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Stanley Kaplan, Pioneer in Preparing Students for Exams, Dies at 90 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
crative niche in the world of for-profit education and made test-preparation classes a rite of passage for students across America, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 90 and had homes in Manhattan and Boca Raton, Fla.
The Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation and Kaplan Inc., his education company, announced his death Monday, saying the cause was heart failure.
Propelled by his students’ success on the SAT and other standardized exams — and by the enormous growth in standardized testing — Mr. Kaplan transformed the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center from a tiny tutoring operation in his basement in Brooklyn in the late 1930s into a nationwide test-preparation company.
Along the way he successfully challenged the College Board’s denials that coaching could significantly improve student scores and convinced the Federal Trade Commission that his claims of helping students were valid.
“To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students, and I disagree with that,” he told The New York Times in 1979.
By November 1984, when Mr. Kaplan, then 65, sold his business to the Washington Post Company for $45 million, it had more than 120 teaching centers and nearly 100,000 students.
Today, Kaplan Inc. is a diversified education company with more than a quarter-billion dollars in revenues and is the Post Company’s largest business.
Mr. Kaplan did not start out with a strategic plan to build a business. He began by preparing students for the New York State Regents exams. But when a student showed up in 1946 asking for help on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (as the SAT was then called), he saw an opportunity. And when students later sought his help on medical school exams, he signed them on, too.
For decades his services remained local, marketed to Roman Catholic schools and to yeshivas. Most students arrived by word of mouth. But he gradually began to attract students from around the country.
A VC
Ever since we made our investment in Zemanta last summer, I've wanted to visit Slovenia, the country where Zemanta was founded and where most of the team is still located.
I got that opportunity this week when most of our family and I flew to Ljubljana, the capital and home of Zemanta. In addition to attending my first board meeting at the company's offices, we spent a day seeing the sights and scenes of Ljubljana and a day and a half on the Adriatic coast in the towns of Portoroz and Piran.
There are some great pics at my wife's blog, my tumblog and my flickr.
Slovenia is a small european country that sits between Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. It was part of the old Yugoslavia (its most northern part) and was the first country to secede (mostly peacefully).
It reminds me most of Italy but also a bit of Austria. The food we ate tended to lean Italian and it was all very good. The wines also reminded me of northern Italy and they were terrific. An added benefit is everything costs a lot less in Slovenia. And like most of europe these days, english is spoken well most everywhere.
The population is small, about 2mm in total, of which about 300k live in and around Ljubljana. But it is a well educated, commerce minded, and democratic country that has modernized significantly in the past decade. The roads from Ljubljana to the coast are among the best I've been on anywhere.
We did not visit the alpine part of Slovenia but you can see some very high peaks from Ljubljana and we flew over the alps there and back. There's serious skiing, hiking, and other mountain sport to be had in Slovenia.
My favorite part of the trip, other than a morning with the entire Zemanta team, was the Adriatic coastline. It is stunning and I am told if you drive south into Croatia, its even more beautiful.
We'll have to return for a longer stay and visit the mountains and the croatian coastline and other spots. It's on the ever expanding list of places we have to get back to.
If you have not ventured to that part of the world,
DNA computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
dleman demonstrated a proof-of-concept use of DNA as a form of computation which solved the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made and various Turing machines have been proven to be constructible.[2] [3]
Self-Service Nation: Why Targeting Small Business Is Good Business
U.S. Business Statistics | The Economics of Sales
A quick look at Census Bureau statistics on business size reveals some startling information:
* Of the 25 million U.S. businesses, only 5.9 million employ one or more people.
* Of the 5.9 million employer firms, only 17,047 have 500 or more employees, yet those firms account for 49 percent of U.S. employment and 61 percent of revenue. That translates into well under 1 percent of U.S. firms accounting for 61 percent of revenue
* Of the 17,047 firms with more than 500 employees, the 890 with 10,000 or more employees account for 26 percent of U.S. employment and 37 percent of revenue.
Let’s say you’re an enterprise software company and that your economic model requires each sales professional to earn $2 million-$3 million in revenue a year to cover the costs of your operation, including the cost of the sales themselves (salaries, commissions, travel and entertainment, sales support and operations, etc.). Each one of these representatives can only do so many deals every quarter, so the revenue per deal must be fairly high — let’s say that the average deal size per customer, per year, must be around $100,000. And that’s just your part of the solution. There are likely other software, hardware and consulting costs associated with the complete solution.
If we assume that the average pre-tax margin of a small business is 10 percent and we take revenue for the 98 percent of U.S. firms with 99 or fewer employees, divide their aggregate revenue by the number of firms to get average revenue per firm and then take 10 percent of that number to derive pre-tax profit per firm, we get $103,962. In other words, the direct sales model would require taking roughly 100 percent of pre-tax profit from firms with fewer than 99 people for just your component of the solution. These are back-of-the-envelope assumptions and are for illustrative purposes only — the point is that direct sales organizations cannot serve the vast majority of businesses on the planet.
Currently t
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he dominant player in the SMB segment of the IT market today is Microsoft, as it’s been able to drive significant sales by riding Windows OEM agreements. If I were Microsoft, I would be more concerned about software-as-a-service solutions eroding my market share in the SMB segment than the threat of consumer web search, but I digress…
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In a web-based software firm, there isn’t a significant marginal cost of research and development (R&D). Cost of goods sold are often very small (especially in software), and CAPEX on a unit amortized basis is trivial. The biggest marginal expenditure is cost of sales. If a company can figure out how to simplify sales delivery and service by leveraging a self-service model, it can reach a large market segment hungry for better products and services.
Using techniques perfected by consumer web companies, a generation of enterprise IT companies will emerge that deliver a vastly superior user experience to IT professionals and employees alike. Improvements in ease of use will liberate employs from terrible software, server-side software development will increase the pace of product improvements and lower support costs, and the self-service model will change the economics of enterprise IT sales forever. Google’s success is as much about AdWords offering advertising services to the SMB segment as it is about serving consumers search services.
The dominant player in the SMB segment of the IT market today is Microsoft, as it’s been able to drive significant sales by riding Windows OEM agreements. If I were Microsoft, I would be more concerned about software-as-a-service solutions eroding my market share in the SMB segment than the threat of consumer web search, but I digress…
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The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission - The New York Review of Books
Fixing Global Finance
by Martin Wolf
Johns Hopkins University Press, 230 pp., $24.95
1.
By common consent, we have been living through the greatest economic downturn since World War II. It originated, as we all know, in a collapse of the banking system, and the first attempts to understand the resulting economic crisis focused on the reasons for bank failures. The banks, it was said, had failed to "manage" the new "risks" posed by financial innovation. Alan Greenspan's statement that the cause of the crisis was the "underpricing of risk worldwide" was the most succinct expression of this view.[1] Particular attention was paid to the role of the American subprime mortgage market as the source of the so-called "toxic" assets that had come to dominate bank balance sheets. Early remedies for the crisis concentrated on bailing out or refinancing the banks, so that they could start lending again. These were followed by "stimulus packages," both monetary and fiscal, to revive the real economy.
Now that we are—or may be—over the worst of the crisis, attention has partly switched to trying to understand its deeper causes. The two most popular explanations to have emerged are the "money glut" and the "saving glut" theories. The first blames the crisis on loose fiscal and monetary policy, which enabled Americans to live beyond their means. In particular, Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve in the critical years until his retirement in early 2006, used low interest rates to keep money too cheap for too long, thus allowing the housing bubble to get pumped up till it burst.
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e. Martin Wolf, the world's most respected financial columnist—mainly for the Financial Times —published a book in 2004 called Why Globalization Works.[2] He saw globalization as a mighty engine for ending global poverty, and was scornful of arguments against it, most of which he dismissed as lacking professional competence. He pointed to the huge success of China in reducing extreme poverty (people living on less than $1 a day). He saw no problem arising from the macroeconomic imbalances that resulted from lopsided trade. As he wrote:
The pattern of surpluses and deficits will create difficulties only to the extent that the intermediation of the flows from the savings-surplus to the savings-deficit countries does not work smoothly.... But no insuperable difficulty should arise. If some people [Asians] wish to spend less than they earn today, then others need to be encouraged to spend more.
As late as mid-2007, he thought that the possibility that "huge calamities" could be generated by world financial markets "looks remote."[3]
His message just two months later was very different:
Nothing that has happened has been a product of Fed folly alone. Its monetary policy may have been loose too long. The regulators may also have been asleep. But neither point is the heart of the matter.... Today's credit crisis...is also a symptom of an unbalanced world economy.[4]
Advice to the Prince - The New York Review of Books
He divides the world of nations into a plain hierarchy that is determined by what he calls "the pyramid of power." The United States is on top as the "paramount" power, but it can seldom "prevail on its own." In the second tier are the "Eight Principals": China, Japan, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, "and just barely Brazil." Below them, says Gelb, are the "Oil and Gas Pumpers." Further down, in a fourth tier, may be found such "Regional Players" as Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea. Beneath the Principals, Pumpers, and Players stand the harmless "Responsibles" (Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, others)—Gelb's naming and ranking of this group may express a shade of contempt. Finally there are the "Bottom Dwellers": Sudan, Congo, and Bosnia figure here but also, curiously, Nicaragua.
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The genius of President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger [in their withdrawal from Vietnam]... was to let the victim drown slowly while they steered the world's attention in another direction—to the most dazzling and theatrical display of American power ever.
Machiavelli would have appreciated the sentiment if not the economy of that sentence.
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Barack Obama in Cairo took a path that was different in tone, in implication, and in many particulars; it can be read as a counterargument to the sort of thinking one finds in Gelb's book. Obama started with a salutation as obvious as it was impossible to predict. This American president speaking in Cairo said to the Arab world that he was "proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country." The phrase "Muslim communities" names an entity that Americans know, yet one that cannot be reliably heard of as we turn the dial on the radio.
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Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books
Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo's neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack—Bongo was late for dinner again. Between mother and son lay the hazards —labeled angry dogs, roving gang of hooligans, girl with a crush on bongo—of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.
Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading,
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Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
Tiny Beetle Adds New Element to Forest Fire Control in the West - NYTimes.com
But tiny bark beetles, munching and killing pine trees by the millions from Colorado to Canada, are now increasingly adding their own new dynamic. As the height of summer fire season approaches, more than seven million acres of forest in the United States have been declared all but dead, throwing a swath of land bigger than Massachusetts into a kind of fire-cycle purgatory that forestry officials admit they do not yet have a good handle on for fire prediction or assessment.
Dead trees, depending on how recently they died, may be much more flammable than living trees, or slightly more flammable, or even for a certain period less flammable. The only certainties are that dead forests are growing in size and scale — 22 million more acres are expected to die over the next 15 years — and that foresters, like the fire-tower lookouts of old, are keeping their eyes peeled and their fingers crossed.
“There’s just a lot more fuel in those dead forests available to burn,” said Bob Harrington, the Montana state forester, who is focusing additional resources this summer on a three-million-acre zone of beetle-infested forest from Butte to Helena.
More than 100,000 people live in that area, and Mr. Harrington said that although fire forecasts for Montana, as in most of the West, called for only an average fire season, dead forests do not play by the rules. They can dry out much faster in heat, without living tree tissue to hold water.
Other beetle watchers say the nightmare of a severe fire season concentrated in the dead-forest zone running along the spine of the Rocky Mountains has, so far, been averted. In Colorado, a combination of deep snows last winter followed by a wet spring has kept fire danger low. But scientists say that recent winters have also lacked the stretches of deep cold — 20 to 40 degrees below zero — that can check the insects’ spread.
“Right now, in our neck of the woods, we’re really wet,” said Mary Ann Chambers, a spokeswoman for the federal Forest Service’s bark beetle incident management team for a
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A technological race to catch up with the beetles and their impact on fire risk is also under way. A forest-health mapping system that will account for the depredations of insects is being developed by the Forest Service and the Interior Department. Called Landfire, the program is expected to be ready by late next year, in time for the 2011 fire season, managers say.
Using satellite assessment and on-the-ground reports, the system will try to give fire managers and forecasters a sense of vegetation stress or health in fire zones across the country, peering into the secret lives of moths, wood borers, beetles and defoliators of every stripe.
Art - A Round Peg - Dan Graham, With a Whitney Retrospective, Defys a World of Square Boxes - NYTimes.com
“I never made money in art,” said Mr. Graham, who for much of his professional life lived in a small $450-a-month apartment on the Lower East Side and was not represented by a gallery. “I was never successful. Artists and musicians knew about me, but I think the work was always too early.”
His fortunes have improved in recent years; he lives alone in a nicer apartment in NoLIta and is represented by a prominent gallery, Marian Goodman, though he says the work still doesn’t sell well, and he speaks disparagingly of “superstars,” including a few represented by his own gallery, like Pierre Huyghe and Tino Sehgal, making it clear that he is not counted among them.
Given the feverish nature of his interests it comes as little surprise that talking to Mr. Graham is less like a conversation than like being swept into a tsunami of language, with gale-force allusions. Over iced tea and later over lunch at the Whitney, where he was helping oversee the show’s installation, he pinballed from science fiction and Philip K. Dick to Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School (he said that most of his work is heavily influenced by a similar concern with light) to bisexuality. (“I think it helps to have bisexual tendencies,” said Mr. Graham, who is straight. “I wish I was bisexual.”)
Though many critics through the years have complained that Mr. Graham’s work can be hard to love and too dryly pedagogical, he said he sees himself as a Jewish comedian working firmly in the tradition of Jewish comedy greats like Mel Brooks and Andy Kaufman, whom he considers to be great conceptual artists.
“Anarchistic humor is very important to my work,” he said, calling “Homes for America” a piece of “pure deadpan humor — it’s a fake think piece.” Works in which the humor is more readily apparent have included one that placed large-screen televisions on people’s front lawns so that passers-by could see what the inhabitants were watching that moment on the television inside the house. Another work proposed altering a suburban house so that it
Art - A Round Peg - Dan Graham, With a Whitney Retrospective, Defys a World of Square Boxes - NYTimes.com
mong his conceptual peers, those who set out to wrest art from the realm of objects and move it more fully into one of ideas, Mr. Graham, 67, is someone whose work does not come easily to mind even for an informed artgoing public. In part this is because his restless intellect has never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style or to be easily categorized. (Most attempts at categorization are parried by Mr. Graham himself with a professorial annoyance and fencer’s agility, and he dislikes being called a conceptual artist and says he is not a professional one in any sense, calling art his “passionate hobby.”)
If the world had nothing else for which to thank him, it might be enough that during a brief stint as a dealer he gave LeWitt his first solo gallery show, along with presenting early work by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Or for the part Mr. Graham played later in the formation of Sonic Youth — he helped Kim Gordon, one of the group’s founders, land her first New York apartment in his Lower East Side building and cast her in an all-girl “band” for a 1980s performance piece, jump-starting her music career. When Mr. Graham, rumpled and white-bearded with a kind of Mr. Natural aura, shows up at cutting-edge rock concerts these days, well-read 20-somethings tend to mill around him admiringly.
But it is the way his artistic DNA has seeped into the work of younger artists over such a prolonged period that underscores his importance. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney who organized the show with Bennett Simpson, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, said that prominent artists as well distributed over the years as Tony Oursler (video artist, born 1957), Rirkrit Tiravanija (known for the shows in which he cooks for gallery visitors, born 1961) and Wade Guyton (who “paints” with printers, born 1972) all showed strong traces of Mr. Graham’s influence. Their work looks and feels almost nothing like his, or like one another’s, a remarkable testament to the way Mr. Graham’s fa
United States Patent: 7552199
United States Patent 7,552,199
Pomerantz June 23, 2009
Method for automatic skill-gap evaluation
Abstract
A method for automatic user skill-gap evaluation using a proxy server or a proxy application. The proxy server or application receives a user input from a user and analyzes the user input to determine whether the user input falls below an acceptable user skill threshold level. The user input consists of user activity within an application and the user activity is recorded in a user action log. To determine whether the user input falls below the acceptable user skill threshold level, the proxy server or application compares the user activity recorded in the user action log with user skill-gap behavior patterns created by a subject matter expert. In response to determining that the user activity recorded in the user action log falls below the acceptable user skill threshold level, the proxy server or application sends a specific training module to the user based on an identified user skill-gap.
Inventors: Pomerantz; Ori (Austin, TX)
Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation (Armonk, NY)
Appl. No.: 11/232,769
Filed: September 22, 2005
United States Patent: 7493630
United States Patent 7,493,630
Hunt February 17, 2009
Tools and techniques for instrumenting interfaces of units of a software program
Abstract
A computer readable medium contains a data structure, which, in some embodiments, is an interface wrapper. The interface wrapper stores information about the interface such as a first data field that contains a reference to instrumentation, a second data field that contains data which represents a reference to an interface of a software program, and a third data field which contains data representing an identity of the unit of software. When a client unit calls a member function of the interface, the interface wrapper intercepts the call and invokes the instrumentation.
Inventors: Hunt; Galen C. (Bellevue, WA)
Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Appl. No.: 11/096,358
Filed: April 1, 2005
Related U.S. Patent Documents
Application Number Filing Date Patent Number Issue Date
09196836 May., 2006 7039919
60102815 Oct., 1998
Current U.S. Class: 719/330 ; 717/130; 717/158; 719/328
Current International Class: G06F 3/00 (20060101); G06F 13/00 (20060101); G06F 9/44 (20060101); G06F 9/45 (20060101); G06F 9/46 (20060101)
Field of Search: 719/313,328,330 717/130,158 715/771
References Cited [Referenced By]
U.S. Patent Documents
3427443 February 1969 Apple et al.
3551659 December 1970 Forsythe
4819233 April 1989 Delucia et al.
5021947 June 1991 Campbell et al.
5193180 M
United States Patent: 5142679
United States Patent 5,142,679
Owaki , et al. August 25, 1992
Method and apparatus for collecting execution status data of structured program
Abstract
Method and apparatus provide for collecting execution status data in the execution of an object program. In compiling a source program described in a structured format to an object program, a PROBE instruction for starting a data collecting program for collecting the execution status data, with a block identification number in an operand field thereof, is inserted at a position of an exit sentence indicating an exit of the program block. When the PROBE instruction is registered in an instruction execution register of an execution unit during a period of the execution of the object program, the data collecting program is started to collect the execution status data, which is then stored in a store table.
Inventors: Owaki; Takashi (Hitachi, JP), Hayashi; Toshihiro (Hitachi, JP)
Assignee: Hitachi, Ltd. (Tokyo, JP)
Appl. No.: 07/378,504
Filed: July 12, 1989
Related U.S. Patent Documents
Application Number Filing Date Patent Number Issue Date
124381 Nov., 1987
819003 Jan., 1986
361438 Mar., 1982
Foreign Application Priority Data
Mar 25, 1982 [JP] 56-42344
Current U.S. Class: 717/151 ; 712/E9.032; 714/38; 714/E11.203; 714/E11.207; 717/154; 717/158
Current International Class: G06F 11/34 (20060101); G06F 11/36 (20060101); G06F 009/45 ()
Field of Search: 395/700 364/280.4,267.8 371/19
United States Patent: 5307498
nited States Patent 5,307,498
Eisen , et al. April 26, 1994
Automated method for adding hooks to software
Abstract
The automatic addition of hooks to software is provided by greatly simplified steps. A function which is to be hooked is renamed. A new function is then created utilizing the original function name to call the renamed function. The new function is provided with a hook entry and exit.
Inventors: Eisen; Ivan R. (Flower Mound, TX), Murphrey; Stephen W. (Highland Village, TX), Zagorski; Don (Kent, WA)
Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation (Armonk, NY)
Appl. No.: 07/986,165
Filed: December 4, 1992
Current U.S. Class: 717/158 ; 712/E9.082; 714/E11.209; 717/154; 717/156
Current International Class: G06F 11/36 (20060101); G06F 9/40 (20060101); G06F 9/44 (20060101); G06F 009/00 ()
Field of Search: 395/700
References Cited [Referenced By]
Other References
Bishop, D. A. DekoVert I Program for Systrace Type Hooks. IBM TDB, No. 7A, Dec. 1991, pp. 171-173. .
Clark, D. K., et al. Useability Measuring Tool. IBM TDB, No. 5, Oct. 1991, pp. 284-285. .
Athwal, D. S., et al. Hook Handler. IBM TDB, Jul., 1988, pp. 126-127. .
Gottlieb, A. M., et al. General-Purpose Software Monitor Architecture. IBM TDB, Apr. 1988, pp. 85-87. .
Weiss, L. Patch Microcode Change Level Check. IBM TDB, Mar. 1984, pp. 5606-5607. .
Hoernes, G. E. Extracting Descriptive Information from Procedures. IBM TDB, Oct. 1981, pp. 2340-2343. .
Winters, R. M. Round Robin Hooking Technique. IBM TDB, Mar. 1975, p. 2831. .
Attanasio, C. R., et al. Performance Evaluator for Operating System. IBM TDB, Jun. 1973, pp. 110-118..
Primary Examiner: Shaw; Gareth D.
Assistant Examiner: Katbab; A.
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Clay; A. Bruce Jobe; Jonathan E.
United States Patent: 7013456
United States Patent 7,013,456
Van Dyke , et al. March 14, 2006
Profiling execution of computer programs
Abstract
A method and a computer for performance of the method. While executing a program on a computer, profileable events occurring in the instruction pipeline are detected. The instruction pipeline is directed to record profile information describing the profileable events essentially concurrently with the occurrence of the profileable events. The detecting and recording occur under control of hardware of the computer without software intervention.
Inventors: Van Dyke; Korbin S. (Sunol, CA), Hohensee; Paul H. (Nashua, NH), Reese; David L. (Westborough, MA), Yates, Jr.; John S. (Needham, MA), Ramesh; T. R. (Newark, CA), Thusoo; Shalesh (Milpitas, CA), Saund; Gurjeet Singh (Mountain View, CA), Purcell; Stephen C. (Mountain View, CA), Patkar; Niteen Aravind (Sunnyvale, CA)
Assignee: ATI International SRL (Christ Church, BB)
Appl. No.: 09/334,530
Filed: June 16, 1999
Buy Open University Learning Resources - (T551) Systems thinking and practice: a primer
This primer introduces the language and ideas of systems thinking and practice. It is a resource for the three undergraduate systems courses T205 Systems Thinking: Principles and Practice, T306 Managing complexity: A systems approach and the summer school based course TXR248 Experiencing Systems. It can also be used as a stand-alone introduction to systems.
A systems approach can be helpful in everyday situations involving people and technology where it is hard to know what to do because of a complex web of conflicting views and needs, a high degree of interconnectedness and a high degree of uncertainty.
Systems does not provide solutions by giving you formulae to apply, or rules to follow. Rather, it gives you ways to understand and work with situations that develop over time and probably have no ultimate ‘solution’.
Learning to think and act systemically often requires a fundamental change in patterns of thinking and behaviour. Systems concepts can be difficult to appreciate until you apply them yourself in a variety of situations. For these reasons T551 places a strong emphasis on practising the concepts in reflective activities and self-assessment exercises.
The primer consists of a printed booklet of about 80 A4 pages, and an order form for the DVD, which comprises of video and audio programmes (each with a set of notes), which illuminates some of the concepts by relating them to three contemporary situations: shopping, transport, and rivers.
Note: T306 students are eligible for this pack at a cheaper rate. Please wait for the application form enclosed with your student mailing, before ordering.
Price: £30.00 (£30.00 + £0.00 VAT)
United States Patent: 7536273
United States Patent 7,536,273
Swanson May 19, 2009
Method and system for computer-assisted test construction performing specification matching during test item selection
Abstract
A method and system for constructing a test using a computer system that performs specification matching during the test creation process is disclosed. A test developer determines one or more test item databases from which to select test items. The test item databases are organized based on psychometric and/or content specifications. The developer can examine the textual passages, artwork or statistical information pertaining to a test item before selecting it by clicking on a designation of the test item in a database. The developer can then add the test item to a list of test items for the test. The test development system updates pre-designated psychometric and content specification information as the developer adds each test item to the test. The test developer can use the specification information to determine whether to add to, subtract from, or modify the list of test items selected for the test.
Inventors: Swanson; Len (Hopewell, NJ)
Assignee: Educational Testing Service (Princeton, NJ)
Appl. No.: 11/623,369
Filed: January 16, 2007
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