The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous.
Depends on rater training, rating scales/rubrics, and the statistics used to account for multiple-rater situations (many facet Rasch model to the rescue here).
Whenever testing comes up on Slashdot, I lose my whole day to explaining how testing works, heheh.
It is not that easy to do. Something like the SAT needs to be able to ascertain the level of a very broad population of users. That is done by targeting items at examinees of a certain ability, using item response theory difficulty estimates acquired in pilot. Yes, you could add more difficult questions, but those are going to render very little information about most people who take them, because they won't get them right. Because the edges of the bell curve are so thin, throwing a bunch of hard questions at the top end will water down the results for the majority of users. Ideally, you want most of your items that are very close to the level of the examinees, so you get nice "high-resolution" (although no one uses that term but me, since I came in from IT and explain everything as though it were a computer) discriminations of ability for the most people possible.
The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.
This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor). And I have to take it again here in a few months to start applying for PhD programs. One of the drawbacks of researching psychometrics is that at some point you'll have to take one of these tests, knowing what the problems are.
So there you go. Yes, adding harder questions would indeed get you better discrimination among the top examinees, but at the cost of discrimination for the bulk of them. Ideally, you could just have the examinee come back and take the next-hardest test, but no one would go for that. Or perhaps the tests could be tiered, with linking items/anchoring, and the examinee could choose what level they wanted to take. I don't know of any major tests that do that, though, and having disjoint populations might cause a problem...
Anyway, there's more testing minutiae than you require.
There is one reason why Gmail killed my email client application: Conversation view. All related messages stay together and you never have the embarrassing problem of replying before reading all of the responses. It also makes for a cleaner inbox that actually reflects how many things you've got on your plate right now. I don't know why offline email clients can get it right (Postbox is trying, but it still isn't as good as Gmail).
The only thing that breaks it is if you have one of those annoying correspondents who insists on just hitting "reply" to any random message from you, and writing about something unrelated without changing the subject line. Or the people who do change the subject line, even though the subject hasn't changed.
I also prefer subject lines to be a one-line summary of the topic, not a "title." Something like: "Please get me that TPS report by next Friday (10/9)" rather than "TPS report." But that's just personal taste.
I also think that because so many of them are pigs, it drives the real police officers out. I think a lot of people join up with good intentions and then either succumb to the terrible attitudes or change careers.
I'm a teacher, in Japan, and I agree. We (I'm American) don't need more time in classes, because that isn't what makes test scores. Yes, kids here spend more time in school, but a lot of that time is wasted with required club activities and whatnot. I didn't see any more studying when I was teaching Japanese high school than I had when I was going to US high school.
Let me explain why there is a difference in test scores. I think there are two reasons, one good and one bad (full disclosure: I design and research standardized tests):
1) The good reason: Teachers in Japan are actually paid enough to attract people who aren't morons. Becoming a public teacher here is hard. People have to demonstrate proficiency in everything from music to swimming to get their license--in addition to the license they have to have in their teaching subject. It's worth their time and effort if they can land a public teaching job. Teachers are respected more here, which is a cultural difference, but they are also worthy of more respect. Teacher quality in the US is hit and miss. If you get a really smart, good teacher, that person is there for no other reason than he/she really believes in education. He/she could get a better-paying job elsewhere. We've all had these people, and they are saints. More often, however, it seems that we get people who range from mediocre to totally incompetent. But what can you expect when, for many years, being a public teacher means being in the working poor (depends a lot on the district, etc.--another problem in the US--education is too local, so quality cannot be assured).
2) The bad: Much of the "education" here in Japan is more appropriately described as "test prep." I teach at a very prestigious university in Japan. Some of my students went to private "test prep" high schools to get in here. They literally crammed for the entrance exam for 3 years. That is not an education. Especially when Japanese tests are the laughing (crying?) stock of the testing/psychometric community. We're talking about reliability coefficients of 0.7--barely adequate for a low-stakes test in a classroom, except these determine people's futures. So what I'm saying is that we in the US do not want to emulate Japan's test scores, because the way they get them is to forego education altogether, and replace it with bad tests which render meaningless results.
Truth be told, I think I got a pretty good education in the US. It was all about picking the good teachers in jr. high and high school, though. I must admit, however, that math and science education in the K-12 system is abysmal. I actually started out as loving that stuff, but was ultimately driven away by the awful classes and teachers. Now I wish that I had had better teachers, because although I'm pretty good at the multivariate statistics at the heart of psychometric theory, you ask me to solve a quadratic equation, and I am kind of hopeless. There is a giant, high-school-shaped blank in my math/science knowledge. Everything I learned in college stuck, though, because those people are actually paid enough money to attract good people.
Overall, I approve of Obama, but this is dunderheaded misunderstanding of education, education systems, and the way people learn. Just increasing time in class is going to do nothing. We have a quality-assurance problem in US schools; the amount of time spent in class is of minor concern.
Also, as for the "agrarian economy" comment... Um, tell that to all the farm kids I went to school with who really did need to get to work in the summer. I don't think it's wise, ever, to disadvantage farmers and ranchers. When push comes to shove, those people will always be the most important part of any stable economy. They're the only people who still do something with intrinsic value as an occupation. The rest of us are just dicking around because someone else is making sure we stay alive.
I have seen papers receive a fail, when re-presented to a different marker, the paper is graded A+.
Either one of the raters is not following the rubric, or they have different ideas of the purpose of the task.
This is not a question of subjectivity; it's a question of whether all raters are rating the same thing. All rating is subjective. It's just that it's supposed to be based on a shared subjectivity.
Also, when people complain that teachers aren't objective, well, that's not in my contract. All a teacher need be is reasonably objective. But in my class, it's my rules, and the students will defer to them because I know more than they do. If they don't like it, they can take the class from someone else.
That being said, I strive to be as objective as possible, but I have decided (from last year) that I will no longer accept any more papers about Iraq or Afghanistan (I'm American, but I teach outside of the US). This is not because I don't believe that Iraq was/is an illegal war of aggression, because I do, or that Afghanistan wasn't/isn't a massive cock-up, because it is. It's that I cannot read papers vehemently denouncing my country objectively. I don't want my feelings to affect their grade, and after a few of these papers, I really began to worry about that. This is especially true when it comes down to factual claims that I know to be distortions, because I actually remember the lead-ups to those very, very clearly. I don't think it's reasonable to expect some sort of Platonic subjectivity from teachers. They're people.
Furthermore, in the case of papers handed to me with uncomfortable arguments, I have had to ask myself, "Would I submit a paper to a Japanese professor, denouncing Japan for its many genocidal conquests into Korea and finally China, and their total refusal to accept culpability for them?" No, I would not. It would be a really stupid move, and would be indicative of a complete disregard for one of the most important features of good writing: appropriacy to audience.
So, there was a slightly-more-impassioned response than you were probably expecting. In the case of standardized rating, you have a rater training problem. In the case of two separate writing teachers, you may or may not have a problem with the teachers, or a problem with the paper. The scores are not expected to be the same in such a case, unless the teachers are supposed to be teaching identical curricula.
As an English prof myself, I'd like to confirm that we spend a lot of time on students' papers. Good papers are easy to breeze through, but the worse the paper, the more time it takes.
As for machine-grading goes, people have been working on that for 30 years. I have no doubt that, statistically, it can provide useful results.
The problem I'm seeing in these comments, however, is a common confusion of testing for assessment and standardized testing. I can't imagine using software to grade a student's paper in class. The student-teacher relationship is a personal one. That person is paying me to help them get better at writing, for example. It is my job to pore over that paper and show them where and how they can improve.
I am also a tester (I actually mostly work with multiple-choice data, but I've also worked on performance rating--speaking and writing). The relationship between a rater and an examinee is very different from that of a teacher and student. The examinee is paying the rater to put them on a scale with other people. This is not a fine-grained assessment; it is always done at extremely "low resolution." When rating a paper for something like the GRE or other standardized test, it is the rater's job to compare the paper to scoring rubrics and make a call on which box of text best describes the paper, and then make note of the number in that box. That's it. It can't really go any more in-depth than that.
For this reason, your comment about "five-paragraph themes" is an important one: Test task design always needs to be clear about what kind of performance is expected, because it is nigh impossible to write rubrics that can be applied to any performance (believe me on this, I beg of you). However, this is actually a question of test specification, not of the software or raters in question. Personally, as someone who works in EFL, I am actually in favor of retaining the "five-paragraph" formula, at least for timed essay tasks. That format is at the heart of all good rhetoric. Yes, it's stilted and silly, but if you can do it, it means that you know basically how information is expected to be organized in Western, especially Anglophone, societies. No good writer would actually use it, but any good writer could.
Again, this is about putting people in boxes, not reading their essays. I can rate a 1-page essay in about 2 minutes, with excellent model fit (I have always used many-facet Rasch modeling for my multi-rater performance testing). I have no doubt that software could be employed whose ratings would be highly predictive of those of human raters.
1) Who modded this flamebait??? It really is their country, and we (the US) really did steal it, and the hispanic population really is rapidly expanding, which really is just a return to who lived on those areas originally, and by all natural rights. That's not flamebait; that's basic American history and current demographics. Geez!
2):
I figure by 2100 in many areas of Texas, New Mexico and California, English will be taught as a second language.
Um, it already is? I have a friend who is a music teacher at an all-Spanish-speaking school in Colorado. This isn't one of those immersion schools for non-native speakers of Spanish (although we have some of those too); this is a school where 100% of the students are studying English as a second language on top of their regular studies. There are schools like that all over the US.
Wait a minute... Do you mean "foreign" or "second?" "Second" language is used in any context where the population at large uses one language, and that is not the native language of the student. "Foreign" is when no one uses it, but students learn the language to communicate with people from other countries. English will never be a "foreign" language in the US, I think, but it is already a second language for many, many students, and has been for generations (like my grandfather, who, until he started school, only spoke German--parents came from the old country and spoke enough to run their bakery and that's it).
Personally, as a language teacher myself, I don't see what the big deal is. The norm around the world is to learn and use multiple languages, not just one. The US is strange in that so many of its citizens are native speakers of the de facto national language. I would actually like to see English codified as the official language of the US, which does not exclude other languages--particularly Spanish--from being served in areas where it makes sense; it just would determine that all official documents must be available in English, and that only the English versions were binding. Communities need to serve their populace as best they can, and offering services in Spanish in much of the US seems like a no-brainer to me. But I think that it's important that we finally declare English as the official language.
I've not been to Japan, but I've heard it's a treat there too.
Yes, it is. I get in line, show my passport, get my photo and fingerprints taken (this is new, and was implemented in response to the US system), get my bags, hand my card to customs, tell them I don't have any drugs, and walk into the terminal.
Only once has anyone gone through my bags, and it was after a winter of backpacking around Asia, which showed up on my passport as going in and out of China a few times in a few weeks.
My laptop or other devices have never been checked, and I've never heard of them checking them.
On the contrary, when I go back to my home country of the US, I am made to feel like a threat. Paramilitary immigration and customs officers bark orders at me, and one time tried to separate my Japanese wife from me and question her about why she only had $5 for a 3-week visit (joint bank account in the US with her American husband, morons--ever heard of an ATM?). My stuff is riffled through every time, and they have on several occasions destroyed my belongings with their crude handling (scratched an otherwise perfect guitar that I was selling, and put a bottle of shampoo that they had opened back in the bag WITHOUT SCREWING THE TOP ON). --All without my having any recourse to the law.
I've been in and out of China--a totalitarian regime--and it is far, far more pleasant than the US.
I almost never go back to see friends and family anymore--and, believe it or not, a part of the reason for that is the shitty treatment I get from my countrymen at the border.
I avoid Apple stores like the fucking plague, and I'm typing this on a Mac Pro, with my work Air at my left, my iPhone at my right, my old MacBook on my wife's desk, a Mini on the TV, and iPods every goddamn where I look. I don't even know how this happened to me, to be honest.
But those stores are awful. A bunch of pretentious asswipes with spiky hair trying to sell me kit that I don't need or want for prices I could beat virtually anywhere else. The only reason to go to one is to see a product and feel it before buying it somewhere else.
These people seem to think they work for Apple. They don't. They're in retail. They might as well be selling shoes at Payless. It's the same job.
Sometimes I wonder if/when the hipster image Apple cultivates will bite them in the ass. No one I know who uses Macs is like those people in the stores. In fact, all of them are nerds who like having a UNIX terminal. And I just got sick of spending all my time configuring things, whether it be on Linux or Windows, and decided I'd rather pay someone else to do it so I could finally get some work done. It's been good.
Ugh, Apple stores. I just want to punch everyone there when I go.
I agree, but I love InkScape, even though it looks like ass. It's by far my favorite vector graphics program. No one else agrees with me, though. I just click with it. I make what I want right away and off I go. No idea why.
Brace yourself for 10 people suggesting that you use TeX every time you need to type a letter, so you can type a letter about how you want the computer to type the letter before you even type the letter.
As a graduate of the "teach them to shoot and they'll be bored" school of gun safety, let me say that this works. I don't own any guns, because to me, here's what that means:
1) Go spend a lot of money at the sporting goods store (AFTER buying the gun, which ain't cheap) for a bunch of non-reusable crap (ammo).
2) Drive out to the boonies.
3) Plunk away at things for no good goddamned reason, gun oil staining whatever you're wearing that day.
4) Get bored or run out of ammo.
5) Drive back home.
6) Spend the rest of the goddamned day taking guns apart, cleaning and oiling them.
I actually kind of like shooting, but only if I am spared the ownership part. Oh, and I hate the noise, and the ear protection you have to wear because of it.
Now, if you're going out hunting, I can see that tracking something could be fun, but then let's say you bring something down. Now what? You're out their field-dressing a big bloody mammal, pulling out guts and lugging the carcass around. No thanks. Just bring me back some if you get anything, how's that?
I never played with the guns in the house, and they weren't even locked up until my dad inherited so many we needed a gun case. Why should I play with them? I'd shot all of them, and it was not that interesting.
And there is probably the heart of why I think pro-control people are kinda crazy. If they had any idea how mundane firearm ownership and use was, they would shrug their shoulders and move on as well.
I am a Democrat; I support public health insurance; I want to tax the bejeebus out of the ultra-rich. But I grew up in rural America, where everyone has guns, and every time I look at a gun control law, I'm like, "do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound?" Talking to pro-control people, what I've noticed more than anything is this: They are from the city. They think "gun," they think "mugging." That and action movies.
In short, they have no idea what they are talking about.
I try to take urban and foreign friends out shooting whenever they are in my ancestral neck of the woods. I like to call my buddy with the MP3 so they can shoot something that they actually have even seen in the movies and find that it's just not that big a deal. Powerful, yes, but so is a drill.
I think that the anti-control people are absolutely right about the pro-control people: They think guns cause crime. Because they are ignorant (how often can we call highly-educated, urban folks that?), they have this weird idea that people change with a gun in their hand. Well, I guess they do. It's just that the vast, vast majority of people kind of sober up and understand that this is something that can be used safely, and that responsibility and care are needed, just like when driving an automobile. The people who don't have that reaction? Well, those would be the violent criminals. They are broken people; there's just not much we can do about them. They are both cliches, but they are both true: "guns don't kill; people do" and "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns."
Some (let's be honest: very, very few) people are just assholes. That will always be true. Disarming ourselves because of that statistical fact just seems crazy to me.
Just to throw another leg on the pile, I am a linguist at a pretty prestigious university, and yes, that's one of the things English really has going for it. Of course, the main reason is the British/American dominance, but what really helps is that English speakers do not care if you throw in words from other languages, as long as they know what they mean. This is further aided by the fact that English is already a pidgin of Old English and Norse, from when the Vikings conquered large sections of the British Isles. Old English was highly inflected--words changed form to show grammatical function--but people found that when they were working with non-native speakers, it was easier to just settle on a subject-verb-object sentence structure and drop the whole inflection system, which means you can just plunk new words in as-is. Also, our verb forms are in a process of simplification now, as new verbs come in, we have just been adding -ed for past and past participles and calling it good. This trend is also spreading to original English verbs as well. The language is becoming grammatically easier all the time. Add to the Vikings a Norman occupation, as well as a legacy of Latin from the Roman (Catholic) Empire, and you have a language that is extremely promiscuous.
Furthermore, although many complain about English's messy spelling system, the truth is that it is actually a considerable strength. The reason that English spelling can be a little hard is that English usually doesn't re-spell words when borrowing them. It just takes the word, uses whatever is the most common romanization scheme for the language in question if it doesn't use the roman alphabet, and throws it in. That's how open it is to new words.
I think the next big international language is sure to be Mandarin, but the writing system is a major drawback. Hanzi (kanji in Japanese) is awesome when you know the character in question, but indecipherable if you don't. It's really cool to just take a single ideogram, write it down, and have an entire morphological unit, but the learning load is really, really high. Of course, Mao saw this and tried to scrap hanzi for the pinyin romanization system, but it was way too unpopular so that idea died. I hope there's something in place before our Chinese overlords are imposing it upon us.:-p
Thank god someone said this. This has been floating around the web for the last few days and every time I see it I'm like, "Uh, hit a glass door that is designed to shatter into tiny pieces so it doesn't hurt someone, run in, pick up a bunch of stuff without even the AC adapters, run out."
Only an idiot would do such a thing without a mask, and there isn't a security guard alive who is going to go up against a bunch of guys, armed or no. That's what insurance is for.
I would have been impressed if they had actually gotten the whole products in that time, but they didn't.
A "mastermind" crime, IMO, can't really involve smashing windows. This is the work of common street thugs.
I loved my Shakespeare prof in college. I took him for 2 Shakespeare classes and a classical mythology. One of the things I loved about him was that he didn't require you to agree with him. You DID, however, have to read--the best bullshit detector I've ever come across.
I had a prof for a Thoreau class, though, who fit that negative stereotype perfectly. Outdoorsy hippie naturalist students got As; those of us who, for example, interpreted vast sections of his writing as masked professions of homosexual longing, however, found ourselves with Cs on every assignment. I actually went to her office twice and basically pleaded, "What do you WANT?" It was a required 400-level class, and I was just trying to get out of school at that point. I'd been kind of biding my time in the English department, waiting for the International Studies degree program to start, after which I could transfer in all my Japanese language and Asian history/poli-sci/economics credits and get a degree that reflected what I'd actually spent my mental energy on--a program that, once it finally materialized, was in the ART DEPARTMENT--No thanks! I'll take English over that!!!
She told me I needed to try to get in touch with nature more.
Towards the end of the class I just kind of gave up. I said, "I don't see why my personal philosophical orientation towards nature should have anything to do with my grade in a literature class." I kind of resigned myself to getting a C in my last semester of university, in my major department, and having to take another semester to make up that one class.
Then my professor invited a renowned Thoreau scholar to come speak to us.
He said at one point, "of course, all serious Thoreau scholars now recognize that Thoreau was gay, and that much of his writing was an attempt to deal with that in a society in which that could be dangerous." I shot a glance at my prof. She blushed and lowered her eyes.
I got an A.
If you are a high school or early-undergrad who is reading this, please take my advice on this: DON'T major in English, or any of the humanities, unless you want to be a teacher. That is coming from a university English professor (well, a linguist, whose research is all statistics, but who works in an English department). Just don't do it. It is a silly place.
I am an educator. Allow me to tell you why this worked for you:
One thing: Supportive, intelligent, educated parents. --The same thing that predicts success in regular school!
People have been trying to figure out why socioeconomic class is such a strong predictor for academic success for a long time, but they didn't want to say what any teacher knows: Middle class people raise their kids better, which ensures they grow up to be middle class. You sometimes get poor people who do it too. They don't move up the socioeconomic ladder, but their kids do.
This is what Geoffry Canada figured out and has applied with some very impressive success at the Harlem Children's Zone. He has said that we've been going about supporting inner-city families all wrong. We've been throwing money at them, thinking that the key ingredient of middle-class kids' success was money. It wasn't. It was culture.
Your mom read to you. That is the single biggest thing a parent can and should do from a very early age. Language, I believe, is the seed of all other learning (full disclosure: I'm a linguist). There is a lot of research suggesting this, one piece of which is that carried out by Margaret Wu at the University of Melbourne, where she found that she could predict reading scores from the science component of the PISA test. Obviously, not that well for individuals, but given the whole dataset, she could predict the average for a country (for cases where they only administered the science one to everyone). Language is key, and when you read to a young child, you are exposing him to organized language at a much higher level than he is used to hearing in normal conversation. It also instills a value for the written word, as it did in your case, and as it did in mine.
So what I'm saying is that, if your parents are smart, educated, and willing to spend the time, unschooling probably provides a better learning environment than we could ever put together in a school. The really scary thing I keep seeing in the US, and especially here in Japan, is the parents expecting more and more from the school. I don't work in K-12 anymore (thank god) but when I did, I was often flabbergasted by the things parents would expect from us. "We only see your kid for 6 hours a day, 8 months a year, in a room with 29 other kids," I'd think, "you have them one-on-one 18 hours a day, all year round! What can I possibly do that you can't?"
I'm assuming someone was at home with you all that time. That's a biggie as well. I might get murdered for saying this, but I've started to think that maybe all those crazy women who protested the ERA were right--sending all the moms to work really did damage society. We are now dealing with a generation in their majority which was not supported when growing up, and as a result, isn't very bright. I was lucky in that my parents work from home, so someone was always there when I needed them, and we used to take long trips (taking school off for up to a month) to see the US. I did my homework in the car. A month of classwork took about 4 days, if I remember correctly. If we had just lived that lifestyle, I think I would have learned a lot more.
Sweat doesn't smell until many hours after exercise
I invite you to come smell my coworker when he arrives at work after biking on a sunny day.
I used to bike to work when I lived in Colorado. There were dedicated bike trails that could get you just about anywhere, and the dry, moderate climate meant that even if/when I sweat, it evaporated immediately, and I didn't have to worry much about inclement weather. Also, Colorado is flat (unless you live in the mountains, obviously), so there are no hills to climb. And Colorado culture means you can totally wear shorts to work, so I was always dressed appropriately for the season.
Here in Japan, I biked to work my first year, but gave up. It was a little too far and too hilly to be attempting every morning and every evening in a suit. The frequent rain was a problem, sometimes resulting in my kind of just hanging out at work until 9, when I could have left at 6, while my wife ate the dinner she made for us alone. Also, with the high humidity, sweat doesn't go away; it just soaks in. Also not cool for the suits.
Now I drive. I would like to walk, and sometimes do, but that can result in being unpresentable too, if it's in the dead of summer. Also, it's a 45min walk at even a brisk pace. Also, there's the hill. Losing 45min to a commute I can do in 10 with a car just doesn't seem like a good use of my time.
Basically, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of reasonable reasons not to ride a bike to work. I loved doing it in Colorado--I loved the freedom; I loved the fresh air; I loved the exercise; I loved not spending money on the commute. I wish I could do it again, but I just can't.
Finally, FWIW, I'm not fat. I'm at ideal weight, and still fit in my clothes from college. I'm 35. So this isn't a "blarg blarg it's not my fault I'm a tub of lard pass the cookies" whinge; it's an attempt to show why there are some very good reasons for not biking to work.
What I can never get my head around are all the people working at large corporations and saying "Government is inefficient! Private industry free market invisible hand blah blah blah is god!" Um, not at any corporation I've ever worked for. I'd say that inefficiency and blinkard organizational stupidity are diseases of any large organization.
But to actually put a star in the government's column, although in both private or public enterprise, it's actually pretty hard to get fired, the people who make the big mistakes don't have a line item in their contract that says you have to give them a big pile of money when they leave no matter what in the case of government. They get named and shamed and have to find another job.
...That job is almost invariably in private enterprise.
Transparency sucks. It's just a toy. It looks cool, but doesn't do anything, and sometimes makes things hard to see. "Sometimes" is often enough to make the whole thing a net negative.
If it looked cool and never got in the way, then I'm all for it. I'm not one of these anti-aesthetics weirdos we have roaming Slashdot. However, it does get in the way, so it shouldn't be used.
I turn 35 this year. What this means is that I started elementary school in the Carter administration. What that means is that I was taught metric in kindergarten first, and then when Reagan came in to usher in the stupid bullshit that continues to this day in American politics, we were told "okay, forget about metric; here's a different system." It was way, way harder. I sometimes feel like I never really made the switch.
I live in Japan now, so I don't have to deal with the ridiculous imperial system anymore. Why anyone is using that is beyond me. The US is a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, any prize must be claimed. See Publication 525, page 34. The example given is a $50 prize.
Report on form 1040, line 21.
The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous.
Depends on rater training, rating scales/rubrics, and the statistics used to account for multiple-rater situations (many facet Rasch model to the rescue here).
Whenever testing comes up on Slashdot, I lose my whole day to explaining how testing works, heheh.
I am a tester.
It is not that easy to do. Something like the SAT needs to be able to ascertain the level of a very broad population of users. That is done by targeting items at examinees of a certain ability, using item response theory difficulty estimates acquired in pilot. Yes, you could add more difficult questions, but those are going to render very little information about most people who take them, because they won't get them right. Because the edges of the bell curve are so thin, throwing a bunch of hard questions at the top end will water down the results for the majority of users. Ideally, you want most of your items that are very close to the level of the examinees, so you get nice "high-resolution" (although no one uses that term but me, since I came in from IT and explain everything as though it were a computer) discriminations of ability for the most people possible.
The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.
This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor). And I have to take it again here in a few months to start applying for PhD programs. One of the drawbacks of researching psychometrics is that at some point you'll have to take one of these tests, knowing what the problems are.
So there you go. Yes, adding harder questions would indeed get you better discrimination among the top examinees, but at the cost of discrimination for the bulk of them. Ideally, you could just have the examinee come back and take the next-hardest test, but no one would go for that. Or perhaps the tests could be tiered, with linking items/anchoring, and the examinee could choose what level they wanted to take. I don't know of any major tests that do that, though, and having disjoint populations might cause a problem...
Anyway, there's more testing minutiae than you require.
There is one reason why Gmail killed my email client application: Conversation view. All related messages stay together and you never have the embarrassing problem of replying before reading all of the responses. It also makes for a cleaner inbox that actually reflects how many things you've got on your plate right now. I don't know why offline email clients can get it right (Postbox is trying, but it still isn't as good as Gmail).
The only thing that breaks it is if you have one of those annoying correspondents who insists on just hitting "reply" to any random message from you, and writing about something unrelated without changing the subject line. Or the people who do change the subject line, even though the subject hasn't changed.
I also prefer subject lines to be a one-line summary of the topic, not a "title." Something like: "Please get me that TPS report by next Friday (10/9)" rather than "TPS report." But that's just personal taste.
Perfectly put.
I also think that because so many of them are pigs, it drives the real police officers out. I think a lot of people join up with good intentions and then either succumb to the terrible attitudes or change careers.
I'm a teacher, in Japan, and I agree. We (I'm American) don't need more time in classes, because that isn't what makes test scores. Yes, kids here spend more time in school, but a lot of that time is wasted with required club activities and whatnot. I didn't see any more studying when I was teaching Japanese high school than I had when I was going to US high school.
Let me explain why there is a difference in test scores. I think there are two reasons, one good and one bad (full disclosure: I design and research standardized tests):
1) The good reason: Teachers in Japan are actually paid enough to attract people who aren't morons. Becoming a public teacher here is hard. People have to demonstrate proficiency in everything from music to swimming to get their license--in addition to the license they have to have in their teaching subject. It's worth their time and effort if they can land a public teaching job. Teachers are respected more here, which is a cultural difference, but they are also worthy of more respect. Teacher quality in the US is hit and miss. If you get a really smart, good teacher, that person is there for no other reason than he/she really believes in education. He/she could get a better-paying job elsewhere. We've all had these people, and they are saints. More often, however, it seems that we get people who range from mediocre to totally incompetent. But what can you expect when, for many years, being a public teacher means being in the working poor (depends a lot on the district, etc.--another problem in the US--education is too local, so quality cannot be assured).
2) The bad: Much of the "education" here in Japan is more appropriately described as "test prep." I teach at a very prestigious university in Japan. Some of my students went to private "test prep" high schools to get in here. They literally crammed for the entrance exam for 3 years. That is not an education. Especially when Japanese tests are the laughing (crying?) stock of the testing/psychometric community. We're talking about reliability coefficients of 0.7--barely adequate for a low-stakes test in a classroom, except these determine people's futures. So what I'm saying is that we in the US do not want to emulate Japan's test scores, because the way they get them is to forego education altogether, and replace it with bad tests which render meaningless results.
Truth be told, I think I got a pretty good education in the US. It was all about picking the good teachers in jr. high and high school, though. I must admit, however, that math and science education in the K-12 system is abysmal. I actually started out as loving that stuff, but was ultimately driven away by the awful classes and teachers. Now I wish that I had had better teachers, because although I'm pretty good at the multivariate statistics at the heart of psychometric theory, you ask me to solve a quadratic equation, and I am kind of hopeless. There is a giant, high-school-shaped blank in my math/science knowledge. Everything I learned in college stuck, though, because those people are actually paid enough money to attract good people.
Overall, I approve of Obama, but this is dunderheaded misunderstanding of education, education systems, and the way people learn. Just increasing time in class is going to do nothing. We have a quality-assurance problem in US schools; the amount of time spent in class is of minor concern.
Also, as for the "agrarian economy" comment... Um, tell that to all the farm kids I went to school with who really did need to get to work in the summer. I don't think it's wise, ever, to disadvantage farmers and ranchers. When push comes to shove, those people will always be the most important part of any stable economy. They're the only people who still do something with intrinsic value as an occupation. The rest of us are just dicking around because someone else is making sure we stay alive.
I'm with you. That's a two-wheeled vehicle, sure, but when you say "motorcycle," I picture, you know, a motorcycle.
I have seen papers receive a fail, when re-presented to a different marker, the paper is graded A+.
Either one of the raters is not following the rubric, or they have different ideas of the purpose of the task.
This is not a question of subjectivity; it's a question of whether all raters are rating the same thing. All rating is subjective. It's just that it's supposed to be based on a shared subjectivity.
Also, when people complain that teachers aren't objective, well, that's not in my contract. All a teacher need be is reasonably objective. But in my class, it's my rules, and the students will defer to them because I know more than they do. If they don't like it, they can take the class from someone else.
That being said, I strive to be as objective as possible, but I have decided (from last year) that I will no longer accept any more papers about Iraq or Afghanistan (I'm American, but I teach outside of the US). This is not because I don't believe that Iraq was/is an illegal war of aggression, because I do, or that Afghanistan wasn't/isn't a massive cock-up, because it is. It's that I cannot read papers vehemently denouncing my country objectively. I don't want my feelings to affect their grade, and after a few of these papers, I really began to worry about that. This is especially true when it comes down to factual claims that I know to be distortions, because I actually remember the lead-ups to those very, very clearly. I don't think it's reasonable to expect some sort of Platonic subjectivity from teachers. They're people.
Furthermore, in the case of papers handed to me with uncomfortable arguments, I have had to ask myself, "Would I submit a paper to a Japanese professor, denouncing Japan for its many genocidal conquests into Korea and finally China, and their total refusal to accept culpability for them?" No, I would not. It would be a really stupid move, and would be indicative of a complete disregard for one of the most important features of good writing: appropriacy to audience.
So, there was a slightly-more-impassioned response than you were probably expecting. In the case of standardized rating, you have a rater training problem. In the case of two separate writing teachers, you may or may not have a problem with the teachers, or a problem with the paper. The scores are not expected to be the same in such a case, unless the teachers are supposed to be teaching identical curricula.
As an English prof myself, I'd like to confirm that we spend a lot of time on students' papers. Good papers are easy to breeze through, but the worse the paper, the more time it takes.
As for machine-grading goes, people have been working on that for 30 years. I have no doubt that, statistically, it can provide useful results.
The problem I'm seeing in these comments, however, is a common confusion of testing for assessment and standardized testing. I can't imagine using software to grade a student's paper in class. The student-teacher relationship is a personal one. That person is paying me to help them get better at writing, for example. It is my job to pore over that paper and show them where and how they can improve.
I am also a tester (I actually mostly work with multiple-choice data, but I've also worked on performance rating--speaking and writing). The relationship between a rater and an examinee is very different from that of a teacher and student. The examinee is paying the rater to put them on a scale with other people. This is not a fine-grained assessment; it is always done at extremely "low resolution." When rating a paper for something like the GRE or other standardized test, it is the rater's job to compare the paper to scoring rubrics and make a call on which box of text best describes the paper, and then make note of the number in that box. That's it. It can't really go any more in-depth than that.
For this reason, your comment about "five-paragraph themes" is an important one: Test task design always needs to be clear about what kind of performance is expected, because it is nigh impossible to write rubrics that can be applied to any performance (believe me on this, I beg of you). However, this is actually a question of test specification, not of the software or raters in question. Personally, as someone who works in EFL, I am actually in favor of retaining the "five-paragraph" formula, at least for timed essay tasks. That format is at the heart of all good rhetoric. Yes, it's stilted and silly, but if you can do it, it means that you know basically how information is expected to be organized in Western, especially Anglophone, societies. No good writer would actually use it, but any good writer could.
Again, this is about putting people in boxes, not reading their essays. I can rate a 1-page essay in about 2 minutes, with excellent model fit (I have always used many-facet Rasch modeling for my multi-rater performance testing). I have no doubt that software could be employed whose ratings would be highly predictive of those of human raters.
Two things:
1) Who modded this flamebait??? It really is their country, and we (the US) really did steal it, and the hispanic population really is rapidly expanding, which really is just a return to who lived on those areas originally, and by all natural rights. That's not flamebait; that's basic American history and current demographics. Geez!
2):
I figure by 2100 in many areas of Texas, New Mexico and California, English will be taught as a second language.
Um, it already is? I have a friend who is a music teacher at an all-Spanish-speaking school in Colorado. This isn't one of those immersion schools for non-native speakers of Spanish (although we have some of those too); this is a school where 100% of the students are studying English as a second language on top of their regular studies. There are schools like that all over the US.
Wait a minute... Do you mean "foreign" or "second?" "Second" language is used in any context where the population at large uses one language, and that is not the native language of the student. "Foreign" is when no one uses it, but students learn the language to communicate with people from other countries. English will never be a "foreign" language in the US, I think, but it is already a second language for many, many students, and has been for generations (like my grandfather, who, until he started school, only spoke German--parents came from the old country and spoke enough to run their bakery and that's it).
Personally, as a language teacher myself, I don't see what the big deal is. The norm around the world is to learn and use multiple languages, not just one. The US is strange in that so many of its citizens are native speakers of the de facto national language. I would actually like to see English codified as the official language of the US, which does not exclude other languages--particularly Spanish--from being served in areas where it makes sense; it just would determine that all official documents must be available in English, and that only the English versions were binding. Communities need to serve their populace as best they can, and offering services in Spanish in much of the US seems like a no-brainer to me. But I think that it's important that we finally declare English as the official language.
I've not been to Japan, but I've heard it's a treat there too.
Yes, it is. I get in line, show my passport, get my photo and fingerprints taken (this is new, and was implemented in response to the US system), get my bags, hand my card to customs, tell them I don't have any drugs, and walk into the terminal.
Only once has anyone gone through my bags, and it was after a winter of backpacking around Asia, which showed up on my passport as going in and out of China a few times in a few weeks.
My laptop or other devices have never been checked, and I've never heard of them checking them.
On the contrary, when I go back to my home country of the US, I am made to feel like a threat. Paramilitary immigration and customs officers bark orders at me, and one time tried to separate my Japanese wife from me and question her about why she only had $5 for a 3-week visit (joint bank account in the US with her American husband, morons--ever heard of an ATM?). My stuff is riffled through every time, and they have on several occasions destroyed my belongings with their crude handling (scratched an otherwise perfect guitar that I was selling, and put a bottle of shampoo that they had opened back in the bag WITHOUT SCREWING THE TOP ON). --All without my having any recourse to the law.
I've been in and out of China--a totalitarian regime--and it is far, far more pleasant than the US.
I almost never go back to see friends and family anymore--and, believe it or not, a part of the reason for that is the shitty treatment I get from my countrymen at the border.
I avoid Apple stores like the fucking plague, and I'm typing this on a Mac Pro, with my work Air at my left, my iPhone at my right, my old MacBook on my wife's desk, a Mini on the TV, and iPods every goddamn where I look. I don't even know how this happened to me, to be honest.
But those stores are awful. A bunch of pretentious asswipes with spiky hair trying to sell me kit that I don't need or want for prices I could beat virtually anywhere else. The only reason to go to one is to see a product and feel it before buying it somewhere else.
These people seem to think they work for Apple. They don't. They're in retail. They might as well be selling shoes at Payless. It's the same job.
Sometimes I wonder if/when the hipster image Apple cultivates will bite them in the ass. No one I know who uses Macs is like those people in the stores. In fact, all of them are nerds who like having a UNIX terminal. And I just got sick of spending all my time configuring things, whether it be on Linux or Windows, and decided I'd rather pay someone else to do it so I could finally get some work done. It's been good.
Ugh, Apple stores. I just want to punch everyone there when I go.
I agree, but I love InkScape, even though it looks like ass. It's by far my favorite vector graphics program. No one else agrees with me, though. I just click with it. I make what I want right away and off I go. No idea why.
Brace yourself for 10 people suggesting that you use TeX every time you need to type a letter, so you can type a letter about how you want the computer to type the letter before you even type the letter.
As a graduate of the "teach them to shoot and they'll be bored" school of gun safety, let me say that this works. I don't own any guns, because to me, here's what that means:
1) Go spend a lot of money at the sporting goods store (AFTER buying the gun, which ain't cheap) for a bunch of non-reusable crap (ammo).
2) Drive out to the boonies.
3) Plunk away at things for no good goddamned reason, gun oil staining whatever you're wearing that day.
4) Get bored or run out of ammo.
5) Drive back home.
6) Spend the rest of the goddamned day taking guns apart, cleaning and oiling them.
I actually kind of like shooting, but only if I am spared the ownership part. Oh, and I hate the noise, and the ear protection you have to wear because of it.
Now, if you're going out hunting, I can see that tracking something could be fun, but then let's say you bring something down. Now what? You're out their field-dressing a big bloody mammal, pulling out guts and lugging the carcass around. No thanks. Just bring me back some if you get anything, how's that?
I never played with the guns in the house, and they weren't even locked up until my dad inherited so many we needed a gun case. Why should I play with them? I'd shot all of them, and it was not that interesting.
And there is probably the heart of why I think pro-control people are kinda crazy. If they had any idea how mundane firearm ownership and use was, they would shrug their shoulders and move on as well.
This.
I am a Democrat; I support public health insurance; I want to tax the bejeebus out of the ultra-rich. But I grew up in rural America, where everyone has guns, and every time I look at a gun control law, I'm like, "do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound?" Talking to pro-control people, what I've noticed more than anything is this: They are from the city. They think "gun," they think "mugging." That and action movies.
In short, they have no idea what they are talking about.
I try to take urban and foreign friends out shooting whenever they are in my ancestral neck of the woods. I like to call my buddy with the MP3 so they can shoot something that they actually have even seen in the movies and find that it's just not that big a deal. Powerful, yes, but so is a drill.
I think that the anti-control people are absolutely right about the pro-control people: They think guns cause crime. Because they are ignorant (how often can we call highly-educated, urban folks that?), they have this weird idea that people change with a gun in their hand. Well, I guess they do. It's just that the vast, vast majority of people kind of sober up and understand that this is something that can be used safely, and that responsibility and care are needed, just like when driving an automobile. The people who don't have that reaction? Well, those would be the violent criminals. They are broken people; there's just not much we can do about them. They are both cliches, but they are both true: "guns don't kill; people do" and "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns."
Some (let's be honest: very, very few) people are just assholes. That will always be true. Disarming ourselves because of that statistical fact just seems crazy to me.
Just to throw another leg on the pile, I am a linguist at a pretty prestigious university, and yes, that's one of the things English really has going for it. Of course, the main reason is the British/American dominance, but what really helps is that English speakers do not care if you throw in words from other languages, as long as they know what they mean. This is further aided by the fact that English is already a pidgin of Old English and Norse, from when the Vikings conquered large sections of the British Isles. Old English was highly inflected--words changed form to show grammatical function--but people found that when they were working with non-native speakers, it was easier to just settle on a subject-verb-object sentence structure and drop the whole inflection system, which means you can just plunk new words in as-is. Also, our verb forms are in a process of simplification now, as new verbs come in, we have just been adding -ed for past and past participles and calling it good. This trend is also spreading to original English verbs as well. The language is becoming grammatically easier all the time. Add to the Vikings a Norman occupation, as well as a legacy of Latin from the Roman (Catholic) Empire, and you have a language that is extremely promiscuous.
Furthermore, although many complain about English's messy spelling system, the truth is that it is actually a considerable strength. The reason that English spelling can be a little hard is that English usually doesn't re-spell words when borrowing them. It just takes the word, uses whatever is the most common romanization scheme for the language in question if it doesn't use the roman alphabet, and throws it in. That's how open it is to new words.
I think the next big international language is sure to be Mandarin, but the writing system is a major drawback. Hanzi (kanji in Japanese) is awesome when you know the character in question, but indecipherable if you don't. It's really cool to just take a single ideogram, write it down, and have an entire morphological unit, but the learning load is really, really high. Of course, Mao saw this and tried to scrap hanzi for the pinyin romanization system, but it was way too unpopular so that idea died. I hope there's something in place before our Chinese overlords are imposing it upon us. :-p
Thank god someone said this. This has been floating around the web for the last few days and every time I see it I'm like, "Uh, hit a glass door that is designed to shatter into tiny pieces so it doesn't hurt someone, run in, pick up a bunch of stuff without even the AC adapters, run out."
Only an idiot would do such a thing without a mask, and there isn't a security guard alive who is going to go up against a bunch of guys, armed or no. That's what insurance is for.
I would have been impressed if they had actually gotten the whole products in that time, but they didn't.
A "mastermind" crime, IMO, can't really involve smashing windows. This is the work of common street thugs.
I loved my Shakespeare prof in college. I took him for 2 Shakespeare classes and a classical mythology. One of the things I loved about him was that he didn't require you to agree with him. You DID, however, have to read--the best bullshit detector I've ever come across.
I had a prof for a Thoreau class, though, who fit that negative stereotype perfectly. Outdoorsy hippie naturalist students got As; those of us who, for example, interpreted vast sections of his writing as masked professions of homosexual longing, however, found ourselves with Cs on every assignment. I actually went to her office twice and basically pleaded, "What do you WANT?" It was a required 400-level class, and I was just trying to get out of school at that point. I'd been kind of biding my time in the English department, waiting for the International Studies degree program to start, after which I could transfer in all my Japanese language and Asian history/poli-sci/economics credits and get a degree that reflected what I'd actually spent my mental energy on--a program that, once it finally materialized, was in the ART DEPARTMENT--No thanks! I'll take English over that!!!
She told me I needed to try to get in touch with nature more.
Towards the end of the class I just kind of gave up. I said, "I don't see why my personal philosophical orientation towards nature should have anything to do with my grade in a literature class." I kind of resigned myself to getting a C in my last semester of university, in my major department, and having to take another semester to make up that one class.
Then my professor invited a renowned Thoreau scholar to come speak to us.
He said at one point, "of course, all serious Thoreau scholars now recognize that Thoreau was gay, and that much of his writing was an attempt to deal with that in a society in which that could be dangerous." I shot a glance at my prof. She blushed and lowered her eyes.
I got an A.
If you are a high school or early-undergrad who is reading this, please take my advice on this: DON'T major in English, or any of the humanities, unless you want to be a teacher. That is coming from a university English professor (well, a linguist, whose research is all statistics, but who works in an English department). Just don't do it. It is a silly place.
I am an educator. Allow me to tell you why this worked for you:
One thing: Supportive, intelligent, educated parents. --The same thing that predicts success in regular school!
People have been trying to figure out why socioeconomic class is such a strong predictor for academic success for a long time, but they didn't want to say what any teacher knows: Middle class people raise their kids better, which ensures they grow up to be middle class. You sometimes get poor people who do it too. They don't move up the socioeconomic ladder, but their kids do.
This is what Geoffry Canada figured out and has applied with some very impressive success at the Harlem Children's Zone. He has said that we've been going about supporting inner-city families all wrong. We've been throwing money at them, thinking that the key ingredient of middle-class kids' success was money. It wasn't. It was culture.
Your mom read to you. That is the single biggest thing a parent can and should do from a very early age. Language, I believe, is the seed of all other learning (full disclosure: I'm a linguist). There is a lot of research suggesting this, one piece of which is that carried out by Margaret Wu at the University of Melbourne, where she found that she could predict reading scores from the science component of the PISA test. Obviously, not that well for individuals, but given the whole dataset, she could predict the average for a country (for cases where they only administered the science one to everyone). Language is key, and when you read to a young child, you are exposing him to organized language at a much higher level than he is used to hearing in normal conversation. It also instills a value for the written word, as it did in your case, and as it did in mine.
So what I'm saying is that, if your parents are smart, educated, and willing to spend the time, unschooling probably provides a better learning environment than we could ever put together in a school. The really scary thing I keep seeing in the US, and especially here in Japan, is the parents expecting more and more from the school. I don't work in K-12 anymore (thank god) but when I did, I was often flabbergasted by the things parents would expect from us. "We only see your kid for 6 hours a day, 8 months a year, in a room with 29 other kids," I'd think, "you have them one-on-one 18 hours a day, all year round! What can I possibly do that you can't?"
I'm assuming someone was at home with you all that time. That's a biggie as well. I might get murdered for saying this, but I've started to think that maybe all those crazy women who protested the ERA were right--sending all the moms to work really did damage society. We are now dealing with a generation in their majority which was not supported when growing up, and as a result, isn't very bright. I was lucky in that my parents work from home, so someone was always there when I needed them, and we used to take long trips (taking school off for up to a month) to see the US. I did my homework in the car. A month of classwork took about 4 days, if I remember correctly. If we had just lived that lifestyle, I think I would have learned a lot more.
Sweat doesn't smell until many hours after exercise
I invite you to come smell my coworker when he arrives at work after biking on a sunny day.
I used to bike to work when I lived in Colorado. There were dedicated bike trails that could get you just about anywhere, and the dry, moderate climate meant that even if/when I sweat, it evaporated immediately, and I didn't have to worry much about inclement weather. Also, Colorado is flat (unless you live in the mountains, obviously), so there are no hills to climb. And Colorado culture means you can totally wear shorts to work, so I was always dressed appropriately for the season.
Here in Japan, I biked to work my first year, but gave up. It was a little too far and too hilly to be attempting every morning and every evening in a suit. The frequent rain was a problem, sometimes resulting in my kind of just hanging out at work until 9, when I could have left at 6, while my wife ate the dinner she made for us alone. Also, with the high humidity, sweat doesn't go away; it just soaks in. Also not cool for the suits.
Now I drive. I would like to walk, and sometimes do, but that can result in being unpresentable too, if it's in the dead of summer. Also, it's a 45min walk at even a brisk pace. Also, there's the hill. Losing 45min to a commute I can do in 10 with a car just doesn't seem like a good use of my time.
Basically, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of reasonable reasons not to ride a bike to work. I loved doing it in Colorado--I loved the freedom; I loved the fresh air; I loved the exercise; I loved not spending money on the commute. I wish I could do it again, but I just can't.
Finally, FWIW, I'm not fat. I'm at ideal weight, and still fit in my clothes from college. I'm 35. So this isn't a "blarg blarg it's not my fault I'm a tub of lard pass the cookies" whinge; it's an attempt to show why there are some very good reasons for not biking to work.
What I can never get my head around are all the people working at large corporations and saying "Government is inefficient! Private industry free market invisible hand blah blah blah is god!" Um, not at any corporation I've ever worked for. I'd say that inefficiency and blinkard organizational stupidity are diseases of any large organization.
But to actually put a star in the government's column, although in both private or public enterprise, it's actually pretty hard to get fired, the people who make the big mistakes don't have a line item in their contract that says you have to give them a big pile of money when they leave no matter what in the case of government. They get named and shamed and have to find another job.
...That job is almost invariably in private enterprise.
Transparency sucks. It's just a toy. It looks cool, but doesn't do anything, and sometimes makes things hard to see. "Sometimes" is often enough to make the whole thing a net negative.
If it looked cool and never got in the way, then I'm all for it. I'm not one of these anti-aesthetics weirdos we have roaming Slashdot. However, it does get in the way, so it shouldn't be used.
I turn 35 this year. What this means is that I started elementary school in the Carter administration. What that means is that I was taught metric in kindergarten first, and then when Reagan came in to usher in the stupid bullshit that continues to this day in American politics, we were told "okay, forget about metric; here's a different system." It was way, way harder. I sometimes feel like I never really made the switch.
I live in Japan now, so I don't have to deal with the ridiculous imperial system anymore. Why anyone is using that is beyond me. The US is a joke.
In Japan all TVs and other tuners have cards. They're free, though.