I ran across this while searching for a reference on Jamie Escalante, and it reminded me of something I just read: Link Here's an excerpt: My dad sent me an issue of Educational Leadership which is all about urban schools. The first article describes a study in which they found that there are three groups of teachers in struggling urba
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That watcom link brings back memories. Remember when there was actually a reason to use something besides Visual Studio? Borland produced the smallest code; WATCOM produced the fastest code; Visual C failed to correctly compile solid standard C++ - not that fancy templace stuff, but normal C++ code you'd write in an introduction to C++ class. Ahh, those were the days. I'm doing some useful, but completely uninteresting, I/O programming <
I just watched a 1974 thriller, The Conversation. In it is the only realistic lock picking scene I've ever seen. What gives? How come modern TV shows and movies pantomime lock picking by sticking a single hairpin into the keyway and wiggling it a bit? Like making functional pencil erasers, the ability to depict lock picking seems to have been lost. This is not t
Edited: This was rambling and incoherent, even by my standards. I'll try to rewrite it later. Or not.
I was at a bar with some campus liberals the other night when the conversation turned to Abu Gharib; one of them remarked that there must be something about war that causes people to commit atrocities. Everyone agreed that war, like the One Ring, is a corruptive force that is irresistibly turns people to evil. Good can't come from evil, so no good can come
I'm reading The letters of Madame Sevigne (Barnwell's translation), and one of the footnotes says that after her early marriage to the Duc de Rocquelaure, Mme de Roquelaure had fallen in love with the Marquid de Vardes. Her love being unrequited, she died of a broken heart at the age of twenty-one. What is it to die of a broken heart? Is it a euphemism f
Ironically, the reason we have agricultural subsidies at all is that small farmers agitated to get them and no one can afford to lose votes in key midwest states where small farmers have a significant percentage of the vote. Ag subsides are a social welfare program that corporations are taking advantage of. you ow
You are inspiring. I am contemplating my life; wondering whether I should keep doing the safe, easy, thing, or pitch it and do something else. Reading this makes me want to change my life.
One idea that has taken hold in the education community recently is the idea that we don't really need to teach people how to do mathematical calculations, since they can be done so easily on a calculator, and are rarely done in "real life" anyway; instead, we should teach "concepts". Why is this idea limited to mathematics? The grammar checker in MS Word gets b
I've never understood how people can do questions like this cold i.e. without asking questions about the situation. I always end up with a completely ridiculous answer for these types of questions
That must be how the book business works too. Every book that's released is covered with quotes from well known authors, praising the book as the next big thing. How do I get a job consulting for studios?
The Copenhagen Consensus results are in. As expected, the climate change proposals have the worst cost/benefit ratio, and three of the four proposals that have negative returns are climate change proposals. I was surprised that spending money on HIV/AI
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later show
The sytem would still rely on some mechanical lock on the gun. Just dissamble the gun and remove the locking mechanism. Since the chip is implanted in the hand, there is no reason that the range couldn't be inches, so that the handle of the gun would have to be in or immediatly next to the owner's hand.
The thing with security systems is that you can never know that it's secure (with the exception of mathematical systems); all you can know is that the system hasn't been cracked yet (or that if it has been cracked, the crack has been kept private: the worst fear of computer security professionals). When it's an alarm for a house, and failure means a false alarm, or theives getting in (which they would have done anyway without the system), instal
A lot of Bush supporters are saying that "after eight weeks of unrelenting catastrophe for Bush, Kerry and Bush are in a dead heat" , implying that things can only get better for Bush. But an extra catastrophe or ten won't really have that much effect on Bush since people have already made up thei
"I feel different from other people. Really different. Yet whenever I have a conversation with a new person it turns into a discussion of what we have in common. Work, places, feelings. Whatever. It's the way people talk, I know, I share the blame, I do it too. But I want to stop and shout no, it's not like that, it's not the same for me. I feel different. "I understand what you mean." "Tha
So what's a biochem student doing posing in front of Van Vleck?
I was too busy taking golf to take writing Organizing my thoughts. Yikes. That sounds a lot harder than organizing my desk, and I can't even do that.
You can jam the signal, or otherwise disable the electronics so that the police officer won't be able to use the gun. Sounds great for pets though. I wish I had one of these when I was a kid.
Among many Americans, there is the sentiment that the "war on terror" cannot end, and the occupation of any foreign country will lead to a quagmire; the United States can't possibly be topped by guerrillas, and any action taken against the guerrillas will only increase their numbers. Have the fundamentals of warfare really changed more in the past few decades th
I've never understood paragraphs. When I was in elementary school, I never used them, and it didn't seem to be a big deal. From middle school through high school, we wrote the same five paragraph essay over and over, varying the filler. That was good training for writing five paragraph essays, but not much else. In college I managed to avoid writing classes alto
The problem fixed itself, a bit after I posted that. Strange, but I'm not gonna complain about it.
The same week I read about an attack on 802.11 , I saw an article on guns for police that can only be used when they are near an ID chip , to be implanted in the owner's arm. Actually, the two articles
It's the same reason that hundreds of flu deaths in a city go unreported, and one single West Nile death is front page news; abuse of American prisoners in America isn't news, but abuse of American prisoners in Iraq is; Americans killing Iraqis create outrage, but Russians killing Chechens do not. For s