View 386 October 31 - November 6, 2005 (original) (raw)

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Wednesday,

Has anyone actual experience with a thing called PLAXO? Has anyone ever made it work? I have wasted a lot more time than I have on this miserable thing. It invites me to change my password, but when I do it doesn't recognize it. It's a very silly program and I am trying to figure out why anyone would use it.

I got into this when invited to do so by people I do know and have some faith in, but now I think it is a way to smuggle spyware into your computer. It sure doesn't actually do anything useful that I can discern.

Lake Woebegon, Part II

I have a commentary on my remarks on the California Standards Based Education requirements from a Northern California school board member who insists, rightly, that the standards as actually adopted were to be considered absolute, not relative, and thus it is at least mathematically possible to achieve them.

I'm sorry, but you're incorrect in your interpretation of the California pupil proficiency system. The mistake you're making is that those rankings aren't relative; they're absolute. What they describe is how well a given student understands the State's standard for the tested subject and grade level.

Saying that all students must be proficient or advanced on this scale merely means that every student must be at least proficient in material defined by the standard. It's (theoretically) possible for the entire student population to be proficient or advanced, in that sense.

The real issue is that it's unlikely 100% of the student population will rank proficient or above by the measurement date (2013, I believe). But that's not due to a mathematical impossibility; it's due to the extreme likelihood that at least some student (e.g., a special education student) won't achieve the proficient threshold.

Alas, while that is almost certainly true of the intent of those standards, the reality is that in transmitting them from Sacramento to local school districts in Los Angeles they were mistranslated, and came across exactly as I said: C is average and passing, and everyone must now be above that. The administrators were unhappy with this requirement, but so far it has not trickled down to the level of principal.

In one sense it doesn't matter anyway. It is impossible that everyone in the school system do "B" work; this is particularly true when you note that up to now nearly half have not been doing what we would have called "C" work when I was young. On the other hand, when school principals understand that they are accountable to people who do not understand that half the children are below average, and bristle when told this (Which half? The African-Americans or the Hispanics?), the principals tend to despair. The task they have been set is impossible in either case, but when you must convince lummoxes the task becomes harder.

The problem is a simple one: half the children are below average, and among that number as well as among quite a few of the average and above average there will be children who have no proclivity for, and no ability to profit from, a traditional college preparatory education. They are quite capable of learning skills, including a number of abstract manipulation skills, and of learning at least some literary and artistic appreciation. I am not certain that Scott's Lady of the Lake and Longfellow's Evangeline a Story of Acadia are the very best 7th and 8th grade reading assignments for cultivating a taste for good literature, although they did have that effect on me, and while there was the usual grousing I didn't notice that many of my local farm kid classmates at Capleville Consolidated were harmed for life. Indeed many of the girls, at least, enjoyed the Longfellow, and once we got to Rhoderick Dhu and James accepting the hospitality of a stranger, and the scene in the passes, there was considerable interest in Sir Walter Scott's epic poem. (Aside: I tried to find an on-line copy of this clearly public domain poem, but Project Gutenberg returns page errors when one tries to download it, and I didn't find another. I am sure there are plenty.)

[Jerry,

Here is a link to a PDF version of the full text of Lady of the Lake

http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/w-scott/lady-lake.pdf
<http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/w-scott/lady-lake.pdf>

Mike Plaster]

Back to my main point: while all classes might profit from Longfellow and Scott in 7 and 8 grade (although I am quite certain that California, unlike Tennessee in 1944, doesn't actually require such difficult works) no one but a blockhead would suppose that all children of all classes can profit from education in the traditional sense. Some learn by intuition and understanding, and some learn by rote; by drills. Grouping the two together in one class is sheer torture for both: frustration for those who must learn by rote as they see others "get it" by intuition, and a hell of boredom for those who must drill on matters they already know. Back when it was important to learn some things by rote -- the multiplication and addition tables (up to 12's!), some key dates and historical events, even "the principal products of Ecuador" -- keeping the groups together wasn't so bad for either; but when you get to more abstract subjects, classroom order breaks down, and teachers spend more and more time trying to bring up the bottom of the class to "C" level, hoping that the natural A students will work hard on their own from sheer joy of learning -- usually but not always a futile wish. And some of the natural A students will learn things on their own that you didn't really want them to learn. I still tell the story of how I made nitroglycerine in my youth.

The California "Standards Based" education like most education reforms means well; but since all teachers have tenure after two years, and there are no incompetent teachers in California -- at least not provably so, on the record, since almost none are ever fired -- what Sacramento thunders probably won't matter. They can't really withhold funds from the State when the schools don't meet the standards. They'll try, but it won't work.

And meanwhile the middle classes desert the school system in droves so that the public schools, far from being a place where all classes mix, become more and more the residue basin for those whose parents can't or won't put them in a good school.

And we continue to outsource jobs to India. The latest are the various tech support positions in DSL Extreme and other such companies.

We might be able to compete if we had decent public schools, but that just isn't going to happen for a long time. If ever.

The Remedy

There isn't an actual remedy, but there is an approach: Abolish the Federal Department of Education, so that all this reverts to the states. If I were allowed to go further I would abolish most of the state structure. Break school districts into as small units as possible, set a locally elected school board over each, return to local financing for the brunt of the school costs with state finance only for special education and as subsidies to provide some balance in funding (but don't insist on equal funding across districts). Give local boards absolute power over teacher qualifications: they can insist on "credentials" or not, as they choose. It's their kids, after all. The results would be uneven, spotty, with awful districts here and there: but there would be some good ones too, and competition among them might drive the worst to see how the best do it.

We know this can work because we have done this in the past, with better results than we have now.

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The wars begin:

Google www.live.com

Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.live.com

==================

Contrast that with MSN search www.live.com

Results

... void *clientData, unsigned numBytesRead, unsigned numTruncatedBytes, struct timeval presentationTime, unsigned durationInMicroseconds) Private Attributes unsigned fHeadIndex unsigned fNextFreeIndex ...

... Include dependency graph for RTSPServer.cpp: Go to the source code of this file. Defines #define USE_SIGNALS 1 #define _strncasecmp strncasecmp #define RTPINFO_INCLUDE_RTPTIME 1 #define LISTEN_BACKLOG ...

... will also delete fSavedPacket, because it's on the list 00432 } 00433 delete fPacketFactory ; 00434 } Member Function Documentation void ReorderingPacketBuffer::freePacket ( BufferedPacket * packet ) ...

... Go to the documentation of this file. 00001 /********** 00002 This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under 00003 the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as ...

... Go to the documentation of this file. 00001 /********** 00002 This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under 00003 the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as ...

... We were asked to return the first SCR that we saw, and we've seen one, 00238 // so we're done. (Handle this as if the input source had closed.) 00239 onSourceClosure ( this ); 00240 return ...

... indicates that we can be read again 00111 // Note that this needs to be done here, in case the "fAfterFunc" 00112 // called below tries to read another frame (which it usually will) 00113 ...

... struct in_addr const &addr, Port const &port, u_int8_t ttl, destRecord *next) virtual ~destRecord () Data Fields destRecord * fNext GroupEId fGroupEId Port fPort Constructor & Destructor Documentation destRecord ...

... The documentation for this class was generated from the following file: liveMedia/ RTSPClient.cpp Generated on Fri Sep 23 02:16:24 2005 for live by 1.3.6

... kbpsIndex = (byte4&0x3E) >> 1; 00203 if (kbpsIndex > 18) kbpsIndex = 18; 00204 kbps = kbpsTable [kbpsIndex]; 00205 00206 unsigned char samplingFreqIndex = (byte4&0xC0) >> 6; 00207 switch ...

[Apparently this anomaly is the result of Google treating . differently from the way MSN search treats it.See Mail for details. Amazing how much I don't know sometimes.]
==================

And if that's not enough to worry about:

Grandfather sued for 12-year-old's downloads.

http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20051102.gtmovienov2/BNStory/Technology/

--- Roland Dobbins

the egregious MPAA strikes again. I am no advocate of domestic terrorism, but I could understand how despicable actions like this could persuade some people that the entire regime is so corrupt that it ought to be brought down in blood. The actions of those who subvert the law to their own profit are rarely so visible and so contemptuously flaunted as this. There cannot be one ethical person in the chain of commands from the top of the MPAA to the paralegals who assist in this activity: they are not only wrong, but they must know they are wrong.

Ah well, we will not have people's courts in this land. If we did, comes the revolution, comrades, I know where their headquarters is.

And see below

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