April 4, 2011 - SAMANTHA BUTLER, THE WHIG-STANDARD Local food can be an election issue and Kingston can become a local food system powerhouse if the federal government implements a local-food-first purchasing policy to increase demand, Kingston and the Islands' Green candidate Eric Walton said Saturday. Kingston has several government institutions...
In what may seem like a scene out of an Austin Powers movie, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner, Northrop Grumman, mounted the laser to the deck of a Navy test ship off the coast of California and aimed it at a small vessel on April 6.
As is shown in the video, a small fire starts in the front of one of the outboard engines and that fire grows until both 200-horsepower outboards are burning.
( Huh. Bet I can figure out what it's being spent on )
The Test Generation
What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they "grow" their students' test scores? Colorado is about to find out.
In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape -- bullet points on Colorado's new fine-art curriculum standards.
All of this left Trombetta pretty frustrated, and on a November afternoon, she really wanted to talk. As she ate lunch (a frozen TV dinner) in her cheery, deserted classroom plastered with bright posters, she recounted the events of the past week. She liked the idea of exposing her young students, many of whom had never visited a museum, to great works of art. But, Trombetta complained, preparing the children for the exam meant teaching them reductive half-truths about art -- that dark colors signify sadness and bright colors happiness, for example. "To bombard these kids with words and concepts instead of the experience of art? I really struggle with that," she said. "It's kind of hard when they come to me and say, 'What are we going to make today?' and I have to say, 'Well, we're going to write about art.'"
(
10-4. Talk about it rather than do it. Wunnerfool )
In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated aphorism called Campbell's Law, named after Donald Campbell, the psychologist who pioneered the study of human creativity: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." In short, incentives corrupt.
....A number of state- and city-level studies from the No Child Left Behind era found that swiftly rising scores on high-stakes state tests were accompanied by appalling stagnation in students' actual knowledge as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold-standard exam administered to a sample set of students each year by the federal Department of Education. In 2005, for example, Alabama reported that 83 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading, even though the NAEP found that only 22 percent of these children were proficient readers. The harsh punishments associated with NCLB had encouraged Alabama and most other states to dumb down their tests and then teach directly to them.
(
Translation : since funding was tied to scores, scores were what was delivered. Teaching, OTOH. Nada.
Zilch. Trashed irretrievably. )
One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.
But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he'd be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.
.....We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone's input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.
...
By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur's eyes.
If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.
America has deficit and long-term debt problems. Like any budget morass, there are two general categories of solutions — spend less or raise more. It's really that simple. These are not mutually exclusive choices; ideally, we can and should do both.
( Commie ! Pinko! Socialist ! Don't you Dare propose something that would work ! )
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have pinpointed a reason older adults have a harder time multitasking than younger adults: they have more difficulty switching between tasks at the level of brain networks.
Juggling multiple tasks requires short-term, or "working," memory – the capacity to hold and manipulate information in the mind for a period of time. Working memory is the basis of all mental operations, from learning a friend's telephone number, and then entering it into a smart phone, to following the train of a conversation, to conducting complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning.
"Our findings suggest that the negative impact of multitasking on working memory is not necessarily a memory problem, per se, but the result of an interaction between attention and memory,
In the early days of nuclear power, WHO issued forthright statements on radiation risks such as its 1956 warning: "Genetic heritage is the most precious property for human beings. It determines the lives of our progeny, health and harmonious development of future generations. As experts, we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by increasing development of the atomic industry and sources of radiation … We also believe that new mutations that occur in humans are harmful to them and their offspring."
After 1959, WHO made no more statements on health and radioactivity. What happened? On 28 May 1959, at the 12th World Health Assembly, WHO drew up an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); clause 12.40 of this agreement says: "Whenever either organisation [the WHO or the IAEA] proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organisation has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement." In other words, the WHO grants the right of prior approval over any research it might undertake or report on to the IAEA – a group that many people, including journalists, think is a neutral watchdog, but which is, in fact, an advocate for the nuclear power industry. The IAEA's founding papers
state: "The agency shall
seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity through the world."
The most recent example of Haiti demonstrates that areas that have not seen cholera in decades can be vulnerable under the combination of poverty, lack of or destruction of infrastructure, weather and natural disasters, conditions in which cholera thrives,
( Interesting. It certainly wasn't the popular Haitian diagnosis. They believed they were victims of biowarfare. )
..... routinely paying beneficiaries to avail themselves of NGO services. Having bought their customers, NGOs send home reports about the great attendance that led to successfully training X-number of people on fishing/farming/water/waste/health. It would be as if Marriott paid guests $50 per night to stay in its hotels and then bragged about its occupancy rates. If the poorest people in the world require payment to take your services, what does that say about your services?
( Don't ask the Mohawk Nation about that. You might get an education about the subtleties of the vassal state )
Ain't that Tweet
Former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson: "We have homophobes in our party."
French ban on Islamic veils takes effect: women may now bare breasts in Cannes but not cover faces on Champs-Elysees:
If Ryan's SNAP (food stamps) cuts came solely from cutting eligibility, 8M ppl would need to be cut off from program.
Image via Wikipedia
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