Malcolm Gladwell

Will you please clarify your response? It seems like you're conflating 2 different things. The two things that I see here are:

1) How do we determine who is a good teacher versus a bad teacher?
2) Should we fire "bad" teachers, or should we just fire teachers who underperform to some standard?

#1 is a very difficult question. Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay on how teachers are like NFL quarterbacks: we can't really tell ahead of time who will succeed. (http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_12_15_a_teacher.html)

#2, are you against firing teachers who are "bad", assuming we had some decent way to separate the bad from the good (not just based on test scores, or even the improvement in scores)? Because the teachers union (at least here in California), is adamantly against even firing the bad teachers. Granted, it's a moot point until we can come up with a good teacher evaluation heuristic (and I personally do not believe it will put much weight on test scores...)

Also, WRT to evaluating teachers through students' test scores: have you ever seen The Wire? One of the main characters (Bunny Colvin) moves from being a cop to an educator. At the end of the year, he is forced to "teach to the test" (e.g., only cover test material) rather than helping his students learn (which he was doing before). I believe this to be an accurate criticism of why we shouldn't use student test scores to eval teachers: it screws up the incentives, and makes the goal for students to beat a…

good reading right up to the last point ...

'... we need better predictive tools to plot the speed at which new technologies will spread. Spreadsheet gymnastics by 20-something b-school graduates should not dictate our investment decisions. We can produce better predictions. We have the data - from decades of technology innovation. We have the ability to analyze the data - after all, Everett Rogers wrote "Diffusion of Innovations" 40 years ago ...' [0]

Baloney.

When will these analysts get it into their heads you cannot predict with certainty by looking into the past figures. If this was the case there would be a lot more people making a killing on the markets, insurance companies would be rolling in dollars because they could reliably predict disasters et., al.

As for the solution or alternative I just don't know. Maybe closely observing select influences in a Gladwellian sort of way [1]. Maybe something the way O`Reilly keeps an eye on the Alpha Geeks to guide what trends are worth investigating. [2]

Reference

[0] business plan archive, 'Top Ten Lessons from the Dot Com Meltdown, 10) Prediction tools must improve', Ibid.

[1] Malcom Gladwell describes one such way you can make rapid decisions by gathering less information on a subject and focusing on a few key indicators. ~ http://www.gladwell.com/blink

[2] Tim O`Reilly may well have read Gladwells book because seems to (publicly anyway) pay close attention to "the alpha geeks" in the hope of understanding gaps,…

This is such a hard problem to solve and there will only be less and less money for it. It is a good approach to start helping people to help themselves, rather than saying "we'll help you AFTER you fix your hardest problems yourself.". This makes no sense and doesn't work. As shown here and in other cities (http://gladwell.com/million-dollar-murray/), leaving homeless until they get so bad that they need ambulance and ER services is VERY expensive.

In our local town, the major hospital group did an experiment. They took a look at the top 50 patients that used the most of their ER and other services. They hired people whose job it was to make sure they stayed on track, got them to appointments (rides and public transport are big issues), made sure they stayed on their meds and followed treatment plans. It was a great success. They used ~70% of the resources that they used before. BUT, the hospital made lots of money on the use of those services, the experiment cost the hospital almost $1M!! It was not continued as hospitals exist to make money not help people.

So let's say a city takes a stance to be progressive and helps their homeless and (largely) gets them back on their feet. Pretty soon everyone in the surrounding areas hear about all the help and services and now one small town is dealing with all homeless that can get to this town. Smaller towns only have so much money to invest in an effort such as this. Additionally, what all jobs can you find to give all these…

"The best thing I can do for many of my patients is to make absolutely sure they have bipolar disorder (and have a need for one of these medications). The recent rate of growth of the diagnosis is concerning for over-diagnosis."

Indeed. It is surprisingly hard for medical system to reverse a diagnosis, so what's made first often sticks. (I know this from my own experience, my friend's, and Rosenhan's experiment). And too often bipolar is confused with borderline, or ptsd, or simply depression... this is particularly bad because some of the drugs which work for some of the illnesses instead drastically increase suicidality in others.

http://www.gladwell.com/2003/2003_03_10_a_dots.html

"In the early nineteen-seventies, a professor of psychology at Stanford University named David L. Rosenhan gathered together a painter, a graduate student, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists. He told them to check into different psychiatric hospitals under aliases, with the complaint that they had been hearing voices. They were instructed to say that the voices were unfamiliar, and that they heard words like "empty,""thud," and "hollow." Apart from that initial story, the pseudo patients were instructed to answer every question truthfully, to behave as they normally would, and to tell the hospital staff--at every opportunity--that the voices were gone and that they had experienced no further symptoms. The eight subjects were hospitalized, on average, for…

> Have you ever seen the Dog Whisperer?

Cesar Milan's body language communicates to dogs and humans that he is the leader.

"When Cesar walked down the stairs of Patrice and Scott's home then, and crouched down in the back yard, JonBee looked at him, intently. And what he saw was someone who moved in a very particular way. Cesar is fluid. "He's beautifully organized intra-physically," Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said when she first saw tapes of Cesar in action. "That lower-unit organization—I wonder whether he was a soccer player." Movement experts like Bradley use something called Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of "effort" it involves. Is it direct or indirect—that is, what kind of attention does the movement convey? Is it quick or slow? Is it strong or light—that is, what is its intention? Is it bound or free—that is, how much precision is involved? If you want to emphasize a point, you might bring your hand down across your body in a single, smooth motion. But how you make that motion greatly affects how your point will be interpreted by your audience. Ideally, your hand would come down in an explosive, bound movement—that is, with accelerating force, ending abruptly and precisely—and your head and shoulders would descend simultaneously, so posture and gesture would be in…

Gladwell wrote a piece last year that suggested the most successful entrepreneurs come out ahead by finding clever ways to avoid risk. Forgive the long excerpt, but it really is good.

"In a recent study, "From Predators to Icons," the French scholars Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires—ranging from Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, to Bernard Arnault, of the luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H.—and chart what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur's career. There is almost always, they conclude, a moment of great capital accumulation—a particular transaction that catapults him into prominence. The entrepreneur has access to that deal by virtue of occupying a "structural hole," a niche that gives him a unique perspective on a particular market. Villette and Vuillermot go on, "The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation." He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and—most crucially—his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure. The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot's telling, is anything but a…