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In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality areA lot of us question why this should be the case, and some of us actively doubt the competence of students when it comes to evaluating teacher quality. My own view is that these evaluations are a signal of some things the professor might be doing well and certain other things that the professor might improve, but they do a poor job of measuring how well the instructor did at teaching the actual material. Sometimes they measure little more than popularity (which is not altogether unimportant!). But here are some interesting results:
often based on contemporaneous student performance on standard-ized
achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student
evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching
quality.
[O]ur results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.In other words, students of harder professors for introductory courses (who may struggle and give lower evaluations of that professor) do better in subsequent courses. Higher rank and experience (and thus lower pressured to get good evaluations for tenure) are negatively correlated with current "value-added" in introductory coursework, but positively correlated with value-added in subsequent courses.
Professor Miron writes that “antipoverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited antipoverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”Another interesting quotation on libertarianism (From Raj Pate's "The Value of Nothing"; HT to Atin Basu and Greg Lippiatt):
"There are two novels that can transform a 14 year old kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shurgged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."
A recent NY Times article/blog post discusses a classic Bayes' Theorem application -- probability that the patient has cancer, given a "positive" mammogram -- and purports to give a solution that is easy for students to understand because it doesn't require Bayes' Theorem, which is of course complicated and confusing.The comment Phil made is priceless. Here is an excerpt:
I'm both perplexed and frustrated by your characterization of the "common sense" cancer calculation, because (except for the rounding) you have indeed applied Bayes' Theorem, whether you know it or not. ... Your calculation is EXACTLY as "labyrinthine" as Bayes' Theorem, because it is EXACTLY THE SAME as Bayes' theorem. Rather than telling your students that you have a better way of doing the calculation that avoids the complexities of Bayes' Theorem --- a claim that isn't true --- you should tell them that you can explain why Bayes' Theorem makes sense.These journalists are one and the same who excoriate bloggers who provide information for free because it cannot possibly be "as good" as information that goes through the lens of journalistic editing. Riiiight. Or maybe experts are sick of being misquoted and taken out of contexts by journalists and figure the only way to do something right is to do it yourself.
andTaxi drivers boast of owning multiple flats for investment. (LA Times)
and"My maid just asked for leave... She's rushing home to buy property. I
suggested she borrow 70% so she could cap the loss." (Business Week)
It's somewhat reassuring that buyers are plunking down sizeable downpayments. (Economist)
