Dog Eat Dog Site

Today was like a lot of days lately. Perhaps it is the same where you work, but I find it increasingly frustrating. I’ll be intentionally vague and say that I deal with electronic equipment on a daily basis. It’s often highly technical and I openly admit that I do not know nearly enough about it, nor do I claim to be any sort of expert. However, many of my co-workers are quite knowledgeable about it and I’m not exactly a dumbass about it either. Most of us aren’t formally trained, but we deal with people who often are. They would qualify as experts. They’re often the engineers who designed the equipment or the expert at the company that built it. Or they deal with the equipment almost exclusively on a daily basis. We do not, we deal with a wide variety of equipment on a limited basis. The kicker is that today, while dealing with a piece of equipment I had never worked on before and had only a cursory knowledge of how it was supposed to work, was able to track down the problem instead of the so called experts.

I readily admit, I didn’t know how to fix it, and needed some explaining on how it worked, but once I got the run down I narrowed it down to the same problem area that it took the experts all day to figure out the same thing. And they aren’t sure how to fix it either. I’m not claiming superiority otherwise I would’ve been able to fix it. But it is frustrating when I(and most of my co-workers) routinely are the ones telling the experts how to fix problems when we try to get answers from them. You know, because they’re paid to know this stuff.

I like my job, I like the troubleshooting aspect of it and the technical side of it, but it’s frustrating when the experts don’t appear to know any more about their area of expertise than my dumb ass. I should also add that I generally like my co-workers and the people I deal with and I’m sure plenty of them have similar gripes about me. Eh, it’s just frustrating at the increasing frequency of what used to be a rather uncommon occurrence.

Florida standardized science tests are a disaster – Boing Boing

However, the test-prep materials were very poor. They consist of multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer. For example: “This sample question offers the following observations, and asks which is scientifically testable: 1 The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses; 2 The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal; 3 Orange blossoms give off a sweeter smell than gardenia flowers; 4 Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals.”

The curriculum guide says that the correct answer is 4, but 1 and 3 are also correct. Krampf asked FLDOE’s Test Development Center for clarification, and the Center told him that although the question had three answers, only one was “correct” in the context of the curriculum — that is, students would only have learned about testing 1, and not about the chemistry needed to test 3, or the observational methodologies to test 4. This is just dumb. It means that the test doesn’t distinguish between students who misunderstand the curriculum, students who are making guesses, and students who have progressed beyond the curriculum. In other words, the test can’t tell you anything useful about the students’ understanding or the teachers’ methodology.

The article sums up the “problem” I had with standardized tests throughout school, even 15-20 years ago. The smart kids knew that often it wasn’t about giving the correct answer as giving the answer that they wanted. Besides, if they really wanted to teach kids how to do well on these tests, they give them the simple formula we would come up with. One answer is always obviously wrong, one answer is the answer you would think it should be if you didn’t know the material, which leaves you a 50-50 shot with the remaining two answers. Personally I always did very well on standardized tests, but they usually were at a lower level than my comprehension.

The whole thing is bullshit anyways. There is way too much standardized testing which is a mediocre measure of students grasping the material at that particular point in time. Plus, it leaves out a lot of other aspects of what should be a well rounded education. That and it doesn’t appear to raise the level of education either.

“We All Hate Our Women,” Ctd – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

As he correctly states, simply jaw dropping.

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. Egypt’s National Council for Women is campaigning against the changes, saying that ‘marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country’s human development’.

I wish I had some sort of witty commentary, but this just further proves that we’ll never win the culture war with religious zealots in that part of the world. Although I would pay money to hear the explanation as to why this law needed to be passed. Sure would liven up discussion in our Congress.

I know I’ve ripped on his New Year’s Eve “performances” in the last couple of years, but I did like and kind of respect him before that. Anyway, another icon has passed away. I’m sure he’ll be missed.