Which makes it all the more important that the metric used for the evaluations is a good one. If the metric used for your evaluations at a private company are a bad one, pretty much only the owners of the company and employees suffer. If the metric used for evaluations at a public school are bad, it can have a heavy cost to a generation of kids. In this case, the union isn't just whining that we don't want to be evaluated and don't want them to be public (though they seem to do that too whih hurts their credibility), but they are correctly calling the evaluation method into question. The evaluations in this case are based on regression of multiple choice results of students, and have a huge error rate. There are ways to evaluate teaching performance that are effective, but this isn't it. The good ways are more expensive, and aren't as easy to check a box to say they're done. Tough luck. Doing a job right doesn't have to be easy, but as you say, it's important, so it is worth doing right.

Yes, good evaluations can do that, but these aren't it. In this case the Union is right. These "evaluations" aren't evaluations, they are results of multiple choice tests run through a regression. Anyone with two bits of understanding of statistics knows to take a regression result with a block of salt, and when you start with bad data that compounds the problem. It is widely considered among education researchers that multiple choice tests do not measure well what a student knows.

If the NYC school system is using bad data and bad statistics like this to make decisions, then they are going to get the obvious result. Teachers will (even more so) teach to the multiple choice test instead of teaching for understanding, and good teachers will be fired or mentored away from being good teachers because of the high error rates in the method. Now of course, the NYC teachers union is also well known for being a significant hindrance to quality education. Their interests just happen to line up with what is right in this particular case. In general they don't want any of their members fired for any reason and will oppose any method of finding out which teachers are poor teachers and weeding them out.

Amazingly, it even gets worse than that. I know a Dr. that often does work as a medical expert in court cases. In one case a family refused vaccination, were educated about the risks, and signed a very strongly worded consent form including being aware that their child may face death or serious illness as a result of not being vaccinated. One of the children went on to contract a disease that the vaccines were designed to prevent and sued. Who do you think won? The family did of course, because the Dr. didn't try hard enough to educate the family about the risks. What exactly should they do, spend their entire day trying to convince people that won't listen anyway?

Whoever came to that asinine decision should be sentenced to spend even just a single week trying to education nutter non vaxxer moron parents about why they should get their children vaccinated. In ten minutes they'd cry uncle at the unending stupidity of the non vaxxers and how unwilling they are to listen to any reason. Somehow they are all convinced by completely unscientific arguments that they all bandy about amongst themselves and will listen to nothing else.

So the result is non vaxxers will increasingly get fired by mainstream primary care physicians and there will certainly be plenty of quacks willing to tell them what they want to hear and take their money. The problem is it's the children that suffer not the parents. The children will get lower quality care. I think it will take nothing less than a widespread pandemic to change the situation and that may not be enough to change the minds of non vaxxers. It will probably take defining vaccine refusal as child neglect to actually fix the problem.

Nice nickname btw

Indeed you can set one up to an extent. The products you are referring to are known in general as CCTV's in the assistive technology/low vision community even though they don't necessarily involve a television anymore. The one thing to keep in mind is that the purpose built and sold products such as the ones you linked to are built with specific features such as contrast enhancement, color adjustment, (and more I'm sure I don't know of), that are effective in helping people with various types of visual difficulties. For example, they can switch a book placed in front of their camera from black on white to display on a screen as white on black, or change it to red on black, etc. Perhaps your girlfriend's grandfather's doctors or specialists could say whether those types of things or other features that these types of purpose built devices have would help or would be able to extend his ability to read printed text. Many also come with a table that slides in the x and y directions to make it easy to move a book around. A large smooth table can work similarly, but it's not as convenient. The other thing to realize is that the reason those devices are so expensive in many cases is that they are built for one purpose and thus are able to qualify for health insurance coverage. That's an unfortunate feature of most health insurance, but they don't want to pay for general purpose devices like a computer, even if it could be used with built in screen reader software like on a Mac (VoiceOver), because that computer could also be used for general purposes. So the result is much more expensive single purpose devices. Go figure. But as explained above, in some cases, they come with features that would either be difficult to duplicate in a DIY solution, or would take quite a bit of research to find out what features are best for a given condition. Maybe your girlfriend's grandfather would qualify for insurance coverage anyway. In this case, given that his condition is degenerative, perhaps, a DIY solution is better if it can work, if it would be cheaper.

Another option is to consider screen reader software such as VoiceOver that comes with Macs or JAWS or WindowEyes that can be purchased for windows. JAWS and WindowEyes are more serious, full screen reader solutions. A screen reader is certainly not an easy learning curve. They replace the standard computer navigation with an entirely new keyboard (and mouse work arounds) and audio based one.

Another option is custom Audio book creation. You can build a DIY book scanner diybookscanner.org/ and ocr any book or page, then use text to speech software to create an audio book. With custom voices they can sound pretty good, though it takes a lot of work to clean up the text input to get nice clean output.

People have already linked the KNFB reader software, which is worth looking into. It's pretty slick, I've seen it in action. It's pretty well optimized and runs on a Nokia cell phone.

I was with you everywhere until you recommended the Intel reader. The Intel reader is in every way inferior to KNFB Reader software on appropriate mobile phones. The Intel reader is much larger, has worse battery life, worse software, and is a first generation product whereas the KNFB Reader is the result of much more advanced work. The assistive technology specialists at the universities I know all prefer the KNFB reader solution, though of course none have an affiliation with it, nor do I.

Actually it's even far worse than that, sadly. People who refuse vaccinations and sign harshly worded consent forms designed to get them to think twice about their stupidity (including "your child may die or be seriously ill as a result of not getting this vaccine") will turn around and sue the very same medical practitioners that tried to get them to take the vaccines when they end up getting the disease the vaccine was designed to prevent. Somehow they can even win cases like this on the twisted reasoning that the doctor should have tried harder to convince them to get the vaccine. Anyone that thinks that way has never tried talking for two seconds to one of these non vaccinator morons and how unwilling to think they are. So the only option the practitioner has is to terminate the patient from their practice which may leave the child with no mainstream primary care physician and much worse medical care.

The other thing that really burns me up about non vaccinators is they lie and use a so called religious excuse to get their kids into school and place all other kids at risk. So the only option I have to keep from exposing my kids to the risk that non vaccinators have created would be to socially isolate them. I think schools should push for much stronger evidence of religious beliefs and get the religious leader to sign a very specific statement to justify why the family is placing other children at risk. I'm pretty sure there aren't any mainstream religions that have a prohibition against vaccinations so its a big lie anyway.

More useful to know is what Nokia did when compared to similar technology stocks. That makes it clear that the 20% drop was real, not just falling with similar market sentiments for other companies. See the yahoo finance 3mo chart, it makes it very obvious that the 20% drop was real and other companies did not have similar results. That's against the NASDAQ, it's similar for other indices.

According to Wikipedia's article on PDMI:

So in other words in order to get HDMI you have to carry around a bulky dock and/or extra device. PDMI does have USB, so hopefully it allows use of both of those at the same time. Either way, it's much more clunky than having them built in. Being able to hook the tablet up to a monitor and keyboard and external storage would make it much more useful. In that case it wouldn't matter that those things are large and unportable, the use case would be having a monitor and keyboard at the office and at home or the ease of hooking into a projector. I suppose it's not the end of the world to carry a VGA adapter and a dock connector, but it defeats part of the purpose of the small tablet.

Yeah, I think this is why Nokia's stock dropped so much. They didn't get anything out of the deal they didn't already have. They didn't get exclusivity, they didn't get control for the future, and they didn't get an operating system that is doing well already. They're really stuck with WP7 now, while they had Meego which could have given them a measure of control going forward. The costs to finish Meego and release products with it couldn't have been as bad as getting in bed with MS who have a history of trashing partners.

Yeah, no USB and no HDMI drastically reduces the devices usefulness. With those a tablet could be a truly mobile computer. That leaves a big opening for the iPad 2, though I'd be surprised if Apple added both of those given how they have not yet offered the ability to connect to external storage on any of their iDevices. I don't see much that this Tab 10.1 offers better than before besides the speakers and the dual core processor. It's not that those are nothing, just not what it could have been.

Wow, you gulped the kool-aid. MS marketing told you it was a new thing and you and a surprising number of people believe that. It's at least the seventh version of their phone platform. MS has had phones with their mobile OS since at least Pocket PC 2000, 10 years ago. And that was based on Wince 3.0. In other words they've had over a decade to get this right, and instead WP7 had to copy everything the competitors figured out about how to make a smartphone work and dump legacy support to get released.

WP7 may indeed be fine, I don't know, but they've had more than 10 years to get it there.

The light sharpener is the much more serious version done on an old school 12 foot satellite dish that is actually closer to deserving mention on slashdot. The article is annoyingly laid out over more than 20 pages, but it is kind of cool what he was able to do with that much concentrated solar power. He also didn't try any better methods of depositing a mirror on the dish. He did small tests with tinfoil and they showed the tinfoil was clearly less reflective than the mirror. Of course the problem with the huge old school dish is that it's a mesh, not a smooth parabola, so any silvering or foil deposition really would have required placing and polishing a smooth parabolic surface for maximum efficiency.

I haven't looked that much but I'm nearly positive you can get a low end android phone now for that $30 that will do at least say 50% of what an iPhone or the higher end phones will do and you can even go without a contract. That 50% may be 90% or more of what you want to do or it may not but it will likely surprise you how much more you can do with a computer you carry with you all the time that has a mobile data plan.

Yeah you got nailed by a major platform change. It was for the better in the long run, but didn't work out so well for you in terms of software support. In general though Mac hardware lasts much much longer than PC hardware. Before the intel switch you would see people with Macs 2-3 times older than other peoples' PCs and still doing what they wanted with them. It's premium hardware and it does last longer in most cases.

Yeah, this accountant was pretty stupid. The IRS had been saying for several years now that they were going to go after unreasonably low wages for S-corporations. All the guy would have had to have done was put his salary at about $80k and he would have been left alone. But he got greedy.

The situation with executives is totally different. If they take that $1 salary then they get paid in either bonus or stock options typically. Neither of which amounts to anything if the company doesn't do well. And in the case of bonuses, those are treated as wages on the W-2 and thus pay the payroll taxes anyway. All of this is ignoring the absolutely crazy high taxes that a corporation has to pay in order to pay an executive a high compensation package. Some of that can be reduced when these corporations use all the loopholes you spoke of which reduces their final corporate tax, but not all of it. They're still paying payroll and/or gross-up and other taxes on the executive's overall compensation. That's actually what makes executive compensation so sick and wrong when the executive isn't even getting good results.