Here in Baltimore and in tech industry marketing we are now told to try anything-----there is no dumb idea-----no wrong direction all called being innovative. What happens when teams of students gather to brainstorm all these startup innovations? Global Wall Street sees these brainstorms as data feed for artificial intelligence---showing how humans think, reason, work co-operatively----shows human interactions, leadership, and reactions to failures. Why would we be throwing money at a global tech industry that likely leads nowhere when our local community economies are dead and in need of ordinary everyday small business?
This week we will look at the study of the brain----it has been central in medical research these few decades tied to achieving just this ----ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and easy control of a 99% when the global 1% has extreme wealth vs extreme poverty.
When I see women as the target for startup funding knowing it is a non-economy I am seeing an attack of women in the workforce----the Hillary 5% are MOVING FORWARD in killing all the gains of women from last century.
Never fearing failure is indeed a character trait all citizens should have---if you fall down get back on the horse but these global 1% are not opening the door to the global 99% they are shutting it tightly.
'Failure as Value
The planning elite attempted to impose what F.A. Hayek (following Michael Oakeshott) has called a “teleocratic” order: a society with a defined end state designed by intellectuals operating outside the social process'.
This article was written by a right wing media outlet and Selma Hayek in indeed just another MOVIE STAR working for team global 1%. We are heading for great economic instability and now is not the time for TRY EVERYTHING.
LET'S JUST STOP MOVING FORWARD WITH NON-ECONOMY TECH STARTUPS AND GET BACK TO REBUILDING OUR LOCAL ECONOMIES FOR ALL.
Try Everything! Shakira Is Right
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Monday, March 28, 2016
Once again, Disney has knocked it out of the park with a wonderfully catchy song at the end of its latest hit movie. The film is “Zootopia,” the inspirational story of a rabbit with ambitions to stretch her professional goals beyond prevailing familial and social expectations.
The hit song, “Try Everything,” is performed by Shakira. It does more than sum up the film’s inspiring message for individuals. It highlights crucial features of the social order and structure of the world around that social science has mistakenly denied for longer than a century. It turns out that this song -- a seemingly superficial pop song marketed to kids -- represents a fundamental attack on the prevailing model of science and politics, as constructed by the ruling class of many generations, and completely upends it.
The music is upbeat. The song is joyful. The mood is celebratory. And yet the lyrics begin with a clear announcement: “I messed up tonight, I lost another fight.” This is the first clue that we are about to learn something counterintuitive. Why, with such a joyful tune, are the words about “falling down” and “hitting the ground?” Why should anyone be happy about messing up?
The answer comes quickly: “I always get up now to see what’s next.”
There are layers to this question of what’s next. That we must seek to know the future at all points to a fundamental truth that we can either treat as terrifying or hopeful.
On the individual level, our skills are improved with every attempt that ends in failure because we toss out the failed pattern in search of a new successful pattern. We don’t necessarily know the path forward. But trying strategies and failing at least gets us closer to what might be true, if only by the process of elimination. Our skills are trained. More importantly, our sense of judgment over what works and what doesn’t undergoes gradual refinement.
Entrepreneurship
Here we see the essence of entrepreneurship, and probably its most salient feature: one that makes real-world business far different from how it is described in textbooks. There is no instruction manual, no sure-fire method for commercial success. The entrepreneur is the driving force of an ongoing discovery process. The process might be compared to entering a pitch-black room and searching for the light switch. You crawl along the wall, vaguely intuiting where that switch might be. You know only a few things: it is not likely low to the ground and not likely too high to reach. But these clues don’t tell you precisely where it is.
Ludwig von Mises described the honing of the entrepreneurial intuition as ever further refinements in understanding (a translation of the richer and more subtle German word “verstehen”). “Understanding,” he wrote, “can approach the problem of forecasting future conditions. We may call its method unsatisfactory and the positivists may arrogantly scorn it. But such arbitrary judgments must not and cannot obscure the fact that understanding is the only appropriate method of dealing with the uncertainty of future conditions.”
Failure as Value
A crucial feature of success is failure as a necessary antecedent and precondition. Because failure is the signal you actually experience in the course of refining one’s judgement, it might be said to be the most valuable feature of entrepreneurship. Indeed, venture capitalists have discovered this. They are far more likely to fund your project if you have had a series of failures. As the Harvard Business Review wrote in “The Value of Failure”: “Many venture capital firms look for entrepreneurial leaders with a failed start-up or two under their belt, for the lessons learned. Indeed, a hot business strategy these days is ‘intelligent fast failure.’”
Or as the song says: “Birds don't just fly, they fall down and get up. Nobody learns without getting it wrong.”
What is the standard of successful and unsuccessful choices? In a world without institutions and feedback mechanisms, we wouldn’t have one. If the light switches in that dark room of uncertainly didn’t actually function to illuminate the spaces, we would have no way of knowing. Fortunately, in a market economy, we have prices as the key indicators, the building blocks of a system of accounting that reveals profit and loss. And herein we find the signaling mechanism to provide the critical information we need.
Anything that disables or distorts that signaling system represents a vital threat to the capacity of our experiences to yield actionable results. Without prices that reflect market realities, we are left with guessing whether our actions are successful or unsuccessful. It is as if the bird is suddenly disabled in its capacity to know whether it is flying or sitting on the ground. That bird no longer possesses the personal capacity for learning.
Ceaseless Change
At some point, the bird analogy breaks down, because the bird only has one task and one skill to master in pursuing its goal. Humankind faces an ever-changing environment, multifarious and competing goals, and must master an ever-changing range of skills.
On the way toward gaining ever-greater expertise in certain tasks, an individual can refine intuitions and judgements. You can find yourself further along the path toward achieving the goal. But the fundamental fact of the future’s uncertainty is ubiquitous and inalterable. The possibility of further failure must become part of the expectation for all action.
As Shakira’s sings: “Though I’m on the lead, I wanna try everything, I wanna try even though I could fail.”
Even the most experienced entrepreneur can fail at the next stage, and the best among them are profoundly aware of that.
In this sense, there is no such thing as “market power” that guarantees that the world will work the way the entrepreneur imagines that it should. A great example is the nearly defunct web browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It was so dominant that the government attempted to break up its supposed monopoly. Far from being unassailably secure, the browser stopped innovating and eventually died at the hands of hungrier and more innovative competition.
The lesson here is that the definition of success is always backward-looking but cannot determine the future.
“I’ll keep on making new mistakes,” sings Shakira. “I’ll keep on trying every day.”
But in the course of this trying, this ceaseless quest for success, we find that we do make progress. And this becomes a source of joy for us, more so than if we had merely followed a preset path with an infallible map laid before us.
“Look at how far you've come, you filled your heart with love,” says the song. And yet, in the future, we could indeed “come last.”
Failure is possible, even probable. Still, there’s tomorrow.
Society’s Direction Is Uncertain
On the social level, no one knows for sure “what’s next,” because the structure of the social order builds up in an unpredictable way. Our own individual uncertainty about the path forward is socially shared to make for a world that is similarly groping its way toward ever more successful paths.
In the words of Enlightenment era philosopher Adam Ferguson: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future.” It is precisely for this reason that he concluded that societies cannot be designed to conform precisely to what we desire, but rather emerge as the product of individual actions.
Once you come to terms with the uncertainties of the emergent order, you are left with the profound injunction to “try everything” to find the way forward. This realization inculcates certain habits of mind. One no longer seeks to know all the answers or feels despair in the face of the consciousness that one does not have them. The mature mind is at peace with not knowing, because it has the confidence of knowing that the answer is discoverable and that time and imagination can cause the answer to reveal itself.
A good example is modeled in the work habits of Don Draper, the advertising genius in the television show Mad Men. He is aware of the incompleteness of his knowledge and goes to bed each night with a sense of discomfort (but not despair!) in not knowing. Often a stray remark from one of his colleagues the next day will trigger an epiphany, and the next ad campaign in his brilliant career is born. The source of value in his life is not that he knows but rather that he is determined to seek and test new insights as they occur to him along the way.
But what kind of society do we need in order to maximize the potential of this form of spontaneous development of individuals and societies? A society hobbled by preset agendas emanating from fixed regulations and laws presume the opposite of a trial-and-error society. They indulge the illusion of knowledge, the myth of certainty, the fantasy that a static order with known solutions can be forced on everyone.
The Anarchism of Shakira
Here we find the core failing of much of 20th century politics and social policy. The state attempted to forge a society with a point rather than permit the process of discovery to take its own course. The planning elite attempted to impose what F.A. Hayek (following Michael Oakeshott) has called a “teleocratic” order: a society with a defined end state designed by intellectuals operating outside the social process. This is in contrast to a “nomocratic” order that provides broad rules for behavior and otherwise defers to the learning process of innovation and individual action.
In a nomocratic order, there is no end state, no precise form that we imagined history is driving toward, and thus do we find meaning to the words of the song: “I won’t give up, no I won’t give in, Till I reach the end. And then I’ll start again.”
Hayek further elaborates on why a society based on the principle of “try everything” is nothing to regret; it creates an opportunity for the emergence of an ever-more beautiful world:
It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible, greater than any single mind can foresee. It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Thus do we see how a catchy pop song reveals core truths about the world around us: more grounded in reality than what has been taught by all the social sciences studies at the best universities for the last 100 years. Pop music, by seeking connection to people’s intuitions about their real lives, as measured by playlists and profitability, can embody a brilliance that eludes the most highly trained philosophical minds.
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The technology of THE CLOUD is doing two major things to our US economy and doing business----first it is designed to end the concept of brick-and-mortar business locations making it easy for startups to come and go calling it a cost savings for that citizen small business owner. It as well moves all of our business documents once on hard drives in those brick - and-mortar buildings into a COMMERCIALLY CONTROLLED MEGA-DATA STORAGE CENTER----THE CLOUD. All data sent to THE CLOUD is indeed being accessed and used for artificial intelligence.
“Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups … machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools.”
If we know from Bush/Obama that over 30% of Independent Contractors are misclassified fraud-----if we know the startup model fails 90% of the time leaving citizens unable to reach income stability----if we know global Wall Street envisions robotics taking almost all work functions we know none of this leads to FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN WHAT WE DO AND THINK.
These several years of OBAMA had Clinton neo-liberals installing tons of these non-economy policies just so WE THE PEOPLE would decline to third world standards trying to survive-----do anything to accumulate wealth.
The mega-computers at global IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES LIKE JOHNS HOPKINS will be taking all accessible high-speed internet capacity so none of this DEMOCRATIZING MACHINE LEARNING is real
'Complex machine-learning algorithms require an incredible amount of computing power, both to train models and implement them in real time'.
The Democratization of Machine Learning: What It Means for Tech Innovation
Apr 13, 2017
The world of high-tech innovation can change the destiny of industries seemingly overnight. Now we are on the cusp of a new grand leap thanks to the democratization of machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. This process of democratization is already underway, according to this opinion piece by Kartik Hosanagar (@khosanagar), Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and a cofounder of Yodle Inc., and, Apoorv Saxena (@apoorvsaxena1), a product manager at Google and co-chair of the recent AI Frontiers conference.
Last month, at the CloudNext conference in San Francisco, Google announced its acquisition of Kaggle, an online community for data scientists and machine-learning competitions. Although the move may seem far removed from Google’s core businesses, it speaks to the skyrocketing industry interest in machine learning (ML). Kaggle not only gives Google access to a talented community of data scientists, but also one of the largest repositories of datasets that will help train the next generation of machine-learning algorithms.
As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems, such as language translation and image understanding, training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data. To increase access to such data, Google had previously released a labeled dataset created from more than 7 million YouTube videos as part of their YouTube-8M challenge on Kaggle. The acquisition of Kaggle is an interesting next step.
Market-based access to data and algorithms will lower entry barriers and lead to an explosion in new applications of AI. As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data and computing resources needed to train and launch sophisticated AI algorithms. Small startups and individuals simply didn’t have access and were effectively blocked out of the market. That changes now. The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance to get their ideas off the ground and prove their concepts before raising the funds needed to scale.
But access to data is only one way in which ML is being democratized. There is an effort underway to standardize and improve access across all layers of the machine learning stack, including specialized chipsets, scalable computing platforms, software frameworks, tools and ML algorithms.
“Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups … machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools.”
Sponsored Content:
“The final step to democratization of machine learning will be the development of simple drag-and-drop frameworks accessible.”
All of these changes mean that the world of machine learning is no longer restricted to university labs and corporate research centers that have access to massive training data and computing infrastructure.
What are the implications?
Back in the mid- and late-1990s, web development was done by specialists and was accessible only to firms with ample resources. Now, with simple tools like WordPress, Medium and Shopify, any lay person can have a presence on the web. The democratization of machine learning will have a similar impact of lowering entry barriers for individuals and startups.
Further, the emerging ecosystem, consisting of marketplaces for data, algorithms and computing infrastructure, will also make it easier for developers to pick up ML skills. The net result will be lower costs to train and hire talent. We think that the above two factors will be particularly powerful in vertical (industry-specific) use cases such as weather forecasting, healthcare/disease diagnostics, drug discovery and financial risk assessment that have been traditionally cost prohibitive.
Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups, the ongoing build-out of machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools. The PC platform gave us access to productivity applications like Word and Excel and eventually to web applications like search and social networking. The mobile platform gave us messaging applications and location-based services. The ongoing democratization of ML will likely give us an amazing array of intelligent software and devices powering our world.
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Here are the jobs of the coming few decades with global Wall Street looking globally for those 3% of citizens who are EXCEPTIONAL students and grads tied to technology engineering. This is the job market. Now, I am no slouch in intelligence but I would not stand a chance in this environment ---#1 it bores me to death---you have to have a personality that fits this very, very technical job model. #2 it is highly mathematical and most citizens are NOT HIGHLY MATHEMATICAL. Women have for too long been identified as mathematics-challenged according to natural brain mechanics for example. So, global Wall Street CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have been building the narrowest of pathways to employment making sure this extreme wealth and extreme poverty broadens----that is today's Congressional economic policy brought to us by global 5% to the 1% state assembly, city councils, mayors and governors-----
SHOW THEM THE MONEY AND THEY WILL DO ANYTHING GLOBAL WALL STREET SAYS.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Machine Learning Skills Pyramid V1.0
While the exact definition of "Data Scientist" continues to elude us, the job requirements seem to heavily include machine learning skills. They also include a wide range of other skills, ranging from specific languages, frameworks, databases etc, to data cleaning, web scraping, visualizations, mathematical modeling and subject matter expertise. (This breakdown will be the subject of a future post, as I was having some trouble with my web scraper ;))
So for the typical "Data Scientist" role, many organizations want PhD level academic training plus an assortment of nuts and bolt programming or database skills. Most of these job requirements are like a rich and complex mix of "can't find the right candidate" (aka Unicorn). So, as an extension to the Data Science Venn Diagram V2.0, I thought it would be helpful to try to clarify and make some important distinctions regard Machine Learning skills.
Back in the 2002-2003 time frame, I spent a bunch of time trying to code my own Neural Networks. This was a very frustrating experience because bugs in these algorithms can be especially difficult to find and it took time away from what I really wanted to do, which is building applications using machine learning. So I decided back then to use well tested and fully debugged library algorithms over clunky home grown algorithms whenever possible. These days there are so many powerful and well tested ML libraries, why would anyone write one from scratch? The answer is, sometimes a new algorithm is needed.
First, some definitions will help clarify:
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We will finish with discussion on employment policy with the building trades industry who make up a large part of the global labor pool. They have been sent all over the world building Foreign Economic Zones for MEGA-INDUSTRY just to leave behind enslavement and environmental devastation. Our international trade unions are being lead by global Wall Street 5% to the 1% leaders who could care less that this is now coming to our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones. They see jobs for now only. WE THE PEOPLE already know the dynamics of these building trades -----global Wall Street brings in global labor pool earning next to nothing throwing a few million at trade labor unions. Throwing those patronage millions will be ending very soon if MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS stay in office. Once global corporations feel they own our US government which they do today---they will no longer need PAY-TO-PLAY.
We are hearing there is a shortage of every kind of worker here in US ---that pesky SKILLS GAP----and our K-12 apprenticeship vocational tracking in schools will see many children hitting these construction labor pools being paid that global labor pool wage......$3-6 and day.
'Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years'!
These two decades will see global Wall STreet expanding Foreign Economic Zones in Africa and US -----and Asian and Latin America will expand what they already have and this will be the end of FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE development for the decades to come. Colonizing the MOON and MARS will be the construction focus after that.
Growing out of the trades – Hiring an Apprentice
Australia’s society, along with the workforce, is undoubtedly aging. As the retirement of the baby boomer generation nears, a decreased labour supply is expected over coming years.
This raises concerns about the short-medium term impact of an aging workforce in the building industry, in particular a shortage of skilled and experienced workers. Therefore, training building industry apprentices for the future is integral for the long-term viability and profitability of many businesses.
A number of skills learned on the job and transferred from worker to another, and it’s safe to anticipate that a large proportion of skilled trades will age out of the workforce in the next 2 to 5 years, and do so in rapid succession, which could affect the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years!
Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years!
If this low apprentice commencement trend isn’t rectified the building industry will be facing serious skill shortages in the very near future. The industry needs to start investing in apprentices now to ensure that we continue to have quality tradespeople in the industry.
“We’ve already done all the hard work for you to ensure you get the top picks of quality candidates.”
Many businesses are not considering the positive implications of taking on an apprentice and as a result we are seeing the effects of the reduced intake of apprentices over the last few years. We have a number of employers calling us and asking if we have a good 3rd year apprentice as they need someone with some skills. But the reality is that there isn’t because the industry wasn’t hiring apprentices 3 years ago.
An aging workforce means retention of job-related skills, expertise and experience are an imperative for the future. If your business is reliant on subcontractors there could be very real implications. To minimise the implications I encourage todays tradespeople to help the transfer of knowledge through hosting and mentoring an apprentice. Without appropriate planning and intervention, the industry will not be able to replenish those exiting the trades with a newly trained workforce.
Now is the perfect time to hire an apprentice that you can train from the ground up, the way you operate without any bad habits picked up elsewhere. Quality applicants have recently left school or pre-apprenticeships and in need of the training that only good trades people and committed businesses can give.
If you are looking for an onsite apprentices or perhaps an office trainee, get in touch with the HIA. We’ve already done all the hard work for you to ensure you get the top picks of quality candidates. For more information phone, HIA Apprentices on 1300 650 620.
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We are shouting to our US trade union FB friends that international labor leaders are partnered with global Wall STreet and these K-career vocational tracking apprenticeships will not include our once strong LABOR UNION APPRENTICESHIPS FOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADS. ONE WORLD ONE TRADE GUILD will look like those Medieval trade guilds with extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
'At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue'.
We are shouting to our US trade union FB friends that international labor leaders are partnered with global Wall STreet and these K-career vocational tracking apprenticeships will not include our once strong LABOR UNION APPRENTICESHIPS FOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADS. ONE WORLD ONE TRADE GUILD will look like those Medieval trade guilds with extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
'At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue'.
These 4 year programs are simply that RACE TO THE TOP ending of US high school and sending students to work at end of 6th grade or end of 9th grade-----child labor will fill future building trade employment not taken by robotics. Here we have DETROIT which we are sure is a mirror of Baltimore where these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA has seen nothing but one long trades apprenticeship training program after another and yet this article still states DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TRAINED IN TRADES.
UAW seeks to grow skilled trades apprentice programs
Melissa Burden, The Detroit News 11:35 p.m. ET May 18, 2015
Lincoln Park — Randy Jercick passed an exam to get into Ford Motor Co.’s apprentice program more than a decade ago, but had almost given up hope that he’d ever get a chance to become an electrician.
Six months ago, the 24-year Ford employee, who works at the automaker’s Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Missouri, was notified he was in.
Jercick, 46, will move off the production line to shadow a journeyman electrician for four years at the plant that builds Ford F-150 pickups and Transit vans.
“It’s a more stable future for me,” he said during a recent three-week visit to the UAW-Ford Technical Training Center here, a nondescript warehouse building that formerly was a Ford glass prototype factory.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be laid off again.”
Ford, General Motors Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles run jointly administered apprentice programs with the UAW. The union hopes to expand the programs, which were dormant for several years leading up to and immediately following the economic downturn. Securing and growing the programs, as well as skilled trades positions that have shrunk following the recession, will be part of upcoming contract negotiations between the UAW and automakers this summer.
The apprentice programs pay to train and develop workers for key and higher-paying skilled trades positions such as tool-and-die makers, millwrights, plumber/pipefitters and toolmakers.
Union members are concerned about the scores of skilled trades workers who could retire at any time. They don’t want to see the jobs, which pay $32 an hour or more, contracted out to non-union members. The automakers, however, are cautious about growing their apprenticeship programs too much. During the recession, the programs weren’t active and many skilled trades workers transferred into production jobs or were retrained for other trades.
Ford has about 390 apprentices in its program. GM has just more than 100 and FCA has 23, according to the carmakers. Each company has thousands of skilled trades workers; at GM, more than half of the roughly 8,500 workers are eligible to retire.
At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue.
“It’s a companywide problem,” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to strengthen our apprenticeship program.”
Reyes said skilled trades workers are necessary to a plant’s daily operations and are needed to maintain machinery. He said it’s “inevitable” that GM will have a mass exodus of retiring skilled trades workers.
“What we’re hoping to prevent is a mass outsourcing of work that’s been traditionally ours,” he said.
Four-year programs
At GM, a majority of its apprentices work in engineering trades, such as making models, concept cars or tooling fixtures. The automaker added no apprentices from about 2005 to 2011 and it has hundreds of skilled trades workers who are assigned to production jobs.
Spokesman Bill Grotz said the Detroit automaker’s apprentice program, which has a history dating back more than 60 years, said GM may add apprentices as workers retire. “As folks retire and move on … we see this as a continuing with the program and growing it to a certain extent as the needs of the business dictate,” he said.
The apprentice programs take about four years to complete. They include about 575 hours in the classroom and 8,000 hours of learning experience on the shop floor. Apprentices get pay increases toward the top pay for their skilled trades classification as they increase their skills. The automakers pay for their schooling and on-the-job-training hours.
Ruben King, 48, of Lee Summit, Missouri, who has worked at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant for 16 years, said it’s well worth it.
“The best thing is getting off the line,” said King, an electrician apprentice, who was among a group from Kansas City Assembly and Woodhaven Forging. He learned skills such as how to bend conduit, read electrical prints, and run and troubleshoot simulated machines during a recent three-week training session at Ford’s training center.
Longtime Ford worker Reggie Anderson, 48, of Raytown, Missouri, who also works at Ford’s Kansas City plant, said he was attracted to skilled trades training because of the job’s higher pay and learning a new skill that he “can use outside of Ford as well.”
Ford to add 200 apprentices
Ford has run an apprentice program with the UAW since 1941. Stacey Allerton, director of Ford’s U.S. labor affairs, said the Dearborn-based automaker plans to continue the program, as its assembly plants have become more technical with automation and robots. Most apprentices are studying to be electricians who would work with sophisticated equipment. Some get advanced training related to programming equipment.
Ford plans to add 200 or so apprentices by the end of the year, Allerton said.
“It is frankly more difficult to find skilled people in the labor pool, so it makes sense to us to be developing and training our existing employees to be capable of performing that work,” Allerton said.
The UAW also is working with Detroit-area schools to teach students about good-paying skilled trades jobs. The UAW-Ford Technical Training Center hosts summer programs for high-schoolers about skilled trades, said UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles.
“The risk is not enough skilled trades period — not just at Ford, but throughout the country,” Settles said, adding he wants Ford’s apprentice program to grow.
FCA, through spokeswoman Jodi Tinson, declined to comment on its apprentice program.
mburden@detroitnews.com
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Unfortunately these kinds of tiered wage structures are simply deregulating what was a strongly enforced equal protection labor law structure......our immigrant workers or long-term unemployed just glad to get that lower wage are not understanding to where deregulated labor wages lead-----it leads to being able to pay anything global corporations want for any reason anytime and yes, that will lead to $3-6 a day instead of those Living Wage tiers we see in this article. Notice how our global Wall Street player de Blasio sold as left social progressive is juking the stats on affordable housing just as all global CLINTON/OBAMA NEO-LIBERALS-----
“I don’t even know what that is. We’ve gone through so many issues in this country; you’d think that we’d be beyond that. But no, those things still go on,” said Espinal'.
Our local labor unions must demand an end to US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES in order to stop all this deregulation and anything goes in wages for our trades. It is a RACE TO THE BOTTOM.
Our global labor pool come to America to get those developed nation wages and work conditions---they don't want to see our US labor laws ignored and have US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones operate as they do in Asia-----
Tiered wages in NY----crazy stuff-----this sounds like Baltimore's Cove Point UnderArmour global corporate campus.
Our low-income workers must understand that deregulating US wages today will bring third world wages tomorrow.
Building Trades Protest Racially-Tiered Wages
October 17, 2014
By Marc Bussanich
New York, NY—The building trades were out in force outside City Hall on Wednesday afternoon because they want the City Council to deny a real estate developer from developing Astoria Cove unless the developer agrees to hiring union members that includes living wages.
Some pundits have been saying that the battle over whether to grant or deny Alma Realty the right to develop Astoria Cove, a four-tower residential development with more than 1,600 apartments, is a litmus test for Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan. In fact, only 20 percent of the 1,600 apartments are slated for affordable housing.
Building tradesmen and women, as well as building and hotel workers who make up the Build Up NYC coalition, say the City Council shouldn’t approve the project on Monday because Alma has a history of hiring contractors who don’t pay their workers equally.
If the City Council votes yea it would clear the last hurdle for Alma Realty to start construction, after the City Planning Commission approved the massive project on September 29.
According to Gary LaBarbera, president of the New York City Building and Construction Trades, the company has a history of hiring contractors who in turn pay tiered wages based on their workers’ ethnicity.
The Daily News reported on September 26, 2014 that SSC High Rise Construction was ordered by the state Supreme Court to pay $1.6 million in back wages for overtime in 2011 because the company paid white workers $25 an hour, black workers $18 an hour and Latino workers $15 an hour.
In the accompanying video, LaBarbera said that racially tiered wages Alma is paying is just the tip of the iceberg.
“They have problems in Far Rockaway in their buildings where they don’t want to give the workers a contract and they treat them unfairly, and they want to really push them out of a job. It’s unbelievable [that they are paying] a tiered-wage scale based on race and color. That’s disgusting and it’s unacceptable,” said LaBarbera.
Now if the City Council doesn’t approve the project, LaBarbera said there’s still hope for Alma Realty.
“It’s not too late for them. All they need to do is sit down with the building trades and 32BJ and come to terms on an agreement that makes sense. Build this project union, create jobs and be a good corporate citizen. But if they continue to resist, we’ll continue to urge the City Council to vote no, a red light on this project,” LaBarbera said.
We interviewed Maria Espinal, a nine-year millwright and of Dominican Republic heritage, to get her reaction to Alma’s history of paying racially tiered wages.
“I don’t even know what that is. We’ve gone through so many issues in this country; you’d think that we’d be beyond that. But no, those things still go on,” said Espinal.
The tradesmen and women, as well as hotel and building workers will be outside City Hall again early Monday morning as the City Council takes up the debate at 10 AM.
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In Maryland and Baltimore our media outlets and global Wall Street 5% to the 1% are bringing out all that left progressive posing on issues of jobs and employment---all our Baltimore City Hall, Baltimore Maryland Assembly, Congressional pols are of course far-right wing global Wall Street Clinton/Obama running as Democrats pushing all these INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR/STARTUP ENTREPRENEUR/APPRENTICESHIP AT 6TH GRADE policies MOVING FORWARD third world wage and labor conditions in US while slapping each other on the back for supporting $15 an hour====women's wage equity ===family leave ===knowing US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE policy will NOT ALLOW THESE LABOR LAWS TO EXIST. Below we see that global Wall Street Greater Baltimore Committee with its EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE committee bringing the worst of conditions for our US AND IMMIGRANT CITIZENS.
'Senator Ferguson spoke specifically about the Maryland Education Development Collaborative (SB 910/HB 1399) which would create a quasi-governmental agency to advance innovations in K-12 education'.
This is what we call BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT 'labor and justice' organizations led by that pesky 5% to the 1% who could care less about WE THE PEOPLE the 99%.....join a committee they control and we cannot change MOVING FORWARD.
Education and Workforce Committee
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Education and Workforce Committee
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Goal: The goal is to influence the academic curriculum throughout the education continuum to prepare Maryland students, including adults and career changers, for careers in these industries.
Implementation: Start by expanding the composition of the workgroup to include leaders from the industries that use the emerging technology.
Gather information on how the technology is used by Baltimore industries and the current capacity of Maryland’s schools and industries to prepare students for success using the technology.
Establish workgroups to develop curricular recommendations at various educational levels:
Elementary and secondary education
Community colleges
Universities
Measure success: If successful, the workgroup will facilitate changes in the education curriculum and influence the establishment of new academic programs or certificates. These changes will better prepare Maryland students for jobs using emerging technologies.
Eventually, the GBC can measure success by the evaluating the preparedness of students to work in technology-related jobs, the impact these workers have on industries in the Baltimore City region, and the reputation the region gains as a leader in emerging technologies.
Recommended focus for the first two years – 3D technologies:
This technology impacts:
gaming
construction
manufacturing
architecture and design
medicine
others
Spend the first year expanding the composition of the Education Workgroup to include members from these industries and gathering information from industries that use 3D technologies. Invite industry leaders to discuss the use of 3D imaging and the technological needs of its workforce and invite leaders of schools and higher education institutions to discuss their efforts to educate students to use 3D technologies.
Possible guests include leaders of:
Baltimore Design School
Under Armour
Gaming companies
Construction companies
Medical facilities
Design firms
In addition, the workforce members want to meet with the executive director of Baltimore Promise (Thomasina Hiers) and the executive director of the Fund for Educational Excellence (Roger Shulman) to learn more about their missions to determine if their objectives are aligned with the workgroup’s mission.
In the second year of this project, the workgroup will meet in subcommittees to develop recommendations to change curriculum and/or develop new academic programs and certificate programs to prepare students to succeed using 3D technologies.
After completing the 3D project, the workgroup will select a new emerging technology and reconstitute the Education Workgroup Committee membership to reflect the industries that utilize that emerging technology.
2017 Education and Workforce Committee news:
The Education and Workforce Committee discussed how to connect the business community with the various social enterprises throughout the region at its April 6, 2017 meeting. Following the discussion, the committee decided to create subcommittees which will focus on preparing youths for the transition to college or the workplace. At the conclusion of the meeting, Committee Chairman David Warnock asked each member to sign up for a committee before its next meeting.
At its March 17, 2017 meeting, the Education and Workforce Committee heard from Sarah Hemminger, Co-Founder and CEO of Thread, and Julia Baez, Executive Director of Baltimore’s Promise.
Hemminger and Baez presented to the committee information about the work of their respective organizations. Following the presentations the committee had an open dialogue with Hemminger and Baez to share their ideas and recommendations.
The Education and Workforce Committee held its first meeting of the year on February 24, 2017. The committee had a lively discussion about education issues that are of major concern in the Greater Baltimore region as it works to select an issue the committee plans to work towards improving.
2016 Education and Workforce Committee news:
Dr. William “Brit” Kirwan spoke about the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education at the Education and Workforce Committee’s October 6, 2016 meeting. Dr. Kirwan, who previously served as the Chancellor for the University System of Maryland, was appointed by Maryland’s Governor, Senate President and House Speaker to chair the commission. It is charged with assessing Maryland’s K-12 funding formula and making recommendations to ensure students are prepared to succeed.
Dr. Kirwan spoke to the committee about the commission and its upcoming work for the next year. Following the presentation the committee had an open dialogue with Dr. Kirwan to share their ideas and recommendations. At the conclusion of the meeting, Dr. Kirwan provided the committee with a timeline for how the commission will operate for the remainder of the year. The commission will meet twice more this year and submit a preliminary report to the General Assembly by December.
The Education and Workforce Committee heard from Ellie Mitchell, Director of Maryland Out of School Time (MOST), at its September 1, 2016 meeting. Mitchell’s presentation focused on the opportunities for cross-sector learning and high quality programming in the STEM field. In addition, the committee reviewed its draft report on 3D technology which details the state of 3D technology in Maryland and offers recommendations on next steps. The draft will be submitted to the GBC Board of Directors for review.
The Education and Workforce Committee discussed the P-TECH model at its June 2, 2016 meeting.
At the May 5, 2016 Education and Workforce Committee meeting, Bob Ayduhovic, Executive Director of the Maryland Center for Construction Education and Innovation, gave a presentation on the center’s history, background, accomplishments and publications. He also spoke about the need for more skilled trade workers and the challenges faced by the construction industry in recruiting people into construction trades. The committee also heard from Rachel Hise, Senior Policy Analyst for the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, who gave an overview of education funding and issues that came up during the 2016 Maryland General Assembly legislative session.
State Senator Bill Ferguson (D-46) spoke to the Education and Workforce Committee during its March 14, 2016 meeting about his initiatives in Annapolis during the current legislative session and about the many education and workforce issues being considered by the Maryland General Assembly. Senator Ferguson spoke specifically about the Maryland Education Development Collaborative (SB 910/HB 1399) which would create a quasi-governmental agency to advance innovations in K-12 education.
The committee also discussed proposed legislation to create a strategic partnership between the University of Maryland, Baltimore and the University of Maryland, College Park. That bill (SB 1052) was recently approved by the Senate and will now go to the House of Delegates.
Finally, the committee also heard about the GBC’s legislative agenda and efforts during the legislative session.
The Education and Workforce Committee learned about the recently released “STEM: Middle-Skill Career Pathways in the Baltimore Region” at its February 4, 2016 meeting.
The Greater Baltimore Committee and Associated Black Charities released the innovative new report that details the many opportunities that exist in Baltimore for current or aspiring middle-skilled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workers at a Jan. 6 event in Baltimore.
The report has seven recommendations:
Strengthen career pathways.
Offer effective basic skills upgrading.
Bridge gaps with support services.
Create ways to gain work experience.
Build stronger pathways for advancement.
Build a stronger employer value proposition and promote employer leadership.
Boost awareness and realistic access to middle-skill STEM careers.
Shaina Hernandez of the GBC and Tanya Terrell of ABC presented the report to the committee.
The committee also heard from its chair Tina M. Bjarekull, who provided an overview of the Maryland FY2017 Proposed Budget.
“A lot of focus right now is on the governor’s budget,” Bjarekull said.
This week we will look at the study of the brain----it has been central in medical research these few decades tied to achieving just this ----ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and easy control of a 99% when the global 1% has extreme wealth vs extreme poverty.
When I see women as the target for startup funding knowing it is a non-economy I am seeing an attack of women in the workforce----the Hillary 5% are MOVING FORWARD in killing all the gains of women from last century.
Never fearing failure is indeed a character trait all citizens should have---if you fall down get back on the horse but these global 1% are not opening the door to the global 99% they are shutting it tightly.
'Failure as Value
The planning elite attempted to impose what F.A. Hayek (following Michael Oakeshott) has called a “teleocratic” order: a society with a defined end state designed by intellectuals operating outside the social process'.
This article was written by a right wing media outlet and Selma Hayek in indeed just another MOVIE STAR working for team global 1%. We are heading for great economic instability and now is not the time for TRY EVERYTHING.
LET'S JUST STOP MOVING FORWARD WITH NON-ECONOMY TECH STARTUPS AND GET BACK TO REBUILDING OUR LOCAL ECONOMIES FOR ALL.
Try Everything! Shakira Is Right
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Monday, March 28, 2016
Once again, Disney has knocked it out of the park with a wonderfully catchy song at the end of its latest hit movie. The film is “Zootopia,” the inspirational story of a rabbit with ambitions to stretch her professional goals beyond prevailing familial and social expectations.
The hit song, “Try Everything,” is performed by Shakira. It does more than sum up the film’s inspiring message for individuals. It highlights crucial features of the social order and structure of the world around that social science has mistakenly denied for longer than a century. It turns out that this song -- a seemingly superficial pop song marketed to kids -- represents a fundamental attack on the prevailing model of science and politics, as constructed by the ruling class of many generations, and completely upends it.
The music is upbeat. The song is joyful. The mood is celebratory. And yet the lyrics begin with a clear announcement: “I messed up tonight, I lost another fight.” This is the first clue that we are about to learn something counterintuitive. Why, with such a joyful tune, are the words about “falling down” and “hitting the ground?” Why should anyone be happy about messing up?
The answer comes quickly: “I always get up now to see what’s next.”
There are layers to this question of what’s next. That we must seek to know the future at all points to a fundamental truth that we can either treat as terrifying or hopeful.
On the individual level, our skills are improved with every attempt that ends in failure because we toss out the failed pattern in search of a new successful pattern. We don’t necessarily know the path forward. But trying strategies and failing at least gets us closer to what might be true, if only by the process of elimination. Our skills are trained. More importantly, our sense of judgment over what works and what doesn’t undergoes gradual refinement.
Entrepreneurship
Here we see the essence of entrepreneurship, and probably its most salient feature: one that makes real-world business far different from how it is described in textbooks. There is no instruction manual, no sure-fire method for commercial success. The entrepreneur is the driving force of an ongoing discovery process. The process might be compared to entering a pitch-black room and searching for the light switch. You crawl along the wall, vaguely intuiting where that switch might be. You know only a few things: it is not likely low to the ground and not likely too high to reach. But these clues don’t tell you precisely where it is.
Ludwig von Mises described the honing of the entrepreneurial intuition as ever further refinements in understanding (a translation of the richer and more subtle German word “verstehen”). “Understanding,” he wrote, “can approach the problem of forecasting future conditions. We may call its method unsatisfactory and the positivists may arrogantly scorn it. But such arbitrary judgments must not and cannot obscure the fact that understanding is the only appropriate method of dealing with the uncertainty of future conditions.”
Failure as Value
A crucial feature of success is failure as a necessary antecedent and precondition. Because failure is the signal you actually experience in the course of refining one’s judgement, it might be said to be the most valuable feature of entrepreneurship. Indeed, venture capitalists have discovered this. They are far more likely to fund your project if you have had a series of failures. As the Harvard Business Review wrote in “The Value of Failure”: “Many venture capital firms look for entrepreneurial leaders with a failed start-up or two under their belt, for the lessons learned. Indeed, a hot business strategy these days is ‘intelligent fast failure.’”
Or as the song says: “Birds don't just fly, they fall down and get up. Nobody learns without getting it wrong.”
What is the standard of successful and unsuccessful choices? In a world without institutions and feedback mechanisms, we wouldn’t have one. If the light switches in that dark room of uncertainly didn’t actually function to illuminate the spaces, we would have no way of knowing. Fortunately, in a market economy, we have prices as the key indicators, the building blocks of a system of accounting that reveals profit and loss. And herein we find the signaling mechanism to provide the critical information we need.
Anything that disables or distorts that signaling system represents a vital threat to the capacity of our experiences to yield actionable results. Without prices that reflect market realities, we are left with guessing whether our actions are successful or unsuccessful. It is as if the bird is suddenly disabled in its capacity to know whether it is flying or sitting on the ground. That bird no longer possesses the personal capacity for learning.
Ceaseless Change
At some point, the bird analogy breaks down, because the bird only has one task and one skill to master in pursuing its goal. Humankind faces an ever-changing environment, multifarious and competing goals, and must master an ever-changing range of skills.
On the way toward gaining ever-greater expertise in certain tasks, an individual can refine intuitions and judgements. You can find yourself further along the path toward achieving the goal. But the fundamental fact of the future’s uncertainty is ubiquitous and inalterable. The possibility of further failure must become part of the expectation for all action.
As Shakira’s sings: “Though I’m on the lead, I wanna try everything, I wanna try even though I could fail.”
Even the most experienced entrepreneur can fail at the next stage, and the best among them are profoundly aware of that.
In this sense, there is no such thing as “market power” that guarantees that the world will work the way the entrepreneur imagines that it should. A great example is the nearly defunct web browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It was so dominant that the government attempted to break up its supposed monopoly. Far from being unassailably secure, the browser stopped innovating and eventually died at the hands of hungrier and more innovative competition.
The lesson here is that the definition of success is always backward-looking but cannot determine the future.
“I’ll keep on making new mistakes,” sings Shakira. “I’ll keep on trying every day.”
But in the course of this trying, this ceaseless quest for success, we find that we do make progress. And this becomes a source of joy for us, more so than if we had merely followed a preset path with an infallible map laid before us.
“Look at how far you've come, you filled your heart with love,” says the song. And yet, in the future, we could indeed “come last.”
Failure is possible, even probable. Still, there’s tomorrow.
Society’s Direction Is Uncertain
On the social level, no one knows for sure “what’s next,” because the structure of the social order builds up in an unpredictable way. Our own individual uncertainty about the path forward is socially shared to make for a world that is similarly groping its way toward ever more successful paths.
In the words of Enlightenment era philosopher Adam Ferguson: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future.” It is precisely for this reason that he concluded that societies cannot be designed to conform precisely to what we desire, but rather emerge as the product of individual actions.
Once you come to terms with the uncertainties of the emergent order, you are left with the profound injunction to “try everything” to find the way forward. This realization inculcates certain habits of mind. One no longer seeks to know all the answers or feels despair in the face of the consciousness that one does not have them. The mature mind is at peace with not knowing, because it has the confidence of knowing that the answer is discoverable and that time and imagination can cause the answer to reveal itself.
A good example is modeled in the work habits of Don Draper, the advertising genius in the television show Mad Men. He is aware of the incompleteness of his knowledge and goes to bed each night with a sense of discomfort (but not despair!) in not knowing. Often a stray remark from one of his colleagues the next day will trigger an epiphany, and the next ad campaign in his brilliant career is born. The source of value in his life is not that he knows but rather that he is determined to seek and test new insights as they occur to him along the way.
But what kind of society do we need in order to maximize the potential of this form of spontaneous development of individuals and societies? A society hobbled by preset agendas emanating from fixed regulations and laws presume the opposite of a trial-and-error society. They indulge the illusion of knowledge, the myth of certainty, the fantasy that a static order with known solutions can be forced on everyone.
The Anarchism of Shakira
Here we find the core failing of much of 20th century politics and social policy. The state attempted to forge a society with a point rather than permit the process of discovery to take its own course. The planning elite attempted to impose what F.A. Hayek (following Michael Oakeshott) has called a “teleocratic” order: a society with a defined end state designed by intellectuals operating outside the social process. This is in contrast to a “nomocratic” order that provides broad rules for behavior and otherwise defers to the learning process of innovation and individual action.
In a nomocratic order, there is no end state, no precise form that we imagined history is driving toward, and thus do we find meaning to the words of the song: “I won’t give up, no I won’t give in, Till I reach the end. And then I’ll start again.”
Hayek further elaborates on why a society based on the principle of “try everything” is nothing to regret; it creates an opportunity for the emergence of an ever-more beautiful world:
It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible, greater than any single mind can foresee. It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Thus do we see how a catchy pop song reveals core truths about the world around us: more grounded in reality than what has been taught by all the social sciences studies at the best universities for the last 100 years. Pop music, by seeking connection to people’s intuitions about their real lives, as measured by playlists and profitability, can embody a brilliance that eludes the most highly trained philosophical minds.
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The technology of THE CLOUD is doing two major things to our US economy and doing business----first it is designed to end the concept of brick-and-mortar business locations making it easy for startups to come and go calling it a cost savings for that citizen small business owner. It as well moves all of our business documents once on hard drives in those brick - and-mortar buildings into a COMMERCIALLY CONTROLLED MEGA-DATA STORAGE CENTER----THE CLOUD. All data sent to THE CLOUD is indeed being accessed and used for artificial intelligence.
“Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups … machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools.”
If we know from Bush/Obama that over 30% of Independent Contractors are misclassified fraud-----if we know the startup model fails 90% of the time leaving citizens unable to reach income stability----if we know global Wall Street envisions robotics taking almost all work functions we know none of this leads to FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN WHAT WE DO AND THINK.
These several years of OBAMA had Clinton neo-liberals installing tons of these non-economy policies just so WE THE PEOPLE would decline to third world standards trying to survive-----do anything to accumulate wealth.
The mega-computers at global IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES LIKE JOHNS HOPKINS will be taking all accessible high-speed internet capacity so none of this DEMOCRATIZING MACHINE LEARNING is real
'Complex machine-learning algorithms require an incredible amount of computing power, both to train models and implement them in real time'.
The Democratization of Machine Learning: What It Means for Tech Innovation
Apr 13, 2017
The world of high-tech innovation can change the destiny of industries seemingly overnight. Now we are on the cusp of a new grand leap thanks to the democratization of machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. This process of democratization is already underway, according to this opinion piece by Kartik Hosanagar (@khosanagar), Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and a cofounder of Yodle Inc., and, Apoorv Saxena (@apoorvsaxena1), a product manager at Google and co-chair of the recent AI Frontiers conference.
Last month, at the CloudNext conference in San Francisco, Google announced its acquisition of Kaggle, an online community for data scientists and machine-learning competitions. Although the move may seem far removed from Google’s core businesses, it speaks to the skyrocketing industry interest in machine learning (ML). Kaggle not only gives Google access to a talented community of data scientists, but also one of the largest repositories of datasets that will help train the next generation of machine-learning algorithms.
As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems, such as language translation and image understanding, training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data. To increase access to such data, Google had previously released a labeled dataset created from more than 7 million YouTube videos as part of their YouTube-8M challenge on Kaggle. The acquisition of Kaggle is an interesting next step.
Market-based access to data and algorithms will lower entry barriers and lead to an explosion in new applications of AI. As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data and computing resources needed to train and launch sophisticated AI algorithms. Small startups and individuals simply didn’t have access and were effectively blocked out of the market. That changes now. The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance to get their ideas off the ground and prove their concepts before raising the funds needed to scale.
But access to data is only one way in which ML is being democratized. There is an effort underway to standardize and improve access across all layers of the machine learning stack, including specialized chipsets, scalable computing platforms, software frameworks, tools and ML algorithms.
“Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups … machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools.”
- Specialized chipsets
Sponsored Content:
- Highly scalable computing platforms
- Open-source, deep-learning software frameworks
- Developer-friendly tools
- Marketplaces for ML algorithms and datasets
“The final step to democratization of machine learning will be the development of simple drag-and-drop frameworks accessible.”
All of these changes mean that the world of machine learning is no longer restricted to university labs and corporate research centers that have access to massive training data and computing infrastructure.
What are the implications?
Back in the mid- and late-1990s, web development was done by specialists and was accessible only to firms with ample resources. Now, with simple tools like WordPress, Medium and Shopify, any lay person can have a presence on the web. The democratization of machine learning will have a similar impact of lowering entry barriers for individuals and startups.
Further, the emerging ecosystem, consisting of marketplaces for data, algorithms and computing infrastructure, will also make it easier for developers to pick up ML skills. The net result will be lower costs to train and hire talent. We think that the above two factors will be particularly powerful in vertical (industry-specific) use cases such as weather forecasting, healthcare/disease diagnostics, drug discovery and financial risk assessment that have been traditionally cost prohibitive.
Just like cloud computing ushered in the current explosion in startups, the ongoing build-out of machine learning platforms will likely power the next generation of consumer and business tools. The PC platform gave us access to productivity applications like Word and Excel and eventually to web applications like search and social networking. The mobile platform gave us messaging applications and location-based services. The ongoing democratization of ML will likely give us an amazing array of intelligent software and devices powering our world.
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Here are the jobs of the coming few decades with global Wall Street looking globally for those 3% of citizens who are EXCEPTIONAL students and grads tied to technology engineering. This is the job market. Now, I am no slouch in intelligence but I would not stand a chance in this environment ---#1 it bores me to death---you have to have a personality that fits this very, very technical job model. #2 it is highly mathematical and most citizens are NOT HIGHLY MATHEMATICAL. Women have for too long been identified as mathematics-challenged according to natural brain mechanics for example. So, global Wall Street CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have been building the narrowest of pathways to employment making sure this extreme wealth and extreme poverty broadens----that is today's Congressional economic policy brought to us by global 5% to the 1% state assembly, city councils, mayors and governors-----
SHOW THEM THE MONEY AND THEY WILL DO ANYTHING GLOBAL WALL STREET SAYS.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Machine Learning Skills Pyramid V1.0
While the exact definition of "Data Scientist" continues to elude us, the job requirements seem to heavily include machine learning skills. They also include a wide range of other skills, ranging from specific languages, frameworks, databases etc, to data cleaning, web scraping, visualizations, mathematical modeling and subject matter expertise. (This breakdown will be the subject of a future post, as I was having some trouble with my web scraper ;))
So for the typical "Data Scientist" role, many organizations want PhD level academic training plus an assortment of nuts and bolt programming or database skills. Most of these job requirements are like a rich and complex mix of "can't find the right candidate" (aka Unicorn). So, as an extension to the Data Science Venn Diagram V2.0, I thought it would be helpful to try to clarify and make some important distinctions regard Machine Learning skills.
Back in the 2002-2003 time frame, I spent a bunch of time trying to code my own Neural Networks. This was a very frustrating experience because bugs in these algorithms can be especially difficult to find and it took time away from what I really wanted to do, which is building applications using machine learning. So I decided back then to use well tested and fully debugged library algorithms over clunky home grown algorithms whenever possible. These days there are so many powerful and well tested ML libraries, why would anyone write one from scratch? The answer is, sometimes a new algorithm is needed.
First, some definitions will help clarify:
- ML Algorithm: A well defined, mathematically based tool for learning from inputs. Typically found in ML libraries. Take the example of sorting algorithms: BubbleSort, HeapSort InsertionSort, etc. As a software developer, you do not want or need to create a new type of sort. You should know which works best for your situation and use it. The same applies to Machine Learning: Random Forests, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, Backprop Neural Networks etc, are all algorithms which are well known, have certain strengths and limitations and are available in many ML libraries and languages. These are a bit more complicated than sorting, so there is more skill required to use them effectively.
- ML Solution: An application which uses one or more ML Algorithms to solve a business problem for an organization (business, government etc).
- ML Researcher/Scientist: PhD's are at the top of the heap. They have been trained to work on leading edge problems in Machine Learning or Robotics etc. These skills are hard won and are will suited for tackling problems with no known solution. When you have a new class of problems which require insight and new mathematics to solve, you need an ML Researcher. When they solve a problem a new ML Algorithm will likely emerge.
- ML Engineer: Is a sharp software engineer with experience in building ML Solutions (or solving Kaggle problems). The ML Engineer's skills are different from the ML Researcher. There is less abstract mathematics and more programming, database and business acumen involved. An ML Engineer analyzes the data available, the organizational objectives and the ML Algorithms known to operate on this type of problem and this type of data. You can't just feed any data into any ML Algorithm and expect a good result. Specialized skills are required in order to create high scoring ML solutions. These include: Data Analysis, Algorithm Selection, Feature Engineering, Cross Validation, appropriate scoring and trouble shooting the solution.
- Data Engineer: A software engineer with platform and language specific skills. The Data Engineer is a vital part of the ML Solution team. This person or group does the heavy lifting when it comes to building data driven systems. The are so many languages, databases, scripting tools, operating systems each with its own set of quirks, secret incantations and performance gotchas. A Data Engineer needs to know a broad set of tools and be effective in getting the data extracted, scraped, cleaned, joined, merged and sliced for input to the ML Solution. Many of the skills needed to manage Big Data, belong in the Data Engineer category.
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We will finish with discussion on employment policy with the building trades industry who make up a large part of the global labor pool. They have been sent all over the world building Foreign Economic Zones for MEGA-INDUSTRY just to leave behind enslavement and environmental devastation. Our international trade unions are being lead by global Wall Street 5% to the 1% leaders who could care less that this is now coming to our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones. They see jobs for now only. WE THE PEOPLE already know the dynamics of these building trades -----global Wall Street brings in global labor pool earning next to nothing throwing a few million at trade labor unions. Throwing those patronage millions will be ending very soon if MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS stay in office. Once global corporations feel they own our US government which they do today---they will no longer need PAY-TO-PLAY.
We are hearing there is a shortage of every kind of worker here in US ---that pesky SKILLS GAP----and our K-12 apprenticeship vocational tracking in schools will see many children hitting these construction labor pools being paid that global labor pool wage......$3-6 and day.
'Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years'!
These two decades will see global Wall STreet expanding Foreign Economic Zones in Africa and US -----and Asian and Latin America will expand what they already have and this will be the end of FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE development for the decades to come. Colonizing the MOON and MARS will be the construction focus after that.
Growing out of the trades – Hiring an Apprentice
Australia’s society, along with the workforce, is undoubtedly aging. As the retirement of the baby boomer generation nears, a decreased labour supply is expected over coming years.
This raises concerns about the short-medium term impact of an aging workforce in the building industry, in particular a shortage of skilled and experienced workers. Therefore, training building industry apprentices for the future is integral for the long-term viability and profitability of many businesses.
A number of skills learned on the job and transferred from worker to another, and it’s safe to anticipate that a large proportion of skilled trades will age out of the workforce in the next 2 to 5 years, and do so in rapid succession, which could affect the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years!
Recent apprenticeship statistics released show an alarming decline in overall apprentice and trainee numbers. Apprentice commencements declined by more than 10% in the last 12 months and more than 40% over the past 4 years!
If this low apprentice commencement trend isn’t rectified the building industry will be facing serious skill shortages in the very near future. The industry needs to start investing in apprentices now to ensure that we continue to have quality tradespeople in the industry.
“We’ve already done all the hard work for you to ensure you get the top picks of quality candidates.”
Many businesses are not considering the positive implications of taking on an apprentice and as a result we are seeing the effects of the reduced intake of apprentices over the last few years. We have a number of employers calling us and asking if we have a good 3rd year apprentice as they need someone with some skills. But the reality is that there isn’t because the industry wasn’t hiring apprentices 3 years ago.
An aging workforce means retention of job-related skills, expertise and experience are an imperative for the future. If your business is reliant on subcontractors there could be very real implications. To minimise the implications I encourage todays tradespeople to help the transfer of knowledge through hosting and mentoring an apprentice. Without appropriate planning and intervention, the industry will not be able to replenish those exiting the trades with a newly trained workforce.
Now is the perfect time to hire an apprentice that you can train from the ground up, the way you operate without any bad habits picked up elsewhere. Quality applicants have recently left school or pre-apprenticeships and in need of the training that only good trades people and committed businesses can give.
If you are looking for an onsite apprentices or perhaps an office trainee, get in touch with the HIA. We’ve already done all the hard work for you to ensure you get the top picks of quality candidates. For more information phone, HIA Apprentices on 1300 650 620.
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We are shouting to our US trade union FB friends that international labor leaders are partnered with global Wall STreet and these K-career vocational tracking apprenticeships will not include our once strong LABOR UNION APPRENTICESHIPS FOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADS. ONE WORLD ONE TRADE GUILD will look like those Medieval trade guilds with extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
'At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue'.
We are shouting to our US trade union FB friends that international labor leaders are partnered with global Wall STreet and these K-career vocational tracking apprenticeships will not include our once strong LABOR UNION APPRENTICESHIPS FOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADS. ONE WORLD ONE TRADE GUILD will look like those Medieval trade guilds with extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
'At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue'.
These 4 year programs are simply that RACE TO THE TOP ending of US high school and sending students to work at end of 6th grade or end of 9th grade-----child labor will fill future building trade employment not taken by robotics. Here we have DETROIT which we are sure is a mirror of Baltimore where these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA has seen nothing but one long trades apprenticeship training program after another and yet this article still states DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TRAINED IN TRADES.
UAW seeks to grow skilled trades apprentice programs
Melissa Burden, The Detroit News 11:35 p.m. ET May 18, 2015
Lincoln Park — Randy Jercick passed an exam to get into Ford Motor Co.’s apprentice program more than a decade ago, but had almost given up hope that he’d ever get a chance to become an electrician.
Six months ago, the 24-year Ford employee, who works at the automaker’s Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Missouri, was notified he was in.
Jercick, 46, will move off the production line to shadow a journeyman electrician for four years at the plant that builds Ford F-150 pickups and Transit vans.
“It’s a more stable future for me,” he said during a recent three-week visit to the UAW-Ford Technical Training Center here, a nondescript warehouse building that formerly was a Ford glass prototype factory.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be laid off again.”
Ford, General Motors Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles run jointly administered apprentice programs with the UAW. The union hopes to expand the programs, which were dormant for several years leading up to and immediately following the economic downturn. Securing and growing the programs, as well as skilled trades positions that have shrunk following the recession, will be part of upcoming contract negotiations between the UAW and automakers this summer.
The apprentice programs pay to train and develop workers for key and higher-paying skilled trades positions such as tool-and-die makers, millwrights, plumber/pipefitters and toolmakers.
Union members are concerned about the scores of skilled trades workers who could retire at any time. They don’t want to see the jobs, which pay $32 an hour or more, contracted out to non-union members. The automakers, however, are cautious about growing their apprenticeship programs too much. During the recession, the programs weren’t active and many skilled trades workers transferred into production jobs or were retrained for other trades.
Ford has about 390 apprentices in its program. GM has just more than 100 and FCA has 23, according to the carmakers. Each company has thousands of skilled trades workers; at GM, more than half of the roughly 8,500 workers are eligible to retire.
At GM’s Flint Engine North Plant, 99 of the plant’s 101 skilled trades workers are eligible to retire, said UAW Local 599 President Dan Reyes. His plant has no apprentices, nor has anyone been tested for the apprentice program. He sees that as a critical issue.
“It’s a companywide problem,” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to strengthen our apprenticeship program.”
Reyes said skilled trades workers are necessary to a plant’s daily operations and are needed to maintain machinery. He said it’s “inevitable” that GM will have a mass exodus of retiring skilled trades workers.
“What we’re hoping to prevent is a mass outsourcing of work that’s been traditionally ours,” he said.
Four-year programs
At GM, a majority of its apprentices work in engineering trades, such as making models, concept cars or tooling fixtures. The automaker added no apprentices from about 2005 to 2011 and it has hundreds of skilled trades workers who are assigned to production jobs.
Spokesman Bill Grotz said the Detroit automaker’s apprentice program, which has a history dating back more than 60 years, said GM may add apprentices as workers retire. “As folks retire and move on … we see this as a continuing with the program and growing it to a certain extent as the needs of the business dictate,” he said.
The apprentice programs take about four years to complete. They include about 575 hours in the classroom and 8,000 hours of learning experience on the shop floor. Apprentices get pay increases toward the top pay for their skilled trades classification as they increase their skills. The automakers pay for their schooling and on-the-job-training hours.
Ruben King, 48, of Lee Summit, Missouri, who has worked at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant for 16 years, said it’s well worth it.
“The best thing is getting off the line,” said King, an electrician apprentice, who was among a group from Kansas City Assembly and Woodhaven Forging. He learned skills such as how to bend conduit, read electrical prints, and run and troubleshoot simulated machines during a recent three-week training session at Ford’s training center.
Longtime Ford worker Reggie Anderson, 48, of Raytown, Missouri, who also works at Ford’s Kansas City plant, said he was attracted to skilled trades training because of the job’s higher pay and learning a new skill that he “can use outside of Ford as well.”
Ford to add 200 apprentices
Ford has run an apprentice program with the UAW since 1941. Stacey Allerton, director of Ford’s U.S. labor affairs, said the Dearborn-based automaker plans to continue the program, as its assembly plants have become more technical with automation and robots. Most apprentices are studying to be electricians who would work with sophisticated equipment. Some get advanced training related to programming equipment.
Ford plans to add 200 or so apprentices by the end of the year, Allerton said.
“It is frankly more difficult to find skilled people in the labor pool, so it makes sense to us to be developing and training our existing employees to be capable of performing that work,” Allerton said.
The UAW also is working with Detroit-area schools to teach students about good-paying skilled trades jobs. The UAW-Ford Technical Training Center hosts summer programs for high-schoolers about skilled trades, said UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles.
“The risk is not enough skilled trades period — not just at Ford, but throughout the country,” Settles said, adding he wants Ford’s apprentice program to grow.
FCA, through spokeswoman Jodi Tinson, declined to comment on its apprentice program.
mburden@detroitnews.com
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Unfortunately these kinds of tiered wage structures are simply deregulating what was a strongly enforced equal protection labor law structure......our immigrant workers or long-term unemployed just glad to get that lower wage are not understanding to where deregulated labor wages lead-----it leads to being able to pay anything global corporations want for any reason anytime and yes, that will lead to $3-6 a day instead of those Living Wage tiers we see in this article. Notice how our global Wall Street player de Blasio sold as left social progressive is juking the stats on affordable housing just as all global CLINTON/OBAMA NEO-LIBERALS-----
“I don’t even know what that is. We’ve gone through so many issues in this country; you’d think that we’d be beyond that. But no, those things still go on,” said Espinal'.
Our local labor unions must demand an end to US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES in order to stop all this deregulation and anything goes in wages for our trades. It is a RACE TO THE BOTTOM.
Our global labor pool come to America to get those developed nation wages and work conditions---they don't want to see our US labor laws ignored and have US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones operate as they do in Asia-----
Tiered wages in NY----crazy stuff-----this sounds like Baltimore's Cove Point UnderArmour global corporate campus.
Our low-income workers must understand that deregulating US wages today will bring third world wages tomorrow.
Building Trades Protest Racially-Tiered Wages
October 17, 2014
By Marc Bussanich
New York, NY—The building trades were out in force outside City Hall on Wednesday afternoon because they want the City Council to deny a real estate developer from developing Astoria Cove unless the developer agrees to hiring union members that includes living wages.
Some pundits have been saying that the battle over whether to grant or deny Alma Realty the right to develop Astoria Cove, a four-tower residential development with more than 1,600 apartments, is a litmus test for Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan. In fact, only 20 percent of the 1,600 apartments are slated for affordable housing.
Building tradesmen and women, as well as building and hotel workers who make up the Build Up NYC coalition, say the City Council shouldn’t approve the project on Monday because Alma has a history of hiring contractors who don’t pay their workers equally.
If the City Council votes yea it would clear the last hurdle for Alma Realty to start construction, after the City Planning Commission approved the massive project on September 29.
According to Gary LaBarbera, president of the New York City Building and Construction Trades, the company has a history of hiring contractors who in turn pay tiered wages based on their workers’ ethnicity.
The Daily News reported on September 26, 2014 that SSC High Rise Construction was ordered by the state Supreme Court to pay $1.6 million in back wages for overtime in 2011 because the company paid white workers $25 an hour, black workers $18 an hour and Latino workers $15 an hour.
In the accompanying video, LaBarbera said that racially tiered wages Alma is paying is just the tip of the iceberg.
“They have problems in Far Rockaway in their buildings where they don’t want to give the workers a contract and they treat them unfairly, and they want to really push them out of a job. It’s unbelievable [that they are paying] a tiered-wage scale based on race and color. That’s disgusting and it’s unacceptable,” said LaBarbera.
Now if the City Council doesn’t approve the project, LaBarbera said there’s still hope for Alma Realty.
“It’s not too late for them. All they need to do is sit down with the building trades and 32BJ and come to terms on an agreement that makes sense. Build this project union, create jobs and be a good corporate citizen. But if they continue to resist, we’ll continue to urge the City Council to vote no, a red light on this project,” LaBarbera said.
We interviewed Maria Espinal, a nine-year millwright and of Dominican Republic heritage, to get her reaction to Alma’s history of paying racially tiered wages.
“I don’t even know what that is. We’ve gone through so many issues in this country; you’d think that we’d be beyond that. But no, those things still go on,” said Espinal.
The tradesmen and women, as well as hotel and building workers will be outside City Hall again early Monday morning as the City Council takes up the debate at 10 AM.
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In Maryland and Baltimore our media outlets and global Wall Street 5% to the 1% are bringing out all that left progressive posing on issues of jobs and employment---all our Baltimore City Hall, Baltimore Maryland Assembly, Congressional pols are of course far-right wing global Wall Street Clinton/Obama running as Democrats pushing all these INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR/STARTUP ENTREPRENEUR/APPRENTICESHIP AT 6TH GRADE policies MOVING FORWARD third world wage and labor conditions in US while slapping each other on the back for supporting $15 an hour====women's wage equity ===family leave ===knowing US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE policy will NOT ALLOW THESE LABOR LAWS TO EXIST. Below we see that global Wall Street Greater Baltimore Committee with its EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE committee bringing the worst of conditions for our US AND IMMIGRANT CITIZENS.
'Senator Ferguson spoke specifically about the Maryland Education Development Collaborative (SB 910/HB 1399) which would create a quasi-governmental agency to advance innovations in K-12 education'.
This is what we call BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT 'labor and justice' organizations led by that pesky 5% to the 1% who could care less about WE THE PEOPLE the 99%.....join a committee they control and we cannot change MOVING FORWARD.
Education and Workforce Committee
Greater Baltimore Committee » »
Education and Workforce Committee
Join A Committee
Goal: The goal is to influence the academic curriculum throughout the education continuum to prepare Maryland students, including adults and career changers, for careers in these industries.
Implementation: Start by expanding the composition of the workgroup to include leaders from the industries that use the emerging technology.
Gather information on how the technology is used by Baltimore industries and the current capacity of Maryland’s schools and industries to prepare students for success using the technology.
Establish workgroups to develop curricular recommendations at various educational levels:
Elementary and secondary education
Community colleges
Universities
Measure success: If successful, the workgroup will facilitate changes in the education curriculum and influence the establishment of new academic programs or certificates. These changes will better prepare Maryland students for jobs using emerging technologies.
Eventually, the GBC can measure success by the evaluating the preparedness of students to work in technology-related jobs, the impact these workers have on industries in the Baltimore City region, and the reputation the region gains as a leader in emerging technologies.
Recommended focus for the first two years – 3D technologies:
This technology impacts:
gaming
construction
manufacturing
architecture and design
medicine
others
Spend the first year expanding the composition of the Education Workgroup to include members from these industries and gathering information from industries that use 3D technologies. Invite industry leaders to discuss the use of 3D imaging and the technological needs of its workforce and invite leaders of schools and higher education institutions to discuss their efforts to educate students to use 3D technologies.
Possible guests include leaders of:
Baltimore Design School
Under Armour
Gaming companies
Construction companies
Medical facilities
Design firms
In addition, the workforce members want to meet with the executive director of Baltimore Promise (Thomasina Hiers) and the executive director of the Fund for Educational Excellence (Roger Shulman) to learn more about their missions to determine if their objectives are aligned with the workgroup’s mission.
In the second year of this project, the workgroup will meet in subcommittees to develop recommendations to change curriculum and/or develop new academic programs and certificate programs to prepare students to succeed using 3D technologies.
After completing the 3D project, the workgroup will select a new emerging technology and reconstitute the Education Workgroup Committee membership to reflect the industries that utilize that emerging technology.
2017 Education and Workforce Committee news:
The Education and Workforce Committee discussed how to connect the business community with the various social enterprises throughout the region at its April 6, 2017 meeting. Following the discussion, the committee decided to create subcommittees which will focus on preparing youths for the transition to college or the workplace. At the conclusion of the meeting, Committee Chairman David Warnock asked each member to sign up for a committee before its next meeting.
At its March 17, 2017 meeting, the Education and Workforce Committee heard from Sarah Hemminger, Co-Founder and CEO of Thread, and Julia Baez, Executive Director of Baltimore’s Promise.
Hemminger and Baez presented to the committee information about the work of their respective organizations. Following the presentations the committee had an open dialogue with Hemminger and Baez to share their ideas and recommendations.
The Education and Workforce Committee held its first meeting of the year on February 24, 2017. The committee had a lively discussion about education issues that are of major concern in the Greater Baltimore region as it works to select an issue the committee plans to work towards improving.
2016 Education and Workforce Committee news:
Dr. William “Brit” Kirwan spoke about the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education at the Education and Workforce Committee’s October 6, 2016 meeting. Dr. Kirwan, who previously served as the Chancellor for the University System of Maryland, was appointed by Maryland’s Governor, Senate President and House Speaker to chair the commission. It is charged with assessing Maryland’s K-12 funding formula and making recommendations to ensure students are prepared to succeed.
Dr. Kirwan spoke to the committee about the commission and its upcoming work for the next year. Following the presentation the committee had an open dialogue with Dr. Kirwan to share their ideas and recommendations. At the conclusion of the meeting, Dr. Kirwan provided the committee with a timeline for how the commission will operate for the remainder of the year. The commission will meet twice more this year and submit a preliminary report to the General Assembly by December.
The Education and Workforce Committee heard from Ellie Mitchell, Director of Maryland Out of School Time (MOST), at its September 1, 2016 meeting. Mitchell’s presentation focused on the opportunities for cross-sector learning and high quality programming in the STEM field. In addition, the committee reviewed its draft report on 3D technology which details the state of 3D technology in Maryland and offers recommendations on next steps. The draft will be submitted to the GBC Board of Directors for review.
The Education and Workforce Committee discussed the P-TECH model at its June 2, 2016 meeting.
At the May 5, 2016 Education and Workforce Committee meeting, Bob Ayduhovic, Executive Director of the Maryland Center for Construction Education and Innovation, gave a presentation on the center’s history, background, accomplishments and publications. He also spoke about the need for more skilled trade workers and the challenges faced by the construction industry in recruiting people into construction trades. The committee also heard from Rachel Hise, Senior Policy Analyst for the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, who gave an overview of education funding and issues that came up during the 2016 Maryland General Assembly legislative session.
State Senator Bill Ferguson (D-46) spoke to the Education and Workforce Committee during its March 14, 2016 meeting about his initiatives in Annapolis during the current legislative session and about the many education and workforce issues being considered by the Maryland General Assembly. Senator Ferguson spoke specifically about the Maryland Education Development Collaborative (SB 910/HB 1399) which would create a quasi-governmental agency to advance innovations in K-12 education.
The committee also discussed proposed legislation to create a strategic partnership between the University of Maryland, Baltimore and the University of Maryland, College Park. That bill (SB 1052) was recently approved by the Senate and will now go to the House of Delegates.
Finally, the committee also heard about the GBC’s legislative agenda and efforts during the legislative session.
The Education and Workforce Committee learned about the recently released “STEM: Middle-Skill Career Pathways in the Baltimore Region” at its February 4, 2016 meeting.
The Greater Baltimore Committee and Associated Black Charities released the innovative new report that details the many opportunities that exist in Baltimore for current or aspiring middle-skilled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workers at a Jan. 6 event in Baltimore.
The report has seven recommendations:
Strengthen career pathways.
Offer effective basic skills upgrading.
Bridge gaps with support services.
Create ways to gain work experience.
Build stronger pathways for advancement.
Build a stronger employer value proposition and promote employer leadership.
Boost awareness and realistic access to middle-skill STEM careers.
Shaina Hernandez of the GBC and Tanya Terrell of ABC presented the report to the committee.
The committee also heard from its chair Tina M. Bjarekull, who provided an overview of the Maryland FY2017 Proposed Budget.
“A lot of focus right now is on the governor’s budget,” Bjarekull said.
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