Bad Week

I had a bad week. I was stressed about work, distracted by March Madness. I'll make up the posts I missed today, and do better.

T.D.I.H. - Feb 15

On this date in 2005, the web site Youtube was launched. As a brief perusal of my blog will illustrate, the site has become nearly ubiquitous in the six years since.

So Far, So Good....

I have now posted more articles this month, with 11 days to go still, than I posted in all of 2009 and 2010 combined.........

Reynolds, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Book!

HOUSE VOTES TO REPEAL OBAMACARE: “The House voted on Wednesday to repeal the sweeping healthcare law enacted last year, as Republicans made good on a central campaign pledge and laid down the first major policy marker of their new majority. The party-line vote was 245-189, as three Democrats joined all 242
Republicans in supporting repeal.” Party-line vote? I think you mean bipartisan vote.

Heh.

1/11/11 at 1:11 !!!!!!!!!!!

First!

Every Time You Fall Down......

OK...I know you have heard this before, but I'm going to try to actually use this blog this year. Wish me luck.

Hello, my Name is Gary and I am.....

...addicted to the Internet.

My computer broke down last Wed around 1:00 PM. It froze up and when I tried to restart it, Windows wouldn't work right. I tried to fix it, and then reboot it and nothing worked. I was without internet access until I went to my parents' house around 1:00 PM on Friday. 48 hours without being able to log on. I nearly went crazy! My whole life was disrupted.

Yet 15 years ago, I had no internet access. I managed pretty well.

Stop for a few minutes and imagine your life with no:

Internet
cable or satellite TV
cell phones
game consoles and handheld games
MP3 player

Scary huh?

Some "Inconvenient Truths" Pt. 2

I have spent a long time arguing AGW and Climategate, both here and at other blogs as a skeptic.

One of the most common rejoinders, especially from a particular lefty named David K, is that this may be messy and ugly, but the science is still good, and no paper or conclusion will have to be withdrawn.

Looks like that argument just fell by the wayside:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers
by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the
United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to
incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global
warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that
those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have
admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular
science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has
also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone
interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at
Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not
supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most
serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to
ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate
change.

So, the IPCC, in the most important document on AGW, one supported by "thousands of scientists" and the "scientific consensus", one written and peer reviewed by the top scientists in the field of AGW, a document designed to force a radical change in the economies of the world and transfer immense quantities of wealth, contains a section that relies on no science, but instead a pop science article based on a telephone interview.

I'm betting that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Update 2/22/09: Predictably, David K rejected my example above. Well here is another example, one that explicitly states that a study published in one of the top journals in the field has been withdrawn:

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise
due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.
The
study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in
its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007
report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used
data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between
7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

Happy Birthday

My blog is five years old today!

Congratulations!

One of my regular (daily) reads, Althouse has just hosted an announcement that the author and host has become engaged to get married to one of her regular readers/commenters.

It's a funny world sometimes. Given the fact that she lives in Madison Wisconsin and he lives in Cinncinati, Ohio they would have never met except for her blog.

Best wishes to both of them, and now we'll see what effect this has on her blog.

Whether the Future?

One of my current daily reads (The Other McCain) has posted a set of rules and guidelines designed to garner your blog a million hits. They aren't actually that hard to follow. The question is, do I go for it? It will require a little more attention and dedication to this blog than I've been able to muster at times. Maybe I will just ease my way into it.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Luck of the Irish to ya!

No, you aren't imagining things, I'm actually writing on my blog. Did you ever get a craving for a chili cheese and onion omelet at 5:30 A.M.? I did. Ummm ummmm good.

There are two reasons I haven't been writing on my blog. The first is my addiction to World of Warcraft. ( I think 4 hours plus a night is an addiction) The second is the fact that I read lots of other people's blogs, and comment on them. By venting on other perople's sites, I really deplete my need to write here. I'm going to try and be better, but we all know how that went last time.

One of the things that has been bugging me lately is ambulance chasing lawyers and their commercials. I am currently off track (on vacation) and usually have the TV on in the background when I am at home. I can't tell you the number of commercials I have had to endure that feature some law firm trying to gin up business for a class action suit against a drug, or surgical procedure or some environmental factor.

Look I know we need lawyers to redress wrongs. But the system has broken down. No instead of lawsuits to correct wrongs, we have lawsuits to enrich law firms. Folks if they can afford to put on the number of commercials I'm seeing, they are making upwards of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars on these things. For all I know, they're billing the cost of these commercials and they aren't even coming out of the law firm's profits.

These law firms make huge profits from these class actions suits, and the plantiffs get a pittance. It is not unusual for a law firm to make millions and the average plantiff to get less than $1000. Much of the time the lawyers create a huge class of plantiffs, harass the target and end settling in such a way that the lawyers make millions andthe plantiffs practically nothing. I know, i've been a plantiff in a couple of lawsuits by default, and gotten a coupon while the lawyers got a new house, car and office, plus the resources to go find another plantiff class.

One of the major reasons health care is so expensive today is these lawsuits. First the insurance for doctors goes up to pay for defending and settling these lawsuits, so doctors have to charge more for their services. Secondly, doctors end up ordering unnecessary tests in order to cover their ass. Of course, now that's not even safe, since I just saw a commercial trying to create a class action about MRI tests.

We need to close about half of the law schools in this country.

Intervention

Hello everybody, my name is Gary and I'm addicted to WoW. (cue everyone responding "Hello Gary") The problem is, I can't use the next line, I'm still in the throes of my addiction. (If you have no idea that WoW means World of Warcraft, you're still safe.)

I started on the small stuff, like Age of Empires and Civilization. I soon moved on to Diablo. But soon I needed a bigger score. I moved on to the hard stuff, City of Heroes. I began to get my friends addicted. But I was still in control. I could handle the stuff. Then I fell into the abyss. World of Warcraft. I'd heard about this one, but stayed away from it. Then one day I heard a siren song. Just get a trial account, try it out. The next day I was at BestBuy buying a WoW battlechest. Soon I was playing the game for 12 hours at a time. (seriously...I'm a school teacher and single...which means no life and lots of free time during the summer)

Last night I was chastised by a good friend, who pointed out (among other things) that I have been neglecting this blog. So, I'm going to try and do better.

College football is coming up, and I absolutely love that sport, especially when USC is supposed to have a good year, and they are this year) Expect at least a weekly report about collge football. (end the BCS!)

It's an election year for goodness sake! Expect some political posts. I can't get excited about McCain. He's too liberal for me. However I will support him as the alternative to Obama. Seriously what exactly has Obama ever done but give a good speech from teleprompters? More to follow.

You can expect some posts about WoW for that matter.

So...I'm back, and I'll try to do better. (battle: puff pastery on Iron Chef?!? What the hell?)

I Am The Champion!

I just won the IrishTrojan's NIT pool for the second year in a row. I came in second two years ago. Go me.

The Master Of My Domain....(or at least the N.I.T.)

http://blog.brendanloy.com/2008/03/defending-champ.html

Valentine's Day For Men

Technically, Valentine's Day is supposed to be for men and women, but for a myriad of reasons has devolved into "treat women ronmantically day". So, in order to restore balance to the universe, there is a proposal to make March 14 a companion holiday for men.

Generic Blog topic #2,090,897,456,001

What are the ten greatest songs that were better as covers than the version sung by the person who wrote them?

To keep the list kosher, we'll confine the list of possible songs to those written by people who have had at least one song sung by them make it to the top ten. The song also must have been released in some form by the writer as well as been sung by someone else.

The first two people that come to my mind immediately are Carole King and Bob Dylan. I'm not a big fan of either of their voices, but they both wrote some great songs.

Behavioral Skills and Expectations

Here is an argument I am participating in on an education blog called joannejacobs.com. The beginning quote is from someone on the otherside of the argument. The discussion began with a post about disruptive students filming "out of control" teachers on their cellphones and posting them on youtube.

"I have a big problem believing that teachers who know how to teach reading and arithmetic can’t figure out how to teach behavioral skills and expectations."


Really? Why?
When did it become the role of teachers to teach behavioral skills and expectations instead of parents? Not too long ago, it was expected that students would already have behavioral skills and expectations before they entered school, and the results were rewarded and punished at home.
We used to teach behavioral skills and enforce expectations by having concrete consequences, and enforcing them uniformly and immediately. This enforcement included corporal punishment, public embarassment, and meaningful expulsion.
Then the 1960's came along and brought us the self-esteem movement and dangerous kooks like Dr. Spock.
Every animal on the planet that raises and teaches it's young uses negative reinforcement to do so. There's a reason for that...it works. We now have a society in which not only can't educators use corporal punishment, but parents are afraid to do so also, for fear of being reported for abuse. The second most effective form of negative reinforcement, shame, is also out of bounds. I have parents who have actually filed complaints on me for embarassing or shaming their child. When I explain to them their child's behavior deserved shame and embarassment they look at me like I am crazy. Shame and embarrsment have also gotten much less effective as popular culture has glorified and celebrated behavior that was once deemed shameful. There literally is no sense of guilt anymore...maybe a little chagrin at getting caught. The most popular kids at school aren't the athletes or cheerleaders, they are the thugs. The ruder and more out of control you behave, the more popular you are. Academic success and good behavior is ridiculed (school boy, acting white). Politeness is seen as weakness.
There are problems with positive reinforcement also. Praise has been completely devalued, because these students have been receiving false praise for poor performance and effort for years. Rewards are ineffective because the students feel entitled to them regardless of performance or behavior. In my experience positive reinforcement doesn't motivate those who don't earn it to try harder, it motivates them to belittle and deride positive reinforcers. As for the students who earn positive reinforcement, they tend to be the students who are going to behave and succeed anyway.
Children are not civilized beings who can be reasoned with. You cannot get children to behave by explaining to them that it is the right thing to do. Children are barbarians. They must be civilized. How do you civilize barbarians? By making the price of barbarity too high to pay, and civilization a more attractive alternative. We are refusing to punish barbarity, and instead glorify it in our popular culture.
So what are we left with? Calling home? About half of the time, the parents side with the students indiscriminately. Much of the rest of the time, the parents have no control over their kids. (This year I have had literally half a dozen parents ask me how to get their child committed to Juvenile Hall) A significant number of parents are simply unreachable. Time outs, detentions? My students either ignore them or simply see them as the cost of doing business. Suspensions? 50% of my referrals to the admin are ignored. When students are eventually suspended, they stay home for a couple of days and watch TV and play video games. (I have students who if they were literate enough would be taunting me with "go ahead and throw me in the briar patch") Expulsions? The district simply refuses to expel students. If they do, they immediately suspend the expulsion, and move the student to a different school instead. I currently have a student who has been expelled twice already this year. (once by a different district with a much better reputation who actually enforced their expulsion)
So, I have 5 classes with 35 students that I see for one hour a day, five days a week. At least half of them see no value in an education and expect (and fell entitled) for society to provide for them. They have no sense of shame or guilt, and no fear of corporal punishment. They know the worst thing that will happen to them is that eventually they will get a couple of days vacation at home.
For the sake of arguement, let's grant that I am responsible for teaching them behavioral skills and expectations? How am I supposed to do that? And if I do try to do that, when am I supposed to teach them the subject matter material?

What the @#&*% Is Going On With TV? Pt. 2

Did I really just see Ana Marie Cox on CNN's reliable sources on a panel discussing journalistic ethics?

Does no one have a sense of irony?

Sudden Revelation About Education

I was involved in a discussion about Math on an education website. One of the commenters wrote the following:


Every lesson was memorizing and practicing a new algorithm. I had the right
answer every time, but I can’t tell you the underlying purpose for even one.There needs to be some balance between memorization and understanding.

This is my response:

Here is the basis of the problem for almost every problem with modern education.
Modern education is based on curriculum written by education professionals, that is people who have been trained and educated in understanding underlying purposes and principles.
What most of them fail to understand, or have forgotten, is that the vast majority of people will never need, and do not desire, to understand the underlying purposes and principles. They just need to be able to get the right answer.

Elementary, Middle and High school students only need to learn how to get the right answers and memorize the basic facts. For something like 75% of the people, that is all they will ever need.

People who need to understand the underlying purposes and principles can go to college to learn them.