Curious why population is even a factor here. If it legitimately should be... why not compare states of the US with states of the EU? (Seems a roughly equivalent thing to do)
Bigger and more diverse countries have a wider variety of political issues and priorities. When was the last time broadband even registered as a political issue in the news, except in the context of some other more important political debate (urban/rural, racial disparity, etc.) And in the US, construction of infrastructure is mostly a municipal level issue, so its both low priority and varies dramatically by state.
Research done more than 20 years ago (and repeated and confirmed) already found that teachers have very little effect on educational outcomes. The biggest correlative factor is socioeconomic status and education level of the parents. Everything else is hit or miss
But hey, let’s publish a pointless paper... because academia.
I think this is an important paper. Even or especially if it confirms other studies. When I was a teacher in inner city San Bernardino, we were held accountable for student achievement ignoring student ability, socioeconomic situation, home life, or their capacity to disrupt the class. In large part, this is because of studies that say a teacher has outsized effect on student test scores. Now, I think a special kind of person can connect better with some kids and help them achieve. I think that is not something you can mass produce. With more studies showing teachers are not as critical as schools want to believe, maybe we can start focusing on other metrics to gauge suçcess.
> With more studies showing teachers are not as critical as schools want to believe, maybe we can start focusing on other metrics to gauge suçcess.
Like cost of hiring? Seriously, if teachers are not as critical, why not hire less or pay less salary... any half decent person in the classroom will do.
I think the study is about right that teachers are not as critical as they'd like to believe. I just don't know what to think of the implications...
I still think a bad teacher is absolutely terrible and that teaching is not easy. I don't look at teacher salaries and think they are too high at all. I think we are bad at measuring what makes a good teacher. I just know it is not based on standardized test scores.
When I was a teacher, I had zero power to remove a disruptive or inattentive student from my class. I had 9th graders who could not deal with negative numbers being expected to do well on state Algebra tests that are of arguable quality. Even if they made substantial progress, they would not be to grade level.
I can still remember one student who after nearly a year of not being bothered to pay any shred of attention in class, during the final review, paid enough attention during the last steps of solving an equation:
Me: Alright, and combining like terms, what is 10x - 18x?
Student, suddenly paying attention: But wait, you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number!
I can't stop the class on nearly the last week of 9th grade algebra to help this student understand negative numbers. And they are not interested in coming in to get help outside of normal class. Parents were not interested in making sure this kid got through school.
Not so fun fact: at this school, less than 4% would go onto any post-secondary education. Of them, about 2% would go on to finish a degree. Something like a 90% transitory rate (meaning that most students who started 9th grade at this school would transfer to a different school before graduation, if they made it that far). I could go on, but there was an underlying cultural issue that did not value education. That trend is hard to buck: I had third generation gang members, kids raising their siblings because parents (often a single parent) were working multiple jobs, kids dealing with daily violence, one kid was stabbed to death right off of campus. The majority of these kids and their families have no experience seeing what an education can do for their prospects. Add onto that a tough employment market (inner city San Bernardio!), and those who did have siblings who did get a degree, they often couldn't find a job.
All this to say, I don't think lowering salary of teachers would help. Maybe lowering the cost of administrators would help. At this same time, there were more administrative personnel in the district than teachers, something I could never understand.
You are 100% right, the world has yet to catch up. But mostly because politics, politicians, voting... etc. Not because we don't understand the problem/solutions.
Could you go a bit deeper there? How is it solved? I def agree that politics and ingrained behavior ("it was good enough for me when I was a kid!") can make change hard or near impossible.
It's worth bearing in mind that this is not a study on educational outcomes, but is assessing how useful value-added models are for quantifying teacher performance. While the biggest correlative factor may well be socioeconomic status, that does not preclude teacher's having an impact on within-group differences.
From the introduction:
> In this paper, we provide a stark illustration of the limitations to using value-added models to identify high-and low-performing teachers. We do this by applying commonly estimated models to an outcome that teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. Aside from the implausibility of teacher effects on height, student height is an attractive measure for this exercise since it is symmetrically distributed, interval measured, and arguably less prone to measurement error than achievement. We find that the estimated teacher “effects”on height are nearly as large as the variation in teacher effects on math and reading achievement.
It's also an interesting approach: take a model that is apparently predictive and see if it's also predictive of something that we know is unrelated. By showing that value-added models are displaying spurious correlation maybe policymakers will take note.
Could maybe take a similar approach to validating our ML models?
I think user ‘sixothree’ was stating that a picture would show after unlocking the phone, not after a call. I myself, have had it happen to me several times couple months ago and thought it was really creepy. It almost seemed as if someone was using the front camera without my knowledge. Thought it to be glitch or something at that time.
Oh gosh, a company in China follows Chinese law! The outrage!
Regardless what your view is, are you seriously suggesting companies should break the laws of the countries they operate in?
Before you say: “unjust laws, yes!” Consider what laws Chinese consider unjust, should they be allowed to break them within the US?
I would err on the side of: if you don’t agree with the values of a country then don’t offer your services. Capitalism, of course puts no value on values, so profit is the only ethical code a business should follow (logically).
The ratings on corners (at least in Australia) are rated based on visibility, not some complicated traction calculation.
They factor how far a head you can see, and how much time you need to react. Lots of cars/bikes can obviously tear through them faster. But that means they are just taking much more risk.
That said, perhaps auto driving can respond quicker, but I’d imagine that doesn’t change most of those ratings give. The time needed to avoid accidents is largely due to physics not reaction speed.
Australia does it, you can use your driver's licence, your passport, or your birth certificate and a recent bill. Or Medicare card.
There is no cost to requiring ID... It is you conflating the cost of acquiring an id with the cost of requiring one. As Australia shows, it can be done with a zero cost (birth certificates and Medicare cards are free)
Australia acheives a 90+% voter turn out. (Compulsory voting through fines) even our poorest are able to vote, that remaining 8% who don't vote are overseas, or missing.
US is lucky if it gets to 60%
The US system has serious problems that completely undermine a democracy... But hey, let's forget the forest and focus on this one tree right here.
Edit: Note people said the EXACT same thing about china "building roads no body needs" in the early nineties. Now china are running license plate lotteries in order to keep traffic bearable. Just have a sense of scale, when you are trying to migrate 350 million people into urban centres, you need to build a lot of houses.
This is too simplistic. There are still roads in china that aren't used much, while inner city infrastructure is insufficient. Also, many houses that are built are villas that farmers from the country side can't afford; Beijing has a lot of empty apartments and a housing shortage at the same time.
A "ghost city" is not a ghost city because there is no one to live in it, but there is no one that can afford to live in it. A lot of property is also bought for speculation given that China lacks a property tax.
As for highways, truckers avoid the ones that are heavily tolled, leading to heavily congested non-tolled roads (so called 7 day traffic jams...). And have you ever seen a road as empty as Beijing's 6th ring road?
So your issue is with poverty, and culture not with infrastructure?
GDP/capita is pretty shitty in china, I agree. Because time/money ratio is so crap, people are prepared to spend time, to save/earn more money, hence toll roads being an issue, and house speculation being an issue.
But no other country has increased GDP/capita faster than china (and on the scale china has) in the history of GDP/capita records.[0]
> Because time/money ratio is so crap, people are prepared to spend time, to save/earn more money, hence toll roads being an issue, and house speculation being an issue.
The point is that infrastructure investments are often misdirected, poorly thought out, or plain corrupt. China needs "affordable" housing, not property as "speculation opportunities" (and given that there are so few ways to invest money, this is what happens anyways). China needs low logistic costs, but has some of the highest in the world even with their "great" infrastructure; toll roads represent great skimming opportunities for officials and their families. Truck drivers are stuck in a crappy situation where they are forced to overload their trucks just to make ends meet, and hope the fines on the way (justified or not) don't bankrupt them.
> So exactly what are we criticising?
We were arguing about whether China's infrastructure investments were wise or not.
> toll roads represent great skimming opportunities for officials and their families
Okay, provide some evidence government officials are 'skimming' from (all) toll roads. That's a pretty big claim, and as far as I can tell, the tolls are either private companies or government run tolls, that isn't corruption, that's taxation and enterprise.
So they don't have affordable housing because they don't allow enough things to invest in?
All truck drivers have to overload their trucks, and hope they don't get fined?
China's a big place, are you sure your statements apply across the whole nation. Or are you pretty much referring to domestic problems in a particular city?
Housing is not affordable in the Bay Area (SF)... is that also because they don't have enough to invest in?
Truck drivers the world over, are over worked, under paid, and have to resort to drugs, over loading, and sleep avoidance to make it... Is that because of corrupt toll road owners?
China has (some) the highest logistic costs in the world? Are you sure about that? Can I see a chart of 'world logistic costs'?
> the tolls are either private companies or government run tolls, that isn't corruption, that's taxation and enterprise.
How do you think business works in China? All of these infrastructure projects are deeply guangxi based, and there is no better guangxi than family (e.g. how all the taxi companies in Beijing are run by official relatives).
> So they don't have affordable housing because they don't allow enough things to invest in?
Most housing is not built for people to live in, its built as investment vehicles for rich people. This is true even in 2nd tier cities, not just the first tier ones. Its a country wide problem that the government is trying to tackle.
> China has (some) the highest logistic costs in the world? Are you sure about that? Can I see a chart of 'world logistic costs'?
About 5X of developed country logistic rates. Sure, India might be higher, but China's "great" infrastructure should have lowered logistic costs to developed country levels, and it it hasn't yet (mainly due to corruption).
Hmm, I did not consider that. I guess we'll see in a decade or two. My opinion is that many of these constructions will go unused - permanent relocation is a lot harder than just using roads, plus no doubt most of them have already been bought for resale (increasing the price) or rent (which may be more acceptable). Also, there are whole apartment blocks in or near major cities that are still unused despite demand, it's not just ghost cities.
If you build things the market is not demanding, however dumb, eventually someone will use these things. Low demand means low prices, even if these prices are too low to justify the investment.
Everything has a clearing price, a price that will draw buyers and get it sold.
Of course, if prices are held artificially high, it will take forever.
It isn't just 'print whatever the consumer needs'. It's
- Dig it out of the ground
- process it
- Fabricate the unprintable bits
- Store all of this
- Print whatever the consumer needs in less time than it takes to drink a coffee.
So unless this make believe "shop" is fronted onto a processing/fabrication plant, which is itself, fronted on a magical mine that you can dig up any resource you like. Your scenario can never happen.*
Yes, there's a ton of raw resource extraction, processing, and transport.
But no, because a Nissan Altima or Apple Macbook (or Moto X!) are not commodities in the same way that gold or lumber or silicon are.
There's a reason that the Nissan Altima was the sixth best-selling car last year. I don't purport to know what that reason is, but it's not because it's comprised of raw materials any different from any other car.
