You have an interesting notion of failure there. You seriously trying to suggest that Jobs was not a success as a CEO until his return to Apple? Hell it seems the only job position he has Held since age 21 is CEO.
Sure he got ousted. He ran Apple so badly that when he departed he was able to personally fund the purchase of a segment of ILM which he turned into PiXAR. He founded NeXT which admittedly failed to emerge as a hardware contender at which point Jobs refocused it on OS development. As a result he was bought out by his Old Company who thought so 'poorly' of what he had done with NeXT that they made it the foundation of their OS and re-instated him to his former status as CEO of Apple.
This is what you point too as a history of failure which was only overcome with experience? Being a founding father of the home computer revolution? Presiding over a company that redefined feature length animation? Presiding over the creation what many consider to be the best personal computer OS available?
I truly wish I too was capable of such a history of 'failing' as Steve Jobs did as a newbie CEO of an industry he helped create. Did he get better with age? Certainly. Did he fail out of the gate? I have a hard time believing you are putting that theory forward.
I have little doubt the experience of losing control of the company he started was a valuable Lesson for Jobs. But dude... by that time he had already experienced a very high level of success by any sane standard.... a level of success that I am willing to bet many 'experienced' potential CEO's would gladly sacrifice a testicle (or other valuable piece of anatomy if that one is unavailable) to experience.
Also noticed you did not mention Gates or the Google wonders.
Again, I am not positing this as an excuse for the insanity that is JJ Abraham's decision to drop a midshipman into the command seat of the flagship. Merely pointing out there are exceptions to the rule of 'experience' being the only way for someone to succeed in the big chair.
Well I think you chose a poor example there in Apple... Steve Jobs is not the best example for someone arguing CEO's shouldn't be young. You do realize he was 21 when starting Apple? Heck... some of the most successful CEO's of our time were kids when they conquered their respective worlds. Microsoft, Google, Apple.
As for the notion that young people cannot command well... Alexander the Great? Not that I disagree with the basic premise that handing Kirk the keys to the flagship was over the top. I just do not find his age to be the main problem. The problem in my eyes was that there was no reason to place him in command of the flagship. Field promotion under extreme circumstances is easy to believe especially for someone performing, especially if they are in the midst of continuing action with no time to properly reshuffle.
Now I think the story did have a premise of the Federation being involved in a serious long standing all hands on deck war... hence why the academy cadets were called out to Vulcan in the first place. But they really did not develop that angle at all and did not use it to keep a field promoted Kirk in the saddle.
They should have put him on a different ship for this movie in the first place rather than going straight to the Enterprise. The story of Kirk gaining the Enterprise would have been good grounds for say the next movie or perhaps even one further down the line.
Well... they did not say it was an intrinsic superiority/inferiority. They said there was a cultural rejection of learning. Not inability to learn... a bias acting negatively against learning. Granted It would be more politically correct and far less controversial to state this whole issue in terms of economic status rather than in racial terms. Instead of african american culture you could describe it as the culture of the the projects/urban lower income vrs that of the middle-upper class. However it isn't inaccurate or racist to say there are cultural issues which impact academic success faced by african american children regardless of their family economic status. In other words issues that most certainly are cultural in nature. Black middle-upper income kids are an unfortunately small minority in most african american communities who tend to feel torn between the social norms of both groups. And those social norms are most certainly not academically neutral. That was a pretty much the whole premise behind the 'Fresh Prince' show with Will Smith. See Carlton in any episode where he wants to 'be cool like Will' for one side and any show with Will actually trying to succeed at school without being 'Carlton'. A silly show... but one that had its finger on the pulse of a very serious issue.
While the driving factor here is far more likely to be economic than racial it is going a bit far to say there are no cultural issues involved. The dividing lines of race and economic status track unfortunately close in this country. They are both correlated strongly to academic success (or lack of)... as for which provides causation (if either) is still a subject of plenty of debate.
For more examples of this in media (excellent for cultural references) go disect some of the following tv shows and movies... Good Will Hunting, Family Matters, Finding Forrester, Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver, and Coach Carter.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head and I find it telling that only one entails the story of a poor white person becoming successful. Consider if you will how successful Mat Damon's character has to be in comparison to some of the other feel good stories I mentioned to make that story 'special'. Will Hunting's success would be so by ANY standard. What is so impressive about a school getting its kids past a standard exam? Why is it special that a group of low income hispanic high school kids learned Calculus? Perhaps particularly relevant to this tangent go watch Coach Carter and really consider the reaction both by the media, community, and the school to his refusal to let his players play on academic grounds. Going a bit deeper pick through the differences in peer interactions with regards to intelligence between Screech in saved by the bell and Erkle in Family matters.... Or the same for Forester and Will Hunting.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Accurately judging the ability of a teacher to teach is a true bastard of a problem. You have the issue under discussion here of different cultural approaches to education. You have the issue of inheriting the results of a long line of less than stellar education... ie systemic problem... and the basic difficulty of how to measure success in such a way that doesn't torpedo the education process in the first place (teaching the test, grade inflation etc...). My suggestion would be to avoid trying to rate their success in the classroom on the fly. You should have successive teachers rate the results in related subjects further down the line IE as a teacher in a subject you should provide a 'grade' for the pervious teachers ability to ground the student properly for starting the next level. After all the true success of a teacher is not in getting a kid to pass a test... but to actually instill long term skills and knowledge. If a teacher is constantly having to backfill and re-cover building block knowledge for a significant percentage of students from a particular teacher that is a very good indication they can't teach.
Proving a teacher can't teach is almost impossible on the individual level, and difficult even at the 'class' level. Many many factors go into the ability of a teacher to successfully impart knowledge to a group of kids, and quite a few of them are not in their control. When they encounter problems such as unruly children there are precious few things they can do about it. Getting rid of teachers is hard... so is getting rid of the spoiled apple(s) ruining the bunch. In the cases where there are systemic issues they often have the impossible task of trying to catch the entire class up to where they should already be in addition to trying to actual advance them through the material at hand. Whether it is cultural or economic based this is particularly common problem in school systems made up primarily of lower income students, particularly in urban areas.
RTLS is nutz. Best thing I have ever heard to describe it is "Two Miracles Followed by and Act of God". The odds of a fully functional shuttle stack surviving an RTLS is not all that high (John Young famously described it as 'russian roulette") much less one that has suffered a failure drastic enough to push them to that particular scenario.
I have read books on the N810 and the Kindle and my personal take is that they are difficult to compare to each other. One is a general purpose computing device that happens to have a relatively pixel dense display and better than average battery life for a handheld computer. The other is a highly specific piece of technology largely aimed at imitating the printed page. In the highly specific case of wanting to read at night next to someone trying to sleep? I guess I would give the nod to the N810 but only if I am more worried about ticking off the person trying to sleep than I am about the strain on my eyes. Want to read in direct sunlight? Better leave the ole N810 at home. Even if you can crank the screen up high enough you can kiss that nice extended battery life that comes with the extreme low light settings goodbye.
Kindle and comparisons are largely null and void. They just are not covering the same territory. The LCD's are typically more general computing devices of which a 'book' reading is one small portion of its capability. The Kindle (or similar e-ink devices) are purpose built for reading comfort rivaling a printed book. It is all they are trying to do and they do it far better than any does.
I feel safe in making that assertion because I have been searching for an electronic option to books for a LOOONG time.
Davinci PDA- Fail but surprisingly better than most other options I have tried... 100 dollar PDA from '94 that still works.
Palm V - Fail
CRT based desktop - Fail
LCD based desktop or laptop - Fail
HTC Wizard - Fail
HTC TynTyn - Fail
Iphone - Fail but comparable to N810.... screen is ultimately to small, to many page flips.
N810 - Tolerable courtesy of high pixel density, caused eye strain during book style reading sessions but was actually able to get lost while reading it.
Kindle - Its a book with one page that re-arranges its ink rather than turning a page.
Hackers of the world, unite!