A rose to Heritage Academy for partnering with JDS Wealth Strategies to provide a monthly financial literacy program for its 5th and 6th graders. Once a week, the free after-school program will teach students basics about how the U.S. and global economies work, investing and reading a financial statement and making investment decisions based on that information. Fifth and sixth grade may sound too early for learning about stocks and bonds, but it’s not. Einstein is quoted as saying, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.” The concept holds true for investment returns too. The fact is that Social Security and employer-based retirement accounts are just not enough for most people to retire on. Understanding economic basics and – for young people – the advantage of time and patience in investing are skills that can help people achieve their goals. Those concepts can be applied not just to the stock market but also to entrepreneurship, personal finance and investing in other assets such as real estate. We encourage all schools to provide financial literacy programs. These are real-world skills all of our children need to develop.
A rose also to the Lowndes County School District for providing students in its career and technical programs with heavy-equipment simulators that the district’s 115 students in auto, construction, welding and industrial maintenance can use to get a jump-start on training for heavy-equipment operators. The demand for heavy equipment operators makes it a well-paying and secure job with average salaries ranging from $58,000 to $95,000 annually, based on benefits, union membership and location. The district purchased the two simulators using a $75,731 grant from the EquipMS Grant program, which the state legislature established last year with the goal of bolstering high school career technical programs. Breaking into the heavy equipment operator career path is difficult since few people have access to the equipment for training. Simulators help students familiarize themselves with the equipment, providing students with a basic sense of how this machinery works. That’s a pretty good head start for those interested in this field. We applaud LCSD for pursuing these valuable learning tools.
A rose to Starkville-based software company Camgian Corporation, which has been awarded a $55-million contract to develop advanced artificial intelligence based technology design to make battlefield decisions faster. Camgian’s work will be used by the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense systems.
Camgian builds software systems that use artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms to drive faster, higher quality decisions. Camgian will do the same work for the Army, but with a focus on improving kill chain automation. The kill chain is the process of observing, understanding, deciding and acting in a battlefield environment. With the speed of today’s warfare, there’s little time to spend making that decision. The pressure to make split-second decisions can be overwhelming for soldiers when there is a lag in information, so Camgian’s work will be important not only to the mission, but to the soldiers as well. We congratulate Camgian on landing this important contract and for the work it will perform in making sure our nation’s military remains on the cutting edge of warfare technology.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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