StrangeSox

Hey son, want to go blow $200 on a Sox game this weekend? Nah dad, they're terrible, let's go to the batting cages instead, and then donate the money to a food shelter!

QUOTE (Paint it Black @ May 1, 2011 -> 05:05 PM) The Tigers are a personal thing for me, as I didn't think they were that good to start the season and I still don't. Nor did I think it would take 90 wins to win this division...and I still don't. The Indians just cannot keep this up. I mean I know I can't really prove why they won't, but their pitching isn't that good and there is no way the guys who are always injured (Sizemore, Hafner) will stay healthy all year. The Indians have now won 13 straight at home. That correction will be very, very fun. Hopefully we catch them when it's happening. Translation: my wishful thinking re: other teams in the division means your opinions on this teams' play is stupid! Ozzie4EVER!

Watch the full 18 minutes, it's hilarious. He gets some really good burns in on Trump.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ May 1, 2011 -> 05:36 PM) And we still failed in the end. That's the best part of all the comparisons to the great run they had last year--they still failed in the end because of the massive hole they put themselves in. I'm not planning on spending a dime on this team this year. I was really excited before the season started and almost pulled the trigger on an Ozzie plan. Really glad I didn't do that.

I love the "anyone who wants Walker fired is an idiot because hitting coaches don't do a damned thing" defense.

Anyone but Ozzie!

Republicans: #1 on the Economy!

Hulu Plus on Xbox and PS3!

apparently Fox Business doubled down on the crazy http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-apri...011/longformers

Bow before my dominance of The Democrat Thread with pointless internet arguments! (it's been slow at work)

Nor do I. But reviewing an arbitration decision is still not the same thing as filing a small claims suit in the first place, correct? What's to prevent the majority of companies from inserting clauses banning class action into the agreements? The States have no way to overturn these now, and it's my understanding that a significant percentage of consumer contracts employee these sorts of provisions. More and more employers are adding them as well. Legally, there's nothing to stop every company from inserting 100% enforceable mandatory arbitration and class action bans into every consumer and employment contract. That's the impact of this ruling.

It would probably have to be reviewed by the arbitrator! This could effectively be the end of class action lawsuits, at least until the law is changed.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:47 PM) From reading you quote there, it sounds to me like they have to force you to go to arbitration first. I've said that's fine. I don't see anywhere that says that's the only recourse and that if they're not happy with the arbitration decision they're precluded from filing a suit. The rest of the language deals with issues relating to interpreting the agreement itself, which again, needs to be put through arbitration before proceeding to litigation. The only thing you can file suit for is review of the arbitration decision which is a very narrow review. Arbitrators are not judges. They aren't juries. They're not held to the same standards as courts and don't have to follow the same rules. Their rulings can and often are kept secret. You can be banned from acting as a class. You can be forced to pay very high upfront arbitration fees and be subject to paying legal representation for the other side if you lose. You are signing your rights to litigation away with these agreements. I don't know how anyone is comfortable with that.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:47 PM) That you really can't. Which is why I hate the federal and state mandates/standards of education, and the evaluations of it. The problem there, to me, is you could get really, really, really bad local standards of education. Thinking of Texas recently and how they wanted to completely rewrite history from a heavily conservative point of view and redefine science to more or less include stuff like astronomy, I would be strongly opposed to city or county-level standards and no higher oversight. Granted, that's a State-level board making terrible decisions, but we've seen plenty of similar stuff like Dover, PA.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:46 PM) Then you see an emergence in the very next year, not years down the road. At the sametime, there had to have been some sort of improvement over the kids who flat out didn't care at all. The reality of teaching doesn't happen with convincing kids to learn finally on the last day. There is a drop dead date in the middle, at some unspecific point, where when they aren't getting it, they quit caring about it. Well that was a heavily framed hypothetical, reality will require a ton of signal filtering.

I also have no idea how you'd ever effectively measure that impact in an objective manner

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:36 PM) I can't imagine that teaching can be done with a completely undetectable knowledge time bomb that doesn't explode for years. I don't buy it. There's undoubtedly going to be some signal lag. If you are a fantastic teacher who got a whole group of dead-average kids and got them all really motivated to learn by the end of the year, well, you've been a fantastic teacher, but test-based results aren't going to show the full impact. They may be much better students now, but they haven't had the time to fully exploit what you've given them. Next year's teacher is going to get a group of kids who improved over the last year, but are now eager to get to the top. You won't see that reflected in the evaluation of your abilities, but the next teacher will. I'd like for Balta to provide some references here, but I see no reason to dismiss the claim out-of-hand. edit: effective teaching isn't just a measure of cramming knowledge into someone's head, which is really all a test can give you, but also motivating them to continue to learn, expand, explore and experiment. That impact will not show up instantaneously but will benefit them for the rest of their lives, more than getting a few more kids marginally better at algebra.

^This is assuming that Balta's claim is correct and that the signal can't be detected in a single school year.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:23 PM) You don't need it but once a year. The previous year sets the baseline for each invididual student when they come into the classroom. Being able to set their baseline against every other piece of data that schools have been tracking for decades, such as race, gender, poverty rates, previous test scores, previous grades, etc, you can easily find similar students, and also similar situation teachers and measure them. But this still doesn't address Balta's contention--that you won't see the signal from your personal performance until 2-3 years later, which means you're being evaluated on the [grade level-2] teacher in your school's performance vs the national comparable [grade level-2] teacher performance. You can't measure a signal two years before it appears.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:15 PM) Trends can be measured in miniuta. It is done 24/7 in trading. What is the volume of data? How long would it take to compile a similar volume of data for a single teacher? Remember, you're evaluating individual effectiveness, not overall educational standards effectiveness.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:18 PM) There are millions of kids in this country. As much as I hate the federalization of education, it isn't going away. What's the sampling frequency for a teacher?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:15 PM) Trends can be measured in miniuta. It is done 24/7 in trading. The very nature of the data is different and the trends are measured for different reasons. For teachers, you've got annual or maybe biannual evaluations at best. That's a very small set of data until you get to long time periods (because each child is a sub-set of data, so you really don't have 40 unique points in one set), and any "trend" could be overwhelmed by a single outlier.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:10 PM) As I just demonstrated, no they don't. The other thing that your trading firms and climate sensors have is data. A good teacher in a good school system gives you 20 data points a year. Then you move them around the next year and you get some splitting up of students, and so you wind up with 5-10 students from 1 class moving into other classes. Or, you have a program like the one I was in, where the same group of students stayed togehter for 4 years or so. You just don't get enough students to do the calculation you want to do here and have the results be meaningful. Well, that depends on the grade level, but I'd say it's anywhere from 25 for elementary to 80-100 for middle school and HS. This would be a very, very complex analyses because there are a ton of variables involved here. If you're basing it on future performance, you've got to control for future teachers, changing standards, and movement of teacher, student or both to another school or district. You're also going to have major hurdles whenever there's an educational philosophy/methodology switch, such as going from elementary school to middle school to high school.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:06 PM) You don't need 10 years to find out that kind of stuff. Trends emerge right away. You can tell very quickly if the initial returns are worse than peers, when all of the variables are put into consideration. The math isn't that complex at all. These kind of algorithms are located on every single trading firms website with way more variables included. Hell the climate change math is a million times more complex than what I am talking about, yet we have to take that as gospel. Anyways, that brings me back to my preferred option, which is in house administrators making these decisions, and then everyone b****es about how teachers can get fired for "nothing". Its either that or keeping it as impossible as possible to fire teachers, which is what the whole point of fighting progress in evaluations is about anyway. By very definition trends cannot emerge right away. Sample sizes here are small and spread over years and decades

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 02:43 PM) How they improve while they are in your classroom is absolutely fair. Not if the improvement in your classroom is largely a signal from the 3rd grade teacher's ability.