The largest study done to date clearly indicates that the No Child Left Behind policy significantly increases the rate of high school dropouts. Frankly, this is no surprise to me, as the misguidedness of NCLB's test-and-accountability approach has been very clear to me from the beginning, because it incentivizes teachers and schools to teach test-taking rather than general education and flexible thinking.

And the study concurs with that thinking, but also brings up another, darker effect: because schools are scored by the test results of their students, school administrators have a strong incentive to "help" low-performing students drop out. When poor performers drop out, the school's scores go up. It's likely not that the administrators kick the kids out. Low performing students are the ones most likely to want to leave anyway. But now the schools have no incentive to fight to keep those kids in class.

It's always been easier to let the struggling, drop-out-minded kids slip away. But now it's actively better for the school if they do, because the school's performance rating will improve. And the study shows that this is exactly what is happening. The actual drop-out rate of urban Texas highschools is 33%, way up from before NCLB, and the more strictly punitive the NCLB implementation, the more students dropped out!

It's amazing to me how Republicans are horrified at the thought of "rewarding someone for breaking the law" when it's a poverty-stricken Mexican father crossing the border to work for $4 an hour at some scut job so he can feed his children, but they're totally in favor of it when it's a billion-dollar telecom corporation that's been illegally spying on US citizens for five years.

What's pathetic is that, if surveillance is needed, there are legal ways to make it happen. The court that approves emergency wiretap orders has approved tens of thousands and only denied a very few in several decades. And the law doesn't even require the order to happen first - only within three days of the beginning of surveillance. And if broader powers were really needed, it could have been a new law passed by Congress. But this administration doesn't even bother with the law, they simply asked AT&T et al. to start the spying even though they knew it was illegal.

And here we are, years later, passing a bill to reward them for the lawbreaking. Frankly, it sickens me.

Discussion of the interrogation technique "waterboarding" is all over the internets these days, particularly surrounding the confirmation of former federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as head of the DOJ.

I am sort of amazed and aghast that the legality waterboarding is even an issue. The right answer is "It doesn't matter if waterboarding is legal or not. The simple fact that it is borderline, and debatable to so many, means we shouldn't use the technique, because it should be the goal of any moral democratic nation to strive to be ethically right. We should err on the side of doing the right thing, and avoid actions that rub up against the border."

One of my ongoing frustrations with the current political milieu is that there is almost no discussion of ethics or right and wrong. People play fast and loose with ethics - particularly the current GOP administration - and then everyone haggles over legal details. Why won't anybody simply stand up and say "I don't give a rat's ass if it's legal or not, it's wrong, so we shouldn't do it"?

Today is the 50'th anniversary of the launch of sputnik and the beginning of the space race.

I was musing yesterday about the varying opinions of the space race: to some, it was a group of humankind's greatest achievements. To others, it was just a great big pissing contest between two superpowers; often people with that opinion speak about the space race in fairly disparaging tones.

My thought about that is this: pissing contests between nations and peoples are common, practically a force of nature. Most of the time, they result in wars: the death of millions and the impovershment of billions more. In that context, a space race is about the most benign outcome one can conceive of between two pendulophallic nations. Frankly, if more contests between nations resulted in a race to outdo each other in scientific and engineering achievement instead of a race to exterminate each other, we'd be a hell of a lot better off than we are.

People who know me know that I'm pretty convinced we're headed for a dick-swinging contest between China and the USA mid-century as china's economy combined with it's current dedication to education and science starts to pull ahead of America's century-long head start. I can only hope that the visions of China doing things like landing on the moon and developing new biomedical and nano technologies before us has the effect of galvanizing another space (or bio-) race rather than an arms race or cold war.

I am a deep believer in the importance of free speech, but there are things that strain that belief. In an article at the BBC, the Catholic Archbishop of Mozambique is quoted as saying, on the subject of condom use to protect against AIDS:

Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose

That's right, he's accusing condom manufacturers of putting HIV into the condoms in order to infect anyone who uses them. Now, the position of the Catholic Church on condoms is already indefensible in the era of HIV/AIDS: it's responsible for a lot of deaths. Fortunately, I think most people, even uneducated ones, hear "abstinence rather than condoms" and realize that if they are having sex, condoms are a good idea. So I think that, in the context of the people who really are correctly educated about condoms and have access to them, the Church's opposition is not all that successful. But now, we have a religious leader using false scare tactics, telling people that the condoms themselves may kill them. Now he really has given people a reason to avoid condoms even when they are having sex. This statement alone is going to result in so many thousands of deaths that it's hard for me to think of it as anything other than criminal. Is it philosophically protected free speech, or is the Archbishop committing thousands of indirect murders? If you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, can you lie to millions in a way that will get many of them killed by a virus they could have avoided?

Last year, a teacher was fired for telling her students that Santa Claus isn't real. This year, a college professor asked students to interpret the Book of Genesis as allegory rather than literal history, and was fired for it. The article linked above quotes professor Steve Bitterman as saying:

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job."

This is so seriously discouraging.

Via Kevin Drum:

Overturning a century of conventional medical wisdom, Japanese researchers reported Thursday that simple chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth ventilation save twice as many heart attack victims as traditional CPR.

What's not shocking here is that this only applies to people who are suffering a plain heart attack. Why? Such people can still breathe. As such, only chest compressions are needed to reestablish minimal circulation. For those people who are suffering respiratory arrest, forced breathing is still necessary.

From the same article, this is depressing:

As many as three-quarters of bystanders who observe a heart attack in a stranger decline to perform CPR, fearing infectious diseases.

That's just sad. You're more susceptible to diseases from all the bathroom doorknobs you touch. A single case of giving CPR to a stranger is not likely to give you anything, and nothing more than a cold in any case. This risk is worth it to save someone's life.

Article at L.A. Times

Via Boing Boing today I read this story about the Boston Police Department blowing up a "suspicious device" found chained to a lamppost in the financial district downtown. Of course, the device turned out to be a traffic counter put there by the highway department.

So this goes beyond simple paranoia into seriously dangerous behavior. Yes, we know the Boston PD basically shut down half the city because of a bunch of lite-brite devices left outside as part of a marketing campaign. But if you watch the Faux News video about it, you can see that they blew this box up just by putting explosives under it. No particular blash shielding or anything.

Suppose this really were a terrorist device? If it were a bomb, a box that size could carry enough explosive to do serious damage for many yards in every direction. Detonating it would be criminally dangerous.

Suppose it were some kind of chemical or biological agent dispersal system. Detonating it out in the open would be even MORE stupid, because winds could carry the toxins or infectious agents very long distances, hurting people nowhere near the scene.

And if it's not one of those things, it should be investigated and perhaps taken back to a lab.

In fact, I can't think of any circumstance at all in which blowing the thing up would be the right thing to do. Either it's harmless, or blowing it up risks making things much much worse. The commentary by the Republicnewsdroids at Fox is particularly galling, prattling on about the cops "not taking any chances" when exploding an unknown box is a ridiculously unsafe thing to do, and clearly in implicit agreement that such "suspicious devices" are a severe threat to our security.

Wimbledon finally enters the 21st century.

I was tempted to snarkily write "Wimbledon enters the 20th century", because of course this should have happened about thirty years ago.

It's amazing how much interesting and funny stuff can go by on the 'net in the course of a few years, and amazing how much of it any one person is destined to miss.

Last night I surfed and read a few things about geek graffiti ... urban nerds making public statements with LED's and magnets, graffiti circuits painted directly on walls with conductive paint, giant projectors putting interactive animations on buildings, etc.

This one hack of postal envelopes is certainly illegal and a waste of public resources ... but funny and fascinating not least because of its subtlety. You have to look pretty close to even see that the perpetrator did anything.