I started working in educational technology in the 1960s. I've seen major fads come and go.

Here's the most important thing I've learned: Always ask them if they have published a study in a peer-reviewed journal about their success (or failure). I didn't see any studies like that on their web site.

It's pretty easy to put together a pr stunt for the cameras and collect some happy kids who love reading. It's pretty difficult to deliver useful results with a sustained effort.

They're not educating people. They're teaching rote memorization.

A friend of mine was in the Peace Corps teaching science in a small village in Africa.

They had never seen ice before.

He decided to show them ice. He used a portable gas-powered refrigerator to freeze some water. He put a piece of ice in a test tube, heated it with a candle, and showed them how the ice became water.

One kid, who was a little more clever than the others, challenged him. The kid didn't accept my friend's argument that the ice became water. He thought that the water was coming from the candle.

Actually, that's a good point. How do you know that the water is coming from the ice rather than the candle?

You could come up with an experiment and see what happens. Then you'd be doing science rather than memorizing facts.

How could you possibly teach a lesson like that with "scripted instruction"? http://m.theatlantic.com/educa...

The really important lesson comes when the kids come up with an idea that isn't in the script, and ask a question that isn't in the script. The scripted instruction teachers will be helpless in that situation. They'll just tell the kid to be quiet and go on with the script. They have to. The teachers are being rated according to how well they follow the script.

The other change that got reverted back to choke hold was "headlock."

No, changing it from "choke hold" to "arm bar" is changing a word in simple English that everybody understands to a word that is in jargon that only the police would understand.

Wikipedia guidelines say that it's written for the general public, not specialists in a field.

It's a deliberate effort to obscure the truth and deceive.

The purpose of an encyclopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is to provide an introduction and overview, and sources for further information.

It's possible for partisans, like the cops, to edit Wikipedia in a way that gives a biased account to favor their side. For example, the medical examiner reported that Eric Garner's death was a "homicide," but a lot of editors who were either cop fanboys or cops themselves kept adding the "explanation" that a homicide isn't identical to a crime. Most eyewitness accounts said that Pantaleo pushed Garner's "face" into the ground. They changed it to Pantaleo pushed Garner's "head" into the ground. They waged a big battle over changing "chokehold" into "headlock," which didn't even have a source.

They're trying to turn it into a defense attorney's version of the killing. That's not NPOV.

So the purpose of their editing of Wikipedia, Google's first hit, is to frame the story their way, for what is most peoples' initial version of the events.

Of course the pigxxx police union didn't like it when mayor di Blasio referred to the "alleged" attacks by demonstrators on police. Presumption of innocence is something they only want for cops, not for other criminals.

Sometimes the court of public opinion is the only place you can get justice, because you won't get it in the (snicker) grand jury or the courts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .

Tampering with evidence is something that the courts regard as a venial sin a few steps lower in their priorities than caging free coffee and donuts from coffee shops.

There's a long history of pigsxxxx cops getting caught red-handed lying under oath, not just once but as a routine practice. I'm hard pressed to think of a case when they were held to account (except for one with a probationary officer who knocked an innocent cyclist off his bicycle and arrested him).

http://observer.com/2015/03/ca...
California Prosecutor Falsifies Transcript of Confession
Court of Appeal slams Attorney General Kamala Harris again
By Sidney Powell
03/04/15

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04...
Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
By JIM DWYER
April 12, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepa...

Holding a cop liable for tampering with evidence is about as likely as the Ferguson government saying, "You're right. Our conscience can't take any more demonstrations. We'll abolish the government and hold new elections, democratic ones this time."

I am unable to come up with a joke for a surgeon named "Gary Alter" who performs gender reassignment surgery.

I always knew Perrier was missing something.

That's right. I was surprised when I first found that out. In fairness to the New York Times, they put it on the front page. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07... The USPS did it under cover of the War on Terror.

The post office has long had a program of "mail covers" (if you want to search Google) where they would copy the sender and addressee of every piece of mail, at the requests of the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, for people like Martin Luther King. They could find out who read the Daily Worker or The Nation. Now the the USPS scans the mail automatically to read the addresse's address, so they can just save the scan permanently. The courts have decided that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment, and doesn't require a search warrant or judge's permission. You can easily imagine that it could be subject to abuses, like the ones the NYT gave. It's one thing to use it to track down letters with deadly poison. It's another thing to monitor the owner of a radical bookstore, or for Sheriff Joe Arapaio to use it to monitor his political enemies, or even to use it against victimless crimes like prostitution.

The US is a great country if you're making $200,000 a year.

If you're making $60,000 a year, which is about the median family income, it's not so great. You have to come up with college education for your children, health care, housing, and transportation. A lot of that would be taken care of by your taxes in a northern European social democratic country.

Yeah, it has 9 of the world's 10 best universities (maybe), but how much do you have to pay to go to one of those universities? When I meet kids from a top school, they seem to have one thing in common -- rich parents. And the kids who don't have rich parents and are waiting on tables to get through school don't usually make it, according to the statistics.

The Asian immigrants that I've met who are killing themselves to get their kids into the US are also pretty wealthy in their native countries. There was a story in the New York Times about how Asians were buying $200 million condos in Time Warner Center and, in one case, sending their kids to Columbia University, where you'd wind up spending $100,000 to for an undergraduate degree. Even on a "lower" income level, of a few million a year, if you own an Asian car dealership, for example, your kids can make more money with an MBA in the US than running the family business back home.

But if you're a middle-class person today, and your parents are making under $100,000, you'd be a lot better off in Europe than the US. College education is free in Europe outside the UK. In the US, even a good state university can cost $100,000 to graduate. Which means you'll have an undischargeable debt for the rest of your life. Europe also has a lot of pro-worker policies, like unions and high minimum wages.

That is awfully naive. A presidential election costs each candidate $1 billion, and they raise the money mostly from billionaire contributors and corporate interests. Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.

A lot of people did just what you described to try to stop the Iraq war. It didn't work. So we killed 650,000 innocent people and handed over Iraq to ISIS. Good work, Bushie! (BTW, there were no WMDs.)

A lot of people did just what you described, after Obama was elected, to push for a single payer health care system, and when that didn't work, for a public option, but they couldn't match the big lobbying groups, like the drug industry, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. So now you have to pay $8,500 a year for health care.

Even Martin Luther King couldn't get anywhere without some pretty powerful supporters who could raise a lot of money and pull some political strings. (And the FBI was tapping his phones.) I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.

The U.S. is getting economically more unequal, the plutocrats are running the country, the Republicans have figured out a way to fool most of the people most of the time (TV), and I don't see a way out. If some radical wants to take direct action, doing something crazy that seems pointless to me, I can't tell him that I have a better way. If we're going to talk about futile destruction, destroying a $50 million satellite makes a lot more sense than signing up to fight in Iraq.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateno...
Bernie’s Reasons Why Not
The progressive champion weighs running for president. “The situation is fairly dismal.”
Kate Nocera and Ben Smith
BuzzFeed
March 4, 2015
(Bernie Sanders may not run against Hillary Clinton for 2 reasons: (1) It has to be done well, or people will say that the ideas themselves don't have support. (2) It may be impossible to raise enough money to compete with Hillary Clinton, whose network plans to raise $500 million.)
“The depressing part about that is that even if you did something phenomenally well — say you have 3 million people giving a $100 contribution each, which would be an enormous achievement — you’d be raising one-third of what the Koch brothers say they are spending.”
“The question then occurs whether or not at this point in history you can beat the money folks,” he muses. “It may be that they have too much power and too much money and a real progressive may not be able to take them on.”

They've identified a legitimate problem, although they don't have a solution.

As it turned out, technology has wound up monitoring our daily lives. We have what amounts to a Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... monitoring everything we read and write.

Except for cash, federal agencies monitor every bank deposit and withdrawal, and every financial transaction.

(That's how Elliot Spitzer got caught hiring an escort -- and he was a multimillionaire governor of New York State.)

And they can seize cash.

If you're ever arrested, you have a police record that you can never escape.

We have license plate scanners and facial identification in the works that will be able to follow every car and every face.

The government is owned by campaign contributors. We spend $1 billion on every presidential candidate, and if you can't pay you don't play.

Maybe when there's a threat to the public welfare that everybody is ignoring, smashing a $50 million satellite will raise the alarm and get some people interested. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately it didn't work this time.

He's lucky he only got 18 months. Today he might have been convicted on a terrorist offense, and gotten 20 years, longer than a lot of murder sentences.

I wish he had touched off a movement to protect our privacy, but it didn't work. Good try, though.

The culture in those days among scientists was not to make a lot of money or bother with the business details. They were scientists first. Alexander Flemming didn't patent penicillin. Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio virus. That's the way they did things back then. Guthrie and his hospital were naive about business, and they trusted Ames to do the right thing.

The NEJM article says that Guthrie produced 500 tests, at a cost of $6 each. That means the $6 covered the costs, including the house and everything else. He presumably hired workers to assemble the kits. It's hard to imagine a principal investigator assembling 500 test kits himself. When the U.S. Children's Bureau found out, they decided that the $262 was too high, and they revoked the deal.

There were congressional hearings, so if you want the details, you can look up the hearings, which might be online.

As Elisabeth Rosenthal said in her New York Times stories about the health industry, drug companies charge the highest prices the market will bear, not because they need the money for R&D or manufacturing costgs, but because they can. And that's what they say in their SEC filings and reports to their investors. You can buy asthma inhalers in the U.S. for $160 and the same inhalers in Europe for $5. This happens all the time. The FDA gave the rights to colchicine, a drug that has been used since the pyramids, to a private company, and they raised the price from 5 cents a pill to a dollar. You could still get it in Canada for 5 cents.

There are very competent people working in government labs, and if they want to, they can manufacture anything. Look at the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. The Centers for Disease Control provides testing services that aren't available commercially for rare infections.

Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.

(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Perspective
History of Medicine
Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property
Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794
August 29, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755

In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.

Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2

Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.

Yes, I read it. It's $83,000 a year, not $147,000. Stop bragging about how smart you are if you can't read a simple newspaper story, realize there are two sides to the story, and do some simple arithmetic.

You say it would be fair for them to make $35/h. Well, $35/h x 40h/wk x 50 wk/yr = $70,000/yr, which is pretty close to $83,000. So they merely drove a good bargain. You have a problem with people making good money?

There are reasons why they make so much money that you resent them.

First, they know how to negotiate. That's something you might learn from them.

When they negotiate, they don't want to match the race to the bottom. They know how much their employer is making and they want a piece of the action. They want job security and they want, in effect, something like an ownership interest in the company. That's not so strange. In Germany, unions have a seat on the board of directors of a company.

Second, they made a grand bargain decades ago. There was new technology that would make their job more labor-saving and efficient. Instead of obstructing it, they agreed to be forward-thinking and go along with it. However, if the company got the benefits of improved efficiency, they wanted the benefits of improved efficiency too. That's why they're making $83,000 a year. Here's a profitable business, where the owners are making millions a year. Why should they settle for $70,000 when their boss is rich and could easily pay $83,000 a year?

My landlord was making at least $300,000 a year, probably more. He inherited the building from his father, like most landlords. He worked hard, just like a longshoreman. Do I envy him? No. That's the free market.

If you live in a rental building, do you envy your landlord if he makes $300,000 a year? Do you envy your maintenance man, who fixes your boiler? Do you envy your auto mechanic? This is a rich country. Why do you want to drag everybody down to the bottom?