Bloomberg is also one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. Their entire business model revolves around providing accurate financial information. We happily pay $2k per month per person for it, partly because it is such a trusted source.
Some reporters may be dumb, but if it has the Bloomberg name attached to it, and has far reaching effects in financial markets, you can be pretty confident that this wasn't just the work of some clueless reporter.
Mike Bloomberg himself stands to lose an enormous amount of money due to lost business in China, as a result of this story's publication. Whether the story is accurate or inaccurate, either way Mike is going to lose money on it. The only business-logical thing that Bloomberg could have done with this story is to sit on it. Clearly there are non-business motivations for this publication. The possibilities that immediately strike me or that an overriding incentive for this publication was provided by an outside monolithic actor or that an ethical / public interest motivation prevailed.
As an engineer who hadn't studied that type of math in quite a while, Elements was pretty tough and I was getting stuck a lot.
ISLR introduces you to many of the same topics in a less rigorous way. Once I was familiar with the topics and had worked through the exercises, Elements became much easier to learn from.
My sister was an award winning teacher when she was at a good school. Now that she teachers on the edge of a reserve she has suddenly become "low performing".
Take 50 ideal teachers who have all the best training and have learned all the best techniques, and put them in a low scoring school. The test scores of the school will not improve. Most of the teachers will be focused on surviving until they can transfer elsewhere.
I hope they aren't just using 13Fs to determine hedgefund holdings. I saw one being filed recently and I was amazed at how useless they are for determining a funds actual positions.
You don't need to report short positions. This resulted in many scenarios where we were short a company, but from our filings, it looked like we were long. 3 examples:
- Class A and B shares. If you are long one and short the other, only the long shows up.
- Own the stock, but sold calls? Don't need to report the calls. Plus, options that are reported are done so as if they are fully exercisable.
- Debt, Convertible debt, and types of warrants and other instruments are not reported.
Agree 100% with this. 13Fs are not indicative of most HFs actual bets. Especially if they are running strategies where a bet consists of a bundle of securities (Eg convert arbitrage).
Also, Given delay in reporting, you’d just be getting in after they get in and likely they get out before you do. So the aggregate impact costs from this strategy becomes their alpha. Hence why some of these LS guys always talk up their positions.
Agree with the second. Making money in stocks is not just what to invest in, but when.
If you bought FB in the beginning of July just after a hedge fund reported it (but they actually bought in April and sold in July) that would have been bad for you.
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver talks about this a lot. From predicting politics to economics to sports to climate change, group predictions are almost universally better than individual expert predictions.
The article exaggerates a little bit. The myth is that every person has one specific style in which they learn best, and that this is how they should ALWAYS be taught.
Different ways of learning different subjects will be more or less effective for different students. All the studies linked in the article show that students perform best when presented new information in multiple representations, so they can then focus on the style that is working best for them in that case.
> replaced all the teachers in a school with teachers recruited from the top 5 or 10 percent of all teachers in the country.
My Sister and SO are both teachers and we've had this discussion. They believe that if you took a low performing school, and replaced all the teachers with the best teachers in the country, you would find zero difference.
My sister has been beaten up by students, breaks up fights nearly every day, deals with child protection services, assault from parents, weapons in the classroom, drugs, gang activity, students who haven't eaten or bathed all weekend, etc. She teaches Grade 6. It doesn't matter in the slightest how good of a math teacher she is.
She's has it bad, but I think many people here may be surprised just how common her situation is.
That's a pretty strong argument for increasing the baseline level of social, community, heath, employment services, in addition to a focus on education. likely need to invest in those changes and then keep the programs funded and running with careful adjustements for multiple generations.
i agree, there's only so much a single teacher, or a school full of teachers can do if a lot of other basic needs aren't being met.
My sister is a teacher, and had been recognized as "high performing". She was even given some type of award. She always taught in pretty well off areas where students came from supportive families.
A few years ago she moved to a school on the edge of a native reserve. She is now officially a "low performing" teacher. She insists she works twice as hard as before and has much more positive impact on the lives of her students. She's been robbed and beat up by students. Yet she now devotes her life to these kids, and would probably be fired in this type of experiment.
My guess is that the 'good' and 'bad' teachers in the study were almost totally dependent on the kids they had.
Yeah, it sounds more like they didn't find a way to gauge performance.
It seems similar to how a "bad doctor" might be the one who is taking the difficult to save cases and having higher fail rates. Difficult children make it difficult for the teachers, but the mediocre ones won't want to bother with them.
This sort of research is amusing in a sad way. IQ studies on large populations have revealed data for nearly a century that would easily have predicted the outcome of your sister's efforts. The scores for teachers have to be normalized against the best available data for the demographic composition of their classroom, if we're going to bother with it at all.
Unfortunately, people don't like what the IQ scores show, and so instead the Gates Foundation has to spend millions on a grand experiment that "teaches us nothing" as Mother Jones would put it, mostly because they refuse to acknowledge just how precisely it confirms the uncomfortable things we already know.
The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused and mistreated their entire lives. They were then released back into the world with a very poor education, and obvious mistrust for the government.
Friend of hers have taught in schools where a cycle of poverty inflicts the population. Most children are raised by single mothers because the father is in jail. When the father is released he has no opportunity to make a honest living for himself and the cycle continues.
The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ. It has everything to do with centuries of mistreatment of groups of people.
I don’t think that the GP was insinuating anything regarding the root causes of the issue.
However “IQ” at least as how we measure it, has clear demographic corollarion, this does not mean it’s “genetic” at least not in a racial manner. However it does seem to be hereditary even if through nurture and environmental factors alone.
The sad truth is that until we as a society come to terms with that there likely won’t be an effective solution.
Time and time again various charities and governmental programs discovered that trying to uplift the least privileged through a new coat of paint doesn’t work, even the gates foundation does not target the “weakest” schools as those are essentially beyond hope at least at this point.
I also don’t think that the GP’s point of rating teachers relative to the current potential of their pupils rather than using local, state and national averages is inherently wrong or discriminatory, if anything proposing that all of only those at risk and underprivileged youth would have new textbooks and cleaner class rooms that they would perform just as well as privileged kids who go to private schools or to private in all but tution public schools.
And while forcing children away from their families and putting them in schools where they would be abused is terrible one thing that does seem to work is just that minus the abuse and the forcing as children with less means that get into good schools through either scholarships or voucher based programs tend to perform extremely well.
That said the most important factors as far as underprivileged youth goes seem to be missing from the study.
Test scores are not the most or even an important factor for such social programs that seek to change the future outlook of these kids for the better.
Teacher or well “educators” can have and should have an impact far greater than pure academic success and that is they should imprint positive social character and personality traits.
So while the scores were not improving has the well being of the kids improved? Has underaged crime rates dropped? Drug and alcohol use? Violence? Was there psychometric collected to see if kids developed traits that would increase the likelihood of them succeeding in life?
Are their happier?
That is the data I would expect to be collected and in my matter much more than their scores on some standardized tests.
> The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused and mistreated their entire lives.
Let's keep in mind that residential schools were absolutely the most progressive thing going at the time. Let's reach out to these poor beleaguered people and give them the benefit of our modern school system! You can see how easily the story could be sold to people as a very moral act before the actual results of the way it was handled were known, generations later.
> The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ.
Why establish a false dichotomy here? You've obviously pointed out an uncomfortable truth which I was already well aware of. There's no reason we can't also be aware of the implications of IQ and any number of other factors determining school performance of any intersectional cohort against standardized metrics.
It's one thing to teach people, it's another thing to beat their native language out of them, which is what these schools were designed to do from the beginning. The whole point was to forcibly Christianize them and exterminate their culture.
> The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded by the US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 at a former military installation, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man." Pratt professed "assimilation through total immersion." He conducted a "social experiment" on Apache prisoners of war at a fort in Florida. He cut their long hair, put them in uniforms, forced them to learn English, and subjected them to strict military protocols.
So does this unfortunate and regrettable historical event mean that we can't use research, demographics, and psychometrics to determine likely outcomes and inform policy decisions?
ii) I think the University of Waterloo has it figured out. Your degree takes 5 years, but you graduate with 6 4-month work terms under your belt. Many of these are at Big 4 and the like companies. ycombinator seems to like Waterloo grads as well, and sama and others have written about this.
Some reporters may be dumb, but if it has the Bloomberg name attached to it, and has far reaching effects in financial markets, you can be pretty confident that this wasn't just the work of some clueless reporter.