Adonis Diaries

Archive for March 24th, 2018

Notes and tidbits posted on FB and Twitter. Part 170

Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory.

La survie est une affaire personnelle. Les grandes souffrances et douleurs ne resserrent pas necessairement les liens dans une famille. On souffre pour l’illusion d’un amour a venir.
Mike Pence the idiot (Vice my ass) is a “Christian” Fundamentalist who believe the next coming will arrive as Jerusalem is converted to Judaism
Artificial intelligence is helping police combat gang violence in London. By applying predictive analytics in collaboration with Accenture, London police were able to turn raw data into risk scores that guide safety efforts and resource allocation.
Bolstered further by drones and bio-metrics, smart policing programs are growing worldwide—from San Francisco to Singapore—and have become a proving point for institutions and companies looking to invest in intelligent innovation.
Christine Lagarde (IMF chief) quoted Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in.” referring to women rights. She then asked each panelist to identify the cracks they see, to an engrossed audience.
“Whoever controls the data, controls the world.” Everyone from Modi to bankers to law enforcement officials at cyber-security events kept repeating that phrase at Davos 2018
The village of Souwayri in central Bekaa3, close to the border with Syria, is daily experiencing dozen of frozen dead Syrian refugees trying to flee  into Lebanon. The extremist factions in south-west Syria, close to the Lebanese border, have been vanquished and no food supply is reaching the people from Israel, as during the past 4 years. 

According to a global survey of more than 30,000 people, government officials are now less credible than journalists, for goodness’ sakes.

atlas_BkP0mSHSf@2x
Alfo lejnat lel nazar fi ma3ayeer moukata3at Israel, kabel ma al siyassiyeen yedlo bi mawakefhom
Nifayaat 3ala shate2 Sami ejet min nifayaat Beit Chabab, Cornet al Hamra wa Mazra3at Yachou3. Hal baladiyyat bit kebb nifayatouha 3ala majra Nahr al Kalb wa al shetteh al ghazeer  bit jamme3a bil nahr

 

Google finds STEM skills aren’t the most important skills


  • Lou Glazer is President and co-founder of Michigan Future, Inc., a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Michigan Future’s mission is to be a source of new ideas on how Michigan can succeed as a world class community in a knowledge-driven economy. Its work is funded by Michigan foundations.

A Washington Post column on research done by Google on the skills that matter most to its employees success. Big surprise: it wasn’t STEM. The Post writes:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both brilliant computer scientists, founded their company on the conviction that only technologists can understand technology. Google originally set its hiring algorithms to sort for computer science students with top grades from elite science universities.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998.

Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the 8 most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer.

Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it?  After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

This is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity.

And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs.

And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.

It’s far past time that Michigan policymakers and business leaders stop telling our kids if they don’t get a STEM related degree they are better off not getting a four-year degree. It simply is not accurate.

(Not to mention that many of their kids are getting non-STEM related four-year degrees.)

And instead begin to tell all kids what is accurate that the foundation skills––as Google found out––are Not narrow occupation-specific skills, but rather are broad skills related to the ability to work with others, think critically and be a lifelong learner.

The kind of skills that are best built with a broad liberal arts education.

The Post concludes:

No student should be prevented from majoring in an area they love based on a false idea of what they need to succeed. Broad learning skills are the key to long-term, satisfying, productive careers. What helps you thrive in a changing world isn’t rocket science. It may just well be social science, and, yes, even the humanities and the arts that contribute to making you not just workforce ready but world ready.

Note: About time students takes seriously the importance of general knowledge in everything they undertake. Most important of all is to learn designing experiments, developing the experimental mind that does Not come naturally, but with training.

 


adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

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