I MENTION IT BELOW, BUT I DIDN’T REALIZE THAT Andy Rosen’s Change.edu: Rebooting For The New Talent Economy is currently free in the Kindle edition. Download it while it lasts!
Archive for 2011
December 11, 2011
STEVE HAYWARD: Eurocrash Update #1. “I recall Margaret Thatcher saying, around 1999, something like ‘All of the crises of the 20th century began in Europe, and all of the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations.’ Might well come true again.”
BATTLE LINES are being drawn.
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Poll: Europeans Don’t Like The Euro. They were smarter than their rulers, it seems.
A LOW-CARB SUCCESS STORY.
ANOTHER LATVIAN BANK RUN?
LIGHT BULB BAN creates public health risks.
Hey, there’s still time to stock up! For a little while longer.
UPDATE: Reader Maynard Schmale emails: “I just changed two burnt out GE CFL light bulbs. They each lasted less than two months. Crony capitalism at its finest.” Yeah, I’ve been disappointed that mine haven’t lasted as long as advertised.
MORE: Another reader writes:
At Walmart today just outside Washington, DC. Noticed that the 100W incandescent light bulb shelves were bare, as was the section for 50W/100W/150W 3-way bulbs. Guess that even some in the GE/EPA/Congress triangle still want their cheap, safe, convenient, warm lights to stay on after 12/31. Too bad they’re not going to give everyone else that chance!
P.S. I’ve been stocking up for months, but if today’s inventory is any indication, readers who haven’t heeded your warnings better get to the store soon. Who knows whether there will be any left for sale when there’s only a week to go…
You snooze, you lose.
HOW TO BECOME A BILLIONAIRE: “You just get your buddy the Secretary of the Treasury to give you insider information at the same time that he is telling the public something completely different.”
Plus, from the comments: “The destruction of the general belief in fair play and honest leadership will have astonishing consequences.”
Other commenters think this is much ado about nothing. We’ll see.
HELEN AND I WERE JUST COMMENTING ON THIS THE OTHER NIGHT: “Vocal Fry” creeping into U.S. speech. “A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.”
It seems to me that “language fads” mostly propagate among young women. I wonder why that is?
EUROPE: “Mr. Cameron may or may not be ‘isolated’ from the rest of the EU’s leadership, but the EU’s leadership is undoubtedly isolated from reality. Under the circumstances, Cameron is in a better place.”
20 SIGNS YOUR RELATIONSHIP is past tense. Ya think?
AT AMAZON, Top Holiday Deals.
Also, Thursday the 15th is the last day for free Super Saver shipping in time for Christmas. Free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime is good until Wednesday the 21st.
And, of course, you can always send gift cards.
ED DRISCOLL: The Documentary As Time Capsule.
STEPHEN L. CARTER: Congress Isn’t Supposed To Be Above The Law. “It has become all too easy for members of Congress to grant themselves special privileges, among them exemption from many complex laws and regulations that apply to everyone else.”
It seems to me that a “living Constitution” approach to the Titles Of Nobility clause would solve this. Where are our creative judges when you need them?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Khan Academy: The Videos Are The Public Face, But The Real Action Is On The Backend:
Using math and computer science concepts decidedly more advanced than most of those in Khan’s video library, the Khan engineers have trained the website’s exercise platform how to predict, with startling accuracy, how likely it is that a student will correctly answer the next practice problem — and whether that student will be able to solve the same type of problem a week, two weeks, and a month later.
They do this by accounting for hundreds of data points that describe, in numbers, the entire history of the relationship between a learner and a concept.
“If [a user is] logged in, then we have the entire history of every problem they’ve done, and how long it took them, and how they did,” says Ben Kamens, the lead developer at Khan Academy. “So whenever anybody does a problem, we see whether they got it right or wrong, how many tries it took them, what their guess was, what the problem was, how many hints they used, and how long they took between each hint.”
The Khan engineers are also working to tweak the exercise platform so it does not confuse genuine mastery with “pattern matching” — a method of problem-solving wherein a student mechanically rehashes the steps necessary to solve that type of problem without necessarily grasping, conceptually, what those steps represent.
Pattern-matching is one of the human brain’s most basic learning tools, Kamens says. It is the sort of useful imitation that allows toddlers to learn how to use language without first learning how grammar works. But there is a difference between imitating problem-solving procedures and mastering the logic undergirding those procedures, Kamens says. Getting to that level of understanding, he says, is probably what determines whether students will remember how to solve a problem after the test is over, after a course is over, and — most importantly, in Khan’s view — once their formal schooling is over.
Khan has half-joked that his ideal assessment model is having professors ambush their students in the hallways with random questions, months after the student has passed the exam, and revise their score based on whether they’ve kept their chops. At Khan Academy, that half-joke is half-real. At a time when students are always within arm’s reach of a computer and a wireless signal, “mechanic practice schedulers” can spring questions on students at intervals to gauge how well they remember how to do certain types of problems.
One of the most interesting parts of Andy Rosen’s new book, Change.edu, is the discussion of how for-profit online schools are using similar techniques. This may turn out to be a killer app as against traditional education.
Plus this:
College students do not graduate with a firm enough grasp of the skills — particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields — that they really need to land good jobs, he said. As a result, the credential colleges use to signal the competence of their graduates, the college degree, says very little about what its holder actually knows.
In a conversation with Inside Higher Ed last week, Khan expressed some ideas on how to improve the signaling quality of academic credentials. Under the current regime, a degree from a college amounts to something similar to an acceptance letter from that college, he says. And that is not ideal for employers.
“We find a lot of college grads with high GPAs that have been exposed to many things … but even in their purported majors, they have a pretty weak grasp of” essential concepts, Khan said. “It’s almost like you view them as a blank slate, and the most impressive thing about them is that they got in to University X.”
In other words, the current price of a college degree is not just the balance of four years’ tuition; one must also consider the cost, to students and employers, of the ambiguity hanging over what the degree actually means. One root of the problem is the fact that the college degree is issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential, says Khan, who holds four degrees himself. This is tantamount to investment banks rating their own securities, he says. Meanwhile, the accrediting agencies that are in charge of making sure those “ratings” are legitimate do not currently focus on what students coming out of those institutions measurably know.
If you read the whole thing — and you should — it sounds like Khan is moving toward the sort of third-party credentialing solution that I have advocated myself in the past. That’s a real killer app.
DON SURBER: Christiane Amanpour Out the Door? “Is ABC punting ‘This Week’ hostess Christiane Amanpour back to CNN, the witness protection program for TV newsers?”
AT AMAZON, Holiday Flurry Deals in Movies & TV.
DAVID WARREN: Europe Digs Still Deeper: “When you’ve dug yourself into a hole, so far down you can’t see the sky any more, the answer is to dig faster. You never know, you might come out in China. This is the primaeval advice upon which Europe’s politicians are now working.”
Plus this: “Place not your confidence in politicians. Economic arrangements which depend upon the goodwill and continuing good behaviour of the political class, must fail.”
THE GIFT OF POVERTY: A Parental Strategy For Teaching Life Lessons.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Subsidies Fuel Salaries. “In particular, whether demanders or suppliers pay a tax is determined by the elasticities of demand and supply. The more elastic side of the market can better escape a tax, leaving more of it to be paid by the inelastic side. The same thing is true for a subsidy but in reverse, the inelastic side of the market gets the benefit of the subsidy.”
RUSSIA: Dmitry Medvedev Facebook message against Russian protesters backfires. “Dmitry Medvedev has been humiliated online after his Facebook page, in which he posted a message denouncing Saturday’s 50,000-strong rally in Moscow, was flooded by protesters criticising the Russian president.”