For your consideration as the year comes to a close:
Top Ten Google Tricks Track flights, do online currency conversions and learn how to search for pictures of Paris (Hilton) rather than Paris (France).
Top Ten SNL Political Skits of the Year chock full of Tina Fey funniness.
Top Ten List of Top Lists . . . or something like that. Includes links to Roger Ebert's best films and the Smoking Gun's best mug shots.
(Way more than) Ten Amazing Photos from 2008 Don't forget to see parts 2 and 3.
Ten Greatest Epic Poems none of which were written in 2008 by the way. (Talk about a lost art, none were written in the last 300 years, let alone this year.)
Top Ten All-Ages Drum Corps in the United States. Second place never felt so good.
Top Ten Songs most frequently played on my iTunes.
Top Ten Science Stories of 2008 (none of which I had heard of, sadly).
Top Ten Fugitives wanted by the FBI.
Top Ten Pieces of Technology CNET misses. I loved my Palm back in the day. Wait . . . that doesn't sound right.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
It's Here!
This probably isn't much news since most readers of my blog (both of you) already know about Michael's blog. BUT IN CASE YOU MISSED IT . . . the 2009 Prognostication Quiz is up and completely worth the twelve minutes it will take you to participate. Even if you don't know Michael you should do it cause it's fun. Truly, this is the gift that keeps on giving as Michael dutifully emails updates throughout the year providing an update on your brilliant (or pathetic) skills as a fortune teller. Go now!
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Miscellaneous
.: Conor Friedersdorf posted the kind of list I wish I could assemble. It's a collection of some of the best magazine writing of the year. I printed off the articles that were of interest to me and brought them to Indiana for the great Geriatric Christmas. It seems that Conor and I have very similar tastes in reading. (You'll note that his list includes Hanna Rosin's Atlantic piece that I wrote about earlier.) Among my favorites from his list:
.: I caught the end of On the Media while driving home today. I always want to like this show more than I actually do. I think the concept of it is great, but I guess I sometimes find the execution to be a bit lacking. The long story at the end of today's program was a good example. Brooke Gladstone explores the upcoming release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM which only gets updated every decade or so. The story is really quite interesting and good. Except for two minor quibbles: the first is I have no idea what this has to do with the media. I guess there's some passing conversation about how the press covers psychiatric illnesses and studies, but that's certainly not a major theme of the piece. More troublesome is that Gladstone wraps up a pretty interesting, well balanced, newsy piece with her own editorializing. The last minute of the report is Brooke Gladstone's take on how she thinks we should view the DSM and this latest update. Not cool! Either be a reporter or give an editorial. You can't do both in the same piece . . . especially not on a program that's supposed to be about holding the media accountable.
.: And while we're in public radio mode, it was recently announced that Weekend America is going away. Good riddance. Like Day to Day, Weekend America essentially tried to be yet another All Things Considered/Morning Edition news magazine except "lighter!" "for the weekend!" Bah. Humbug. M/NPR already has two great newsmagazines and frankly that's plenty. Is it too much to ask that they find something else to fill up the hours between them, especially on the weekend?
.: And while we're in bah, humbug mode, my Christmas was fine. I was going to post my three part treatise on why I'm not a merry man for most of December but I didn't get off my lazy butt to make it happen. Besides, the truth was I really wasn't all that miserable. I went to Indiana. I got a good book and a great disc (among other gifts). More importantly I saw my family. So I'll just save my complaints for Christmases future.
- The End by Michael Lewis on, well, the end of Wall Street
- Sebastian Junger's piece on Afghanistan
- Two Weird for The Wire about a troublesome criminal defense
- Hot for Creature about Bigfoot. Yes. That Bigfoot.
.: I caught the end of On the Media while driving home today. I always want to like this show more than I actually do. I think the concept of it is great, but I guess I sometimes find the execution to be a bit lacking. The long story at the end of today's program was a good example. Brooke Gladstone explores the upcoming release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM which only gets updated every decade or so. The story is really quite interesting and good. Except for two minor quibbles: the first is I have no idea what this has to do with the media. I guess there's some passing conversation about how the press covers psychiatric illnesses and studies, but that's certainly not a major theme of the piece. More troublesome is that Gladstone wraps up a pretty interesting, well balanced, newsy piece with her own editorializing. The last minute of the report is Brooke Gladstone's take on how she thinks we should view the DSM and this latest update. Not cool! Either be a reporter or give an editorial. You can't do both in the same piece . . . especially not on a program that's supposed to be about holding the media accountable.
.: And while we're in public radio mode, it was recently announced that Weekend America is going away. Good riddance. Like Day to Day, Weekend America essentially tried to be yet another All Things Considered/Morning Edition news magazine except "lighter!" "for the weekend!" Bah. Humbug. M/NPR already has two great newsmagazines and frankly that's plenty. Is it too much to ask that they find something else to fill up the hours between them, especially on the weekend?
.: And while we're in bah, humbug mode, my Christmas was fine. I was going to post my three part treatise on why I'm not a merry man for most of December but I didn't get off my lazy butt to make it happen. Besides, the truth was I really wasn't all that miserable. I went to Indiana. I got a good book and a great disc (among other gifts). More importantly I saw my family. So I'll just save my complaints for Christmases future.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Spotting Teacher Talent
So I posted a recent New Yorker article over on my facebook page that I thought was quite excellent. I thought this because A) Malcolm Gladwell creatively and seamlessly connects two apparently unrelated topics, namely predicting the success of a college quarterback in the NFL and predicting the success of a classroom teacher and B) because I agree with his conclusions. Turns out this has generated much discussion! Four Five comments at last check! Exciting.
So a few quick comments about the article. One of the points Gladwell makes is that we don't know who a successful teacher will be until they are actually teaching in a classroom. Very much like trying to predict which college quarterbacks are going to be successful in the NFL, there simply is no clear set of predictors that allow us to say with confidence that a person will become a good teacher. The reason this is important is we often try to address teacher quality by doing things that sound like they should help teachers, but in fact have nothing to do with successful teaching.
Currently the only tangible rewards that we offer teachers are based on their experience and educational credits. A teacher gets paid more and moves up the seniority ranks by taking more courses and teaching more years. The problem with this is that research shows us it has absolutely nothing to do with what the teacher actually does in the classroom. A bad teacher with a masters degree is still a bad teacher. A great teacher with three years of experience and a lowly BA is still a great teacher. There is no correlation between asking teaching to take more classes and the results we will see in our schools. That was the point I was trying to make in my little facebook comment.
Michael read the quote (and likely the whole article) and said that, "It would be nice if there were some more reliable marker than just students' test scores." (In all honesty, I am not entirely sure if Michael was referring to the fact that it is too bad we don't have a better marker to indicate who will be a successful teacher OR if it's too bad that we determine a successful teacher mostly by test scores. I assume it was the latter.) Which opened up the conversation about testing. Let me say briefly that I understand the point that tests alone do not indicate teacher quality. To be sure, standardized tests are blunt instruments that tell us one piece of the puzzle. I would, however, argue that they represent a pretty big piece of the puzzle.
Researchers who study school test data can clearly identify the impact that teachers have on their students test results while controlling for race and poverty. Year after year we will see that certain teacher's students continue to improve at a faster rate than average and certain teacher's students fall behind. This should make sense, right? If we believe that teachers are important to the education a student receives (as nearly everyone says) than we would expect to see that better teachers create better results. I would argue that being a loving, caring supportive teacher should not overcome the fact that students are falling academically behind after spending a year in that teacher's classroom. It would be nice to have complete, holistic evaluations of teachers (and by the way, we do know how to do that; we haven't figured out the executional and political challenges of making it happen in most public school districts), but until we're there testing data seems a pretty objective, valuable tool to begin the conversation. Much more on testing in the months to come, I'm sure.
So a few quick comments about the article. One of the points Gladwell makes is that we don't know who a successful teacher will be until they are actually teaching in a classroom. Very much like trying to predict which college quarterbacks are going to be successful in the NFL, there simply is no clear set of predictors that allow us to say with confidence that a person will become a good teacher. The reason this is important is we often try to address teacher quality by doing things that sound like they should help teachers, but in fact have nothing to do with successful teaching.
Currently the only tangible rewards that we offer teachers are based on their experience and educational credits. A teacher gets paid more and moves up the seniority ranks by taking more courses and teaching more years. The problem with this is that research shows us it has absolutely nothing to do with what the teacher actually does in the classroom. A bad teacher with a masters degree is still a bad teacher. A great teacher with three years of experience and a lowly BA is still a great teacher. There is no correlation between asking teaching to take more classes and the results we will see in our schools. That was the point I was trying to make in my little facebook comment.
Michael read the quote (and likely the whole article) and said that, "It would be nice if there were some more reliable marker than just students' test scores." (In all honesty, I am not entirely sure if Michael was referring to the fact that it is too bad we don't have a better marker to indicate who will be a successful teacher OR if it's too bad that we determine a successful teacher mostly by test scores. I assume it was the latter.) Which opened up the conversation about testing. Let me say briefly that I understand the point that tests alone do not indicate teacher quality. To be sure, standardized tests are blunt instruments that tell us one piece of the puzzle. I would, however, argue that they represent a pretty big piece of the puzzle.
Researchers who study school test data can clearly identify the impact that teachers have on their students test results while controlling for race and poverty. Year after year we will see that certain teacher's students continue to improve at a faster rate than average and certain teacher's students fall behind. This should make sense, right? If we believe that teachers are important to the education a student receives (as nearly everyone says) than we would expect to see that better teachers create better results. I would argue that being a loving, caring supportive teacher should not overcome the fact that students are falling academically behind after spending a year in that teacher's classroom. It would be nice to have complete, holistic evaluations of teachers (and by the way, we do know how to do that; we haven't figured out the executional and political challenges of making it happen in most public school districts), but until we're there testing data seems a pretty objective, valuable tool to begin the conversation. Much more on testing in the months to come, I'm sure.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Close the Gate
I like to think that I don't have many actual pet peeves, being the easy-going, laid-back kinda guy I am. But I confess that the overused, underthought use of the "-gate" suffix to affix to any sniff of a political scandal drives me batty. Mostly it's the laziness of the thing that gets on my nerves. Can't our pundits and reporters be any more creative, have any more fun than simply calling something stupid-gate?
So I was delighted to read Eric Zorn's column in the Chicago Tribune today where he's offering up a contest to name the Rod Blogojevich scandal . . . without a gate! Here are his options:
These are all outstanding options (my personal favorite being gBay seeing as how it both encapsulates the scandal and is fun to say). See how much better they are? Look at the creativity! References to history! Pop Culture! The Internet! Think of all we've lost putting up with such lousy scandal names as plamegate and troopergate. All the while we could have been discussing The Outing or Palinpalooza. Pundits of the world: Hear my cry! Don't allow the weak, short hand of the -gate conspiracy suck you in again!
So I was delighted to read Eric Zorn's column in the Chicago Tribune today where he's offering up a contest to name the Rod Blogojevich scandal . . . without a gate! Here are his options:
Corruptapalooza -- Crisp and to the point. The (your concept here) + (apalooza) conceit is fairly recent, at least by "-gate" standards. The Lollapalooza music festivals began in 1991, at it was some years after that the the apaloozapalooza began.
Teapot Dumb -- The Teapot Dome political bribery scandal, which this is a play on, truly is ancient history. It rocked the administation of Warren G. Harding in the mid 1920s. And there are no teapots -- yet -- in our current scadal. But "dumb" just says it all.
Imblaglio -- "Imbroglio" is a relatively unfamilar word -- the kind of word you might encounter on the SAT -- meaning an extremely confused, embarassing, tangled situation. You don't actually pronounce the "g" -- "im-BRO-lyo" is correct -- so this name works more on a visual rather than aural level. "Im-BLAH-lyo" lacks the signature syllable of the scandal; "Im-Blag-lyo" is a forced play on "imbroglio." Still...
gBay -- Short, sweet, modern and apt. The allusion combines one of Blagojevich's nicknames in the press, GRod, with the Internet auction site eBay.com. It reminds us that most of the elements of this scandal involve governmental favors allegedly up for the highest bid.
These are all outstanding options (my personal favorite being gBay seeing as how it both encapsulates the scandal and is fun to say). See how much better they are? Look at the creativity! References to history! Pop Culture! The Internet! Think of all we've lost putting up with such lousy scandal names as plamegate and troopergate. All the while we could have been discussing The Outing or Palinpalooza. Pundits of the world: Hear my cry! Don't allow the weak, short hand of the -gate conspiracy suck you in again!
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