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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes<br>...<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> On 12/8/12, spike wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> <snip><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>> software framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>> questions, ordered from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>> response and does the ranking and deciding which question to ask <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>> next?**** spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>>...Keyword is "branch", as in "branch quiz" or "branch test".<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>At least one such product exists:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><a href="http://www.wondershare.com/pro/quizcreator.html">http://www.wondershare.com/pro/quizcreator.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Cool thanks Adrian! I am looking at this and another product BillK suggested.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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? <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Ja?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>spike <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>