Actually from Kennedy onward there was a practice in the white house of makeing tape recordings or other records of important calls. The most extreme example of this was Nixon who recorded everything. So you can at least get that info, a little late of course.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/nixon.html

Much of this information ends up in Presidential Libraries where it remains hidden for some time before being made public under the Presidential Records act.

Congress on the other hand, thats different.

As I noted in my post below there are free tutoring systems online. One route to the teachers may be to not focus so much on having them integrate their lesson plans immediately but to position the computers as a supplement for post-class tutoring or other factors.

I have had some experience with wiring schools. Your mileage may vary depending upon where you are and the attitude of the local administrators and school board but it might be good to get at least the principal/other teachers on your side before expanding too far.

In my one experience with this a nice grassroots effort like this, initiated by a teacher, died an ugly death when the school board stopped it. Basically they and the school district admins refused to let anything happen until they were convinced that noone could ever do anything "bad" online. Here Bad was a largely undefined quantity. Unfortunately this stoppage meant that the system that had been installed on volunteer time sat unused for fear that it might be. So far as I can tell the problem with this initiative was that they sought permission rather than forgiveness and had no demonstrated successes of students learning on the system.

Ultimately we got computer updates largely through the efforts of one students' father who, like you, just dove in and helped. He of course had to fight uphill battles with the district but thankfully was aided in that by the school as a whole.

With that in mind I'd say you should get your fiancee to wow the rest of the school particularly the principal with what has been and can be accomplished. Then if the school board comes butting in you'll at least have an ally and demonstrated cases of kids learning and not doing "bad things" with the machines.

On a more practical note you might also clue the school into freely available tutoring systems. Many educational researchers put their work online for free meaning that there are Intelligent Tutoring Systems that your fiancee's class can access online. One such repository is the LeanLab at Carnegie Mellon University: http://www.learnlab.org/

Good Luck.

Also, as reported here radiaton has been deliberately fed to children in Massachusetts. In this case it was part of a nutritional study by Quaker Oats and MIT to be able to argue that nutrition touches more of the body. As does radiation.

Part of the days of Eugenics in America. Brougt to you by the Human Betterment Foundation

At about the same time as part of Operation Plowshares the U.S. Military proposed using atomic bombs to dredge a harbor in Alaska. As is noted it was stopped over "concerns over the impact on the local population". Or rather the local native population's steadfast refusal to have atomic bombs detonated right next to their village.

Lest you think this is silly though, as noted on the Project Chariot page, when faced with the direct refusal of the population to have a bomb detonated next to their home the Atomic Energy Agency just went ahead and irradiated the place anyway without telling anyone.

Although the detonation never occurred, the site was radioactively contaminated by an experiment to estimate the effect on water sources of radioactive ejecta landing on tundra plants and subsequently washed down and carried away by rains. Material from a 1962 nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site was transported to the Chariot site in August 1962, used in several experiments, then buried. Thirty years later, the disposal was discovered in archival documents by a University of Alaska researcher. State officials immediately traveled to the site and found low levels of radioactivity at a depth of two feet (60 cm) in the burial mound. Outraged residents of the Inupiat village of Point Hope demanded the removal of the contaminated soil, which the government did at considerable expense.

Assholes.

See also here.

It is worth noting, for those interested in electronic voting and vote security that Barb Simons is credited in the effort to get the ACM to set their policy on electronic voting. Just as importantly the helped to move the League of Women Voters from their pro-DRE stance on electronic voting to the new SARA stance which calls for auditability and recountability.

I found her comments on Open Source in the article quite insightful too. Not that I am against it but t isn't a security panacea.

In recent years the advice I've been given, from people who pay more attention to stretching than I, is that the warm up is important to ensure that you don't stress the muscles before they are flexible enough. It isn't about stretching them out so much as making sure that the muscles, tendons, ligaments, are warm enough for exercise without risking a tear. This is different then streatching out the muscles which should be done after the exercise when they are at their warmest.

The purpose then of post-workout stretching is to increase flexibility or prevent the reduction in flexibility that some kinds of exercise (e.g. powerlifting) bring.

This makes sense to me as stretching cold muscles can damage and weaken them because they aren't ready to stretch while failing to stretch muscles causes them to seize up.

Back when I was boring my friends with mention of the UKs plans to store all e-mails (precursors to the current black box route) one of my friends pointed out that not even the Chinese Communist party has considered doing that. They have their filters and so on but they really are one step behind the Brits when it comes to spying on their own people. And, as she readily pointed out the Chinese people would be pissed off by it. I guess the Brits are more cowed.