Statistics channeling East Coast rap = ... ?

The question remains is "Statz-4-life" stranger than product from Weird Al? .

Pinball Coffee Table

This has a high lust factor!!

" Friends With Money "

A funny read a few days after listening to a "disadvantaged" teen sorting through her Yahoo! [junk] mail looking for responses to some recent job applications speaking aloud to herself affirming she'd like a credit card whereupon the clinician at the site tried to get her to see why credit cards + joblessness + adolescence were a bad mix. And, this blog post somehow relates to a discovery, in the same week, that a college acquaintance named Vibe and summers in Key West -- because he can; all that from an old Vibe that I wasn't sure why I hadn't tossed but which called me to start reading after I'd finally figured out how to cable correctly the DVD recorder in the kitchen. Yep, it takes me about a year to hook up any new technology we acquire. We have more DVD players than people living here.

There are two laptops in our household (XP and OS X) and one desktop (W2K) mostly situated/isolated for the child to surf and to play any of his variations of Zoo Tycoon; all of these PCs are wirelessly taking advantage of our 24/7 DSL connection in our tiny 5-room apartment on the 3rd floor of a triple decker in Dorchester, MA. Furthermore, there are 2 non-networked pre-OS 8 macs in our kitchen and dining room with educational software for the child and that I use for music listening. Technically, we possess six televisions although only three (each with cable and some not-so-current game box attached) are in regular use.

What is money, exactly? Access to better choices?

One of the female teens I was teaching about computers asked me why I didn't "hock" all my technology and get my car fixed. And, at the site for my other job one of the male teens with whom I worked asked if I was rich--a query prompted by my pulling out my digital camera from my fanny pack.

I'm clearly not rich, but some of my friends are. Maybe. Some people with whom I'd even conversed in college probably are judging by the movie deals I read about in the media but my closest friends are across the spectrum but generally range from artists with jobs of some sort (usu. part-time or grad school-based) to college profs. In between, you'd find an eclectic bunch including a personal trainer, a school psychologist, consultants, a college counselor at a private school, and some who've likely inherited and already earned more money than I'll probably ever see in my lifetime. C'est la vie. Meanwhile, I'm barely employed by an assortment of NPOs. and where we live our 8-year son thinks bad things are routine to the extent that he won't play in the huge Ronan Park around the corner.

Proof as to Why We Were All Screwed in OH

1. The Conyers Report, aka Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio
2. GAO Report 50-956 Elections: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed

The real post--A-bomb Hiroshima, a 1st person acct 60 yrs late

After the physicality of an event in time all else is interpretation. And, journalists are not necessarily any better than any other human at defining boundaries. How different would our understanding of Vietnam if we'd had only embedded reporting upon which to rely. It's 60 years later til we can read 1st hand accts, and only recently has other scholarship begun to re-define the textbook account of what happened. A slightly shorter summary of the matter can be found in the Japan Times "Pair want reporter's Pulitzer for '45 story on A-bomb revoked". Good luck @ finding the finally released text. I can find selections of it in Google Cache. George Weller's "A Nagasaki Report": Parts 1, 2, 3, 4,

The clarity of simple thinking!

I love reading/hearing/seeing Alan Kay!

Today, science (a concern with what is real) is mixed with mathematics (a concern with what is true) is mixed with engineering (a concern with how something can be made). Each worker in each of these fields also partly works in the other two. Each field has a different temperament associated with it: mathematicians tend to be idealists, scientists realists, and engineers pragmatists. And each finds themselves temporarily adopting a borrowed temperament when they use the other areas to aid advances in the one they most love.

So saith the man in the foreword to Mark Guzdial's Squeak: Object-Oriented Design With Multimedia Applications, (Prentice-Hall, 2001).

"Do what you love, forget the money"

Can One Be Smart Enough about Blogging?

Another unintended consequence of techne too intertwined in our lives? Or, another to file under eth-tech @ del.icio.us. From TVC Alert Research News, 7 September 2005:

(2 Sep) In this follow-up column, Ivan Tribble offers cautious advice to bloggers, who are also seeking new employment, especially in an academic environment. He continues to argue that it's especially important for bloggers to 'be careful [about] what you say.' SEE: Bloggers Need Not Apply Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 July 2005 (Tribble's original article) RELATED: Why I Blog Under My Own Name (A University of Maryland professor's response to Tribble's original article)

Also, see other interesting leads @ TVC Alert on Microsoft suing the European Commission & the on-going debate with regard to copyright and the Google library program.

political doublespeak

Reality re-defined by the power of language? Try to understand better and Google it—define:doublespeak!

BBC News [UK] August 30th, 2005 Families of Israeli Arabs shot dead on a bus in Galilee are not considered terrorism victims because their killer was Jewish, the defence ministry says. Under Israeli law, only attacks by "enemies of Israel" are considered terrorism, the ministry said. The ruling means families of the four victims will not be entitled to the lifelong monthly payments given to Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks. The ministry says it has offered them an unspecified one-off payment. The Arabs were killed by a 19-year-old Israeli army deserter who was thought to be trying to derail the evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Courtesy of bedouin @ News From Babylon.

Must blobbing heads and clueless commentators annoy!!!

Ahhh, nothing like another disaster whose magnitude forces me to crawl out from my cave and actually want to see news coverage. But, it's mere moments before I need to run screaming far away from reality because (1) OK, this ain't brain surgery, to quote a former professor and (2) could I have some actual analysis of why the circumstances are what they are. Is that too much to ask? I listened to one news commentator/anchor ask some question about whether the New Orleans residents in the SuperDome were allowed to go outside. Now, I suppose it could have been an innocent query as opposed a value-laden message suggesting that those in question were either prisoners or somehow lost their right to exercise their freedom to move. But there is hope tonite with PBS's NOW's "Katrina: Why the Devastation Was So Bad" an update to a 2002 piece where it took on just such a question what happens when a big hurricane hits the Gulf coast. The original reporter, NPR's Daniel Zwerdling , will be in the house. (Props to truthout.org for the data bit.)

    PBS Airdate: Friday 02 September 2005 at 9:00 p.m. on PBS. 

(Check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html.)

---

What you don't know about Katrina and the Gulf Coast. NOW investigates why the devastation was so bad. With the death toll rising and the damage estimates in the billions, NOW reports on why New Orleans was virtually defenseless against hurricane Katrina. ...explores how one of the biggest civil engineering projects in US history-the levying of the Mississippi River-set off an environmental chain reaction that helped destroy the natural barrier protecting New Orleans from catastrophic storms.

Aside from the fact that I consider W. the best worse case example of a legacy child and mediocrity, I can only fantasize that some good will emerge from the cascade of disasters now embodied in the latest miasma -- Katrina's aftermath; the good would occur if somehow, some way more people could see fit to heep more blame on W. What can I say, I want a leader who sees a global community; the good leader owns the current situation as well as the detritus and barnacles along for the ride -- even if he knows they are external to his control and admininstration. Instead the best that W. has to offer is a tautalogy: well those who are now suffering in New Orleans are poor are Brown; that's why they are suffering. They are what they are. So I've been incredibly reductionist but it's not that far off the mark. And, the science writer for the Houston Chronicle wrote on Dec. 1, 2001:

"New Orleans is sinking. "And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Missis sippi River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city perilously close to disaster. ... "So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country." The other two were an earthquake in San Francisco and a "terrorist attack on New York City."

Culturally Situated Design Tools: teaching math through culture

Very cool if you're into elementary math and relating geoblocks/patterns to different ethnicities.

Gifted males and the "Bartleby Syndrome"

Because, I ask you -- can we ever know enough about genius and gender?

"Hyena People of Nigeria"

Pieter Hugo's photo series shows that there are more than one way to live tough.

define:melungeon

OK, watching Weird USA last nite/this morning, I learned the existence of a word of which I'd never heard - "melungeon" - whose meaning seems, to me, a more specific type of mulatto. Googling for a definition brings up a lone Wikipedia entry. Yet another example of serendipity?

• In May 2005, while looking for who all might be of mixed Japanese-black ancestry because of international nite @ Jordan's school, I bumped into a list of largely known, or safely-guessed-at terms at MixedFolks.com.
• I have this unattached interest in "invisible" ethnic minorities such as Japan's Burakumin.

All of which connect to my fascination w/ linguistic anomalies as in foreign accent syndrome, regionalisms and translation idiosyncracies as described in "Minority Wonders" and "Lost in Translation".

Finding comics on the brain

First, I bumped into the amusing "Whatever happened to Speedy Gonzalez?" via growabrain: Comics & Cartoons Archives. Then, yet another encounter with Shujaat, from Al-Jazeera; this time in his (?) "Choppers for Food Programme" , again, courtesy of growabrain. Encountered some Middle East heroes in AK Comics, then with some time to spare, wandered over to Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.

girls' development as explained in "the pizza story"

My interactions w/the K-4 set makes me curious as to what does happen @ schools. I recall some of what I think I wasn't taught @ school & much of what I merely imbibed in the home of one, often, angry black woman. My most vivid memory is of a conversation w/her (aka my mom), my brother (approx. 20 yrs my senior) about the solution to South Africa was arming legions of us folk and aiding in an actual revolution. Child development is a mecurial transformation on so many levels. From a review of Tomboys! Feisty Girls and Spirited Women, we learn:

New York University professor Carol Gilligan, author of In A Different Voice, acts as a talking head. She emphasizes socialization and other factors that threaten a girl's development. In a pithy synopsis, Gilligan retells what's known as "the pizza story." She says, "Ask a 11 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'Peppers and onions.' Ask a 13 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'I don't know.' Ask a 15 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'Whatever you want.'"

MBTA riders in search of better outcomes

And, "MBTA resolves to coordinate trains" [May 2005].

Pat of Plymouth says that after rushing home from caring for her 93 year-old mother in Pennsylvania to tend to her hospitalized husband, she got the boot from a Plymouth & Brockton bus. She wasn't loud or drunk or throwing food. She was $2.13 short on her $16 one-way fare.

The one-finger victory salute...

...from W. direct to the people!

no 2004 "Patterns of Global Terrorism" from State

When is no news not good news? When the State Department decides to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism--especially when combined with the US' top terrorism center saying that were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

The annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report is submitted in compliance with Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(a), which requires the Department of State to provide Congress a full and complete annual report on terrorism for those countries and groups meeting the criteria of Section (a)(1) and (2) of the Act.

End of an Era? Adobe's buying Macromedia

I've not found anyone cheering yet but...many people blown away about the cognitive effect. Does anyone else remember the MA-based Allaire? Travel back to January 17, 2001: "The outlook for the next fiscal year is a little muddier as [Macromedia] today announced the purchase of Web applications platform developer Allaire (Nasdaq: ALLR), which owns the HomeSite webpage editor and the ColdFusion application server for developing scalable e-business software." (Courtesy of the Motley Fools.) Going forth to 2002, we have this commentary, courtesy of evolt.org posting:

Macromedia started out as a developer of animation products for the CD-ROM world only to find that market being quickly replaced by the burgeoning World Wide Web. Their product line was quickly changed to attack this new market. Two of the products it introduced, DreamWeaver and Flash, became the most widely used products in their respective categories. More recently, Macromedia acquired Allaire, which brought with it three important products: HomeSite, ColdFusion, and JRun. HomeSite, like DreamWeaver, was the most widely used product in its category and seemly competed with DreamWeaver. ColdFusion and JRun were both pioneers in the Web application world that had strong followings. These five products effectively guaranteed Macromedia a spot on almost every Web developer’s desktop, and in some cases, their servers as well.

Jeremy Allaire's still around; see a interview from just last week @ Engadget. So who fires the next salvo? Oh, yeah nobody...nobody else left standing but Microsoft. Here's a an alternate history in what couldabeen -- "Will Macromedia Soon Become Micromedia?" from 2003.