Category Archives: Front Page

Could you get into 11th grade in a third world school?

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A dare…

This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.

If our athletic performance at the Olympics were as poor as our global academic performance it would be a national crisis and every level of government would be attempting to respond. That we blithely ignore the declining intellectual standards of American students seems almost insane. The cognitive skills of our children will determine both America’s economic future and the economic future of each child.

But perhaps I overstate the high standards of the developing world, particularly India and China. So, to test that assumption, my company Indian Math Online has created the “Third World Challenge” – this is a shortened and greatly simplified version of the multi-day proficiency test that every 10th grader in India must pass to go on to the 11th grade.

If you click on the link, you can see if you measure up.

Its a scam

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From the New York Times…

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.

The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.

If you read the whole article, you will find that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Around the World….

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While we have been primarily focused on the problems in the US we have been ignoring things that have been going on around the world.

Here is a list of some of the things we have been ignoring.

The fact that the giant Large Hadron Collider broke down the first time they tried to use it.

The contaminated milk scandal in China.

The huge truck bomb that went off in Islamabad.

Thabo Mbeki is resigning under pressure from the fans of Jacob Zuma. Mbeki has his problems, but Zuma is a thug.

Ehud Olmert is finally leaving office. In the short term he is being succeeded by Tzipi Livni who’s claim to fame is that she used to be Mossad agent.

NASA is going to have a press conference on the Sun. Seems that solar winds are at a 50 year low in addition to the fact that there have been few solar flares.

Truth or Fiction?

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From The Sacramento Bee….

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to issue minimum-wage checks to 200,000 state workers in less than a month, he may want to rehire any semi-retired computer programmers he terminated last week.

The massive pay cut would exhaust the state’s antiquated payroll system, which is built on a Vietnam-era computer language so outdated that many college students don’t even bother to learn it anymore.

Democratic state Controller John Chiang said Monday it would take at least six months to reconfigure the state’s payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, though Schwarzenegger insists such a change should occur this month.

I have to wonder if this is really true or not. Part of me thinks that if Mr. Chiang really wanted to obey the Governor’s order, he could find a way. Then again, I know enough about how IT works on the state level to think that maybe he is telling the truth.

An Adventure Story

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From Sippican Cottage….

There’s a lot of figuring and checking. My helpers can’t be hurt, as they’re at the top of this rollercoaster looking down, but I imagine that watching the thing crush me and being sent to the workhouse for the rest of their miserable lives would be less fun than shoe-shopping and playing X-Box, so I was determined not to let the thing land on me. I’m considerate like that.

But it started to rain, less than thirty seconds after I was dumb enough to say: “Thank God it hasn’t rained.” Time to act.

I have had more excitement moving heaver weights, but I am not as smart as Sippican Cottage is. Life is always more exciting when you are dumb.

Fear Rules the Day

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From the New York Times…

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”

Read the whole thing. They sound really scared. People who are really scared do stupid things.

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in. “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”

Although Mr. Schumer, Mr. Dodd and other participants declined to repeat precisely what they were told by Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, they said the two men described the financial system as effectively bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day.