Everything I have read about this glosses over this critical bit which I am very curious about. I understand there is/was a worldwide pandemic and all of that, but it feels to me that there wasn't necessarily a reason exams couldn't be taken in socially-distanced class rooms (with students wearing masks, as well as the teachers, of course) or if needed be in repurposed venues, like football stadiums (leaving plenty of space between students).
Was there a concern for fairness should the exams proceed? Or was it safety? Or did the government put their foot down on no exams? Or was it the teachers/unions? What happened?!
Competence. In the next couple of weeks Schools are going to come back in the UK. There will be little to no real routines to limit the virus, and certainly no funding. That's 7 months into the pandemic. To put it simply, it was easier to just disregard the personal achievement of an entire generation than to spend money on actually sorting out a reasonable testing measure. Figuring out a real way of making sure exams were taken would've required competence.
> it feels to me that there wasn't necessarily a reason exams couldn't be taken in socially-distanced class rooms (with students wearing masks, as well as the teachers, of course) or if needed be in repurposed venues, like football stadiums (leaving plenty of space between students).
Exactly what you’re proposing just isn’t feasible, because of the sheer numbers. I see American posters on reddit complain about having to do a handful of finals at the end of high-school, and the SAT/etc as well, which I understand is optional.
“In my day...” (wow I’m old... this was only about 12 years ago) my sixth-form had about 1,300 students (650 in yr12/L6, 650 in yr13/U6). Most L6 students did 5 AS-level subjects and 4 A2 subjects. Most subjects are then comprised of modules (e.g. In mathematics: Pure P1/P2/etc, Stats S1/S2/S3/etc, Mechanics M1/M2/etc, Decision/Discrete D1/D2/etc), and each module has its exam at the end of the term/trimester.
In my case, I took 5 subjects at AS-level (L6) and had no less than 8 exams in the May-June of my first year. Multiply that by 1,300 - with probably over 100 different exams. That’s almost 11,000 Covid-safe exam-sittings that need to be arranged.
Social-distancing regs mean that you need four times the floor-space for an exam room than previously (doubling distance from 3 feet to 6 feet in both directions). Doing exams outside on a field wouldn’t work: inclement weather and even a gentle breeze and writing on paper difficult and distracting. Doing it indoors means you’ll not only fill your sports-halls and cafeterias (which we did every year anyway) and need to spill-over into smaller classrooms - which means you need many more exam invigilators.
...and invigilators, in my experience, tended to be older people (60s-70s) - often recent retiree teachers. The exact same people who are quite legitimately fearing for their life over Covid so we can’t blame them for choosing to stay home.
...so we have a 2-month long period where schools and colleges need 4x the space and with far fewer authorised staff to oversee it.
Some schools will be able to handle it, others won’t. If it’s a combination secondary-school + sixth-form then they’ll also need to handle GCSE exams for the yr11 kids and SATs (unrelated to the US SAT exam) for the kids in yr9. Additionally schools also have “mocks” for yr10 (mock-GCSEs, but they still count towards your score in yr11). There may also be additional testing done for other years at the county-level. So that’s another few thousand exam sittings to add to that. My secondary-school sent the Yr7 and yr8 kids home for a week if they were overloaded with handling exams for so many. So if the LEA/exam-boards were to press-on with the exams then that’s unfair to the kids at schools that don’t have the capacity.
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Grading “by algorithm” - especially when that algorithm isn’t public - nor probably even we’ll-understood by the MPs in-charge - is a bad idea, yes. But I can’t think of a workable alternative: people’s lives should not depend on the outcome of exams - but we can’t trust teachers own subjective grading of their own students to be necessarily and sufficiently objective enough. There’s no economically-viable solution to this problem - even without a pandemic going on.
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Now that I think about it - I suppose one option would be still do in-person exams, but only do the core/essential exams for the most important course modules and use that as the basis for university admissions - so if this pandemic happened 12 years ago I’d only sit the P1/P2/P3/etc exams for mathematics and disregard Mechanics/Statistics/Discrete - ditto for physics, and so on. So the exam load would drop from my estimate of 11,000 to maybe 7,000-ish - I don’t think that would be small enough to manage still)
Absolutely. I just focused in finding good weight allocations for the given risk, but changing the objective function given to the negative of the sharpe ratio should get you good allocations that maximize the sharpe ratio.
You'll notice I am returning the expected return and variance of the returns. I didn't talk about it too much (besides a high level risk vs. returns at the end) because I didn't want to introduce another concept, but you can readily compare the sharpe ratio using those.
Yes, exactly. I was looking to solve the second problem, not the former. Following the secretary rule is good strategy for a lot of things, but I think we actually have more information here.
I am not super well versed on the secretary problem but I think some people have already looked into it for AC [1].
In general, what I was looking was to associate a risk profile to a series of decisions of either HOLD or SELL(amount) given the current probability distribution.
Hey there, author here. For sure, I hinted at this on the last paragraph of the post. The interesting bit is that if you do that you will build a more diversified portfolio (as the turnip price distributions on other islands are not correlated).
And for sure, if you have access to other people islands a lot of this becomes moot, as you will probably just sell at the highest price in any of your friends islands :)
Do you honestly believe Chavez would not be in this position? Seriously? (de pana?) Venezuela was doing 'great' because oil prices were soaring, which in turn made dubious economic policy affordable. Chavez did enjoy massive political support, mainly because venezuelans do enjoy their free rides (just look up how many pensions and public jobs Venezuela has, which, by the way, are now the ones being affected the most by this crisis).
I am absolutely sure that Maduro, while incompetent, is in the same kind of problems Chavez would be, and is pushing the same agenda Chavez would have. Let's not get confused by personality cult here.
Sorry, I'm not biased politically, which is kind of a rare thing these days here I guess. I am able to see good things both in a guy like Leopoldo Lopez and Chavez as well. Just ask yourself if you can do the same. But on to the point.
If you lived in Venezuela right around the time when Chavez died, you would remember vividly how you were able to access those Cadivi dollars, no matter how bad and annoying the system was with the three/four stupid folders they made you fill. Importers could buy stuff with their black market dollars and then replenish their stash when Cadivi finally payed them. As soon as Maduro took power he dismantled Cadivi and it has been next to impossible to get dollars at the official exchange rate. In my opinion that is the root of all problems, and yes, I do believe that under Chavez that would not have happened even if he was foolish enough to establish that exchange control for so long in the first place.
Hell, think about it, if tomorrow they really start offering dollars at whatever conversion rate, let's say 2000 but coming from the Central Bank, I can bet you everything I have this whole problem goes away immediately. There is an inherent quality at just being able to go to your bank to exchange currency instead of exchanging on a pool of people you know.
I'm very sorry to sound harsh, but you have a fundamental misunderstanding on how economy works. It's not the government who choses an exchange rate (or for that matter, the value of anything), it's the market. If you choose to believe that Cadivi was a 'great' thing, you are simply living in a fantasy fueled by high oil prices and cheap dollars that make you think that this was 'great'.
The thing with free rides is that, no matter how high or 'great' they sound on paper, they eventually end, and you see the real problems.
> "Importers could buy stuff with their black market dollars and then replenish their stash when Cadivi finally payed them."
Sounds just great. A 'great' working economy, working around arbitrage and fantasies. I don't need to have 'political biases' to see that Chavez, whose agenda crippled the entire private sector and killed every other possibility of economic growth that didn't depend on oil, would be in exactly the same position as Maduro.
Don't get me wrong, I too believe the exchange control is really bad. I certainly did not enjoy assembling the stupid folders and God knows how many trips to the bank. My main point was that what Maduro is doing almost makes the other system seem like a good thing.
But yes, we both agree that the person that started this whole craziness was Chavez. But I still disagree with you regarding what Chavez, or any other politician for that matter would have done in his shoes. I believe Maduro's main flaw is this attitude of not doing anything while the whole structure is crumbling. In my life, I have never seen any other politician like him unless we are talking about some of these government secretaries that end up being governors or mayors when the actual elected person starts slacking for whatever reason.
Alon Halevy is pretty big in the field of data integration. Some of my undergrad project was about improving certain aspects on his work on LAV integration. You might also find his work by Alon Levy instead of Halevy. If you want a theoretical view of the field, checkout Maurizio Lenzerini's work.
As a hiring manager, I use LinkedIn either to primarily source engineers or to validate the experience of an engineer that I found via some other means (open source project, coding event, etc).
To some extent, if you don't have a LinkedIn you don't really exist within the job market - which is fine I guess if you never intend to change jobs but might be something you do want to do some day :)
I'm actually curious why you wouldn't have a LinkedIn?
I have considered moving away from LinkedIn and designing an online resume. LinkedIn is not perfect, there are plenty of reasons you might not want to use it.
Besides finding engineers, what does LinkedIn provide you as a hiring manager that a resume would not? (Assuming an online resume or a pdf has links to company information, references, etc.) I can't imagine anyone actually puts stock in LinkedIn "endorsements" or "recommendations".
Actually not a requirement -- that's why we asked for email first. :)
We don't message it, but the last two fields are optional. Truth is we won't be able to handle every candidate that comes through yet so we're working in batches. The more information we have on people, the more we can prioritize them.
That being said, I'd love to chat -> zach@jobstart.co. I'll make sure you don't fall through the cracks.
Everything I have read about this glosses over this critical bit which I am very curious about. I understand there is/was a worldwide pandemic and all of that, but it feels to me that there wasn't necessarily a reason exams couldn't be taken in socially-distanced class rooms (with students wearing masks, as well as the teachers, of course) or if needed be in repurposed venues, like football stadiums (leaving plenty of space between students).
Was there a concern for fairness should the exams proceed? Or was it safety? Or did the government put their foot down on no exams? Or was it the teachers/unions? What happened?!