Happy Memorial Day

Here is a salute to all the veterans:

What’s up in Chad’s life?

Not a lot. 

Still employed as an enumerator for the time being, although that is rapidly closing out.  Applied for a position as a census clerk which just got posted yesterday even though the census website says all jobs are filled.  If I get it great, if not oh well.  Still have an open application for multiple positions with TSA and have moved on the next phase for consideration with the VA.  Eventually something will come thru.  To help things along I decided to bump up the resume a bit, so I am currently studying for the CompTIA A+ exam.  Aiming to take that by the end of June and then I will try out the Network + exam.  I have other higher level certs but a lot of the jobs I am seeing are specifically asking for those and I don’t think the HR people know the difference.  Other than that I am getting ready for classes to start again on the assumption that I am going summer quarter and playing some World of Warcraft, trying to get ready for the November expansion.

Maybe it's a good thing my blogging has dropped off

The rest of the world just now seems to be catching up with my enlightened world view.

Me, December 2007:

The real conflict in American politics isn't Republican vs. Democrat and it didn't just start in the last say 40 years, it is French vs. Scottish and it started in the mid 1700's.

Despite being educated at William and Mary College (which was founded by scholars associated with the Scottish Enlightenment) Jefferson was really a child of the French Enlightenment. This can be seen in his vision for America as an agricultural nation of Yeoman farmers and his hostility to the idea of corporations. It is also evident in his hostility to organized religion. These are all characteristic of many French Enlightenment writers.

Hamilton (and others) with whom Jefferson was antagonistic believed that America should be a commercial nation and pointed to Scotland's transformation from the poorest nation in Europe to a modern society as a model. Many of them also believed that religion should have a prominent place in civil life. An idea much more in line with the Scottish Enlightenment.

David Brooks, May 2010, Two Theories of Change:

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

…

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

…

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

…

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

Personally, I dispute the idea that followers of the British or Scottish Enlightenment are in retreat.  I think we are holding our own against the Mongol hordes of the Jefferson / French Enlightenment barbarians.  I also dispute the idea that the Scottish Enlightenment was the one driven by sentiment, but that is an argument for a different time.

h/t

Hopefully everyone is aware that when I talk about my brilliance, blah, blah, blah, I am just messing around. I derived my 2007 post from How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and even then after I did some Google searching I was able to come up with another example of someone coming up with the same idea back in 2001. In short, it was nothing that original I just hadn't seen it articulated in the blog circles I run in, and if I hadn't just blown the whistle on myself I would probably still be able to claim credit for the idea.

Sometimes I am so brilliant I amaze myself

Back in in 2007 I pointed out that the education industry had not kept up with technological developments;  that it wasn’t taking advantage of technology to deliver the best possible product.

Two areas that I specifically mentioned were customizing education to the needs of the end user and utilizing constant feedback techniques to insure that material is being delivered and learned to the fullest extent possible.

Second the ultimate customer for the project, will have to be heavily involved in the process. For example Boeing needs Aeronautical Engineers. To really get the type of engineer that they want they would need to lay out a set of skills that they feel are important. From there it would be necessary to backtrack to the courses which develop those skills, and a curriculum would need to be developed. From there textbooks would need to be written and labs developed. On and on continuing up the chain until a comprehensive program had been developed.

Once that process has been completed it is necessary to deliver the required knowledge to the student. Most of the pieces are already in place. Lectures can be developed and delivered via pod cast or youtube (The open courseware project and iTunes university are already doing some of this). Reading assignments can be emailed out. Textbooks and other course materials can be placed on Wikibooks. The two major sticking points as I see it are labs and a feedback mechanism.

Feedback is the easiest - IM, Email, Phones, Blog Comments, all those offer a feedback loop. Testing is another method. Here we have to be careful though. We want the test to be both fair and applicable as well relatively secure. In other words we don't want a bunch of multiple choice questions floating around on the internet that a student can memorize to get a passing grade, but we want the test to really measure knowledge. Part of this problem can be solved by the use of adaptive testing.
Adaptive testing is a method of testing that adapts to an examinees knowledge level of a subject.

CAT successively selects questions so as to maximize the precision of the exam based on what is known about the examinee from previous questions.[1] From the examinee's perspective, the difficulty of the exam seems to tailor itself to their level of ability. For example, if an examinee performs well on an item of intermediate difficulty, he will then be presented with a more difficult question. Or, if he performed poorly, he would be presented with a simpler question. Compared to static multiple choice tests that nearly everyone has experienced, with a fixed set of items administered to all examinees, computer-adaptive tests require fewer test items to arrive at equally accurate scores.[1] (Of course, there is nothing about the CAT methodology that requires the items to be multiple-choice; but just as most exams are multiple-choice, most CAT exams also use this format.)

Apparently someone was listening because the NYC Public School System is experimenting with exactly this type of system, as described in this Freakonomics article from the NY Times.

The School of One tries to take advantage of technology to essentially customize education for every kid in every classroom and help teachers do their job more effectively. That is of course a daunting task — and perhaps, some might argue, unnecessary — but the amount of thought and analysis that have so far gone into the program is impressive. Furthermore, the enthusiasm it has generated from people like Duncan and Klein make it a program to watch. And the early results are promising.

You’ll hear about School of One’s conception, its potential pitfalls, and most of all how it works day-to-day. You’ll spend some time in a classroom in I.S. 339 in the Bronx, hearing from kids like Lionel (at right), whose daily “playlist” — in this case, his math lessons — are chosen in part by an algorithm that is designed to learn how Lionel learns best.

And you’ll hear how Chris Rush and others track and analyze the schoolwork that Lionel is doing to make sure he’s not just doodling away his time (like Levitt did in the third grade).

I'll be interested to see how this all plays out.  I don’t think it will be the panacea for America’s education woes but I do think it has potential, especially the idea of addressing individual learning styles.

(There is a podcast associated with this article that is worth listening to.  On a similar subject I have mentioned the Intelligence Squared debates before.  They had one a few months ago regarding the damage the teachers unions were doing to education.  It is worth a listen also.)

A blast from the past

I was cleaning out an old briefcase today and came across the training sheet that they gave us in IDC school for teaching sailors how to treat the 6 basic GITMO wounds.

So now Glenn Greenwald is a hyperbolic jerk

Most people have known that, as well as the fact that he is a sock-puppeteer, for some time, but sometimes you have to smack Huffington Post contributors with a very large clue bat before they can figure things out.

For Lawrence Lessig that smack was Greenwald calling him a liar after Lessig challenged him on some of his statements regarding Elena Kagan.

But Greenwald was not a fan of Kagan. He and I exchanged a number of emails about his views of Kagan. I thought his criticism of her was mistaken. But as I acknowledged to him, and in "print," the source of my judgment is my own private experience. And that private experience is no doubt not evidence for others. So I can well understand skepticism and questions, especially when someone is being appointed for life to such a critical job.

What struck me yesterday as I researched the issue, however, was how hyperbolic Glenn's campaign had become.

…

So I called Greenwald on that on Rachel Maddow's show last night. I said I had enormous respect for Greenwald's work. But that his hyperbole needed to be "checked." And much of my ten minutes or so was devoted to pointing out the incompleteness in Glenn's raging campaign to discredit the president's nominee to the Supreme Court.

…

This morning Glenn responded to my challenging his hyperbole by calling me a liar. I had "spew[ed] total falsehoods on TV," he claimed.

Funny, funny stuff.

Finally finished Naked Economics - I highly recommend it

Finally finished the book. Overall I would give it an 8.5 out of 10. It takes a number of highly complex topics and boils them down to understandable chapters that I thought built on each other pretty well. There were a few things I disagreed with, for example Wheelan goes full retard in his support of Anthropogenic Global Warming, but reasonable people can disagree on that. I think he also understates the potential damage health care reform can do to our society. On the other hand he is fairly scathing about earmarks, subsidies, and entitlements and what they mean in regards to economic growth and the future of America's economic health:

Think about what that means. Going forward, somehow we have to raise enough revenue to (1) pay for whatever government we chose to have, which we aren't doing fully now; (2) pay the interest we've accumulated on past bills; and (3) pay for the new expenses associated with an aging population and expensive entitlement promises.

That's going to require serious political leadership and recognition by Americans that the status quo is not an option. Simon Johnson, who had plenty of experience with financial crises as the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, has noted, "Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company or a country." During the first decade of the new millennium, three parties borrowed heavily: consumers, financial firms, and the U.S. government. So far two have paid a huge price for that leverage. Is there another shoe to drop. (pg. 324)

Wheelan is also critical of some tax cuts, disputing the idea that the Reagan tax cuts actually ended up increasing treasury revenues (pg. 96, 97), again reasonable people can disagree on this one, and in fact this idea was echoed in National Review this week:

Some people are more sensible about that Laffer Curve talk. Laffer, for instance. Arthur Laffer, whose famous (and possibly apocryphal) back-of-the-napkin diagram launched supply-side tax policy, readily concedes that the growth effects of tax cuts are oversold in the political debate. “Does every tax cut pay for itself? No. I think Irving Kristol wrote that, once — and then did a pretty good job of arguing for it. But if some guy running for Congress in Clayton County, Texas, says all tax cuts pay for themselves, what do we want to do? Go after him with a shotgun? Sure, they’re going to cite me, and there’s very little I can do about it. But there’s the same amount of ignorance on the other side, ignoring the economic feedback effects of tax cuts.”

...

There is considerable debate among economists and federal legume-quantifiers about how large supply-side revenue effects are. The Congressional Budget Office did a study in 2005 of the effects of a theoretical 10 percent cut in income-tax rates. It ran a couple of different versions of the study, under different sets of economic assumptions. The conclusion the CBO came to was that the growth effects of such a tax cut could be expected to offset between 1 percent and 22 percent of the revenue loss in the first five years. In the second five years, the CBO calculated, feedback effects of tax-rate reductions might actually add 5 percent to the revenue loss — or offset as much as 32 percent of it.

Personally I would argue that the balancing of the budget in the 90's is proof that the Laffer curve is accurate and that those rates happened to be the ones at which economic growth and revenue growth matched in a sort of min -max curve, but I am not the PhD. so who cares what I think.

Anyway even if you don't agree with the guy the arguments are well made and worth considering.

Down to the last two chapters in Naked Economics

I still highly recommend this book.  My major complaint with it is that he does buy into the Anthropogenic Global Warming stuff a little to wholeheartedly, but that is just a passing irritation.  In the chapter I just finished on international economics he really takes it to the gold standard fanatics, which I loved. 

Car Bomb in Times Square

Scary shit!