A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
“National Park Service $100,000 Job Opening. Skills Required: Large Format Photography” highlights what might be the world’s only open position for someone who loves the smell of fixer and stop bath. If you apply within the next few days you can get paid for using a view camera! (at least as long as film is still available)
Full post, including commentsI bought a Samsung U32D970Q 4K monitor to replace a 2560×1600 pixel HP monitor on my Windows 10 desktop computer.
Short review: Was blind but now I see.
Long review: I was concerned that Windows 10 and the seven dwarf applications that I typically use wouldn’t handle the high pixels-per-inch well, but it turned out to be trivial to install the monitor. I left the computer running, unplugged the old monitor, plugged the new monitor in via DisplayPort, and Windows automatically (a) adjusted the screen resolution to the new monitor’s native resolution, and (b) scaled up the fonts used for itself and nearly all application programs (exception: Canon’s crummy CaptureOnTouch scanner software, which now would make a good companion to Derek Zoolander’s mobile phone).
Text looked a little fuzzy at first, consistent with reviews that I had seen on the Web about this being a “BGR” pixel pattern instead of “RGB.” I went into the ClearType control panel and clicked on the sharpest-looking text options in each of five screens. Then everything was completely turned.
Text now seems clearer than before. The brightness and contrast is excellent. 4K video content and high-res DSLR pictures look great.
I’m hopeful that this monitor, for which I paid $950, will be good on a height-adjustable desk. Due to the fact that it is designed for use in portrait as well as landscape mode, the stand provides for a 5-inch range of height adjustments. Thus the keyboard-to-monitor separation can be significantly larger when used at a standing height (the Ergo Desktop Kangaroo provides a 6.5-inch keyboard-to-monitor adjustment range). The downside of the flexible stand is that it is… flexible. The monitor moves a bit as I type and all desk vibration is amplified.
Samsung includes all of the cables that you would ever need, including one to bridge the PC to the 4 USB ports on the monitor (a USB 3.0 hub).
I considered the Dell UP3216Q, but it is a lot more expensive and doesn’t have the range of height adjustment with its included stand.
The monitor has no speakers, which I don’t mind, and no camera, which is upsetting because the clean appearance will be ruined if you hang a webcam over the top (does anyone have a good idea for mounting a desktop webcam? Top of the monitor seems like a bad location (captures top of head). Bottom of the monitor also seems bad (captures chin).
Full post, including commentsThe December 7, 2015 New Yorker has a couple of articles that could be useful to young people planning a career in the Refugee Nation that we’re building here in the middle of North America.
“Resettled” describes the screening process for Syrian refugees:
M. and his family were repeatedly fingerprinted. In interviews, they were asked the same biographical questions again and again. The boy summarized the process in two questions: “Do you want to go to America?” “Did you engage in terrorist activities?”
I.e., if you can take fingerprints or ask a potential terrorist “Did you used to be a terrorist?” you can get a government paycheck.
“The Refugee Dilemma” describes a fifteen-year-old from Sierra Leone:
The family had applied [circa 2000] for refugee status in the United States, and a year after they arrived at the camp the application was accepted. They left for Minnesota, where there are roughly a hundred thousand refugees, many attracted by the state’s social services and high rate of immigrant employment.
He was on track to enroll at Yale (one of whose employees later figures in this saga):
It was the first time that Kargbo had ever been surrounded by white people, and he thought that they had “a bad vibe about black people.” Students made fun of his accent, and he would sometimes respond by grabbing or pushing them.
He and a young friend generated some work for family court judges, child support enforcement officers, etc.:
He enrolled in Job Corps, hoping to become a nurse’s assistant, and began dating Sarah Hemmingson, a white eighteen-year-old whom he met through his friends. She liked that he was understated and funny and didn’t try to impress her. “He wore clothes that were too small and wrong for the weather and made him look homeless,” she told me. … Not long after they began dating, Hemmingson became pregnant. They named their daughter Destanee.
He generated work for Americans in the criminal justice industry:
Kargbo continued to smoke marijuana and drink heavily. He was arrested for a series of misdemeanors, serving no more than a few days in jail for each crime: disorderly conduct, being a public nuisance, fleeing a peace officer, shoplifting, and possession of burglary tools—he’d acted as a lookout, according to the police, while a friend tried to break into a store.
After eight years, he gets a W-2 job:
When Kargbo describes his life in America, it falls into two halves: before and after the Fords. At twenty-three, he fell in love with Marquette Ford, one of the few black people who lived in his neighborhood, and eventually moved into her mother’s home in Woodbury, a suburb of St. Paul. “His group of friends were horrible, and I took him right out of that house where he was living and introduced him to a different type of family,” Marquette told me. He dropped the rapping dream and took a job at a company that manufactured banners and signs.
He and his new young friend generate more work for Americans in the family court and criminal justice systems:
Marquette and Kargbo had three children in four years and moved into a house across the street from Renee. Most people from his village had large families, and it felt natural and comforting to do the same. He stopped socializing, unless his friends came to his house, where he was always watching the children. He worked night shifts, taking care of them during the day. “He chose to be Mr. Mom,” Renee said. “He did the cooking, because Marquette doesn’t cook, and he did the cleaning, because Marquette doesn’t like to clean.” Destanee visited on the weekends, and Kargbo took all four children to the library and taught the older ones to play soccer.
In August, 2013, when Kargbo was twenty-eight and his younger son was a year old, Marquette stayed out past the children’s bedtime without telling him where she was. When Kargbo called her cell phone, it was answered by a man he didn’t know. When she returned home, they got into a physical fight. Marquette’s friend, who dropped her off, called the police and Kargbo was arrested for misdemeanor domestic assault.
The rest of the article describes two additional years in which attorneys, psychologists, doctors, nurses, judges, federal immigration bureaucrats, and prison industry employees all draw paychecks from the taxpayers. Where does Yale cash in?
Ayana Jordan, a psychiatry fellow at Yale who studies mental health in Sierra Leone, told the judge that if Kargbo were deported he would likely have another psychotic episode. “He’d be highly stigmatized, seen as abnormal, feared, shunned, chased out of town,” she said. Jordan said that during her visits to Sierra Leone people told her that mental illness could be “caught” when a cool breeze entered the room while someone was sleeping, through witchcraft and bad dreams, and by bathing at the wrong hour.
Mr. Kargbo earns his freedom after a little more than two years due to the perception of one government worker (a judge) that other government workers (at DHS) were unproductive and/or lazy:
Kargbo’s lawyers filed another habeas petition, arguing that his ongoing detention had come to seem punitive, since it was improbable that he would be deported anywhere. On October 2nd, two months after the hearing, a magistrate judge recommended that the petition be granted, noting that there was no evidence that the D.H.S. had made any attempts to find a new country that would accept Kargbo.
Perhaps the typical refugee immigrant cannot generate this kind of growth in employment for various government-funded sectors of the economy, but even a handful of guys like Mr. Kargbo should result in a lot of hiring.
Related:
Full post, including commentsI can’t understand why we Americans struggle to maintain a healthy body weight…
Among many other virtues, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
Henry Marsh describes his youth in a comparatively uncompetitive world:
Until the age of twenty-one I had followed the path that seemed clearly laid out for me by my family and education. It was a time when people from my background could simply assume that a job was waiting for them – the only question was to decide what you wanted to do. I had received a private and privileged English education in a famous school, with many years devoted to Latin and Greek, and then to English and History. I took two years off on leaving school, and after several months editing medieval customs documents in the Public Record Office (a job organized by my father through his many connections), spent a year as a volunteer teaching English literature in a remote corner of West Africa. I then went up to Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
I was destined, I suppose, for an academic or administrative career of some kind. During all these years I had received virtually no scientific education.
I was fortunate that my college at Oxford allowed me to come back after my year away to complete my degree and I was later accepted to study medicine at the only medical school in London which took students without any scientific qualifications. Having been rejected by all the other London Medical Schools since I had neither O-levels nor A-levels in science I had telephoned the Royal Free Medical School. They asked me to come for an interview next day. The interview was with an elderly, pipe-smoking Scot, the Medical School Registrar, in a small and cramped office. He was to retire a few weeks later and perhaps he let me in to the Medical School as a kind of joke, or celebration, or perhaps his mind was elsewhere. He asked me if I enjoyed fly-fishing. I replied that I did not. He said that it was best to see medicine as a form of craft, neither art nor science – an opinion with which I came to agree in later years. The interview took five minutes and he offered me a place in the Medical School starting three weeks later. Selection for medical schools has become a rather more rigorous process since then. I believe the Medical School at the huge London hospital where I now work uses role-playing with actors, along with many other procedures, to select the doctors of the future. The nervous candidates must show their ability to break bad news by telling an actor that their cat has just been run over by a car. Failure to take the scenario seriously, I am told, results in immediate rejection. Whether this is any better than the process I went through remains, I believe, unproven. Apparently the actors help select the successful candidates.
Marsh is a big believer in long hours for novice doctors, but that’s no longer how people are trained:
I wanted to be a surgeon – at least I thought I did – so I managed to get a job on a surgical ‘firm’, as it was called, in my teaching hospital. The firm consisted of a consultant, a senior registrar and a junior registrar and the houseman. I worked ‘1 in 2’, which meant I did a normal working day five days a week, but also was on call every other night and every other weekend, so I was in the hospital for about 120 hours a week.
It was at the time when the government was starting to reduce the long working hours of junior hospital doctors. The doctors were tired and overworked, it was said, and patients’ lives were being put at risk. The junior doctors, however, rather than becoming ever more safe and efficient now that they slept longer at night, had instead become increasingly disgruntled and unreliable. It seemed to me that this had happened because they were now working in shifts and had lost the sense of importance and belonging that came with working the long hours of the past. I hoped that by meeting every morning to discuss the latest admissions, to train the juniors with constant teaching as well as to plan the patients’ treatment, we might manage to recreate some of the lost regimental spirit.
‘If they are to be compliant with the European Working Time Directive your registrars can no longer be resident on-call. The on-call room will be taken away. We have examined their diary cards – they are working far too much at the moment. They must have eight hours sleep every night, six of it guaranteed uninterrupted. This can only be achieved if they work in shifts like the SHOs.’ My colleagues stirred uncomfortably in their seats and grumbled. ‘Shifts have been tried elsewhere and are universally unpopular,’ one of them said. ‘It destroys any continuity of care. The doctors will be changing over two or three times every day. The juniors on at night will rarely know any of the patients, nor will the patients know them. Everybody says it’s dangerous. The shorter hours will also mean that they will have much less clinical experience and that’s dangerous also. Even the President of the Royal College of Surgeons has come out against shifts.
‘We have to comply with the law,’ she said
How good can a person get with this kind of training plus a career’s worth of experience?
Early the next morning I lay in bed thinking about the young woman I had operated on the previous week. She had had a tumour in her spinal cord, between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, and – although I do not know why, since the operation had seemed to proceed uneventfully – she awoke from the operation paralysed down the right side of her body. I had probably tried to take out too much of the tumour.
More: Read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
“When I’m in a downtown crowd I wonder if the jihad will catch up with me,” said a young American. I responded “When I was a kid in the 1970s you didn’t have to wonder if you’d be the victim of violence. You knew that if you went downtown after dark that you would be.”
What is responsible for the falling crime rate? I’ve seen various theories but am wondering if there is a simple explanation: welfare is a more attractive alternative for most people.
Let’s look at the old, old, days. There was no central government-provided welfare (though religious and social organizations ran various programs, as did some towns). Both men and women who couldn’t get jobs might find crime attractive, therefore. And in fact women were active as criminals throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in England (see Moll Flanders!).
Early welfare programs were designed primarily for women with children. Thus if a woman was able to produce or obtain a child, she could in many cases earn a better living from welfare than from crime. A 1988 change in federal law made it potentially more lucrative for a woman to collect child support from a one-night sexual encounter than to go to college and work (see “History of Divorce”). That left an American world in which it only men found it economically rational to be criminals.
SSDI was greatly expanded in the 1970s (see “Disability Policy and History”), thus making a lot more men eligible for welfare. The conditions of collecting welfare gradually improved for both men and women. The free government-provided house changed from an apartment in a squalid high-rise filled with other welfare collectors to an apartment in a “mixed income” building, potentially the same apartment that a person earning 4-5X the median wage would rent. A person relying on welfare might also find him or herself in a single-family suburban house (see “Vouchers Help Families Move Far From Public Housing” (NYT, July 7, 2015), for example, for how an adult who has obtained custody of minor children can get $1,840 per month to live in the better neighborhoods of Dallas), essentially living the American Dream.
If the “better welfare leads to less crime” theory is correct, why do we still have crime at all then? Perhaps some people are not well-informed regarding welfare options, e.g., how much more comfortably they could live if they moved to a different welfare jurisdiction (we surveyed college-educated Massachusetts residents and found that they typically underestimated the potential profits from child support by a factor of 5-10, for example). Perhaps some people are not good at handling the paperwork challenge of qualifying for all of the various programs (see this posting asking “Just how many government workers can a poor American support?”). Perhaps the answer is that, for young men who don’t have custody of minor children, the waiting list for a free house is so long that the benefit is rendered useless and the immediate cash benefits from welfare are not enough to outperform a life of crime.
Full post, including commentsI can’t bear to watch politicians on TV but the transcripts can be interesting. Here’s one from Sunday night: President Obama speaking about the shootings in San Bernardino.
But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.
Obama is now a scholar of Islam? How is he qualified to say what is a legitimate and what is a “perverted” interpretation of this religion?
As a father to two young daughters who are the most precious part of my life, I know that we see ourselves with friends and co-workers at a holiday party like the one in San Bernardino. I know we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris.
People without children don’t have feelings or opinions that are worth noting, though they are useful because we can tax them to subsidize Americans with children.
The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.
How can we know this? What stops an organization from getting hold of nuclear weapons, for example, and wiping us out?
We’re working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria
Turkey wants advice on border control from a country with 11+ million unauthorized immigrants (Pew)?
Fourth, with American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process and timeline to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war.
Perhaps we can email the folks in Syria an ISO 9000 notebook for ending their power struggle. Once they have the thoroughly documented process that they have previously sought in vain, surely they will stop fighting immediately.
This is our strategy to destroy ISIL. It is designed and supported by our military commanders and counterterrorism experts, together with 65 countries that have joined an American-led coalition.
These ISIL guys are stronger than 66 countries combined.
Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun.
So everyone on the no-fly list needs to have at least one friend who can buy a gun?
We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons, like the ones that were used in San Bernardino.
So that Americans waging jihad will concentrate on making better bombs, as the Tsarnaev brothers did?
For over a year, I have ordered our military to take thousands of air strikes against ISIL targets.
U.S. air strikes are not effective against ISIL targets.
ISIL does not speak for Islam. They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death.
Does ISIL actually have a “cult of death”? Or are they just trying to capture territory, rule that territory, and maintain a culture with which they are comfortable? We did a lot of violent stuff when taking over North America from the Indians and we seldom engage in that kind of violence anymore. If ISIL did manage to get a secure hold on a country is there evidence that they would be more violent than the U.S. government?
Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda promote, to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.
If we truly have freedom of religion, why can’t Muslims interpret Islam any way that seems correct to them? Why does Islam have to become compatible with the values that Barack Obama chooses to state?
We were founded upon a belief in human dignity that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.
Can this be true? My understanding is that our country was founded by guys who owned slaves and set up laws specifically so that those slaves would not be their equals under the law.
Let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. … So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt that America will prevail.
There was no mention of the fact that San Bernardino stayed true to the California tradition of promising to pay large amounts to retired public employees and to bondholders who had lent the government money. Yet the city did not prevail. In fact, it went bankrupt in 2012 (SB Sun). The citizens of San Bernardino did not turn out to be exceptional to the point that they could ignore actuaries and arithmetic.
My take-away from the transcript is that the government doesn’t have any new or practical ideas for preventing a recurrence of the sad events of last week and, further, that political leaders tend to be as overconfident on ISIL as they have been on pension commitments. I do wonder if attacks like this are not a priority for our top leaders because they personally are not at risk. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik would not have been able to get anywhere near President Obama, for example.
Readers who watched this: Was it persuasive/reassuring as an audio/video experience?
Full post, including comments“Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges” is out with the 2013 numbers. It seems that working at a nonprofit can be pretty rewarding, if not profitable. The president of Columbia collected $4.6 million, the president of Penn clocked in at $3 million, etc.
The U.S. is supposed to be a place with a deep pool of talent. Being a college president is, absent some sort of hashtag protest, a coveted job and a relatively easy one. Why is the wage then so high? Is the U.S. in fact not blessed with a large pool of qualified people? Is there cronyism going on such that people are not being paid a market-clearing wage? What?
Full post, including commentsDo No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
‘Informed consent’ sounds so easy in principle – the surgeon explains the balance of risks and benefits, and the calm and rational patient decides what he or she wants – just like going to the supermarket and choosing from the vast array of toothbrushes on offer. The reality is very different. Patients are both terrified and ignorant. How are they to know whether the surgeon is competent or not? They will try to overcome their fear by investing the surgeon with superhuman abilities.
I told him that there was a one or two per cent risk of his dying or having a stroke if the operation went badly. In truth, I did not know the exact figure as I have only operated on a few tumours like his – ones as large as his are very rare – but I dislike terrorizing patients when I know that they have to have an operation.
Taking the pen I offered him he signed the long and complicated form, printed on yellow paper and several pages in length, with a special section on the legal disposal of body parts. He did not read it – I have yet to find anybody who does. I told him that he would be admitted for surgery the following Monday.
‘Sent for the patient?’ I asked as I entered the operating theatre on Monday morning. ‘No,’ said U-Nok the ODA (the member of the theatre team who assists the anaesthetist). ‘No blood.’ ‘But the patient has been in the building for two days already,’ I said. U-Nok, a delightful Korean woman, smiled apologetically but said nothing in reply. ‘The bloods had to be sent off again at six this morning,’ said the anaesthetist as she entered the room. ‘They had to be done again because yesterday’s bloods were on the old EPR system which has stopped working for some reason because of the new hospital computer system which went live today. The patient now has a different number apparently and we can’t find the results from all the blood tests sent yesterday.’
Is it any better here? A friend who is a doc at a Boston-area hospital said that they’re hoping in about two years to get back, from their $2 billion Epic system, most of the capabilities they had in their old (home-grown) electronic medical record system.
Where does the experienced brain surgeon fit into the hospital hierarchy?
‘What’s all this about cancelling the last case?’ I asked. The anaesthetist was indeed a new one – a locum recently appointed to replace my regular anaesthetist who was on maternity leave. We had done a few lists together and she had seemed competent and pleasant. ‘I’m not starting a big meningioma at 4 p.m.,’ she declared, turning towards me. ‘I’ve got no childcare this evening.’ ‘But we can’t cancel it,’ I protested. ‘She was cancelled once already!’ ‘Well I’m not doing it.’ ‘You’ll have to ask your colleagues then,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they will, it’s not an emergency,’ she replied in a slow and final tone of voice. For a few moments I was struck dumb. I thought of how until a few years ago a problem like this would never have arisen. I always try to finish the list at a reasonable time but in the past everybody accepted that sometimes the list would have to run late. In the pre-modern NHS consultants never counted their hours – you just went on working until the work was done. I felt an almost overwhelming urge to play the part of a furious, raging surgeon and wanted to roar out, as I would have done in the past: ‘Bugger childcare! You’ll never work with me again!’ But it would have been an empty threat since I have little say in who anaesthetizes my patients. Besides, surgeons can no longer get away with such behaviour. I envy the way in which the generation who trained me could relieve the intense stress of their work by losing their temper, at times quite outrageously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment.
When our department was moved from the old hospital to a newly built block at the main hospital some miles away, the entire second floor of the new building was dedicated to neurosurgery. As time passed, however, the management started to reduce our facilities and one of the neurosurgical theatres became a theatre for bariatric surgery – surgery for morbidly obese people. The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.
How does IT help?
As she talked she typed on the keyboard and the slices of a huge black-and-white brain scan started to appear, like a death sentence, out of the dark onto the white wall in front of us. ‘You won’t believe this,’ one of the other registrars broke in. ‘I was on yesterday evening and took the call. They sent the scan on a CD but because of that crap from the government about confidentiality they sent two taxis. Two taxis! One for the fucking CD and one for the little piece of paper with the fucking encryption password! For an emergency! How stupid can you get?’ We all laughed, apart from the registrar presenting the case who waited for us to calm down.
I went down to my office where I found my secretary Gail cursing her computer again while she tried to get onto one of the hospital databases.
‘This may take a while,’ I added. ‘The scans are on the computer network of your local hospital and this is then linked over the net to our system…’ As I spoke I typed on the keyboard looking for the icon for his hospital’s X-ray network. I found it and summoned up a password box. I have lost count of the number of different passwords I now need to get my work done every day. I spent five minutes failing to get into the system. I was painfully aware of the anxious man and his family watching my every move, waiting to hear if I would be reading him his death sentence or not. ‘It was so much easier in the past,’ I sighed, pointing at the redundant light-screen in front of my desk. ‘Just thirty seconds to put an X-ray film up onto the X-ray screen. I’ve tried every bloody password I know.’ I could have added that the previous week I had had to send four of the twelve patients home from the clinic without having been able to see their scans, so that the appointments had been entirely wasted and the patients made even more anxious and unhappy. ‘It’s just like this with the police force,’ the patient said. ‘Everything’s computerized and we are constantly being told what to do but nothing works as well as it used to.
‘Have you tried your password?’ ‘Yes, I bloody well have.’ ‘Well, try Mr Johnston’s. That usually works. Fuck Off 45. He hates computers.’ ‘Why forty-five?’ ‘It’s the forty-fifth month since we signed onto that hospital’s system and one has to change the password every month,’ Caroline replied.
‘When can I start?’ I asked, unhappy at being kept waiting when I had a dangerous and difficult case to do. Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright. ‘A couple of hours at least.’ I said that there was a poster downstairs saying that iCLIP, the new computer system should only keep patients waiting a few extra minutes. The anaesthetist laughed in reply. I left the room. Years ago, I would have stormed off in a rage, demanding that something be done, but my anger has come to be replaced by fatalistic despair as I have been forced to recognize my complete impotence as just another doctor faced by yet another new computer program in a huge, modern hospital.
What role does management play?
I returned to the Training and Development Centre. The second session had already started. The PowerPoint presentation now showed a slide with a long list of the Principles of Customer Service and Care. ‘Communicate effectively,’ I read. ‘Pay attention to detail. Act promptly.’ We were also advised to develop Empathy. ‘You must stay composed and calm,’ Chris the lecturer told us. ‘Think clearly and stay focused. Your emotions can affect your behaviour.’
The new chief executive for the Trust, the seventh since I had become a consultant, was especially keen on the twenty-two-page Trust Dress Code and my colleagues and I had recently been threatened with disciplinary action for wearing ties and wristwatches. There is no evidence that consultants wearing ties and wristwatches contributes to hospital infections, but the chief executive viewed the matter so seriously that he had taken to dressing as a nurse and following us on our ward rounds, refusing to talk to us and instead making copious notes. He did, however, wear his chief executive badge – I suppose just in case somebody asked him to empty a bedpan.
How does all of this affect Dr. Marsh?
Not for the first time, I thought of the trivial nature of any problems that I might have compared to my patients’ and felt ashamed and disappointed that I still worry about them nevertheless. You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.
More: Read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
I have volunteered to tutor a student in AP statistics at the local high school. Stats: Modeling the World
Have any readers helped a student in this class? If so, what materials were useful? Or has anyone taught himself or herself statistics and found something concise and good?
Separately, the student is quick to say “I can’t do this” or “I don’t know” when in fact a few minutes of thinking would have resulted in the answer or a procedure for getting the answer. My personal theory is that this comes from being given so many trivial problems in the earlier years of K-12. Students who are brighter/quicker than average get the idea that every problem can be solved very quickly and therefore that, if a problem cannot be solved almost instantly, there is no way to solve it. Any ideas for working on patience/persistence with respect to math/stats?
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