303 karma · joined August 30, 2012
One helpful approach is to initially grant the benefit of the doubt to the person that you think offended you. I ask myself, "Am I certain the other person meant to be condescending" (or some other offense)? Do they have a history of this? If I respond harshly, will I get a listening ear?
I think Stallman did well by recommending to be kind. We want our collaborations to be productive. If we are quick to take offense, we will destroy relationships and collaboration.
My point is NOT to excuse bad behavior but rather to make sure I am not jumping to conclusions and breaking good collaborative relationships...
Of course we address repeat offenses. Having been gracious initially, those discussions are more likely to be productive. I think Stallman's approach does that well.
Many called Ross Perot a nutjob when he coined the phrase "The great sucking sound of jobs leaving the country." I watched it happen.
We also watched the ratio of the highest paid employee/ lowest paid full time employee skyrocket. I understand that there are high performing employees, but economies need a large middle class who have income to buy products (without running up debt) for the economy to prosper.
Now we see people trying to support families on what were after school jobs for high school students... Times changed when offshoring became easy...
1) Does the student have a history of completing what they start? If not, consider a part-time trial at a community college with expectation of finishing with decent grades in courses that will transfer.
2) Will the student need remedial classes? The school gets paid but these courses do not satisfy graduation requirements. They do increase debt!
3) Does the student have a clear goal for a major? College is an expensive place to "find yourself."
4) What are the job prospects for that degree? How likely is it that the student will be high in the distribution of the graduates? Will the anticipated salary permit repayment of debt and self-support?
5) Are the time-to-graduate estimates realistic? A surprisingly low percentage of students complete a degree in 4 years. 5-6 is more common and results in more debt...
6) Has the student learned to live within budget? There are many distractions at college. Spring Break trips add cost...
Students and their parents need to have some difficult conversations: 1) How well prepared is the student for a given major? Remedial classes add cost but not credits toward the degree. 2) Does the student have a track record of finishing what they start? 3) Will the starting salary for graduates with that degree permit the student to pay their living expenses and their loan debt? 4) Are the time-to-finish estimates realistic? IIRC, the majority of students in 4 year programs actually take 5-6 years.
A second advantage is that the students have a written record to study. This should help motivated students with the drive to learn the material. Without such a drive, nothing you do will make a difference.
A third benefit to this approach is the ability to add links to good explanations of difficult concepts in the notebook.
I'm old enough to have experienced something similar. When I was young my dad won a color TV in a sales contest. I think it was the first in our neighborhood and was the first in our extended family. Every Sunday evening my grandfather would come over and bring desert and we would gather as a family and watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. As we got older, my siblings and I would beg to be permitted to stay up and watch Bonanza. Good times!
The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
A culture that passes on default values of industriousness and a high regard for education will generate individuals that are more motivated and perhaps more resilient than one who does not. A culture that values consistent parenting of children will likely pass on more deliberate traits than a culture that does not value active parenting.
One should not be surprised to see different distributions of outcomes from different groups who hold different values. One of the advantages of living in a multicultural society where people live together peacefully and actually listen to one another is that we can learn which choices lead to the best outcomes and encourage our children to emulate those and to avoid choices that lead to dependency and addiction.
The Brookings Institute can hardly be considered a right wing think tank and yet they published a well reasoned piece on the behavioral aspects of poverty [1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-behavioral-aspects-of...
I don't want a walled garden of software. I don't mind a distinct authorization to run non-app store software (I break it, I own it...), but I want to run it easily. For example, I want an OS will easily let me install and run R and a current Python distribution like Anaconda.
While I want my phone, iPad, and MacBook to play nicely together, I want each to be optimized for a different set of tasks.
The laptop is a tool, albeit a very useful one. Eliminating the laptop is not the solution. Most universities have already addressed the issue of plagiarism. One sets explicit, written standards, explains that it is self-deception as well, and then use software that can detect it. Warn the first time, fail the second. Actions have consequences in the real world. The sooner students learn and accept this, the happier and more productive their lives will be.
Having grown up in an era where we wrote essays by hand and later used typewriters, computer word processing is a very useful tool. Abandoning it is foolish. Start by requiring drafts, encourage revision, and hold students accountable. If they are old enough to use laptops, they are old enough to use them properly.
Go back and review the news that came out. "The Big Short" is a decent summary. The trading manager at Bear Stearns who bought the derivatives got to walk out and keep his big bonuses. The share holders ate it. The rating institutions were complicit too - they knew the products were crap but knew the customers (lending institutions) would go to another one and so wrote the bogus ratings. See the players in the game got paid. The snooks got screwed.
Bill Black, who prosecuted the Savings and Loan Crisis, and sent many fraudsters to jail reviewed the 2008 crash and was incensed at the lack of prosecution.
The consumers saw what they wanted to see. Very few consumers perfomed due diligence. The old proverb tends to be true: "If something seens to be too good to be true... It probably is." Fraudsters have taken advantage of the gullible throughout human history. Our generation has no excuse: we have unparalleled access to information and most are too lazy to put the effort in to check these things out our to hire competent counsel who work for us not the seller. How many parents and students understand the debt they take on for college and the expected ROI???
I will also note that I found this works best when surrounded by a few like-minded individuals with complementary skills to serve one another as "a second pair of eyes" and a sounding board for hypotheses and conclusions.
Farange reported the moves between offices that occurred twice a month and the lavish EU spending on administration. Both noted there was no way for the people to vote down laws or vote out these bureaucrats.
Statist bureaucrats too often spend the people's money with little regard for return on investment. They are the brightest people in the room - just ask them. They don't face the same restraining force as the business owner whose customers can go elsewhere if they don't think they are getting value for their money. As the Brexit folks framed the issue, this was about being responsive to the people, giving them the ability to vote out the whole lot and get others who will be responsive to the people paying the bill.
We have the same problem here in the US. There really is little difference between the establishment Democrats and Republicans. All are big government types who focus on policies that benefit their big donors. They are spending us into oblivion and devaluing all our assets by flooding the economy with more printed fiat currency. Our unfunded future liabilities are even worse. We need to do our own house cleaning.
So I say "Happy Independence Day" to the folks in the UK and hope my neighbors are looking closely enough at our own situation and will will band together to do our own house cleaning this November.
The difficult truth is that not every student has the prerequisite skills, ability, and self-discipline to complete university level work. Do you really expect the taxpayer to subsidize remedial courses at the university if the student couldn't acquire the prerequisite skills at the secondary level? Here in New York, despite record per pupil primary and secondary school expenditures, student performance has continued to drop. Why should taxpayers be forced to continue to subsidize poor performers? Those who want to do so are always free to contribute to scholarships.
Now let's consider student performance at the university level. Take a look at, for example, Richard Arum's book Academically Adrift. He notes that a large fraction of students graduate with very limited critical thinking and reasoning skills. This is because very little was demanded of them. As Arum so aptly put it, instead "they provided beer and circuses." The schools were paid for this...
Much of this outcome was produced because schools were paid (typically because of easily-obtained government subsidized loans). These students have not been so pleased when saddled with all the debt later on. Surprise: it is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Talk about the "gift that keeps on giving..."
Now ask, How is "free college" going to provide return to the taxpayers if the students don't have significant "skin in the game"? How will you ensure this?
Matters have been exacerbated by what we call "rampant credentialism." Those who make hiring decisions love this because it provides a way to screen candidates without getting sued. Is there really sufficient demand for workers with all these credentials to pay to produce them all? I don't think so.
I have watched the "great sucking sound" predicted by Ross Perot as jobs were offshored. This now includes those STEM jobs Americans want. I know. I have one. When I started work almost 35 years ago I was in an analytical division of a major corporation that had over 300 scientists and technicians. There are 27 of us left. The major scientific societies have noted demand is weak and salaries are flat at best and appear to be declining.
Are all these new graduates going to be able to find employment at a salary where their taxes repay the public investment? I don't think so. It is one thing if a system is designed where people can freely contribute to provide such education. It is another matter entirely to do this by force of tax law without regard for return on investment. What gives any of you the right to force this on another? Who died and made you despot?
Finally, let me return to the one who has proposed "free college." What has Sen. Sanders really produced in his lifetime? How many such successful programs has he run? What has he really done?
That said, the key to a free society is peaceful exchange of ideas. Don't like his ideas? Great! Critique them! But the fundamental human rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights include the right to assemble and speak freely. I would note that rallies to listen to the ideas of a presidential candidate are precisely the situations those who drafted the Bill and those who ratified it envisioned.
Let's leave the thugs out of the picture. If you want to protest, fine. Be peaceful and do impede the exchange of ideas from those who came to hear what the candidate said. You do not have to agree with anything you hear.
Many of us here realize that this exponential growth in national debt supported by printing unbacked fiat currency cannot continue. We will be in especially deep trouble if other nations decide not continue to use the US dollar as the reserve currency. We cannot continue to outspend on defense the next 11 or 12 nations combined. We cannot solve every crisis in the world.
We do not have a perfect choice for president. We never do. We do know that Mrs. Clinton is another one who sees more government intervention as the solution to every problem. She was not very effective as Secretary of State and I am surprised she has not been indicted for compromising national security with her private email server. Even if they had put up Sen. Sanders, his own wife's experience (shutting down the college she presided over because it was economically unsustainable, getting a nice severance package, leaving the students with debt...) shows that his plan is unworkable. At least Mr. Trump realizes that not every expenditure is possible or prudent. He seems to understand the concept of 'vital national interests' - that we must get our own house in order before we can continue to help the greater global community.
Those of us who say this are often publicly vilified. We do not seem to be able to have a peaceful, rational exchange of ideas. So people will keep their mouth shut and go cast their ballot in the privacy of the voting booth, exercising their fundamental human right guaranteed by under a constitutional republic. Gee, it sounds a lot like what the voters in the UK just did.
At least in the US, the last two decades have not been kind to the once iconic corporate research labs. As global competition increased and the push for constant high quarterly returns by investors, more and more has been off-shored. The most recent casualty was DuPont CR&D but there has been constant erosion. My colleagues and I have actually lost count of the number of downsizings we have been through.
Here is a test for you: Next conference you go to, look at the talks and posters. How many corporate people are there who are not instrument vendors or contract labs?
Years ago we had a professor (I forget the name) from MIT come to our Research Labs and give a talk on his research. He was using game theory to study product research, development, and manufacturing. When all was said and done, he concluded that if you were not first or second to market, you spent significantly more money to enter the market and your probability of being profitable was much lower.