Article: Bill Gates on improving education

J.,

You may find this article interesting from a scientific perspective.

"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."

Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students' education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.

"We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year," he says. "Well, I'm enough of a scientist to want to say, 'What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?

There is also some discussion of approaches that aren't cost-effective (smaller schools), and how teacher's unions are torn between sticking up for their weakest members (people who shouldn't be teachers) vs. sticking up for good education.

Have a good day!

-M.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Grand Strategy of Al Gore

Insightful article on the grand strategy of the green movement. This quote made me think:

Gore's self-presentation  as a condescending, de haut en bas Great Explainer patiently enlightening the rubes so infuriates many of his opponents that they cannot help themselves.  They start arguing with him about hockey sticks and CO2. This is exactly what Mr. Gore wants; it moves the argument onto his strongest terrain.  Whatever one thinks of the scientific evidence for climate change, Gore is on much stronger ground when he argues that the earth is warming than when he argues that a great green global treaty on the lines he proposes can ever be either adopted or enforced.

It's certainly true that my own irritation with the AGW folks is essentially methodological: not that their beliefs are wrong but that they are unproven and unscientific. It offends me that someone would claim that something (positive temperature feedback) is 100% accurate when it's actually somewhere between perhaps 30% and 80%, and yet the observation is correct that Gore is undoubtedly much happier talking about science which is 60% certain than policy which is about 1% likely to be workable or cost-effective. So from a policy perspective, debating the science of climate change is playing into his hands.

Ironically, though, I'm a lot more sympathetic to the policy aims than the science. In a general sense, I DO support environmentalism. I support research into clean energy (esp. solar and nuclear) and I pay extra money for free-range chicken eggs and meat (although I don't care if it's "organic"). But I get really exercised about untruths and unprofessional science.

-Max

[1] Nothing in science is ever 100% accurate. Newtonian physics is terrifically well-supported by everyday experience, is used by civil and mechanical engineers every day, is simple and intuitive... and it's wrong, as Einstein pointed out with Special Relativity. But Special Relativity is wrong too, according to General Relativity. And General Relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics, so we know one of them must be wrong. All of these theories are immeasurably better-supported and better-tested than positive temperature feedback via CO2 emissions (i.e. "global warming").

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Bayesian Inference in F#

Recommended: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lucabol/archive/2008/11/26/bayesian-inference-in-f-part-iia-a-simple-example-modeling-maia.aspx

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon