Products and Services – On The 8 Spot

April 14, 2009

rePost:Please Send This To All My Teachers In College hehehe:Stumbling and Mumbling: In praise of dumbing down

remember sir Ken Robinsons TED talk here, of how schools kill creativity, he says something there like “college produces college professors”, I love my professors but sometimes feel this sentiment. same with the board exams, the EE board exams produces exam takers/passers not electrical engineers. red the half of the post i didnt grab

In praise of dumbing down
Complaints about “dumbing down” have become a cliché. However, in narrow technical terms, the dumbing down of exams could be a good thing, as this recent paper explains.
The intuition is simple. Exams can only measure a subset of the skills required for most jobs. If you set tough exams, people with good skills which the exam doesn’t test will either fail or not even enter. The result is that employers who look for exam grades plus other skills will not get a pool of able candidates.
In such cases, the dumbing down of exams can help. They’ll allow those people with good but non-tested skills to now acquire credentials as well. And as these people can now get jobs ahead of good exam-passers with poor other skills, so labour productivity might improve. This would happen if the decline in average tested skills is small, relative to the improvement in average non-tested skills of the new exam-passers, or if non-tested skills are very important for job success.
It’s possible, therefore, that dumbing down can be good for the economy.
So much for theory, what of practice?
via Stumbling and Mumbling: In praise of dumbing down.

March 20, 2009

rePost:Is It?:Is the Waiting Room Necessary? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

: Image via CrunchBase

The problem is not waiting but actually not knowing how long the waiting would be. I think the doctor could actually try to implement gathering of patient statistics. I imagine that when you get appointments you already have a reason to go. The doctor could aggregate patient data on how long it takes per procedure and the variance with respect to each patient. This would help the doctor in estimating more accurately how feasible is the appointments for the day.
I agree with ML(17) and Saumya. I would like to add that if the waiting room was designed to have activities that were well suited to how long the average waiting time is. They need to make waiting rooms more activity centered rather than waiting/magazine reading centered!.

Is the Waiting Room Necessary?

By Daniel Hamermesh

I spent 40 minutes waiting to begin diagnostic tests preparatory to seeing my ophthalmologist. What a waste of my valuable time! And my calculations from data from the American Time Use Survey suggest that this is a standard problem: the average adult American spends four hours per year waiting for medical or dental care, with each wait averaging around 45 minutes.
Pricing this time out at even half the average wage rate, the cost amounts to about $5 billion per year. Seems like a lot, and very inefficient, but what is the alternative?
The only way that every medical provider could ensure no waiting would be for the provider to have downtime herself, in order to have unutilized resources, both of her time and the services of the capital stock used in the practice. I’m not sure what’s the right mix of provider and customer waiting; but as annoying as my waiting is, the current system may be economically efficient.
via Is the Waiting Room Necessary? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

March 3, 2009

Stumbling and Mumbling: The power of stereotypes

: Image by peterjaena via Flickr

This is sad to read. In the Philippines people are labeled early on because of close family ties, where 2nd or 3rd degree relatives see each other at least once a year. One thing I observe in these awkward situation is the way people give young kids labels that tend to be based on superficial reasons that then I believe sometimes become self fulfilling.

The power of stereotypes
Reputations can be self-fulfilling prophecies ; if you give a man a bad name, he‘ll live down to it. A new paper (pdf) by Thomas Dee shows this.
He did an experiment at Swarthmore College, asking a group of students to take a GRE test. Before the test, some students were asked about their sporting activities, and whether these conflicted with their academic work, whilst others were not asked.
And Mr Dee found that the athletes who were asked these questions performed significantly worse than the athletes who weren’t.
This suggests that when people are primed to be aware of a stereotype – “jocks are dumb” – they are more likely to behave in accordance with it.
Stumbling and Mumbling: The power of stereotypes.