[ExI] sequestration, was: RE: standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
...

> On 12/8/12, spike wrote:

> <snip>

>> ****Question code hipsters:  is there a standard product or a 

>> software framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test 

>> questions, ordered from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the 

>> response and does the ranking and deciding which question to ask 

>> next?****  spike

 

>...Keyword is "branch", as in "branch quiz" or "branch test".

At least one such product exists:

 

>http://www.wondershare.com/pro/quizcreator.html

 

Cool thanks Adrian!  I am looking at this and another product BillK
suggested.

 

Both you and BillK, being space guys, may be interested in why I am doing
this.  Adrian already knows about sequestration, being a fellow yankee.
BillK, as I recall you are British, ja?  Here's the Readers Digest version:
the US government has been borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it takes in
taxes.  Clearly this not sustainable, even in the easily foreseeable future,
so our congress designed a horrifying OR ELSE, which is a brute force
approach to balancing the budget, known in the mainstream media as the
fiscal cliff.  The government makes severe across-the-board cuts, about half
of which comes from domestic spending and the rest from the military.

 

The punchline of all this is that even these drastic cuts are not enough:
even after the cuts, we still have a significant budget deficit, on top of a
whole new and long list of problems.

 

Second punchline: if the US goes over the fiscal cliff, we get a free test
for economic theory.  We get to find out from actual evidence who was right,
Hayek or Keynes.  But that is s subject for another day.  

 

Right now I am looking over that cliff, gazing into the abyss until it gazes
back into me.  Here is what I have realized (do feel free to comment
hereupon.)  Even if we don't have full sequestration, many of the effects
will be seen anyway.  The compromise by the US congress might be nearly
indistinguishable from sequestration.  If so, the immediate impact of
sequestration will not fall directly on the military, but rather military
contractors.  If that happens, military contractors which hope to survive
into the next decade will promptly eschew business as usual, and embrace
business as unusual.  That means they will need to carefully inventory their
skill base, and select from among their own staff the most versatile and
critically skilled individuals, and. let the rest go.

 

Second notion:  the aerospace majors in particular, and the other mainstream
businesses in general, have failed to deal with the rise of a recent
phenomenon that has my full and undivided: the MOOCs, massively open online
courses.  I took an artificial intelligence class from Stanford's Sebastian
Thune  online last fall, and found it excellent.  So did many thousands of
others.  Of course I did not get any actual credentials from taking that
course.  All I got from it was the actual knowledge.  Only paying Stanford
customers get Stanford credentials, and you can't even become a paying
Stanford customer unless you are young, rich and handsome.  Being none of
the above, I am out of luck, but Thune still managed to give me some
excellent ideas, such as this one. 

 

Industry has long relied upon the university to evaluate the student,
judging applicants based on the reputation of the institution and the
student's grades.  But what if we have a new generation of MOOC trained
talent, who cannot produce those credentials but who have terrific potential
as rocket scientists anyway?  

 

This has become a critically important question because of what happened in
the US university system over the past decade.  It became dramatically
easier for students to get loans, with what amounted to a government loan
guarantee.  The university system responded by accepting students in
enormous numbers and offering worthless degrees.  Consequently, starting
about 3 to 4 years ago, the universities were graduating class after class
of bachelor's degrees, many of whom never found a job, or are still
halfheartedly looking for one.  Clearly if they have no jobs, they will not
be repaying those student loans.  The government has been responding by
postponing the payment schedule to prevent those students from going into
full default.

 

The long term result is as foreseeable as the sunrise in the clear morning
twilight.  If we have huge numbers of student loan defaults, the government
will stop guaranteeing student loans, or make the award of those loan
guarantees dramatically more difficult.  If so, we will see the other side
of the coin we saw in the past decade: many talented students who cannot
afford higher education, but who have the drive and ambition to use online
resources to educate themselves.  

 

If a company has the means to identify and exploit that human resource
MOOC-trained engineers without college degrees for instance, that company
will rise to dominate the industry. 

 

Ja?

 

spike 

 

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