If you want to see it generate a Haiku from your webcam I just upgraded my silly little bring-your-own-key Haiku app to use the new model: https://tools.simonwillison.net/haiku
It took me a few rounds to detect this trick. I had a boss who would pick up on clues from upper management on where they may be headed. He would come back to our team, and throw everyone at a problem. "This is a priority for management.", he'd tell us. We'd solve the problem. About half the time, the solution would die right there, because management never requested it.
What he was actually doing was trying to guess what upper management wanted before they requested it. This way, when the request did come through, he'd have the solution on the spot. It made him look great. It wasted about half our team's time. One thing it did do for us is give us more experience in solving new problems, but at the expense of getting our day-to-day work done on time.
But I did get to the point of not being so eager to jump on his "call to action" meetings unless I had outside verification that it was an actual call to action by management.
It has taken me a long time to realize that at least half of the prose I write, when writing a scientific paper, will be thrown away. Trouble is, until the full document takes shape, I never know which half.
If someone can predict and deliver what a customer wants, before they want it, with a 50% hit rate, that is excellent.
What appears to be troublesome in the narrative is, "It made him look great." It would be far more encouraging to see, "It made our team look great!" I get the sense that perhaps this boss wasn't sharing success, both credit and reward, with the team.
Haha exactly, most of that comment looked like a glowing praise of that manager honestly! A rising tide should lift all boats - would be nice if GP posted whether the team also got any credits and rewards for being the LITERAL definition of Innovative Risk Takers!
I'm going to answer this assuming you mean gaining number sense, which is something I didn't realize I was missing until I gained it.
I got my undergrad in math and physics. I was good at math. It wasn't until I had been teaching high school for 3-4 years when some gave me a copy of Shortcut Math by Gerard Kelly. After reading it and practicing the techniques, arithmetic made so much sense. I was able to easily add, subtract, and multiply larger numbers in my head.
Interestingly enough, many of the techniques taught in this book are also part of the common core math curriculum. It's a way to help students gain number sense.
I've straddled and blurred the line between being in IT and an educator. I've seen home schooling go horribly wrong and incredibly right. From my observations of the few dozen families I've watched, it seems to mostly depend on the motivation of the parents, and how much time they're willing to put into it.
The ones that tend to go wrong are those parents whose primary motivation is to keep their children from learning things, usually on religious grounds. I'm not saying that parents who provide a religious education do a bad job, but if the goal is to avoid having kids learn certain basic level facts (like reproduction), they will have gaps. I've also seen where parents expect to throw their kid in front of a computer to do all their learning, which also goes bad. In these first few cases, I've seen situations that come close to neglect. A third path that can go either way are the single-issue families. This would be parents who want their child to focus on one specific talent in order to nurture it, like singing, dance, or a sport. In these cases, so long as there is other topics covered, the kids can turn out ok as well as be at the top of their field. There's also cases in this area that can look like abuse when the parent is a little too vested in their child's success.
The home-schooling stories that are super successful are usually where one parent (or ideally, both take turns) at turning every day activities into learning opportunities. One family took at least one trip per week to a museum, zoo, botanical garden, park, public government building, or conservation area. The kids had to research the location before the visit, write up a list of questions they had, had questions added by parents, find and record the answers during the visit, and write up a report afterwards. They would research an issue and write or visit government representatives to discuss the issue as a well-informed member of the public. In those families, it seemed the entire family was about daily and life-long learning. The parents also had the kids involved in a lot of outside activities like local plays, orchestras, sports. Just as busy as the public school kids, just a more holistic approach to learning.
I know a few truck drivers. They're not getting paid any more than in past years. Trucking companies may have increased demand, truckers are still getting paid trucker's wages. Enough to get by on at the cost of having to work 12+ hour days.
They have seen a serious pay cut since the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, however 70% is a big exaggeration. That would imply the typical trucker was earning the equivalent of $135,000 per year in 1975 based on today's BLS numbers. And if it were accurate, I'm not sure how anyone could think that would be sustainable across a field flooded with 1.7 million drivers. With the pay decrease, there are dramatically more drivers today than in 1975 after adjusting for population growth. It's now providing a lot more jobs at a lower pay. The reason wages dropped was due to increased competition and deregulation, the value of their services declined. The reason wages were so high before was due to artificial labor scarcity and price controls via a cartel system (which Jimmy Carter fixed when he signed the MCA bill), ie it was fake.
Business Insider covered this extensively, they found the typical trucker has seen a 21% pay cut since 1980 in real terms -
"Business Insider compared freight wages, adjusted for inflation, from the BLS 1980 area wage survey and location-specific wage estimates from the BLS' Occupational Employment Statistics. For the five cities in which comparable data existed in both surveys, wages decreased by 21%, on average."
While a 135k sounds great, now consider they have to pay for their fuel, they are independent contractors generally. Then taxes on top of that. when truck drivers attempted to get a loan at a previous employer the conversation of "but I make a 100k a year" happened several times. No you really make 50k.
I used a 'typical' driver earning $75,000/year in 1975. $75,000 today, after expenses, is considered well-payed. New drivers earn $20,000 to $30,000/year.
According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator[1], $75,000 in 1975 would be equivalent to $362,000 today.
Business Insider has, shall we say, a very Capital-oriented view of the trucking industry, constantly shilling for low driver pay. Drivers who read it are always amazed that they never seem to mention that there would be way more drivers than needed if they could earn what they used to.
Long haul trucking should go away, in favor of long haul rail. The reason the former can compete with rail is because of heavy government subsidy in the form of free highways.
Trucking causes most of the damage to highways (fatigue damage), and the environmental costs of trucks are huge (fuel, rubber dust, brake dust) compared to rail.
The US already moves over 40% of its total hauled tonnage by rail, more than twice that of the next largest economic entity, the EU, which is pushing about 20%. Long haul trucking isn't just competitive because the "subsidy" of not being banned from the federal interstate highway system. Pretty much all the freight that can be economically shipped by rail already is. Rail is inflexible and requires substantial investment in fixed infrastructure to add terminals. Intermodal facilities frequently add so much difficulty at both ends that it's often simpler and faster just have one truck drive 300 miles than to run a trailer 100 miles, piggyback by rail 200 miles, then another truck run the trailer from the intermodal terminal 100 miles to the destination. Charging trucks a toll to use the interstate or whatever isn't going to make rails magically appear over steep mountainous areas in the western US, or bridges for parallel tracks materialize over all the rivers and streams in the midwest/south, or new rights of way appear through the densely populated northeast. It's not like government sugar tariffs and corn subsidies combining to perversely make corn syrup cheaper than sugar. Rail and truck transport fill different niches and are both necessary to a functioning transport network.
No one is expecting magic, but if we priced in the externalities of trucking (mainly increased fuel taxes or tolls for road damage) that would help shift cargo transportation mix a little more towards rail.
I inherited a large database that "supported" an application, when in fact the application layer was built into the database. I took over from a begrudging dev who was involuntarily transferred from dev/dba to just dev. In reviewing the hundreds of ETL jobs, I found one that started off as SQL that invoked visual basic script in an external file share, which at some point invoked a small obfuscated machine code script located on yet a different external file share. Googling didn't tell me what the machine code actually did. The disgruntled dev said that if I wasn't smart enough to figure it out then I should quit. He had put this mess together with the idea that it would be job security. Finally, his boss forced him to admit that the machine code stripped a text field of spaces. The job was re-written in straight SQL and ran much faster.
I heard a neighbor kid get hit by a car. A bunch of us were outside playing tag, heard the tires screech and the thump. The kid was an impulsive type, and the lady who hit him was our lunch room monitor, a very very sweet and kind woman. The kid was shooting across the road to check the mailbox, even though his mother had just told him she already picked up the mail. Other than the screech and thump, the only other sound I remember was our lunch room lady wailing when the paramedics stopped trying to revive him. We were half a block away observing, but is was like she was right next to me.
The kid was a grade or two below me, so I wasn't really friends with him. 40 years after the fact, that event still sticks with me.
When I was about seven I remember a boy named Simon who I used to play with, who told me how he liked to hide in the bushes beside the road near our houses and jump out in front of cars as they approached. I was too young to comprehend how messed up he was (he was one of those 'bad' kids who kept getting in trouble in school) and I went along with him to watch. He urged me to try it first but I knew better, and hid in the bushes while he did it.
I didn't yet understand how completely insane the situation was. The first couple cars just swerved or honked and went past without stopping, but a lady driving a VW Beetle was slower to react and slammed on her brakes, skidding and swerving and barely missing him. I can remember seeing him run out in the road, facing her with his arms out and an excited look on his face.
The lady driving was completely beside herself, screaming and crying as she ran over to him, demanding to know what was going on. Simon confessed and also told her about me hiding nearby, and I remember being terrified as she grabbed his arm and ran over to me, still shouting and sobbing all at once. She was (understandably) just completely out of control and she marched us up the road to our houses to tell our parents.
I wasn't allowed to play with Simon again and I think that was the day I realized that cars and driving were deadly serious, and nothing to joke around with. For me it was mostly seeing the reaction of the lady driver and trying to comprehend why she was so upset. Looking back on it, I feel sorry for her and for Simon's parents, because they must have had a hell of a time raising him. Strange the things you remember from childhood, but fortunately most people turn out OK.
I'll second Mendeley. I've used several other options, but Mendeley has a Chrome plug-in that will download the PDF as well as try to read author and other bibliographical info. The desktop app helps in searching for key words within all documents as well as individual documents.
