Yes, but this isn't really a proposal that teachers are going to like. Teachers in this program will be more highly paid than those not in it and will not be well liked by their peers. They will be expected to disseminate their expertise among their peers. Imagine how well that would go over in the lunch room. Teachers unions and their democratic members are staunchly against pay for performance systems and this is basically another one.

To some extent these concerns are founded and to some extent, of course, they are not. Teaching is looked down upon and much of that is due to teaching not being treated as much as a professional career as it should be. Another portion of why teaching is rightly looked down on is the large number of teachers that teach poorly yet are not removed as teachers due to union efforts. There are a variety of reasons why teachers don't treat their jobs more professionally. One is that the job is harder than most people think and there is nothing directly forcing teachers to treat it more professionally. There is a perverse incentive system where the teachers that work harder to teach better get paid less per hour and have less free time because the teacher that punches in the clock and goes home two second after the bell rings gets paid the same amount. Teaching certification programs and tests are far too easy, leading to teachers that do not have a broad understanding of their material. Finally, teacher development programs for active teachers are beyond terrible. They are rarely appropriately content focused or focused on the actual items that need to be addressed by each teacher to develop their teaching to be more effective. But teacher education and certification programs have a perverse incentive to turn out more graduates so they get more tuition and state money, instead of making standards and coursework more rigorous. The only solution is to make the certification tests more rigorous and test the right things, unlike the current ones. Then the teacher education programs would be forced to adapt.

But it's a vicious cycle. Because many teachers don't treat their jobs professionally, and bad teachers are difficult to weed out, parents don't have the respect for teachers. Thus the support for teachers from parents and students reduces. The answer is to change the system of incentives so that good teaching is rewarded. Better, more effective teaching can be identified, but it's not easy or cheap. Unions need to stop blocking efforts to adopt pay for performance and instead should work with schools to develop appropriate evaluations for teachers instead of rightfully pointing out that pay for performance with bad evaluation systems are not a good idea. They should also be more willing to help weed out bad teachers for the greater good of all their members.

No, I've never heard of those. I can't remotely think of anything web animated that I could bother to care about either as I have other things I like to do with my time. There are those people that do like web animated stuff I suppose, and when flash dies it seems there will be a vacuum. That vacuum will create a business opportunity. Where there's opportunity, there's money to be made.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but at the same time my experience is very different from yours. Where I went to undergrad, math and stats majors took a mathematical statistics class and social science majors were required to take at least a general ed stats class (or could substitute it with more rigorous courses). Because I could get credit for it, I took the general ed stats class after the rather rigorous mathematical stats class. Most of the social science majors sat slack jawed in the general ed stats class and it was renowned for being the most difficult class they had to take. After the first day I realized I could just show up for the exams and did so, studying just a little out of the book. It's not that I'm that brilliant and it turned out the courses covered rather different material. Other math and science majors i knew reported similar experiences to mine. But the social science majors were simply not prepared to think analytically enough and even at the level of rigor of the general ed stats class. And the general ed stats class had a total enrollment of about a thousand students each semester across many sections, so it's certainly not a small sample size.

Where I do agree with you is that the primary difference between statistics and mathematics is uncertainty, and that hard science students are often unhappy grasping this central concept. If you've seen that soft science students have a better time grasping the principles of statistics, then that is certainly something to take advantage of to level the field. Hard science students will tend to have an easier time with the rigor and equations.

As you seem to be aware of by the end of your post, the companies such as Microsoft that fund the BSA, and thus the BSA, are well aware of the benefits of piracy to their bottom line. But they also want to ignore that fact and throw piracy out there as the big bogey man for a number of reasons including pressuring for ever more draconian copyright laws so that they can squeeze those that they do manage to catch those pirating or just without proper software license documentation. Not having saved all the documentation perfectly isn't the same thing as pirating it, but the BSA and it's contributors such as Microsoft will sure use the laws they've bought and paid for to charge you the same.

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.