Greenville’s doing just fine. I’m more concerned about the brain/talent drain in the Pee Dee of SC due to lack of state support for economic development and infrastructure: http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/smaller-town-startups-stopping-the-brain-drain-in-south-carolina/283338/
Not Every American Needs to Learn How to Code
Let’s make sure our citizens are literate first and capable of doing basic math before we try to sell the next “American Dream” as being a app maker to our kids.
I love coding. I loved when my students were interested in coding as a middle school teacher. However, I made it clear to them that while hard work will get you halfway there, there’s a lot of persistence, skill and luck involved in developing the next Angry Birds.
While we realize the hard work involved in something insanely complicated like electrical wiring, we tend to gloss over the difficulties involved in computer science careers because “it’s just computers” and not a physical thing that you have “to do” in order to see results.
Code is only the latest in the classic American / Horatio Alger dream that hard work and the right education will by the golden key that ensures everyone has a job. Go west, get a farm. Learn chemistry. Become a mechanic. Learn how to fix computers. So on and so on and so on. Now: Learn to code! It fits very nicely with the current disruption/app/techie focus of the economy and suggests that the companies and donors that comprise it are necessarily the country’s future. They’re not.
via No, Mr. President, Not Everyone Needs to Learn How to Code – The Wire.
Edit: Dave Winer has a great post on this as well:
Bottom-line: In all likelihood, coding will NOT make you rich. So you’d better have another reason for wanting to do it, because it’s not easy.
Like blogging, coding isn’t easy and probably won’t make you rich!
The Story Behind a T-Shirt
Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it.
And go look (watch) this amazing production:
Code is on GitHub.
The Ministry and Drug Gang Economics
I’d argue the same is true for ministers and most any level of professional job given our current economic mega-recession and the tendency of those inside the core to overstay their welcome…
The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders.
Interesting piece with nice graphics on the PhD market…
How to Win on Price is Right Using Math
Make sure to check out the cheat sheet at the bottom. Math is pretty awesome when you use it…
Many contestants fail to win anything on The Price is Right, of course. But as I watched the venerable game show that morning, it quickly became clear to me that most contestants haven’t thought through the structure of the game they’re so excited to be playing. It didn’t bother me that Margie didn’t know how much a stainless steel oven range costs; that’s a relatively obscure fact. It bothered me, as a budding mathematician, that she failed to use basic game theory to help her advance. If she’d applied a few principles of game theory—the science of decision-making used by economists and generals—she could have planted a big kiss on Bob Barker’s cheek, and maybe have gone home with … a new car! Instead, she went home empty-handed.
via Winning The Price Is Right: Strategies for Contestants’ Row, Plinko, and the Showcase Showdown..
Why isn’t Thomas Whitley in this competition?
Science Magazine has posted the 12 finalist videos from its annual Dance Your PhD contest. The contest asks scientists from around the world to send in videos of themselves interpreting their research in dance form. As usual, this year’s finalists have gone all out with some wacky, fun, and just plain bizarre videos. You can vote for your favorite, with the winner and reader’s choice announced on November 21.
L.A.’s iPad Conundrum
I just re-checked the Apple site because I’m utterly confused as to why the L.A. school district would be buying $770 iPads when the $499 models are perfectly fine for school use (helped with a few deployments myself over the past few years).
I’m guessing they went with the 64 GB wifi models ($699 retail) for some reason (oh but students will need lots of space because more is better and the cloud is insecure!) instead of the perfectly reasonable and much cheaper 16 GB $499 models?
Weird.
According to the L.A. Times, a new school district budget shows that iPads will cost $770 each. Apple’s discount on the tablets doesn’t kick in until the District buys at least 520,000 of them. That will cost approximately $400 million. In a statement to the Times, officials said that earlier cost estimates, “preceded the actual procurement process.” The District went on to say, “The negotiated discount [i.e. $678] does not go into effect until the district has reached the $400-million spending threshold.”
via L.A. Unified’s iPad Rollout is Way Over Budget | PadGadget.
And who goes ahead with an order this large (and with this much national scrutiny) when you don’t have the final price from Apple nailed down??
New math indeed.
I don’t understand bureaucracies (and evidently they don’t understand technology or bulk purchasing or business economics).
Differences in Private and Public School Teacher Pay
As a fan of economic theory (by no means an expert), I’ve always tried to rationalize the chasm that exists between private school and public school teacher pay.
Having been both a private school and public school teacher, I’ve had to rationalize this on a whole different level.
Though there are lots of generalities in this article, I do agree with the concluding paragraph here:
The biggest lesson public education can draw from the salary gap isn’t to cut wages, or quash unions, or hold open auditions for unlicensed teachers. The lesson, in fact, has little to do with salaries at all. The moral is that not all teaching jobs are alike. Different school environments make for radically different work, and many teachers find private schools offer a more rewarding experience. Attracting and retaining teachers, then, means more than just raising salaries. It means taking disciplinary obstacles and bureaucratic nonsense out of teachers’ paths.
via Why Are Private-School Teachers Paid Less Than Public-School Teachers? – Ben Orlin – The Atlantic.
My only caveat is that not every private school is the same Dead-Poets-Society engendering experience for teachers. I taught at three very different private schools over the last decade and I had three very different experiences. There were varying levels of responsibilities, overhead, bureaucracies, call for standards etc.
In general, I’ll say that the best schools are where the teachers are happy and passionate about their jobs. How to accomplish that? Get out of the teachers’ way and trust them as the professionals they are (or at least they are hired to be).
Another Reason I’m Not a Teacher Anymore
erm… no:
Why Great Teachers Are Fleeing the Profession – Speakeasy – WSJ: “Teaching is essentially a part time job. They ‘work’ an average of 6 months out of the year. That number is further reduced in the northern climes by snow days (about 10 a year) which are NEVER made up. They have long holiday breaks, generous sick and ‘personal’ time provisions and average-length work days. For this they take home $50,000-$100,000 + a year. They contribute almost nothing to their health insurance and pensions. THEY ACTUALLY HAVE PENSIONS! This puts their compensation on par with (or above) that of someone who graduates #1 in his class at harvard law with a job at a top law firm.”
If the community where I was teaching were openly receptive to helping me support my family as a single parent, I’d still be a teacher.
That’s not the case.
The Scam of College for Everyone
No doubt…
Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed – Brett Arends’s ROI – MarketWatch: “Move over, Illuminati. Stand down, Wall Street. Area 51? Pah. It’s nothing.
The biggest conspiracy of all? The College-Industrial Complex.”