first 5 years, depth of subject knowledge is another. If we focus on things to help "season" teachers faster and increase their depth of knowledge we will get better teachers. Teacher mentoring is big trend right now (just google it when you have a few spare hours) and seems to be well worth it. I'm not a huge fan of No Child Left Behind, but it's attempts to require more "highly qualified" teachers is at least heading in the right direction. It might be the best part of that bill actually.
Sometimes instead of focusing on measuring quality, you just need to focus on doing the things that you know will increase quality.
You've gotta be a bit humble when focusing on teacher quality though. While it is a factor in education, home-quality still blows it out of the water in terms of overall impact. That includes nutrition as well. WIC/food stamps and the school lunch program do far more to increase the quality of our education than all the teacher quality you could ever get. The best teacher in the school may not be doing anywhere near as much good as the school lunch lady is!
The USDA has been setting guidelines for decades. Those % of your recommended daily intake charts on everything in the store: USDA. Food pyramid and whatever it's been replaced with now: USDA. The program in question: State 9NOT FEDERAL) program which is using the USDA guidelines to assist in making healthy meals.
Source: http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2012/02/16/school-lunch-uproar-in-north-carolina-preschool/
Diet can certainly help you lose weight, but it won't make you fit. I'd rather be moderately overweight but still capable of taking several flights of steps without getting short of breath than at-weight but winded after a single flight of steps.
Actually plenty of legitimate offices won't see an uninsured patient, even if you state you have plenty of money to pay cash. Most medical practices don't lack for business and you simply aren't worth the risk to them. This is sometimes the sign of a good and popular doctor, but it can also be a simple case of demand outstripping supply.
It's also not uncommon for an office to not be accepting any new patients whatsoever because they simply have no more capacity unless they add more Doctor's or existing patients die or no longer need that specific specialty anymore (that's common in pediatrics and pediatric subspecialties). In larger practices it may just be the most well-known docs that aren't accepting new patients but you can still get in with the other docs.
While I find the ideal morally repugnant it would be perfectly legal. The only time a Doctor is legally required to treat patients is in an emergency room or if it's a pregnant woman in active labor (see EMTALA). The Civil Rights Act might apply as well, so they may not be able to refuse treatment based on race/religion/sex and so forth.
Typically Doctor's have contracts with hospitals which require them to see patients when they are on call for their specialty or lose privileges at that hospital. For their private practice they have much more freedom in accepting or rejecting patients.
Although exceptionally rare, a Hospital can even kick admitted patients out. It turns out some patients think they can sexually harass the nurses and they just have to put up with it. They don't and in extreme cases they will discharge you for it. They typically try to find a male nurse or transfer to another facility, but they don't have too.
While 90% of your typical hospital chart is both incomprehensible and useless after you've been discharged (you probably don't care how much you peed on a given day), the Discharge Summary, Operative Notes and most radiology reports should be reasonably comprehensible with a little help from a dictionary or Google. If a specialist is consulted the Consult Notes may be significantly more technical, but potentially very educational. Progress Notes are frequently still hand-written and may be illegible, but I still recommend people get copies of them. Labwork is just raw data that most people won't be able to do anything with, but in most cases the results that are outside 'normal' will be flagged for you.
I recommend everyone acquire everything I've listed above anytime they are in the hospital. If you have any questions bring it with you to your regular doctor and ask!
Can you think of a better way to communicate this to John Q. Public?
I'd have to say that the many variants on heart surgery are pretty major exceptions to that. From bypass to valve replacement to a full artificial heart. They are all pretty reliable and can add many years of very productive life and for the most part a "full recovery". Artificial joints are pretty great and quite reliable as well. Hearts and joints both perform simple mechanical functions that we can emulate pretty well. Other organs are much more difficult.
The main thing is to try to have a level-headed talk with your doctor and ask what the prospects are.
From reading the article it seems the biggest benefit was in construction time. The big reactors may create tons of profit once they get going, but they take 7+ years to build, with no guarantee that the economics will remain the same once it's built. Smaller reactors may not be as profitable as the big ones, but the ability to get money coming in far sooner may outweigh overall profit.
It's been said a few dozen times here already, but this isn't the test he took. The test he took was for 10th grade, the samples were from 4th and 8th grade tests.
What hasn't been mentioned is why the paper decided to use those. They had to know that a whole lot of people would make that mistake and it appears that they were intentionally trying to make him look like an idiot. That's not very good reporting if you ask me.
Melon covers a number of fruits in range of sizes. Considering they're trying to give a size comparison that's not terribly useful. I didn't realize they would be considered uncommon and I'm guessing the majority of the readership (remember, it's a local paper) would be quite familiar with the term.
Depending on how you and your city are set up recycling can save you time. How often do you have to take the trash out? How often would you have to take it out if only genuine trash was in it? In general the only time I take out the trash is the night before pick-up unless it's really starting to stink for some reason (diapers or rotten food since we don't have composting). Depending on how far your primary trash can is, this may save you a lot of time.
My city only has drive-thru recycling, but we didn't even have that option in our previous town so we decided to try it out. I was truly amazed by how much recycling we had, especially cardboard. They'll actually sort everything there, but we sort into plastics, metal/glass and cardboard. We let them sort the various plastics and the metal/glass there.
My city takes a pretty low-key approach to incentivizing recycling. They have 3 sizes of trash cans for your curbside pickup and the bigger ones cost a bit more per month than the smaller ones. I believe it's only $2/month difference. They are discussing offering curb-side recycling in the future.
This article isn't talking to scientists, it's talking to the public in hopes that we will put pressure on the scientists to do better. He's basically trying to shame the rest of the profession into doing better.
You say you can't wait to learn why the naked mole rat doesn't get cancer on it's own... well if NIH/NIA keeps it's current attitudes and gets it's budget cut then none of us may ever find out.
I don't think the author would disagree with you and they certainly aren't against animal testing. The point is that the only reason we test mice is because they are easy to raise in factory conditions, breed fast and we have a lot of data on them. Those are all very good things. The problem is that they are terrible stand-ins for human beings most of the time and especially as stand ins for cancer, since they don't even get the same cancers as we do. The author is encouraging us to find the best animal test subject for the test instead of just using the most convenient. That may vary depending on what is being tested. And yes, it may take much longer due to gestational cycles and such, but that's ok. Good, accurate research is worth the time and the wait.
No, I'm very pleased with his ability to communicate in a way that is perfectly understandable to normal people. I don't see you complaining about his using the term "octopus" which is just as much a nickname as "kraken" since neither of them is the scientific name of the animal in question.
If someone discovers a large dinosaur that matches any of the various representations of dragons through the ages I'd have absolutely no problem with them calling by that name.
To be less snarky about it: Communicating scientific information to the public and to the press is always a tricky endeavor and there is a balance to be found between speaking 90% latin and between super-sensationalism. I thought this article struck a decent balance between the two.
Most people with accents are very quickly understandable.
To an adult this is certainly true, but not necessarily for children. Children are not just small adults.
I can see the danger in this and it could be used improperly depending on how the decisions are made. It sounds like they are just sending people to the classrooms and having them make the call. That's clearly not a particularly good way of doing it. Ideally you'd want some sort of blind approach where you just play high-quality audio recordings of the teacher to some kids and ask them what was said.
It's hard to overcome my raw suspicion of anything that Arizona does lately, but if done properly (very minimal punishment for accent offenders and free and convenient classes) then this could have a lot of benefits for both students and teachers.
Yeah, I didn't say that. All I said was that we knew what downsides there are to our system and society has accepted them. This says nothing about the USSR or communism.
I wouldn't say that society has accepted the downsides. I'd say we found an alternate and less extreme solution than what Marx proposed. For the most part we've relied on increased government regulation and labor unions, basically setting up other entities with enough power to counter-balance the ultra-pure capitalists.
Nope, it's taking control away from the user. In the past I had my account setup so that people could not tag me in images at all, no exceptions.
Now anybody can tag me in an image on their profile. I can choose whether or not that get's listed on MY profile, but I cannot control where I'm tagged on other's profiles, and am not necessarily even aware of it.
Here's the actual text of the current options:
Profile Review: Approve or reject posts you're tagged in before they go on your profile. Note: You can still be tagged. This controls whether tags go on to your profile.
Profile Visibility: Decide who sees posts you're tagged in on your profile after you approve them.
As soon as Google gets Google+ working with Apps accounts I'm outa here.
I believe the point is that it should be the states responsibility to prove that the guitar is made with illegally harvested wood, not my responsibility to prove that it isn't. For the most part, customs/immigration has never really operated on any kind of presumption of innocence and the current climate isn't likely to make that any better.
In recent decades perhaps, but throughout most of history theology has generally been the most intellectually rigorous pursuit there was. You may not agree with their foundational assumptions, but they were generally aware of what they were assuming and were following quite rigorous logic beyond that.
There are still some hard-core theologians out there, typically in the theology departments of the Ivy League. They don't make for very good entertainment though so few are very aware of them.
While I am very sympathetic to the desire to get him out of Texas I'm afraid I can't support foisting him off on the rest of the country.
Finally! A legitimate complaint about the study. I was beginning to doubt we could do anything other than beat our chests and say "MS BAD!" Kudos to you!
Those people have the option to upgrade their PCs. Many people do not have any options which provide a stable always-on connection.
I can understand their reasoning. I don't agree with it, but it's their choice and their right to limit their audience if they choose to.
I'll admit I'm somewhat biased in that I'm just not that interested in D3.
You're looking at a different measurement. Yours is probably also worth looking at of course, but it's a different measurement.
It is commonly call the debt-to-income ration, but that could certainly be called a poor choice of terms. It's about the accumulation of debt, not the total debt load. It is what I said it was: for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one. This does accumulate into a debt load over time, just like it does in businesses.
Of course, right now the biggest owner of US debt is actually the Federal Reserve, which overshadowed China 2 months ago: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/fed-eclipses-china-top-owner-us-debt. So due to the weirdness that is the Fed, the govt now owes itself 1.4 Trillion.
If I had a point (and I'm not sure I did), it was that those seeking for the govt to be run more like a business might be in for a nasty shock if they got what they asked for. The budget of a sovereign nation is very different from that of a household or a business and approaching it from either direction will lead you astray if you aren't careful.
And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-24-Dont-believe-national-debt-hype_n.htm