Gender-based affirmative action in science & engineering education

It would appear that science and engineering schools have been trying fairly hard to boost the percentage of women in their programs.

The politically correct take on the gender imbalance in science & technology programs seems to be that it's just a failure of marketing:

“The way engineering traditionally has been marketed doesn’t appeal as much to women as to men,” said Carrie-Ann Miller, director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at Stony Brook University

This whole issue seems like small potatoes at first glance. But could gender-based affirmative action in science & technology education (and employment) have unintended consequences? An Instapundit commenter writes:

I work for a very large high tech company. I presently manage a research team in the corporate lab. The problem is that there is no encouragement for American non-minority males to go into science and engineering because we will almost never hire them. Instead we are being forced to look for technical females and under-represented minorities. Since very few American females choose engineering, we end up hiring Chinese and Indian women. The universities that I work with tell me that they find it almost impossible to recruit American males to PhD programs. I believe within less than a generation we will be in deep trouble, technically, in this country, and we’ll be without the means and capability to maintain the highly sophisticated civilization that we’ve constructed.

Del. Mike Smigiel critiques Maryland LCV's scorecard

Some highlights:

He wonders what an early voting bill has to do with the environment:

three years ago, in the 2005 – 2006 “scorecard” the League rated legislators on whether they were good or bad environmentalist based on how they voted on the “early voting bill” (SB-478) and a second score was given on whether the legislators voted to over ride the Governor’s veto on the “early voting bill”. . . . it is no accident that these two votes, which have nothing to do with the environment, were rated as pro environmental votes to make sure Republicans got at least two more bad votes on the environment than their Democratic counterparts.

He goes on to note another bias in LCV's scorecard that is less obvious but no less egregious:

the League of Conservation Voters does something inexplicable that usually will help Democrats and hurt Republicans. The League of Conservation Voters is only counting the first vote on bills and not the later vote on the same bill, after amendments, which is passed and then sent to the governor for his signature, where it then becomes law. It would seem if your intent is tell the public where a legislator is on the environment it would be better to tell them where he or she ended up and not where they started out. It is much more likely that Democrats would vote for a bill that is full of what Republicans may consider to be excessive regulations or taxes when it is first introduced. It is usually after a public hearing and an opportunity to amend bills in committee and on the floor that Republicans would come on board and find that the bill, having gone through compromise, is now acceptable.

"How to Think About Oil Spills"

Stephen Hayward gathers relevant facts:

Over the last 50 years, offshore drilling spills, including the Deepwater Horizon, have unleashed a little more than 1 million tons of oil; tanker accidents have spilled 4 million. For every offshore drilling spill, there have been seven tanker spills, many much larger than the Exxon Valdez, only the 40th largest tanker spill on record.

He writes without hysteria and points to relevant studies

The ecological effects of the Ixtoc 1 disaster should be borne in mind when we hear claims that the Deepwater spill will inflict large and long-lasting effects. According to a 1981 study by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, about half of the Ixtoc 1 oil evaporated, and another 25 percent sank to the bottom of the ocean, much of it broken up by wave action and chemical dispersants.

...

A recent study of seven basic ecosystem types, and their most typical perturbations, found that of ecosystems that make a recovery from various catastrophic events (and, it must be noted, not all do), ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills were the fastest to recover, often within a span of one to four years.

He speculates reasonably:

While we still don’t know the precise cause of the failure of the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon (a technology that has successfully prevented spills in more than 150 offshore drilling accidents over the last 40 years), early accounts suggest that the same factors that cause most airplane crashes came into play: complacency and sloppy maintenance.

And he comes to sensible conclusions:

As some environmentalists have come to regret, the limitation of nuclear power after 1979 resulted in the expansion of coal-fired electricity instead, but coal is now environmental enemy number one because of its high greenhouse gas emissions. A halt to offshore drilling now would be equally ill-advised.
...
In short, there is considerable risk that overreaction to the BP/Deepwater spill will have second-order environmental impacts that could be cumulatively worse than the spill itself, both for the Gulf and for other environmental arenas.

Another reason to vote Ehrlich over O'Malley

The mainstream left, which O'Malley personifies, tends to flunk Econ 101.

Partly because their rhetoric on jobs, unemployment, regulation and so tends to fly in the face of basic economic principles.

Even Tom Friedman knows it

"Good jobs...don't come from government."

The gaping chasm on jobs policy between Ehrlich and O'Malley

If this bit from Len Lazarick at MarylandReporter.com isn't a clear and significant difference between Bob Ehrlich and Martin O'Malley, I don't know what is:

Republican Ehrlich favors an approach that calls for government to get out of the way of business, cutting taxes and reducing regulations – or at least making them more consistent and business-friendly.

Democrat O’Malley seeks to show what government has done to foster job and business growth by getting involved. He talks about tax credits, spending on education, cracking down on predatory business practices and overcoming the state’s “pathological modesty” about its positive business environment.

The proper role of government in job creation has only two steps:

1. Make the tax structure and regulatory environment as simple, minimal and predictable as possible while still accomplishing the basic/core/necessary tasks of government.
2. Step aside and let the private sector create the jobs.
   

If you care about the economy, employment and job creation, please vote for Ehrlich. To donate or volunteer for his campaign, go here.

"Higher education's bubble is about to burst"

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent essay up at the Examiner.

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble.

...

Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier -- kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

For insights on a possible future in post-bubble academia, Glenn points to a book called DIY U. by Any Kamenetz (4 stars on Amazon):

My question is whether traditional academic institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether -- as Anya Kamenetz suggests in her new book, "DIY U" -- the real pioneering will be in online education and the work of "edupunks" who are more interested in finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing interests.

UPDATE: Another book by Curtis Bonk seems to have a similar message (and gets more stars on Amazon): The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. From an Amazon reviewer:

Bonk shows us that transformative change is coming, and it won't be stopped. He explains that technology, openness, and unprecedented access to knowledge are removing control of the learning process from institutions and placing it into the hands of the individual. This change is nothing short of revolutionary.

A riveting narrative, "The World is Open" will undoubtedly draw comparison to Friedman's seminal work "The World is Flat," but this book is perhaps more important.

Does organic farming have an "enormous carbon footproot"

Gary Jones thinks it does, as do others that he points to:

Organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view.
. . .
Farms only represent ~2% of US CO2 emissions but around a third of the anthropogenic methane (a gas which is 21-24 times as potent as a greenhouse gas) and nearly 80% of the anthropogenic nitrous oxide (295-310 times as potent as CO2).
. . .
a major climate change advantage almost universally claimed for Organic (no fossil energy to produce the N), actually represents a carbon footprint that is enormous.

Chris Christie rocks

He gives a clinic on how to forthrightly stand up to teachers' unions. We need more like him in Maryland.

Andrew Breitbart as "Rage Machine": a slanted profile in the New Yorker

Rebecca Mead's article on Andrew Breitbart is unfair and one-sided. She disdains him. Her revulsion can be guessed at just from the title (Rage Machine), but the adjectives she uses remove any doubt.

If you take her text, remove the quotes, remove Breitbart's self-characterizations, and filter out everything else except the descriptive words that Mead herself uses to paint her picture of Breitbart, you find mostly words with overwhelmingly negative connotations. Here's the list:

"hostile"
"psychotic"
"bluster"
"petty"
"seething, sneering voice"
"outbursts"
"brazen, blustering provocation disorientingly couched as a reasoned response"
"cultivated oafishness
"constitutionally adversarial"
"out of line" and
"feverishly cluttered" (his main website)

When I think of Andrew, a very different set of words comes to mind: likable, energetic, clear, blunt, persistent, colorful, engaging, factual, intelligent, fair, articulate, perceptive, and quick.

The few times that Mead uses adjectives with positive connotations, she quickly undercuts them with "buts":

• She describes him as "effective", but it's due to his "rhetoric" and "comic demagoguery" (with the implication that he is fooling or tricking people somehow).
  
• He can be amusing, but "his aesthetic ... [emphasizes] outrage over nuance, and comedy over comprehension"; "his tone [is] exquisitely balanced between humor and menace."
• He's "tall and burly" but has "eyes the color of Windex, silver hair that he sometimes forgets is no longer blond, and jowls that he wobbles for emphasis when he wishes to express outrage."

If you don't count these backhanded compliments, Mead use only two descriptive words in the longish profile that would seem to carry positive connotations for most New Yorker readers: "urbane" and "Jewish."

Jared DeMarinis has a bad idea

Jared is director of "Candidacy and Campaign Finance" for the Maryland State Board of Elections. He and Linda Lamone seem to have plans for regulating the use social networking sites by political campaigns:

A push to pass the new rules in time for the current election cycle could place Maryland among the first in the country to oversee how campaigns use social networking sites. California and Wisconsin are considering similar measures but have faced opposition from groups that fear an infringement on First Amendment rights.

The board is to vote on the rules today, but final approval from a state legislative committee will still be required. DeMarinis says he is fast-tracking the approval process in hopes of getting the rules in place for November.

Maryland does not need more limitations on political speech.

Four books that aren't gloomy enough about "sustainability" to be bestsellers

John Tierney via Muck & Mystery:

Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”? Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley.

Governor O'Malley on the Maryland state budget: Pot. ketle

Marta Mossburg reports:

Last week the nonpartisan Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting released Maryland's "Financial State of the State," and the news is not good. It says the state's retirement system is underfunded by $33 billion as a result of overpromising benefits while underfunding obligations. For example, in fiscal 2009 the state set aside $1.3 billion for retirement benefits even though actuaries said a minimum of $2.2 billion should have been deposited.

The result: The state has 49 cents for every dollar promised to state workers. Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, did not create this problem. Underfunding of the pension plan started in 2002, said R. Dean Kenderdine, executive director of the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System.

But O'Malley has continued to raid funds dedicated to transportation and cleaning the Chesapeake Bay, issue debt to pay for current projects -- and push massive pension obligations into the future, increasing their cost, at the same time he claims fiscal responsibility.

His sleight of hand to balance the budget shows that he is also living in the financial "fantasy land" that his ads accuse former Gov. Robert Ehrlich of inhabiting.

For a variety of financial reports from the Maryland Comptroller's office from the 1990s to the present day, go here.

New "electronic bill review system" for MD state legislature

Sounds like a good thing. It would also be nice if this system were open to the public.

Crowdsourcing works.

A rarity in Baltimore

Last Sunday, after nearly a decade in Baltimore, I finally saw my first Baltimore Oriole. The feathered kind, icterus galbula, not the human baseball-playing species.

What a gorgeous bird. Smaller than I expected, and sad that there aren't more of them around.

Mrs. BaltoNorth and I saw it during a very pleasant six-hour kayak ride on the Gunpowder Falls. We went from Hereford all the way down to Loch Raven.

[N.B. I didn't take the photo. It's from Wikipedia.]

Obamacare conundrum: Good, universal, cheap. Pick two.

Andrea McArdle updates the old engineers' dictum after seeing (1) big losses among Massachusetts health insurers, (2) new subscribers gaming the system and (2) a governor who doesn't seem to understand that price controls never work.

President Obama, please take note.

Cooking vegetables the Italian way

This cook book sounds like it might be a good one:
Red, White & Greens: The Italian Way with Vegetables, by Faith Willinger.

I like how it's organized:

Ms. Willinger treats each of her nineteen headline vegetables in a separate chapter

This organization allowed one reviewer to get these results:

The other day I opened the fridge and discovered that I have some zuchhini. I opened up Red White and Greens under "zuchhini", and within a little while I was eating wonderful zuchhini carpaccio. The next day I found out I still have some leeks from my last shopping. I opened the book under "leek", and discovered how simple it would be to make roasted leek. It was delicous.

On the other hand, Jack Bishop's book has more stars on Amazon. It's called The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook: 350 Essential Recipes for Inspired Everyday Eating. From a highly rated Amazon review:

He gives these extraordinary yet simple recipes and encourages you to think for yourself. ... take what is simple and good and bring it together. Inspired. This is one of those cookbooks that doesn't just give you recipes but gives you ideas. Bishop also simplifies some recipes that have been intimidating to me. He makes polenta so simple, I have made it twice now while busy doing other things. ... All the recipes in this book can be made without fuss and turn out impressively. This is a cookbook for real people, who don't have time to cook all day, and normal kitchens. This is absolutely my favorite cookbook.

Race and ethnicity in the 2010 US Census

The Census guy came to our house yesterday. I listed my race as "some other."

Looking at the 2010 Census form, one wonders how and why they selected the racial categories and subgroups. There are seven racial subcategories for Asians, five for Pacific Islanders, and four ethnic subcategories for Hispanics. But no racial subcategories for Blacks or Whites.

Here's a partial answer to the "how and why" question.

Another thing that struck me as odd: the organization responsible for determining the categories is OMB.


UPDATE: Wikipedia traces the evolution of racial categories in the US Census from 1790 all the way to the present day, here.

How to close your EZPass Maryland account

I had some SNAFUs closing out my EZPass MD account recently so I thought I'd pass on what I learned as a public service. Here are four ways to cancel:

In person:

Bring your account number to one of the EZPass MD Stop-In Centers.
Ask them to close the account.
(Just be aware that the center at 6000 Pulaski Highway is not the 6000 Pulaski Highway in Baltimore City. It's way north past Havre de Grace in Perryville.*)

2. BY PHONE

Call 410-888-321-6824.
Press 9 to bypass the menu and speak to a person.
Ask them to close the account.

3. ONLINE

EZPass buries the "Close My Account" link in the bowels of their website. Here's how to find it:

Go to ezpassmd.com
Click MY ACCOUNT
If you don't have an online account, set one up.
Log in.
Click ACCOUNT PROFILE
Click the CLOSE MY ACCOUNT link

4. BY FAX

Fax your request to 410-633-6618.

That's it. Good luck!!

*Don't ask how I know this.

Minimum "N sizes" chosen by states for NCLB AYP reporting

Of all the states, Maryland has the smallest "N-size" by far.

N-SIZE: STATES
----------------------------------------------------------
05 : MD
10 : LA SD UT
11 : NH
16 : CO
20 : ME MN
25 : AK AR NM NV
30 : FL IA IN KS MI MO MT NE NJ NY OH OK PR WA WY
34 : ID
40 : AL AZ CT DE GA HI MA MS NC PA SC VT WI
42 : AZ OR
45 : IL RI TN
50 : CA TX VA WV

Missing: KY and ND


You can also find N-sizes for many states on this "accountability illusion" data map.

If I remember my statistics correctly, statisticians recommend--in most situations-- a sample size no smaller than 30 or 40 to have reasonable confidence that the sample is representative of a population.

Almost all of the states were in this ballpark.

My guess is that the folks from the Maryland Department of Education who chose the tiny N-size of five would flunk Statistics 101 and perhaps get forty lashes from their statistics teacher. Nancy Grasmick, are you listening?

To find the reasoning behind your state's N-size, go here, open the PDF for your state's "Consolidated State Application Accountability Workbook" and scroll about two-thirds of the way through the document to "critical element" #5.5.

Another way President Obama is holding back the economy

James Pethokoukis:

But the wonks aren’t driving U.S trade policy in the Obama administration. The political team is. Its priority is passing healthcare reform. To pass healthcare reform, Obama needs his core union support. And a push for new trade agreements would alienate Big Labor.

So Obama has not nudged Congress to pass long-stalled treaties with Colombia, Korea and Panama. Instead, the emphasis has been on get-tough actions such as slapping preliminary duties on tires from China and bricks from Mexico.

As goes California, so goes Baltimore County?

I've been wondering lately how far down this road we are in the Baltimore County Public Schools:

The school systems of California’s major cities are broken; the wealthy praise them and flee, and the poor complain about their inadequacy, but insist on the sort of identity “pride” politics curriculum and staffing that ensure the inadequacy.

On the subtleties of sales & why people buy

Gary Jones at Muck and Mystery:

I know the risk of being sensible when dealing with customers. They do not want to hear the pros and cons of your product. They want you to reassure them that they are making a wise purchase. It's part of what they are paying for. They want to have a satisfying buying experience as well as acquiring a good product. They don't want to be cheated out of the pleasure of making a buy.

That's part of why I don't do the selling. I'd be honest - it's a mental disorder - and so deny my customer an important portion of what they seek.

Ayuh.

A "sudden acceleration" problem even bigger than Toyota's

Glenn Reynolds:

Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.

How to put the the insurance back into health "insurance"

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute makes the case for high-deductible health care insurance:

But both sides seem curiously unwilling to address the most important participant in the health care equation - the consumer.

Democrats appear to see consumers only as a class needing protection. Their focus is almost exclusively on government action.

Republicans at least give lip service to a consumer-focused health care system, but seem reluctant to really endorse proposals that shift more risk and responsibility to those consumers.

Perhaps that is because in the long-run, the only way to spend less on health care is to consume less health care.

Two new speed cameras giving out $40 tickets near Baltimore County schools

The first two cameras--out of fifteen planned--are located in Dundalk and Halethorpe:

One focuses on westbound lanes on the 7000 block of Dunman Way near Dundalk Middle School and Dundalk Elementary School, while the other is trained on eastbound lanes of the 1200 block of Sulphur Spring Road in Halethorpe, near Arbutus Middle School. The cameras went into operation Monday.

If you're from District 42 and are wondering who is responsible for the speed camera law, you can blame (or thank, depending on your point of view) Del. Steve Lafferty and Del. Sue Aumann. Both of them voted for speed cameras last year.

I'm with Del. Bill Frank and Senator Jim Brochin. Both voted against the cameras.

Obama borrows from Nixon playbook in bid to lower health care costs

What is it with left-of-center public servants emulating Richard Nixon these days?

As Reason's Steve Chapman sees it, President Obama has hopped on the Nixon policy bandwagon in a big way:

So how does Obama intend to make health insurance affordable? He wants the federal government to regulate premiums from coast to coast.

This approach mirrors Nixon's disastrous wage and price control program. Chapman relates how it worked out for Nixon:

Nixon's own chief economist, Herbert Stein, admitted that the administration eventually had to give up because the program was "a total disaster." Among the unwanted side effects: "Cattle were being withheld from market, chickens were drowned, and the food store shelves were being emptied." Motorists had to wait in line for hours to buy gasoline. At one point, Americans faced a nationwide shortage of toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. Oh, and the inflation rate didn't fall. It rose.

I wonder what President Obama will try when he finds out that price controls don't work. Ford-style sloganeering?

A good article on AIM and Dr. Hairston's grilling in Annapolis last week

Here it is, from Bryan Sears:

Delegates and senators from Baltimore County said they didn't get a lot of answers out of Baltimore County Public Schools Superintendent Joe Hairston last week . . .

Not many people believe this:

Hairston told legislators Feb. 18 that the directive had been sent out without his knowledge, while he was on medical leave for a double knee replacement.

"While all of this was going on, I was not on duty," Hairston said. "I came back on duty and corrected all this."

This is accurate:

Much of the two-hour meeting with Hairston was fraught with tension. More than once, legislators indicated frustration or irritation as Hairston, who attended with Joanne Murphy and Ed Parker, president and a member of the Board of Education, respectively, declined to answer questions, citing confidentiality or personnel issues.

The hearing was filled with momemts like this:

That prompted Sen. Jim Brochin, a Democrat who represents the Towson area, to ask if Hairston could offer any specifics on the communications issue.

Hairston, Murphy and Parker sat mute. Brochin asked a second time, then moved on.

Del. Wade Kach, a former teacher, is doing some good things:

Kach said a majority in the House of Delegates is willing to ask Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler to investigate AIM on two fronts. . . whether AIM's implementation represents a conflict of interest [and] whether a school system committee studying AIM violated the state's open meetings act . . .

"This is a big deal," said Kach, who taught for 30 years in the school system. "People are very upset."

How not to respond to angry parents and concerned legislators (the AIM saga continues)

[UPDATE: After getting some feedback this morning, I've changed a few words in the sixth paragraph. It's more accurate now. When someone points out a mistake in this blog, I try to fix it quickly. In this case, within three hours. If only Dr. Hairston and BCPS were so responsive and so concerned about truth and transparency. I submitted a long list of AIM questions to BCPS/Greenwood two or three weeks ago. I still haven't gotten a response.]

In the wake of Superintendent Joe Hairston's recent visit with the PTA, BCPS communications staffer Charles Herndon tried to smooth things over with a letter to the Forge Flyer. It starts:

Dr. Hairston was gracious enough to meet with the [Baltimore County PTA] Council

Gracious? It was not gracious of Dr. Hairston to meet with the PTA. It's his job to meet with important constituencies of the school system. Maybe Mr. Herndon meant the least common meaning of gracious:

Condescendingly courteous; indulgent

Yes, that captures it. Dr. Hairston often treats key stakeholders, such as the county's top-level PTA, like ignorant kids. As Jean Suda put it after the PTA Council meeting with Dr. Hairston:

I left . . . with the impression of having watched an old episode of "Father Knows Best." [Dr. Hairston] was there to hear us, but not to listen in a way that might lead to any modification of his thinking. . . . If we don't agree with him, there must be something wrong with us.

Dr. Hairston, we don't like being treated this way.

Mr. Herndon continues:

Above all, Dr. Hairston tried during the meeting to bring two things to the discussion that have been sorely missing – context and accurate information.

Accurate information has indeed been sorely missing. Because, except for some Orwellian "straight talk" like this, Greenwood doesn't give us much information.

Parents [Many people, including parents and politicians,] were so upset by [after reading Jean's account of] the PTA council meeting that [according to a well-connected observer] state legislators [stepped up the] pressured [on] Dr. Hairston and two Board of Ed members (JoAnn Murphy and Ed Parker) to answer questions at a hearing in Annapolis last Thursday. After receiving a few hours of Dr. Hairston's "accurate information, " state delegates and senators responded with comments such as these:

• "Was that a yes or a no, Dr. Hairston?"
  
• "You sound like President Clinton parsing the definition of 'is'."
  
• "I'm very disappointed that you've been pleading the Fifth all over the place."
• "None of you [Hairston, Murphy and Parker] seem to want to answer our questions."
  

Something is wrong here--really, really wrong. I'm still not sure exactly what it is, but I hope to find out.

An assessment of AIM from an IT perspective

I emailed this letter six days ago (early on 2/15/10) to twenty or more people at BCPS. I got no responses.

Dear BCPS Board Members,

A parent's notes of the February 4th PTA council meeting with Dr. Hairston include this line: "most importantly, at the end of the discussion, the Superintendent revealed that he intends to implement AIM this spring." I'm not sure whether this statement is accurate or inaccurate. Either way, it's an indication of a serious problem with the Baltimore County Public Schools.

I have been a BCPS parent for over eight years. I also have a decade and a half of experience in the information technology industry. In those 15 years I have not observed any IT project that was so consistently and seriously flawed as AIM. Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. CONCEPTION. Neither the superintendent nor his staff have ever, to my knowledge, communicated why we need AIM.

2. PLANNING. There is no evidence of planning, whether it be cost estimates or implementation plans.

3. DESIGN. The designers have fallen into one of the worst mistakes in the IT business: building a system to meet the vague wishes of management without taking time to understand the specific needs of the folks who enter the data. This is a guaranteed recipe for GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

4. USABILITY: The AIM application is clumsy and unnecessarily time-consuming. The user interface is very poorly constructed, even if one judges it based on 15-year-old pre-internet standards.

5. TESTING. BCPS claims that AIM has been "rigorously tested," but they refuse to divulge any details of test plans, benchmarks or test results.

6. IMPLEMENTATION. The superintendent sprang the implementation on unsuspecting teachers and parents in a December surprise. One teacher described it as "like Pearl Harbor."

In each of these phases, BCPS leadership has communicated poorly, failed to listen and demonstrated a disturbing lack of transparency.

AIM is the epitome of a poorly thought out, poorly designed and poorly implemented program. But it keeps rising from the dead like a zombie. Will you please help us kill it for good?

Sincerely,

Dave Greene
BCPS parent
Member, "End AIM Now!" Facebook group
BaltoNorth.blogspot.com

BCPS Board of Education:

Ms. JoAnn Murphy
Mr. H. Edward Parker
Dr. Joe Hairston
Ms. Jacqueline Camp
Mr. James Coleman
Mr. Earnest Hines
Mr. Rodger Janssen
Ms. Ramona Johnson
Ms. Margaret O'Hare
Mr. Joseph Pallozzi
Ms. Valerie Roddy
Mr. Lawrence Schmidt
Mr. David Uhlfelder

I wonder why this never happened to me.

Gary Jones, prefacing a post on eco-quarreling:

A woman that I'd been seeing once pushed me through a plate glass window in a rage due to my political views that Republicans were mean and Democrats were incompetent, or the reverse, I wasn't sure which.

Lawrence Kane's new book comes highly recommended by Dr. Helen

He has excellent thoughts on how to defuse potentially violent situations. Dr. Helen's interview with Kane is here.

The book: Little Black Book of Violence: What Every Young Man Needs to Know About Fighting.

Matthew Yglesias asks permission to opine

They were talking about this excellent story in the NY Times. It describes some grandiosely unethical habits of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. Yglesias timidly describes the story as "pretty great." He needs a tag-line for his blog. How about this:

"Self-censorship and a soupcon of opinion"

His temporizing is yet another indication that we're a long way from achieving a post-racial society.

Glenn Loury as usual is lucid, entertaining, informative and on point.

"It's the economic uncertainty, stupid"

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

Did he believe that the healthcare reform and related tax proposals, the proposed cap and trade legislation and the consequent increase in energy costs, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the agitation for higher taxes on the wealthy, the proposal to increase corporate tax rates, the proposal to increase capital gains taxes, the trial floating of ideas such as a national VAT and removal of the earnings cap on FICA, the more robust regulatory bureaucracy . . . did he believe any of these uncertainties were depressing hiring?

He stated yes, without a doubt and proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like.

It’s obvious to me that the Obama administration has no grasp on what their 'flavor of the day’ tax and regulatory proposals do to business decision making,

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, are you listening? President Obama?

via Glenn

Social networking for sick people: PatientsLikeMe.com

[UPDATE: a formula stimulated by a friend's comment: social network + shared data = better patient outcomes.]

Wow.

If you or a loved one is dealing with a major (or minor) health problem, you really MUST check out PatientsLikeMe.com.

My first reaction to the website: brilliantly conceived and wonderfully implemented.

I've only taken a quick look at it, but the site lets anyone with a disease or medical problem find others going through exactly the same ordeal. You can share your personal story and your opinions of the drugs and treatments you're going through and see what others think of theirs.

The site also lets you look at aggregate data. For example you can see which medicines and treatments are most commonly prescribed for your condition.

And that seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Watch the Jamie Heywood's inspiring TED video:


Then check out the PatientsLikeMe.com website.

Del. Wade Kach asks Maryland A.G. Gansler to investigate BCPS conflict of interest on AIM project

Here's the latest on AIM ethics and conflict-of-interest from the East County Times:

Retired county public school teacher Delegate Wade Kach (R-5B) is in the process of asking Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler to look into possible conflicts of interest involving the Articulated Instruction Module (AIM) which was prepared for grades K-12. . . . One of Kach's concerns is that Dr. Barbara Dezmon, an assistant school superintendent and creator of the program, may be a recipient of royalties if AIM is purchased by other school systems in the future. "The person who developed this program is an employee of the Board of Education. The program should be the property of the Board, not an individual," Kach opined.

Thank you, Del. Kach.

Dr. Dezmon, Assistant to the Superintendent for Equity and Assurance, has been feeling the heat for months now. If she really believes in the AIM program for its own sake, she should do the right thing and sign over any AIM-related IP rights to Baltimore County.

Another issue: BCPS seems to be violating the open meetings law.

A third question came to mind when he learned that the meeting of the committee to review AIM, handpicked by Superintendent Hairston, was closed to the public. In addition, he was told by Cheryl Bost, TABCO president, who is not a member of the AIM committee, that she was escorted out of the room when she tried to listen in. "It appears that the open meetings law is not being followed," he noted.

Dr. Hairston's long-standing practice of secretive mushroom management* is fast becoming a major issue among BCPS parents. The inner workings of the Greenwood bureaucracy need a triple dose of sunlight. The Rx for BCPS: Transparency. Transparency. Transparency.

*Mushroom Management: When a company's staff [and other stakeholders] are treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark, covered with dung, and – when grown big enough – canned**.

**See, for example, AIM scapegoat and former BCPS Northwest Area Assistant Superintendent Bill Lawrence. Many BCPS teachers believe that Lawrence's transfer/demotion is Hairston's way of diverting AIM-related heat away from himself.

It's about freakin' time

The MSM starts to look closely at IPCC:

WASHINGTON – A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.

The flaws — and the erosion they've caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The work of the climate change panel, or IPCC, is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it really is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists.

No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world.

"A lot of stuff in there was just not very good," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the first report. "A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good."

Kudos to Seth Borenstein and the AP.

via Walter Russell Mead:

AP Story Breaks US Media Wall of Denial on IPCC Mess; Al Gore Still Silent

Pachauri FAIL

Walter Russell Mead sums things up.

"Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work"

A new book by David Schoenbrod et al. Based on these two blurbs from Amazon, it it might be worth a look:

"Our environmental laws badly need re-thinking. This book makes that case and then charts a course for action. A straightforward, comprehensive, and persuasive case for reform."--William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1973 and 1983-1985 (William D. Ruckelshaus )

"The authors remind us that a number of our environmental laws are not achieving their important goals. Breaking the Logjam documents the power of well-regulated markets to achieve significant improvements in air quality and challenges us to incorporate those lessons more broadly, hopefully provoking a valuable national discussion on these complex issues."-Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund

Spring training starts in 10 days!

To get in the spirit, here are some articles on strength training for baseball. I can't vouch for the quality, but some of them seem worth a look:

12 month baseball strength training program

Plyometric training

Forearm & rotator cuff exercises

Comprehensive baseball weight training