Friday, November 9, 2007
I heard this in a radio advertisement on my way to work today. The ad was placed by the California Teacher's Association (CTA), and included this statement:
This law forces us to teach to the test.
As if that were a bad thing! The premise of the ad is that the tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act – the ones that actually measure the scholastic achievement of our school kids – force the teachers to spend time teaching that stuff instead of whatever it is that they would do otherwise (say, inculcation in Muslim culture or leftist ideology).
I kid you not – that's exactly what the ad says.
Talk about missing the point!
I believe our public schools have reached the point where the rot is unrecoverable. The only hope for reform is to close them, and let the private sector take over; let parents choose where to spend their education dollars.
Not that that's likely to happen. But I can dream, can't I?
Here's a fascinating story (if you're a geeky type) about a radical new design for warehouses, enabled by very smart robotics. The story likens the design to random access memory (the RAM of your computer), but I think a closer analogy would be a disk cache.
The graphic (above right) is a schematic of shelving units, color-coded for how frequently the items on them sell (red most frequently, violet least frequently). The entire system self-adapts to the changing sales rates of the goods on each shelf. This is exactly the behavior of a LRU (least recently used) disk cache.
This is a great example of modern technology penetrating the most mundane of industries. Right now (as usual) it's only cost-effective at very large scales; in a few years the costs will come down and you'll see this technology in even small warehouses...
Another professional meterologist who is skeptical of global warming: John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel:
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM.
Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data back in the late 1990's to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental wacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the "research" to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.
Environmental extremist, notable politicians among them then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild "scientific" scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.
Now their ridicules manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.
You can read John's entire paper here, and his blog here.
