MIT's Elegant Schoolbus Algorithm Was No Match For Angry Parents (bostonglobe.com) 399
"Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer," writes the Boston Globe. Slashdot reader sandbagger explains:
"Boston Public Schools asked MIT graduate students Sebastien Martin and Arthur Delarue to build an algorithm that could do the enormously complicated work of changing start times at dozens of schools -- and re-routing the hundreds of buses that serve them. In theory this would also help with student alertness...." MIT also reported that "Approximately 50 superfluous routes could be eliminated using the new method, saving the school district between $3 million and $5 million annually."
The Globe reports: They took to the new project with gusto, working 14- and 15-hour days to meet a tight deadline -- and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to feed new information to a sprawling MIT data center. The machine they constructed was a marvel. Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes -- the algorithm landed on a plan that would trim the district's $100 million-plus transportation budget while shifting the overwhelming majority of high school students into later start times.... But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh's tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent's resignation...
Big districts stagger their start times so a single fleet of buses can serve every school: dropping off high school students early in the morning, then circling back to get the elementary and middle school kids. If you're going to push high school start times back, then you've probably got to move a lot of elementary and middle schools into earlier time slots. The district knew that going in, and officials dutifully quizzed thousands of parents and teachers at every grade level about their preferred start times. But they never directly confronted constituents with the sort of dramatic change the algorithm would eventually propose -- shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
But will the whole drama play out again? "Last year, even after everything went sideways in Boston, some 80 school districts from around the country reached out to the whiz kids from MIT, eager for the algorithm to solve their problems."
The Globe reports: They took to the new project with gusto, working 14- and 15-hour days to meet a tight deadline -- and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to feed new information to a sprawling MIT data center. The machine they constructed was a marvel. Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes -- the algorithm landed on a plan that would trim the district's $100 million-plus transportation budget while shifting the overwhelming majority of high school students into later start times.... But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh's tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent's resignation...
Big districts stagger their start times so a single fleet of buses can serve every school: dropping off high school students early in the morning, then circling back to get the elementary and middle school kids. If you're going to push high school start times back, then you've probably got to move a lot of elementary and middle schools into earlier time slots. The district knew that going in, and officials dutifully quizzed thousands of parents and teachers at every grade level about their preferred start times. But they never directly confronted constituents with the sort of dramatic change the algorithm would eventually propose -- shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
But will the whole drama play out again? "Last year, even after everything went sideways in Boston, some 80 school districts from around the country reached out to the whiz kids from MIT, eager for the algorithm to solve their problems."
Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
What about providing optimal bus routes without changing start times? Or what about factoring in a cost for changing start times to only do so when the new start time makes a huge difference in the bussing cost? They just need to take into account the political cost of moving start times as another set of parameters.
Re:Optimal Busses (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - parametrize the costs of change. It's actually a pretty big blind spot that they missed this, but it's understandable. They tried to fix their issues in one giant step, which naturally flopped.
Instead, tune that algorithm to make very small, yearly changes that move things in the desired direction. Essentially, they need to factor in the human / political element of this, which states that people resist change of all sorts. So the challenge then is to find a path which minimizes the pain of this transition for the most people. So it's a ten year plan instead of getting fixed in one shot.
Re:Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
Changing things a little each year for ten years won't fix problems like school times that sharply conflict with work schedules. It will, however, make a bunch of people raise a stink for each of those ten years, and increase the total cost of the transition because you're changing things every year.
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I Would Absolutely Would Be Rich... (Score:5, Insightful)
...if I had a mere dollar for every project that failed because they failed to identify the primary customer and understand their needs.
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The algorithm was designed to understand the needs of who the designers thought were the primary customers, the students, and for the desire of the school district to save money on transportation. The desirability of adopting later start times for high schools is well documented; teenagers are natural night people. There don't seem to be any particular disadvantages to earlier start times for elementary schools in terms of student outcomes. So if those are the things you are trying to accomplish, starting h
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Re: Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
Because in the vast majority of places in the U.S., i.e. everyplace that that is not New York, Chicago or Boston there is no public transportation ssytem.
In the places that do have public transportation what parent wants their kid riding public transportation? Except in the few cities mentioned above public transportation consists of buses basically going down major routes, the places no one actually lives. People even in towns and cities live in cul-de sac communities specifically designed not to be driven through. Trying to get buses in there is a nightmare, one reason school bus routes often require a hour to take a kid somewhere that would take their parents ten minutes to drive.
For people who don't know cul-de-sacs are mazes design specifically to prevent through traffic. It's home builders/developers answer to buyer's complaints about not wanting to live on a street that has lots of traffic. Typically a neighborhood has one entrance with short streets going off a common road, each having its own short streets, ending in a circle around which houses are built. They are built to only be easily traveled by car. It is common to only be half a mile geographically from a major road, but be miles away by road.
Re: Optimal Busses (Score:2, Informative)
A few sidewalks and footpaths connecting isolated parts of the mazes could make wonders.
Re: Optimal Busses (Score:5, Informative)
Parents who don't want to raise lazy, fat, spoilt kids?
That's why you put the bus stops on the main roads. It's not rocket science.
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There is no means to guarantee safety ever.
Growing up, I had to walk the 1.5 miles to school, even for kindergarten. I would usually walk up a couple blocks, meet up with another kid in my class and we would walk the way together. Sometimes, alone. Age 5.
From age 10 (4th grade), school board issued everyone a bus pass if you lived within 2miles of a bus stop. Morning busses were filled with kids ranging from age 8 - 16; in addition to the normal business commuter crowd.
I am not american, but such is no
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Stupid as. Private for profit, their only purpose to serve the wallets of the investors, if they could rent the children out as slaves they would, their last priority is teaching children, their first priority profits, honestly how well do you think that will really work, it routinely fails to provide good services every where else, if fact ' cheap shit service, lawyers and lobbyists and maximum profit' are their motto (that's cheap to provide, charge maximum amount of course, else where the profits).
Basic
Re:Real problem is to elegantly remove all the bus (Score:5, Informative)
There is a fallacy of averages in play here.
We try to provide an education for all students, and there are federal laws protecting that right to an education. But some students cost more to educate than others. Special needs students are very expensive to educate. Most charter and voucher schools find ways to get out of taking their fair share of special needs students, and few parents will have the resources to home school them.
But voucher systems typically pay the district-wide average of student cost, rather than the average cost of educating a non-special-needs student. As a result, they overpay for what the schools are delivering. Students who are less costly to educate leave the public school system, leaving that system with a higher percentage of those expensive students while simultaneously damaging its economies of scale. The result is a downward spiral of public education.
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Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - parametrize the costs of change. It's actually a pretty big blind spot that they missed this, but it's understandable. They tried to fix their issues in one giant step, which naturally flopped.
Instead, tune that algorithm to make very small, yearly changes that move things in the desired direction. Essentially, they need to factor in the human / political element of this, which states that people resist change of all sorts. So the challenge then is to find a path which minimizes the pain of this transition for the most people. So it's a ten year plan instead of getting fixed in one shot.
The basically used an incomplete objective function. I'm not sure the small yearly changes would help since instead of one big headache you're creating a moderate headache each year. Plus, your problem between the current state and the optimal state probably isn't convex, ie there may not be a series of incremental steps that don't incur some major costs along the way.
I think the better strategy is to look for situations when the routes and/or schedules need to change anyway and take the best smallest modif
Re:Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it flopped because they, like you, didn't consider the full effects of the change.
You see, if school starts 2 hours early, it means it lets out 2 hours early. No big deal if the high school student gets home at 2:30 or so when mom and/or dad don't get home until 6:30, but it's a really big deal if the kid is 5 or 6 years old. That's not minor adjustment level changes either.
So that's the real reason it failed, they failed to codify all of the constraints when they optimized the problem. They now need to either stay where they are, try again with the constraints corrected, or come up with a practical way to loosen the actual constraints that costs less than the current non-optimal scheduling.
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Re:Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Optimal Busses (Score:4, Interesting)
Rule of thumb: People will complain about changes.
Later start times are correlated with better student performance. It also saves many parents money because they don't need daycare for after school, since the school day will end later. It also saves money on buses. For high school students, later start times are correlated with lower pregnancy and arrest rates, since they have less time after school to get in trouble before their parents come home.
But the people that don't like the change complain, and the (more numerous) people that benefit mostly stay silent.
Re:Optimal Busses (Score:5, Insightful)
But this plan was burning parent's money. It would make the older kids who would be fine at home alone for a few hours get home later and the young kids who shouldn't be alone that long get home earlier.
So take a single parent that's just managing and impose that on them and now they're fiscally sunk. I'm betting you'd complain about that too if you were in their position.
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The problem is that they'd need daycare for before school instead of after. If the bus here had changed from just before 8 till after 9, it would have screwed a lot of people. It seems easier to arrange for the kid to spend an hour or 2 at the neighbours after school then in the early morning. Perhaps if more workplaces were flexible or there wasn't such a need for dual incomes, things would work better.
Re: Optimal Busses (Score:3)
By 10 I walked alone to school and it was a bit further than 2 miles. Streets have only gotten safer since, at 14 he should be able to get his own breakfast and get ready for school; at that point you're just there to monitor his adolescent impulses; I had a job then which I sometimes (illegally) worked till 2am to get extra cash, then walked or biked home.
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My 14 year old has been getting themselves up in the morning and ready for school and to the bus stop entirely on their own for years now.
I'm assuming it's illegal in modern day america but a 10 year can easily get themselves to the bus stop (or walk to school) and back again without parental supervision or interaction.
I've had to leave at 4am and the kid has got himself to school fine, and I've only arrived home at 1am and the kid has managed to do their homework, have dinner, and go to bed just fine. I ne
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Part of the problem is that they wanted to reduce the number of buses needed for everyone. If everyone's school day starts about the same then all the buses have to pick up all the kids at about the same time too.
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Re:what about we just build more homes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Home schooling works superbly in the best case.
In the worst case, it's a disaster. Parents don't care, kid watches TV for a year, learns nothing and loses much of what was previously learned. You'd be surprised to find out just what portion of parents are that bad, probably close to one quarter.
Bad Headline (Score:2)
Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate argument against the plan. The plan wasn't nixed because people were angry to it, the people were angry because it's a bad plan.
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You may have forgotten that this would also have the elementary school kids getting home 2 hours earlier when both parents are still at work. Many bosses wouldn't be that understanding about needing to leave 2 hours early every day.
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You might not be a parent.
If elementary school starts 2 hours earlier, that means it also *ends* 2 hours earlier. Now, where does that elementary school child go for the 2 extra hours (while parents are, presumably, at work)? That's right - now you need pay a nanny.
There is nothing "elegant" about an algorithm that optimizes one variable. You can optimize any one variable to the detriment of others (what if *all* kids go to one giant school, for example :) ) It is not a fault of the algorithm though - it's
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The two hours earlier was for high school students, TFA doesn't mention what times elementary students would've started/ended at (and I can't be bothered to find out).
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Just wondering, do elementary schools not offer after school programs anymore? I went to after school every day when I was in elementary for 2hours until my parents could get me
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What exactly is bad about starting school at 7:15AM?
For most people, that means drop the kids off at school, then head to work.
It's only a problem if you've organized your life around the 9:30 start time. The change would be difficult for some. (I suspect that for many it would be less difficult than they make it out to be. People often complain loudly about change, then when that doesn't work they make some simple adjustments to adapt to the change.)
In Europe, many countries are considering moving the start of the school day from 8-9 am to 10, because it is simply neither healthy nor productive to wake people up so early, child or not.
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Waking the kid at 7:00 and dropping it half dead in school at 7:15 is probably no problem, if the parents manage to get out of bed early enough and the school is close buy. Probably best is, to put it completely dressed into bed, that saves time.
But: what is a half dead kid supposed to do in school so early? Sleep another 2 hours before the classes start? I don't know a school that has enough sleeping room for early coming kids.
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They experimented here one year with starting the high school students early, like 6:30 instead 7:50 to catch the bus (I'm at the end of the route and there's a few dozen houses further down the roads). It was sure hard on the teenage kids and their school work. They canceled it the next year.
As it is, the bus serves 3 or 4 schools, which are staggered by about half an hour and it seems to work well.
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That's because while they might be hot shot programmers, they are crappy analysts.
I suspect that any grad student from a, "lessor" school, but had been trained in analyzing requirements correctly, this would not have happened. That's because they would have asked the most obvious question, who are the customers and what are their needs.
Failing to account for the work schedules of parents (the real customer ) is a 100,000 watt light sign proclaiming Inadequate Analysis.
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PS: That lack of proper analysis on the part of MIT can easily be explained - they weren't parents and probably never gave a thought or helped out with the details of getting siblings off to school, perhaps even being influenced by their memories of hating being bussed.
Sorting through 10^120 options (Score:2)
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Given there have only been around 4.3 x 10^17 seconds since the big bang, it seems unlikely that they actually sorted through 10^120 options.
They could do it with aggressive pruning of the search tree.
The Installed Base Wins Again (Score:3)
Another case where the installed base wins over new things because it is too disruptive to change it.
The school scheduling equivalent of COBOL.
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Easy. You're a Mom who HAS TO GET TO WORK by 8am or you're fired! To do this you need to drop off your kid by 7:15am. That is the problem.
I see comments here whining about change, but it is simple economics. You don't show up to work at 8am you won't have a job for long. If people can't work you bet your ass they would freak out as they are just shifting the costs from the school district to the parents aka tax payers who now can't work.
High school kids are independent enough to get to school and prep them
That's pretty barbaric (Score:2)
I mean, what nation decides to place a higher value on an arbitrary start time for work than it does at making certain its children are able to attend school?
Oh. Wait. That would be our nation.
It's downright silly to put such demands on people. To tell them simultaneously that they must ensure proper care and education of their children and that they have to be employed while being without recourse or protection of the law should the first priority come in conflict with the second. Only psychopaths demand t
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That's great. My boss would fire you. Infact, I was denied being hired full time because I was 8 minutes late one day, 22 one other day due to an accident, and 9 the rest. I learned my lesson.
The boss who signs your checks tells you what to do an when to come in. Do not like that then die as you starve. That is just reality. I studied International Marketing in College. The US, Sweden, and Germany have more clocks than anywhere and tardiness is never acceptable PERIOD in our cultures. You can rebel all you
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Interesting that people who get most of their work done before 9:00 are stupid to believe going to bed early would shift everyones performance as well.
I don't sleep before 1:00 ... and usually not before 3:00.
I don't know why. But it is pretty pointless to go to bed at 23:00 and can not sleep till 2:00 or 3:00 ... why can I not do something that I enjoy during that time, and you simply leave me alone with your "wisdom"?
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I don't know why. But it is pretty pointless to go to bed at 23:00 and can not sleep till 2:00 or 3:00 ... why can I not do something that I enjoy during that time, and you simply leave me alone with your "wisdom"?
I am leaving you alone. I'm just saying, if you need to be somewhere at 8 AM you really need to learn to plan ahead. Otherwise show up bleary eyed and useless to both of us.
That said, when I was in charge of calling meetings I declared that 10-3 were the golden hours. You can show up at noon for all I care, and I'll work with you. But if I need to call a 10 AM meeting I expect you to be there.
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Teens are naturally night people. It's more or less hard wired for the majority of them. Younger kids naturally wake up early and fall asleep early (in spite of attempts to resist in many cases).
After the early 20s, many people shift to a mid point between the extremes.
Unfortunately, like many things we've squeezed all the slack out of the system and so we demand that people adapt to serve the social structure rather than the social structure adapting to serve the people.
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That's great you don't. I do. I work better at 9 hours as I feel tired if I sleep less due to my genetics and age. I am also on my feet for 6 to 7 hours a day so I am more tired too. 6:30 would mean I would need to go to bed at 8:30 at night to get up by 4am to be out of the door by 5am to get to work by 6:30am.
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> You need to be at school at 8? That means you get up at 7 One hour from bed to classroom? That would be quite an impressive trick even for a college student who lives on campus, let alone a kid in elementary/middle/high school whose travel includes vehicular travel of any kind.
I got up at 5:45, was on the road by 6, and at work by 6:30. Did that for 30+ years, with the wake up/road time getting dialed back as traffic got worse.
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Re: Fucking barbarians. (Score:3)
Every aspect of your comment sounds completely insane to me. An hour from bed to school is not hard where I live. My 9 year old son often gets out of bed at 7:45 and is at school at 8:30. We live right next to school, but even with 15 minutes walking or biking, it's quite doable. No primary school in a city should be further away than that (though in very rural areas they might be).
The idea that a school would punish a child for coming on foot or bike is too idiotic toi believe, were we not talking about th
Re: Fucking barbarians. (Score:5, Interesting)
They just learned what every programmer knows (Score:5, Funny)
Programming would be so much easier without the damn user!
You can rigidly optimise for anything. (Score:2)
The big question being: Are you really willing to stomach the results? So optimsing school bus usage for highest effciency brings morning schedule out of wack by 2 hours and more for on the far ends of the queue? Gee wizz, what a surprise. Who would've thunk?
In other words: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
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Highest efficiency brings the least resilience.
The first bus to stall at a traffic light is going to bring the school system to a halt.
Complaining that school starts too... late? (Score:5, Informative)
Too-early start times, especially for high schools, are a well known reason for poor academic performance:
http://time.com/4741147/school... [time.com]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s... [cbsnews.com]
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Early start times are a problem for highschoolers. This plan started high school later - but started elementary school earlier. That's a better fit to young kids' sleep schedules but would've wreaked havoc on their parents' schedules.
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Young kids also need sleep till minimum 7:30 ... sending them to school before 9:00 is simply torture.
Typical case of mathematicians (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
No, it wasn't 'political'. The algorithm successfully computed an optimal schedule for the students with regards to bus transport, but did not include any data at all about the optimal schedule for the parents.
If they wanted to find the optimums, they should have included the whole system and not just the least impactful part. The parents schedules are the most important ones since they are responsible for making it all happen; from breakfast to dinner to bedtime.
I see this all the time. Brilliant programmers and mathematicians that think they can just throw the data into an algorithm and get an answer without understanding the data itself or how to interpret it medically/biologically.
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TFA said that the algorithm suggested multiple solutions based on different parameters
optimizing cost (but that annoyed the most parents and gave fewer high school students late starts)
pleasing the most parents and giving all high school students late starts (but this cost way more)
balancing those factors
The compromise was chosen and apparently pleased nobody. I'm reminded of the engineering slogan "fast, cheap, good - pick 2". It doesn't sound like a problem with the algorithm technology, rather how it was
Even when MIT horrendously fails ... (Score:3)
MIT's algorithm wasn't elegant. It was a complete failure. Still, it is being spun as some sort of success. They're blaming the field of algorithms. The brilliant and elegant men of MIT could not fail.
All this university branding ...
School start times are often too early (Score:2)
School starting at 7:15 is ludicrous. Especially for older children for whom getting up early is counter-indicated by biology. (There are studies but I can't be bothered looking up references for a /. comment.) And wouldn't that mean school is then getting out for the day at 1:30 or so? Or do school days run longer in the US than I'm familiar with from when I went to school. Where and when I went to school, it ran from roughly 8:45 or 9:00 to about 3:15 or so, which meant I could get up at 7:00, do the nece
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I used to get on the bus at 7:02am (home at 2:45pm), every school day for four years. 8:02am prior to that for middle and elementary school. If you stick to a routine your body adapts and biology doesn't suffer. As for parents and work time conflicts, this was back when one parent could be a homemaker while the other, yes usually the father, could support an entire family with one full time lower middle class blue collar job. There was even enough for college and retirement because they didn't live beyond t
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There are pedophiles out today and it is dangerous in urban areas with traffic. The reason they start that early is not just because Mommy has to be at work by 8 but because you would increase bus drivers by 300%. Think about it?
You can have the same bus driver drive preschool, elementary, middle, and high school. If they all started the same time you would then need to hire 4 times the amount of bus drivers for each shift.
Re:School start times are often too early (Score:5, Insightful)
Traffic is no more dangerous than 30-40 years ago, in fact, it's safer. I don't think a larger % of the population has a proclivity to kidnap and abuse children than before, either.
You sound like part of the problem. In normal places like NYC or parts of Europe, kids walk, bike, or take public transit to school, and parents aren't quaking in their boots in fear.
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My first thought. (Score:4, Insightful)
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No they do not. It's a choice to live in a certain manner. You pare back the wants from the "needs". I was a single parent and went that world just fine. I dealt with stupid rules by basically saying in a courtly manner "I'm a single parent you imbecile, I can't."
Having single parents, by the way, was something this algorithm obviously did not take into account.
Re:My first thought. (Score:5, Insightful)
I call BS.
The duel income family is not a result of two parents having to work to meet needs. Its the result of two parents having to work to meet wants.
Why the hell do 2 adults and a kid need 2500 sqft of house? Is it really necessary for each kid in a family of four to have their own room? Why the hell does every member of the family need a $1000 iphone?
The difference in family incomes from 30 years ago isn't that families have half the buying power. Its that they spend twice as much. Most of the increase is for stuff they wouldn't have had 30 years ago.
Let me run down some examples. 30 years ago no one needed an ISP. Most people pay >$150 a month for internet access. No one 30 years ago had a cell phone. Unless you're on Cricket you're paying ~$80-100 a person for a smart phone date plan. You can throw in the difference in price for an 1800 sqft to a 2500 sqft house. Two new cars, vice one new car and a beater. Laptops, tablets, heck desktops, if anyone still has them, none of which a household had 30 years ago.
Now don't get me wrong. Lots of that stuff is nice to have. Some of it, like Internet access and connected devices are even pretty close to necessary today. But it is stuff in excess of what the single income household use to have 30 years ago.
facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift?? How retarded .. (Score:2)
shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift.
Elementary school kids should start at 7:15???
When are they supposed to leave the house? 6:45?
When are they supposed to get out of bed? 5:45?
When are the parents supposed to get out of bed?
Hello!!! That is torture!!
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Redicilous? Where do you live? In the US, Germany, and Nordic countries tardiness is never ever acceptable PERIOD. Sure you can be a few minutes late every now and then but if it is a common occurence then prepared to be disciplined.
I have to get up at 4:45am to get to work at 8am due to traffic and other variables where I live. I was late 3 times when they demanded I come in earlier last month and I was angry too. Then I thought about it and realized if I didn't be there on time they would fire me and repl
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Arriving to work on time sure, thats a fine value
Why is going to bed early and getting up early a value? Its all arbitrary. At least all of the shops I know of and have worked at dont really give a crap what time you show up (at least before noon so you can be there to discuss things with others or to make it to a meeting when scheduled). As long as you aren't inconveniencing someone else by not being there what does it matter, do your 8hrs of work and as long as you get it done adequately who cares
Of cours
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Get a city map. Study the layout as concerns where people live and where they work. Get back to me when you realize five miles isn't that far from work for most people. Hell, I now live in a tiny town and know people who live on one side and work on the other. Over five miles.
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What has getting up early for work as a guy over 30 to do with getting up early for school for a 6 or 7 year old?
Easy answer: nothing.
There's the problem... (Score:2)
"Computers can solve your problem.
Computers do not solve problems. Computers run programs written by humans. Those humans try to solve the problem via computers. When (if?) humans take responsibility for the problems they tell the computers to create, then and only then will we be able to better resolve the problems that face us.
So, the problem wasn't the optimization... (Score:3)
....it was the choice of cost function. They could have chosen the cost function so that no school had their time moved up more than, for example, 30 minutes. The end result might not have saved as much in bus costs, but by removing the objectionable results, they might have successfully implemented the optimized schedule. If they had asked parents about acceptable start times in the surveys, surely they should have exposed the problem up front.
Graduate students (Score:2)
If you've ever worked with a fresh college grad, you know that they are very, very junior. College does not teach students how to be software engineers, it only teaches them how to write code, and maybe a bit of logic theory. To be worth much in business, it takes a few years of experience.
Missing the actual reaction of humans who use a system (in this case, parents dealing with bus schedules) is very typical for a young person just out of school, or in this case, still in school.
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Get "back" to 9 to 5? Study history. Before Henry Ford, people commonly worked six day weeks, 10-12 hour days. We have it pretty darn good these days.
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So you missed the whole part about shifting the start from 9:30AM to 7:15AM? This is what happens when you view everything through radical agenda.
And the client exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt (Score:4, Insightful)
Second world country problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
In first world countries, it is assumed that people work for a living and that the average work day spans from around 7am to 5pm with a little time for drifting. As such, in first world countries we have government subsidized day care that operates from 7am to 5pm. This means that everyone should be able to make their work window happen during those hours.
For children who are too young to be home alone before and after school, the schools are open early and there are people watching the playgrounds. Then there are programs sponsored by the government to provide after school activities (similar to day care) for kids up to around 6th grade until 5pm.
In these environments, we don't have school buses... we simply have public transportation. The parents drop off and pick up using public buses... even if you live on a farm 500km from civilization... there should be a regularly serviced bus stop nearby.
Parents often make groups to walk kids to and from school each day... and the single parent with a long way to go to get to and from work generally don't have problems because no one would consider making one of their child's friends mother have to quit their job.
Then there's the issue of making sure that mom or dad don't have that problem. Whether you're a 1%er or you're the bottom 1%, the government pays your child welfare to make sure their have what they need. This pops an extra $300-$500 a month into your bank account. So you can afford to have a slightly more flexible job or even to be a student long enough to make things easier later on.
We pay for this as tax payers in the first world and don't think anything of it. It doesn't matter whether we choose to have children of our own or not. What matters is that the people we work with need to be healthy. The people who work for us need to be healthy. The people who pick up the trash on the road need to be healthy. The people who we pass on the street need to be healthy. Otherwise, you get second world problems like school shootings because people aren't healthy. Or equally disgusting... people live in neighborhoods with security gates and guards because they're terrified of their own lives.
The first world is willing to live with a little less to get a lot more. We have governments with parties who we don't trust, but are smart enough to make sure there are enough parties that they can't make any choices without actually debating those laws openly. So while we don't trust the people in the government... we trust their enmity towards one another to keep them from hurting us. We also trust the government to make sure our tax payer money is spent in a way that will get them reelected because we can see, touch and feel how much better our lives are than the second world Americans on TV.
Bring back consultants (Score:3)
A long long time ago, known as the '80s, we still had people called "general business consultants". These people were hired by businesses, for lots of money, purely to look around and make decisions. They didn't justify those decisions (with any sort of data) at all. They simply said thing like "I believe this is the best course of action.". You believed them because they had a good track record and experience in the field, or you didn't.
Nowadays, general business consultants have been replaced by data engineers -- people who like to collect huge amounts of data points, and have dumb-ass machines make decisions based on those data points. Alas, like every study that's ever been done with data points, it all comes down to whether or not you have enough of the right data points, and not too many of the wrong data points. And that's a skill that absolutely none of these data engineers has ever had.
I can make the cost of transportation absolutely $0. It's really easy. I'll just cancel all of the buses. Oh, wait, you actually want buses? I hadn't thought about that. Okay, I'll take your children at midnight. Oh? You don't like that either? Here's a thought, I'll get more buses, not stagger anything, and you'll be happy. Oh wait, we don't have that much money?
Look at that. Balancing costs and services can't make everyone happy. Maybe happiness costs money, or customers. Shock of a lifetime.
Maybe one day, data engineers will be able to put in the very important data point that says we're never trying to solve a problem. Solving any problem is ridiculously easy. We're always trying to solve a problem within another problem -- within a context. Like, in this case, within a parent's business day. That's hard, if not impossible, every time.
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Start time changed from 9:30 to 7:15 rather than an overnight work shift. If changed had been used instead of shifted, it would've been clearer.
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The two hour change in the morning comes with a two hour change in the evening. Meaning that young school children would start getting home well before their parents.
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College students WERE kids more recently than the "grownups" who are under a misguided delusion that suffering (getting up at 6 am for a high school student) somehow builds character.
Bravado and posturing is all very nice, but in other countries all schools manage to start all at the same time at 9.00pm and things work out fine.
In the USA, whinging about busses costing money and requiring absurd pre-sunrise wake up times to compensate is a product of inadequate taxing and incompetent government.
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Well, and this just goes to show that the Netherlands has never had to deal with "forced bussing".
Once upon a time, it was determined that black kids got worse educations at their local schools than white kids at their local schools. The obvious solu
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Actually, Massachusetts almost totally got rid of "forced busing" rules around 2013. Many towns and cities the size of Cambridge (~100k population) in the US have their own districts and route kids to local elementary schools within a mile or two of their homes.
Even bigger US cities do this -- in NYC, kids typically go to local elementary schools, semi-local middle schools, and then take public transportation to high schools.
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I can certainly understand the desire for more mixed schools; some schools in Amsterdam could certainly use being a bit more mixed.
But still, that doesn't mean everybody has to be bussed, just half of the kids living in a neighbourhood that is itself completely homogenous as well as too far away from a different neighbourhood.
Of course the real solution to that problem would be to encourage more mixed neighbourhoods. Add bigger, more expensive houses in poor neighbourhoods and more affordable housing in wea