No Child Left Behind: The Potemkin Plan for Education

School Violence Data Under a Cloud in Houston

In the last four school years, the Houston district's own police, who patrol its 80 middle and high schools, have entered 3,091 assaults into a database that is shared with the Houston city police but not with the Texas Education Agency in Austin.

In the same period, the Houston district itself has listed just 761 schoolhouse assaults on its annual disciplinary summaries sent to Austin. That means that the school authorities either have not reported or have reclassified 2,330 incidents described as assaults by the district's police.

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This is only one in quite a series of similar NYT articles. Principals and other school administrators are no different from physicians, pilots, police and marines. If you punish them for bad outcomes, but don't provide incentive or means or tools to really improve outcomes, then the inevitable outcome is bad data showing good outcomes.

The Houston program is particularly pernicious. It removes principals from schools with bad outcomes. This is a wonderful way to select for dishonesty. You eliminate the honest and conscientious, so only the dishonest remain. Perfect.

The national "No Child Left Behind" program is based on this Houston program.

As goes Houston, so goes America. Thank you again Mr. Bush.

Staying the course in Iraq - NOT

Exit strategy now on table | csmonitor.com, Daniel Schorr

Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, warned the Bush administration against creating the impression that 'our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible, not meeting our strategic objective of building a free and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world.

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It's now widely believed, based on troop deployment schedules and other real world measures, that the Bush administration plans to exit Iraq by early next year.

The more Bush says that "American will stay the course" the more many observers are convinced he intends to exit. He's got a reputation now for saying one thing loudly while doing another under the table.

Ironically, given the incompetence of the Bush Administration and the Pentagon's post-war plans (see prior postings!) an early exit may actually be the least bad of our very bad options.

The Spam Protection Act of 2004

Congressional Spam Filter: NYT Editorial Nov 3, 2003

Members of Congress would like to score points back home by passing an antispam law. But it would be a cruel trick if the bill pre-empted the roughly 30 state laws with weak federal rules.

One indication Congress may end up being too lenient is that some industry lobbyists, who usually fight any antispam law, are now saying they want Congress to act. And some consumer lobbyists are now hoping Congress does nothing. The Internet, which knows no borders, is best regulated at the national level. But it must be done in a way that puts the public's interest ahead of the spammers'.

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Our legislature never fails to demonstrate loyalty to its paymasters and post-legislative support system. I suppose this is a form of integrity, which we should extend by making every congressperson a publicly owned corporation.

Geeks will not be bothered, they know that the only solutions to spam are technical (such as filtering based on the managed reputation of the sending service). This may be naive, however. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) should have proved the danger of bad law to even the most naive geek. If Congress keeps to recent form, some perverse combination of the DMCA and this new law will somehow make it illegal to interfere with the transmission, delivery and receipt of spam.

NYT Magazine: Disastrous misplanning for Iraq

Blueprint for a MessAn extensive dissection of the failures of the Pentagon and Bush Administration. A number of powerful people appear to have been delusional, probably including Bush himself.

If Powell was the man many thought he was, he ought to have resigned over this. Heck, Bush should be impeached for incompetence. (Alas, probably not an impeachable offense? I'm sure we could find others.)

Given where we are now, what should our goals be? We cannot leave our forces pinned down in Iraq indefinitely -- we don't have that big an army. At this point, we probably can't "win" anyway.

Dingell's Hilarious reply to the RNCs attempt to censor the Reagan story

Dingell's Letter (pdf)Dingell is a veteran house democrat. He urges CBS to present a "fair and balanced" view of the Reagan years, and lists some examples. Like White House astrologers. A wonderful riposte, with a nice dig at FOX news.

Controlling the Media: The Republican National Committee flexes muscle

CNN.com - RNC asks to review 'The Reagans' - Oct. 31, 2003

The Republican National Committee Friday asked CBS to allow a team of historians and friends of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife to review a miniseries about the couple before it airs.

Republicans have expressed concern that the miniseries, titled 'The Reagans,' may inaccurately portray the couple.

...Gillespie said that if CBS denies the request, he will ask the network to run a note across the bottom of the screen every 10 minutes during the program's presentation informing viewers that the miniseries is not accurate.

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Fascinating. CBS must wonder how it got into such a pickle. FOX would never be in this position -- on the wrong side of the RNC.

CBS can cave, and get some flack from the NYT. Or they can resist and earn the emnity of the Wall Street Journal, the RNC, the Bush administration and the Church of Reagan. No contest. They have to cave.

On the other hand, these biographic miniseries on commercial TV do not have a reputation for accuracy. They're often at the honesty level of a Bush press briefing. So, without having seen it, I suspect the RNC may have a point. Unfortunately their credibility is even lower than that of commercial TV, and their reputation for vengeance is most unseemly.

Starving Children in Plain Sight: A letter to the NY Times

Starving Children in Plain Sight

Obviously, far more scrutiny is needed of caseworkers, of the lack of auditing of adoption subsidies and of the failure to mandate annual medical checkups for adopted children. The cause of abused youngsters needs far more from New Jersey than more emaciated poster children.

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The NY Times editorial page responds to a horrific story of child neglect by advocating annual medical exams for adoptive children, presumably to detect abuse. A reasonable proposal, but inconsistent. The call should be for annual state sponsored exams of all children to detect abuse, neglect, and poor parenting. Certainly NYT editorial writers are very busy parents, and may be prone to leave the children with sitters. They may deserve particular attention. If one wishes to conserve resources, perhaps the exams should be limited to children at a higher risk of abuse or neglect. Poverty, poor character (politicians), two income families -- all possible leading indicators for neglected children. Let us brook no delay in implementing this proposal.

--
John Faughnan MD, MS
parent of three adoptive children

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I rather doubt the NY Times will print my emailed letter, they never have before.

DeLong on Health Care Economic Policy

Semi-Daily Journal

My two years spent working part time on health while at the Treasury convinced me that being a health economics policy guru was like being trapped in the 11th circle of Dante's hell. The problems are just too complex. The uncertainties just too great. And I do not have any of the answers.

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Now that's honesty. There's been a recent jump in payor (insurance) company mergers recently, allegedly because the pool of insured people continues to shrink. As the pool shrinks, costs and risk sharing push mergers. Somewhere the train jumps the tracks, but I don't know what year it will be.

In a somewhat related vein, Dr. Lagace had this to say about a shortlived double residency in psychiatry and family practice: "It's like playing Russian Roulette with two bullets". Dr. Lagace is a family physician (so am I). As physicians respond to economic incentives by bailing out of both family practice and psychiatry, look for the next event to be a "crisis" of health care delivery in primary care and mental health. (Actually mental health services have been in the dumps for years, but Republicans figure the madhouses will handle those problems.)
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Bush Nazi Connection: Irrelevant and distracting

Conason on "Bush-Nazi" story

There are many unflattering terms that can and should be used to describe George W. Bush. He is, among other things, a truly bad President. But neither his offenses, nor the Republican Party's politics of personal destruction, can justify using such tactics against him. Imputing Nazi sympathies to the President or his family ought to be beneath his adversaries.

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Odd that this has gotten traction. There's nothing here -- GWB's grandfather made some dirty money and was a good senator later on. Makes The Shrub seem more Kennedy like I suppose.

My dark suspicion is that Karl Rove wants to keep this story alive because it's silly, and it lets Bush act aggrieved. Time to forget it and talk about Bush's real failings.

Tribal engineering in Iraq: NYT

Victory in Iraq, One Tribe at a Time

There are about 10 large tribal federations in central Iraq, but there are hundreds of subgroups, each with its own sheik. He is the leader of the people, and in return for his services -- mediation, arbitration, attracting government services to the tribal area -- he is respected and obeyed.

New efforts ought to be made to persuade the sheiks to assert their influence and help keep the peace. The easiest would simply be to hire the sheiks and their tribesmen -- putting them on salaries and allowing them to spread the wealth among their people. In addition, sheiks in areas where coalition soldiers and oil pipelines are coming under frequent attacks should be told that the only way their tribes can receive luxuries -- extra government services, construction aid, easy access to senior officials in Baghdad %u2014 is by making sure that there are no attacks against coalition soldiers in their domain.

If a sheik refused to cooperate, not only could his perks be withheld, they could be given to a neighboring sheik. This would eventually pit the uncooperative sheik against his own tribesmen, who would see that he was not serving their interests. If this weren't enough to get the sheik into line, it wouldn't be too difficult for the coalition to enact 'regime change' on a small scale: almost every tribal leader has rivals within the group who covet his position.

... Amatzia Baram is professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa in Israel and a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.

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I doubt tribes are quite so easy to manipulate, but this is a concrete suggestion. It sounds very British, and somewhat reminescent of US Special Forces activities in Afghanistan.

Cybercrime in Brazil and Beyond: A deeper significance

Brazil Becomes a Cybercrime Lab

The country is becoming a laboratory for cybercrime, with hackers - able to collaborate with relative impunity - specializing in identity and data theft, credit card fraud and piracy, as well as online vandalism.

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Education + access to knowledge + lack of alternative opportunities + intellect + youth = cybercrime. In Russia add in "organized crime" for a slightly different spin.

That equation means that youthful (re: "developing") nations with dysfunctional economic systems will be fountains of cybercrime.

Wait until they become fountains of biohacking.

Maybe we need to rethink our approach to the world?

Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives

Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives

America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003, 238 $22.95

Days before the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom this past March, a well-known intellectual close to the White House walked me through the necessity and promise of the coming invasion. Whatever rancor it caused in the short term, he said, would pale in comparison to the payoff that would follow. In the months and years to come, Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny would write books and testify to the brutality of the regime, the bankruptcy of the Arab nationalism that stood idly by while they suffered, and the improvement of their lives. That testimony and the reality of an Iraqi state where basic human rights were respected would shatter the anti-Americanism that fills the Muslim Middle East and start a wave of change that would sweep over the region.

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A terrific overview of the Bush ideology, taken from a review published in Foreign Affairs and reprinted in the New York Times. There is no doubt that our foreign policy reflects GWB's vision, and his unwavering course. History will tell if his course is more like that of Churchill or more like that of the captain of the Titanic.

BBC NEWS | Technology | IP addresses are set to run out in 2005

Tackling the net's numbers shortage

In the early days of the internet, it seemed improbable that all of the four billion available IP addresses would be used, but that is exactly what is happening.

Every mobile phone, PC and server has an address which, like a phone number, needs to be dialled when it is accessed over the web.

But as more people log on around the globe, the available number of IP addresses is dwindling.

A taskforce of experts hope to solve the problem by creating what is called IPv6 and would provide 64 billion extra IP addresses.

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I suspect the journalist did the math correctly, but an editor made the mistake. The number is 64 billion billion billion. More significantly, IPv6 was created years ago and has been implemented in several test cases. I think both OS X 10.3 and XP SP1 include IPv6 support.

This is the personal ID number of science fiction fame. At birth one will be assigned an IP address -- certainly appearing on one's hospital id bracelet. That number replaces SSN, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Names are merely a changeable label, the number persists. Never reused, it most likely goes to the grave with the person. Post-mortal derivative avatars may apply to inherit the number, but they'll probably have to make do with their own. Pre-mortal avatars will certainly have to get their own numbers.

Bush: the clueless president

On High-Speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap

CANBERRA, Australia, Oct. 23 Minutes after President Bush finished an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.

'Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?' he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.

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It's been pointed out that Bush doesn't read very much and never has. Evidently no-one tells him very much either.

It pays to be pretty and telegenic: The stories of Lynch and Johnson

Ex-POW's Family Accuses Army Of Double Standard on Benefit (washingtonpost.com)

AUSTIN, Oct. 23 -- Shot through both legs and held prisoner in Iraq for 22 days, Army Spec. Shoshana Johnson returned home in the spring to a difficult convalescence that lacked the media fury and official hype that attended her friend and comrade in arms, Jessica Lynch.

Depressed, scarred, haunted by the trauma of her captivity and at times unable to sleep, Johnson walks with a limp and has difficulty standing for long, according to her parents.
And now that Johnson is on the verge of her discharge from the Army, insult is being added to her injury, they say. While Lynch was discharged as a private first class in August with an 80 percent disability benefit, Johnson, set to leave in the coming days, learned last week that she will receive a 30 percent disability benefit from the Army for her injuries.

The difference, which amounts to $600 or $700 a month in payments, has infuriated Johnson and her family. They have enlisted Jesse L. Jackson's help to make their case to the news media, accusing the Army of a double standard, insensitivity and racism. Lynch is white; Johnson is black.

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It certainly pays to be telegenic and pretty, being white probably helps some too. The story illustrates the interaction between our government, our institutions, and the political machine. If only there were a sense of shame in our modern culture ...