Whoops

I was checking my old hotmail account today and when I log out it takes me to the MSN home page. I found it rather humorous that the main image on the screen was linking to this:


Microsoft prominently running an article about what free software you can use to replace expensive Microsoft software. HA!

Getting Married!

This news just in:

Curious Physics Minor and The Heartless Siren to Wed!
Details are sketchy, but this engagement has been confirmed by multiple sources. Here are our exclusive pictures of the ring:

Teachers' Unions

In the comments on that previous post about Teachers' Unions, Katya raised a point I'd like to give further justice than just a reply in the comments:

Do you think there's anything about teachers' unions that makes them particularly bad? Maybe the quality of a teacher is harder to measure . . . or it's easier to blame shortcomings on the students.

There are, of course, some unique challenges with determining the quality of a teacher. Their success will have some correlation with the success of the students they teach, however exactly what, or how strong, that correlation is would be difficult to determine. What bugs me is the Union's stance against merit based incentives of any kind. Their opinion seems to be "There's no perfect way of doing it, so we won't allow any merit based incentives". If you buy into this type of reasoning, then there's really no reason to ever do anything. You'll rarely, if ever, be able to do something perfectly. This is true of some very important things. Like voting: The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem (in association with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) proves that no voting system is fair. So, by the logic of the Union, we shouldn't bother with voting either, because we can't do it perfectly.

Obviously, such an approach to life is rather limiting. In pretty much every aspect of our lives we accept solutions which are less than optimal simply because perfect solutions are either impossible to find or the necessary effort required to find them outweighs the usefulness of having them.

But, how do you measure the quality of a teacher? Any such measurement will need to include a subjective evaluation from students, other teachers, and administrators. So you'll need a way of dealing with the subjectivity of these evaluations and prevent them from turning into political games and popularity contests. I'm not exactly sure how you go about doing this. I'm sure there are lots of people that work in subjective survey taking that have some good ideas on the matter though. All such evaluations would be anonymous, of course, to prevent retaliation and gaming the system.

Part of this, I think, could be to include "down-the-road" evaluations. Have students fill out a very simple evaluation of how good they think the teacher was a year after having had them. (In very controlled systems like public education I wouldn't think this would be too hard to organize). Then you can get some larger picture perspective from students, who otherwise might be bitter about a final grade or something.

You can't grade performance simply on students' grades. That would further increase the amount of GPA bloat already existing. Creating an outside exam creates the same problem we already have with standardized testing: teaching to the test. But you can include that as some part of the overall metric.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is to be sure that merit based incentives take a longer window than 1 year into account. A teacher may have a bad year, a bad group of students, or some other issue that comes up. However, if you take a 5 year span and see that student/peer/supervisor evaluations are consistently low, and student performance is consistently low, then you can probably start making a pretty good guess about the overall quality of that teacher. During those 5 years they can be encouraged to improve their teaching. If, however, they consistently show, during a 5 year span, that they just aren't cutting it, it's time to cut them loose.

This gives teachers plenty of time to get their act together, have a bad year, deal with a bad group of students, whatever, while still allowing school systems to reward teachers who consistently receive good evaluations.

If we really want to improve public education in this country the best thing we can do is remove the cruft from the teaching staff. I think we can all look back on our public education and remember teachers who were excellent as well as teachers that just sucked. Knowing that those excellent teachers will not be rewarded for their quality is frustrating and saddening.

Stupid People want to Continue to be Stupid

KSL is reporting a blurb entitled: Not everyone happy about no texting-while-driving bill.

Some say they don't want all their driving time to be a waste. "You know, the text can wait. But it's just like, for me, pulling over would be just ridiculous," one man said.

It rather boggles my mind that it is even necessary to pass laws prevent typing up text messages while driving. Making phone calls while driving is one thing, if you let the call take precedence over the driving you will probably end up in an accident, however you at least still have your eyes available to watch the road, and hand(s) to do stuff. But texting? You are necessarily removing your eyes from the road and distracting your brain and fine motor skills to type out a stupid message, and using one or both your hands to do it! Getting caught doing this should already cause you to get your license suspended for reckless driving.

And apparently there are people who believe their text message is so important that it absolutely cannot wait until they reach their destination. Who do these people think they are exactly?

Several months ago some friends and I were driving up to Salt Lake City. We were in the car pool lane and came up along a car that was swerving back and forth about half a car's width into the lanes on either side of it. We saw the girl driving it looking down at a cell phone held in her lap, using both hands to mess with it. We laid on the horn which startled her into looking up and correcting her steering into a single lane. Once she noticed we weren't a cop she promptly looked back down and began swerving again. [sigh] Stupid people. We should've called UHP, but didn't have the number. So frakkin' dangerous. GET OFF THE ROAD!

Change. A little anyways.

CNN is reporting: U.S. reverses policy, drops 'enemy combatant' term. The big defense of the Bush Administration about indefinite detainment and arbitrary treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was that the prisoners were "enemy combatants" and therefore not subject to the Geneva Convention nor to U.S. criminal law.

This convenient classification meant (according to the Bush Administration) that the prisoners actually had no rights or privileges of any kind and could be held with or without evidence and didn't have to be allowed to speak to an attorney or allowed a trial. From a country that claims to stand for freedom, justice, and the rule of law, this whole treatment seemed rather hypocritical to me. I wrote about it several times on my blogs.

I'm pleased to see that something is changing. These people should either be tried for their crimes or released. There is no middle ground. If they're prisoners of war, then well, honestly, you have problems with that designation because what war are they prisoners of? Iraq? We've claimed that the war in Iraq was "Mission Accomplished" therefore the prisoners should be released. Is it the "war on terror"? Because that's something that's impossible to end and designating prisoners as a prisoner of war in a war which cannot end (because it's not a real war) is really rather unfair.

So, here's to promoting the rule of law again (at least some parts of it).

These days, unions often suck.

First, don't get me wrong, unions had a very important place in forcing employers to provide safe and healthy work environments to employees. They were a critical part of the Industrial Revolution era of things. However, it sure seems like they've lived long past their original usefulness. It seems to me that oftentimes now unions are more an agent of stagnation and rot than good change. My impetus for writing this short post today comes from this article (which will be changing as the news conference in currently in progress): Obama urges special rewards for best teachers. The teachers' union has long opposed merit pay/bonuses for teachers. Why? Just WHY? Oh, you mean if we reward teachers for being good at teaching then the bad teachers might feel inferior somehow? Good! Having been through 12 years of public education I would be more than happy to put pressure on the crappy teachers to encourage them to either improve or find a new job. But, from my discussions with actual teachers, it seems that the teachers' union mainly exists to ensure that firing any teacher is difficult, and that no teacher gets rewarded in any substantial way for being better than others.

I've had an interest in possibly teaching at a high school level, however it is the nonsense included in things like the teachers' union that makes me think twice. I'd prefer to work in a field which rewards me for being good at what I do.

How many interviews does it take to get a job?

Though cousin to the more popular "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toosie Roll pop?" my question is probably more important.

I just completed my sixth, yes 6th interview with Lawrence Livermore National Labs. I've been told that I can probably expect a job offer, but anything official must come through HR, so I can't take that to mean I will be offered a job.

I think that is actually the last of the interviews though. To summarize them:

1 Preliminary screening interview after the Career Fair in January
3 On-site interviews in Livermore, California last week
1 Position placement phone interview last week after returning to Provo
1 Position placement phone interview today

These last two phone interviews are very good signs that I will be offered a job, but there's still the possibility of it not happening.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it appears that CPM will probably need to decide in the coming weeks if he'd like to live in California and work for LLNL for the next stage of his life.

What do you all think?

Life Update

I realize that I have not been updating this blog very actively. Mainly it's because most of the things that I've been blogging about fit more aptly on my real-identity blog. So it has been getting a lot of updates.

But, I'll fill you in on some things that have been happening. I've been spending time working on the Board. The future of the Board lies in in the Django-Python web framework. If you happen to know it, or have any interest in learning Python/Django let me know, we can also use an extra coder.

As I will be finishing school in the coming months I've been looking for job opportunities. I've been off interviewing at places and sending out applications and resumes. I may be getting some offers in soon and I'll then have to decide what I want to do with the next stage of my life.

I also have the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Spring Research Conference coming up, and I need to finish revising the paper I had accepted into the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. Hand in hand with all of that is collecting data for my Master's thesis work and trying to get something useful to happen with my program. Having realized that some of my data was bad, my hopes have risen for the results of the next batch of processing.

That's the bulk of what's been happening in my life without getting in to too many details.