It is column time, and has been
over the weekend. There is a bit of mail.
I have inquiries regarding my statement
about Sandy Berger escaping jail, and
Martha Stewart serving time. Haste does not always make for good irony. My
point really was that the republic will not be safer for jailing Berger -- a
fine and the humiliation is quite enough -- nor is it safer for jailing
Stewart whose crime, denying actions that were not criminal and for which
she couldn't prosecuted, were much less serious than Berger's, who did steal
documents, and did lie about doing it. Neither is really a Federal Case or a
Big Deal, and sending either to jail for these matters is silly.
There is an important summary article on education and the
International Baccalaureate Program
over in mail. Anyone
interested in education will find this worth the time.
On the phone from Fargo, N.D., State Rep. Bette
Grande's voice rings with clarity. "Colleges are a business," she says in a
starched Midwestern accent. "When we put research as our No. 1 focus, we
forgot the student," she says. "We got ourselves all turned around."
Ms. Grande could be talking about any of the
ills plaguing a modern university -- drops in per-student spending, tuition
increases, or maybe the lack of face time with professors. But she has
something much more contentious in mind.
She wants her state's university system to do
something about the fact that its students can't understand what the heck
their foreign-born instructors are saying.
Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in
the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education
in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in
writing that his or her instructor did not "speak English clearly and with
good pronunciation," that student would then be entitled to withdraw from
the class with no academic or financial penalty -- and would even get a
refund.
Further, if 10 percent of the students in a
class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to
move the instructor into a "nonteaching position," thus losing that
instructor's classroom labor.
Almost as soon as the bill went public, Ms.
Grande realized she had touched a nerve. Calls and e-mail messages poured in
from all over North Dakota and from as far away as Florida and Arizona. In
nearly a decade as a legislator, Ms. Grande had never attracted such a
prodigious and impassioned response.
That's probably because anyone who has studied
mathematics, engineering, computer science, or economics at an American
university in the past decade is likely to have harbored the frustrations
Ms. Grande's bill aims to soothe. With rising international enrollments in
graduate programs, classroom language barriers have become both a public
hobbyhorse and a subject for scholarly study in their own right. In more
than a dozen states, legislatures have passed laws to set English-language
standards for international teaching assistants. But Ms. Grande's bill was
designed to send a stronger message: If you can't speak the language
clearly, get out of the classroom. <snip>
TabletPC is great for most purposes, but I do
find LisaBetta a bit slow for getting the mail and this log done. It's
mostly Outlook's fault.
I used to travel with two computers, one large and heavy which I would
set up in the hotel and leave in place, the other to carry to meetings. The
TabletPC is perfect for that latter task, and in fact more than adequate for
production work (except when piggy Outlook decides to take over all the
resources), but the keyboard is a little small, and of course the screen is
small. I could use a larger keyboard and screen. Something for pounding out
lots of words. Big screen, fast enough processor that when Outlook is being
piggy the words don't slow down as I type.
Of course I can do all this with the Mac -- except that it isn't capable
of most games. But perhaps that is the price.
But I do wonder, what are the big, fast, games-capable laptops nowadays?
I have not looked into high end laptops in a long time.
I'll probably just continue to make do with the TabletPC, which is, after
all, pretty nifty. I am getting this done... and editing a big WORD document
at the same time. And I can see the screen. It's just small.
But a BIG screen would be nice.... Anyone out there got a hot gaming
laptop with a good keyboard, suitable for producing 7500 words of fiction a
day in B&B's and old Villas? Suggestions?
======================================
This may be of interest:
The `No Child' Law's Biggest Victims? An Answer
That May Surprise
There is overwhelming evidence that gifted
students simply do not succeed on their own.
By Margaret DeLacy
Since education is high on the national agenda,
here's a pop quiz that every American should take. There is overwhelming
evidence that gifted students simply do not succeed on their own.
Question: What group of students makes the
lowest achievement gains in school?
Answer: The brightest students.
In a pioneering study of the effects of
teachers and schools on student learning, William Sanders and his staff at
the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System put in this way: "Student
achievement level was the second most important predictor of student
learning. The higher the achievement level, the less growth a student was
likely to have."
Mr. Sanders found this problem in schools
throughout the state, and with different levels of poverty and of minority
enrollments. He speculated that the problem was due to a "lack of
opportunity for high-scoring students to proceed at their own pace, lack of
challenging materials, lack of accelerated course offerings, and
concentration of instruction on the average or below-average student."
While less effective teachers produced gains
for lower-achieving students, Mr. Sanders found, only the top one-fifth of
teachers were effective with high-achieving students. These problems have
been confirmed in other states. There is overwhelming evidence that gifted
students simply do not succeed on their own.
Question: What group of students has been
harmed most by the No Child Left Behind Act?
Answer: Our brightest students.
The federal law seeks to ensure that all
students meet minimum standards. Most districts, in their desperate rush to
improve the performance of struggling students, have forgotten or ignored
their obligations to students who exceed standards. These students spend
their days reviewing material for proficiency tests they mastered years
before, instead of learning something new. This is a profoundly alienating
experience.
Question: How well is the United States
preparing able students to compete in the world economy?
Answer: Very poorly.
Of all students obtaining doctorates in
engineering in American universities, just 39 percent are Americans.
According to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, "The
performance of U.S. physics and advanced math students was among the lowest
of the 16 countries that administered the ... assessments."
Question: What group of special-needs students
receives the least funding?
Answer: Our brightest students.
And it's getting worse. For example, Illinois,
New York, and Oregon recently cut all state funding for gifted programs.
Hardly astonishing. After all, the best way to see that no child is left
behind is to make sure that no child gets ahead. This is the end of the
public school system as economic leveler. Those who can afford private
schools will get ahead. Those who cannot will stay back with the children
who are not left behind. A new economic aristocracy combined with the
meritocracy we think we like so much.
Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the
blogosphere dominated by white males? By Steven Levy Senior Editor Newsweek
March 21 issue - At a recent Harvard conference
on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace.
Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a
response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if
the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw
out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was
from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The
Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken
'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion,"
Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American
blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was
a predominantly white-only one."
After the comment was posted, a couple of the
women at the conference--bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt--looked around
and saw that there weren't many other women in attendance. <snip>
Apparently there is an A list of blogs and bloggers who are supposed to
dominate the blogosphere and who get invited to events like this. First I
heard about it, but it's not surprising. Establishments attempt to control
their turf... But we also have
March 30, 2005, 7:58 a.m. Diversity Mongers
Target the Web Can quotas rule the ultimate meritocracy? By Heather Mac
Donald
Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have
just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away
from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has [4]declared
that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires
corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the
actual population" -- i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are
found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and
minorities are found in the general population.
Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan
Estrich's [5]campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing
to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread
wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages. For Levy to
have mentioned the web at this moment is about as smart as inviting Stephen
Hawking to an astrologers' convention: The web demolishes the assumptions
behind any possible quota crusade.
A Harvard [6]conference on bloggers and the
media triggered Levy's concerns. Keith Jenkins, a Washington Post photo
editor, had [7]warned during the conference, via e-mail, that the growth of
blogging threatened minority gains in journalism. Whereas the mainstream
media have gotten to "the point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote, the
"overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere [might] return us to a
day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."
Who would've guessed it? The mainstream media,
Jenkins admits, has gotten to "the point of inclusion." You'd never know it
from the ongoing agitation for more race- and gender-conscious hiring and
publishing. Just this December, the National Association of Black
Journalists [8]wrung from the president of NBC News a promise to hire more
black journalists at the highest levels of the newsroom. At an NABJ
conference last April, a Denver Post editor [9]accused newspapers and
broadcast outlets of refusing to hire blacks and called on NABJ members to
denounce such alleged discriminators. The Association tallies and publicizes
black representation in newsrooms to the minutest detail, including the
[10]ratio of black supervisors to black reporters. Susan Estrich, meanwhile,
has had her female law students at USC logging daily ratios of female- to
male-penned op-eds in the Los Angeles Times for the last three years --
numbers that she has used to try to bludgeon editor Michael Kinsley into
instituting female quotas. The [11]Media Report to Women, cited by the New
York Times's Joyce Purnick, pumps out statistics on the percentage of female
interviewees on network-news shows and of female news directors in radio,
among other crucial discoveries. Female book reviewers in The New York Times
Book Review are weekly stacked up against male reviewers at Edward Champions
"[12]Return of the Reluctant."
These diversity grievances follow the usual
logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field;
therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members.
The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there
who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the
challenged field.
If the quota mongers really believed these
claims, they should welcome the web enthusiastically, since it is a world
without gatekeepers and with no other significant barriers to entry. Imagine
someone coping with real discrimination -- a black tanner, say, in 1897
Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets
beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has
turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather
goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market.
Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can
obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product
based solely on its quality -- a universe where race is so irrelevant that
no one will even know his own -- and he would think he had died and gone to
heaven.
For allegedly discriminated-against minority
and female writers, the web is just that heaven. <snip>
But, I find, to be one of the A list bloggers you must link frequently.
Like a fanzine, where,you must give comments to receive comments, you must
link often to be often linked to. Or so Steve Levy tells us.
Ah well. We have a quality readership here, and I couldn't afford the
time to go to Harvard conferences on blogging anyway...
Still on the beach, but I have to get home to
Do The Taxes.
Regarding games and PC's, I don't really need the hottest new system.
What I want is specifically EQ 2
Everquest II "requires a video card with at least 4 texture units."
My TabletPC apparently doesn't have 4 texture units. It's nvidia Adapter
Description NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M with Installed Drivers nv4_disp.dll.
This was apparently good enough for Star Wars Galaxies, but not Everquest 2.
Not that I expected to do much from a dialup, but I thought I could at least
set up some stuff for sale, and look at markets, and clean up some old quest
stuff that didn't require actual fighting.
I don't really do much gaming on the road, and the TabletPC keyboard
really is pretty good, and I can run an external keyboard, and a big monitor
if I am really doing a lot of work. An updated laptop would be useful but it
isn't vital.
I fear I don't know enough about graphics cards to know what 4 texture
units means. This system has Adapter RAM 32.00 MB (33,554,432 bytes) which
one would have thought would be enough.
Name NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0176&SUBSYS_08B0103C&REV_A3\4&1BFA44D4&1&0008
Adapter Type GeForce4 420 Go 32M, NVIDIA compatible
Adapter Description NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M
Adapter RAM 32.00 MB (33,554,432 bytes)
Installed Drivers nv4_disp.dll
Driver Version 6.14.10.4574
INF File oem2.inf (nv4_NV17 section)
Color Planes 1
Color Table Entries 4294967296
Resolution 1024 x 768 x 60 hertz
Bits/Pixel 32
I presume it's the "color planes" that limit me. Being down here on
dialup I can't do much research on the subject...
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column,
8,000 -
12,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
If you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front
page of this site, click here for a better
explanation of what we're trying to do here.
This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.
If
you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this
place?,
which tries to make order of chaos.
Boiler Plate:
If you want to PAY FOR THIS,
the site is run like public radio: you don't have to pay, but if no one
does, it will go away. On how to pay, I keep the latest HERE. MY
THANKS to all of you who have sent money. Some of you went to a lot of
trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic)
mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also
toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
