Archive for September 2007
Not much corn at the market today — it’s been getting down into the 30s at night here. So this may be the last of the corn (whimper). There’s a 2-for-1 sale at the store on 1 1/4-inch thick pork chops, so pork chops and corn pudding today. I don’t use the saltines, and instead use a tube of Ritz crackers. Inspired, isn’t it? Ritz cracker topping.
Chao Mian tomorrow (yeah, yeah, but I’ll make it with chicken). Greens and stuff in the refrigerator I need to use up.
Offered without comment.
Wagner meets Bugs Bunny: “What’s Opera, Doc?”
Fred speaking at the NRA Industry show:
He may not be my candidate, but he does have his moments. This is certainly one of them.
Search-and-rescue crews have found a hiker who has been missing since last weekend.
Mary Hyde Wingfield was found in North Cascades National Park shortly after 2:30 p.m, said Chief Ranger Kinsey Shilling.
A helicopter crew scouring the rugged area for Wingfield found her “in a standing position” nearly 5-miles from a trailhead, he said.
Wingfield, 33, was flown to Diablo where she is being evaluated by paramedics for dehydration.
So far, so good. But it gets, well, weird:
Searchers had discovered two shoe prints that match Wingfield’s size and the make of shoe she may have been wearing, Shilling said. They also found a water bottle, a dental insurance card, a grocery store membership card and a note on her employer’s letterhead indicating she was in an emergency state without food or water.
The note, signed by Wingfield, said she was heading downstream.
Back up. She was severely dehydrated, without water, and she was heading downstream? How, excactly, does that work? Or do I need another cup of coffee?
Hat tip: Ace.
I have your Knucklehead of the Year (maybe the decade) right here (and because this just can’t ever disappear, I’m reproducing the whole sheee-bang):
An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.
Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweatshirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport.
“She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day,” Pare said at a news conference. “She claims that it was just art, and that she was proud of the art and she wanted to display it.”
No, you didn’t misread that. She made a fake bomb belt, wore it to the airport, and then claimed that it was art! Here is evidence that any idiot can get into MIT, because even that moron who didn’t know that military academies are run by the military is an Einstein compared to this mouthbreather.
Simpson was charged with disturbing the peace and possessing a hoax device. A not guilty plea was entered for her and she was released on $750 bail.
During the hearing, Simpson smiled as she entered wearing a T-shirt and sandals. After she posted bail, she left in a taxi with a man who identified himself as her boyfriend, but neither would answer more questions from reporters.
No doubt because it was a stunt, and she thought she was being cute. Arteests and leftists are like that. They always think their st00pid stunts are cute.
Prosecutor Wayne Margolis had requested $5,000 bail, saying Simpson showed a total disregard for the situation she was in — an airport after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Ross Schreiber, who was appointed to represent Simpson, said she was not a risk to flee, was a good student with no prior convictions and she cooperated with authorities.
He said she had gone to the airport to meet her boyfriend. “She was there for legitimate purposes,” Schreiber said.
Simpson was “extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used,” Pare said. “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”
Simpson is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology sophomore from Hawaii, officials said.
The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, and Simpson had Play-Doh in her hands, Pare said.
It was Art. Of course, it did.
The phrases “Socket to me” and “Course VI” were written on the back of her sweatshirt, which authorities displayed to the media. Course VI appears to refer to MIT’s major of electrical engineering and computer science.
Simpson was a member of MIT’s swimming and diving team in 2006, according to the team’s Web site, which lists her hometown as Kihei, Hawaii. MIT spokeswoman Patti Richards said aside from confirming she was a student, the school did not have any comment.
She was arrested about 8 a.m. outside Terminal C, home to United Airlines, Jet Blue and other carriers.
A Massachusetts Port Authority staffer manning an information booth in the terminal became suspicious when Simpson — wearing the device — approached to ask about an incoming flight, Pare said. Simpson then walked outside, and the staffer notified a nearby trooper.
Wait. She walked past him with a bomb belt on, and he became suspicious? That’s it? Became suspicious?
The trooper, joined by others with submachine guns, confronted her at a traffic island in front of the terminal.
“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force.”
It’s a damned shame they didn’t. Use deadly force, I mean.
Pare said Simpson took a subway to the airport, but he was not sure if she had the device on at that time.
The major praised the booth attendant, but said the incident is a reminder of the terrorism threat confronting the civil aviation system. Two of the four passenger jets hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, took off from Logan.
The city was the focus of a major security scare Jan. 31 when dozens of battery-powered devices were discovered in various locations. Bomb squads were deployed and some transportation links were closed temporarily. They turned out to be a promotion for the Cartoon Network.
Tie her tubes. Now. I wonder if MIT is just a little bit embarrassed . . . naw.
Har!
So please. Stick to misinterpreting as gloriously nationalistic the inherent socialist message embedded in the performance of the Battle of Thermopylae, and leave the heavy thinking on cultural collisions to those thinkers who are smart enough to recognize that thinking requires a willingness to eschew thinking in the name of the kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on the kind of thinking that, given how we are culturally inscribed, we invariably find ourselves thinking through.
You intellectual peasant.
Read the whole thing. Simply brilliant. Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm (though I would have gotten there eventually — Jeff’s a daily read).
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you’re bored, I guess.
I saw this over on Betsy Newmark’s blog. Remember that judge who sued a dry cleaner for millions because his pants were ruined? Here’s why something has to be done to stop that crap:
Roy Pearson, the D.C. administrative law judge whose $67 million lawsuit against his neighborhood dry cleaners turned into a worldwide lesson in how one obsessed person can hijack the American legal system, lost his case in court, but today delivered the crowning blow to the owners of Custom Cleaners:
Bowing to the emotional and financial strains of two years of litigation, Soo and Jin Chung today announced the closing of the dry cleaners that may or may not have lost a pair of Pearson’s pants that he put in for a $10 alteration in 2005.
“Two years of litigation” whitewashes the situation. What the reporter meant to write was, “two years of defending themselves in a frivolous lawsuit.” And since tort reform never happens, I propose we use these litigation nuts’ weapon against them. File a lawsuit against the judge who brought the suit, and just as importantly, the judge who didn’t throw this out of court.
Enough is enough.
From Australia, there’s this:
A lesbian woman felt violated and devastated when she learned she was pregnant with twins, after she had told a Canberra obstetrician she wanted only one child through IVF, a court heard yesterday.
In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the ACT, the former Canberra woman and her female partner are suing obstetrician and gynaecologist Sydney Robert Armellin for the wrongful birth of one of their twin girls, now aged three, claiming more than $400,000 for the cost of raising her to the age 21.
Again, there are times I really question whether anyone should be allowed to have children. Hat tip to Andrew Bolt.
Most people’s idea of a family outing would be, oh, a picnic:
A husband and wife team accused of trying to rob a Philipsburg store, then robbing a second store — with their 1-year-old child in tow — before driving to Pittsburgh to buy crack were ordered to stand trial after a hearing that even a veteran prosecutor called bizarre.
“It’s a very unusual case,†said Centre County Assistant District Attorney Steve Sloane. “You can’t write this stuff or make it up. A 1-year-old was taken to an armed robbery and the rest of the family goes along on a crack run.â€
Clayton and Stephanie Shaw are accused of attempting to rob the Philipsburg Uni-Mart about 11:50 p.m. Sept. 10. According to the criminal complaint filed by state police, they were sitting around their apartment drinking beer “when the subject of robbing the Uni-Mart came up.â€
Anybody can understand that. Doesn’t robbing the Uni-Mart come up in conversation all the time? Oh, but it gets better:
Clayton Shaw, driven to the store by his wife in their minivan, rushed into the Uni-Mart with a white shirt over his head and demanded cash, police said.
“Yeah right, Clay,†was the response from the clerk, Shanelle Keith, who knew him and recognized his voice, police said.
Clayton Shaw fled after telling the clerk he was “just joking,†police said.
The couple then went back to their apartment and, when they couldn’t quiet their crying 1-year-old, they formed a new plan, police said.
“They get the baby in the car, and they basically figure, the heck with it, let’s go rob the Minit Mart,†Abernethy testified.
Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, is he?
“They then returned to their apartment and picked up their other two kids, then drove to Pittsburgh and bought crack cocaine and smoked it,†said state police, relating the couple’s alleged confessions following their arrests.
Of course, they did! Who wouldn’t?
But the court drama wasn’t over.
Sloane asked Jordan to revoke Stephanie Shaw’s bail.
He played a recorded conversation between Stephanie Shaw and her husband, who is in jail and unable to post bail, in which she told her husband they should abandon their children with the county’s Children and Youth Services and flee to North Carolina.
On the tape, Clayton Shaw can be heard rejecting his wife’s pleas to run. She said she expressed hope his bail would be reduced Wednesday and said they were unable to regain custody of the children, so they should flee from prosecution.
“We’re not going to have them anyway,†she could be heard saying on the tape, “so what the (expletive) would it matter if we leave?â€
Jordan imposed tougher bail restrictions, requiring Stephanie Shaw to check in daily with her bail agency. He rejected an evaluation by Public Defender Sean McGraw that Clayton Shaw be freed to await trial.
Stephanie Shaw’s attorney, Ron McGlaughlin, said she is not going to run and was merely being emotional.
It’s moments like this when I struggle with the idea that anyone should be allowed to reproduce.
It looks like there’s a nameserver somewhere down. If you get an error trying to reach a site, that’s probably what it is.
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Fred on the latest version of Hitlerycare:
Check out the Carnival of Education.
Bear enters tent, bites Pa. Boy Scout through sleeping bag. And bear season doesn’t open until November.
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Pissed Off has an interesting article about partial credit:
My AP is against giving too much partial credit on exams. At Friday’s welcome meeting he passed out copies of a final exam from summer school and asked us what was wrong with it. Not one person in the department could come up with an answer. The questions were well written in mathematically precise language. They were typed. They covered the entire range of the course and they were not too easy or too hard. He was in shock that we could find nothing to complain about.
After a few minutes he yelled “Don’t you see it? The multiple choice section is worth 24 points (4 points each) and the rest of the exam consists of 4 and 6 point questions where partial credit is given. This is ridiculous. An exam should have no more than 30 or 40 points of questions with partial credit. Besides, don’t you have better things to do than to mark papers?”
I thought when I first read this that the AP was being stupid, but upon reflection (and it may well be that I’m giving the AP too much credit), I can understand where this came from: Partial credit not only can be abused, but frequently is, in my experience, and I don’t mean by students. But the question of partial credit, what is abuse and what is appropriate, led to assessment in general, and here we are.
I’d like to talk about assessment issues, and remembering that a commenter on an earlier article stated that his administration to a large extent controlled the weighting of graded items, address this both to faculty and administrators. If you’re into assigning macaroni art projects, you’re probably wasting your time here. Just sayin.
Categories of assessment
Not all graded items are created equal. The distinctions between different types of assessment must be taken into account if we are to give students the fairest, most honest and accurate assessment possible.
Knowledge assessment v. still-warm-still-breathing assessment. Knowledge assessment obviously assesses a student’s knowledge, preferably of the topic at hand (and not something else). Still-warm-still-breathing assessment has nothing to do with knowledge, but may assess attitude or some other tangential property. Giving points for attendance is one example of still-warm-still-breathing assessment. After all, a student may not be in class because he already knows what a differential equation is. I probably don’t need to tell you that I’m not a big fan of the latter. I also don’t understand it. In primary and secondary school, attendance is mandated by law, so why base part of the grade on it? In the university, most faculty don’t grade on attendance because 1) it’s tedious and takes up too much valuable time, and 2) it treats students like children.
The only thing I have to say about still-warm-and-breathing assessment is this: If you absolutely must grade on something that has no direct relationship to knowledge, find some way to tie knowledge to it. So if you feel you have to grade on attendance, instead of wasting time calling roll at the beginning of class, give pop quizzes. You get a partial attendance check that bears some relationship to the topic, even if it is what I call the “Were you awake through class” type of quiz.
In-class v. out-of-class assessment. The crucial distinction between the two is that the former is given in a controlled environment, whereas the latter is not. This points up a weakness of out-of-class assessment: You can never be sure if the assignment reflects the student’s knowledge, or that of some other person (or source), be it another student, well-meaning but seriously misguided and unethical parents, or wikipedia. Of course, students can cheat on in-class assignments, but that’s a different topic (see here).
Another important distinction is time. I suspect that if I had had days in which to do an assignment, I might eventually have come up with an answer that was more or less correct, but if it took me days to think of it, then I didn’t know it very well. Out-of-class assignments therefore tend to inflate the representation of the student’s knowledge that in-class assignments, such as exams, more accurately represent.
I do not mean that out-of-class assignments are bad. But out-of-class assignments should be designed so that they assess knowledge and skills that are not easily assessed in a timed environment, or they should be designed less as assessment than reinforcement.
Contextual v. discrete assessment. Because “integrated” has been <s>perverted</s> redefined to mean “anything that doesn’t assess knowledge related to this course,” I’m reverting to the older term, contextual. A final paper is an example of a contextual assessment, because it assesses the student’s overall knowledge of the course material. Case-based assignments, those in which the assessments are embedded within the context of a case, or assignments that assess multiple, interrelated knowledge domains are also contextual.
Assessments in which the items bear no necessary relationship to one another except that they all relate to the general topic are discrete assessments. There is a grey area between the two, where the individual items may be discrete, but the items themselves are contextualized. Story problems on a math or science exam would be an example.
Also at issue are individual and group assessments, which need no definition.
In my experience, assessment is too often given very little thought. I have, on too many occasions, sat by while a colleague said something like, “We’ll have two exams at 45 points each and 10 assignments at 10 points each, that adds up to 100 so it will be easy to calculate final grades,” and left it at that. In my humble opinion, one should invest a great deal of care and thought when designing an assessment system.
Ideally, an assessment system will use a combination of assessment types to best evaluate the student’s knowledge across the spectrum. Exams are an excellent assessment for detailed knowledge, and quizzes can be excellent checks along the way (both for the instructor and the student). Every class should implement some kind of in-class assessment, if only to guard against academic misconduct.
Group projects (and group work in class) certainly have their advantages, but they also have distinct disadvantages. Before any instructor implements group projects, he should decide how he will guard against unfair work distribution within the group. Too often, students who like group work do so because they can sit back an let everybody else do their work for them.
However, group projects are excellent for contextualized work that is too complex to be assessed on an exam. Otherwise, there is little point in assigning group work. I am aware of the maxim about teaching to others being the best way to learn, but that doesn’t imply that those others learn anything.
Controlling for fairness when assessing group work is extremely difficult. I found that assigning students to one group which they worked with all semester long helped a great deal; students are willing to let others slack on the first project, but are much less so inclined on succeeding projects. I also used a system of contracts. The students as a group when the project was ready to turn in had to allot what everyone in the group agreed was an accurate percentage of the work done to each student in the group. Each student had to sign the contract, consenting to the percentage given him, and I assigned no grade to anyone in the group until the contract was signed and submitted. Once signed, a percentage score could not be appealed (if there is a conflict, we resolve it before any grades are assigned). So if the project was worth 50 points, the project grade was 45 points, and Johnny got a 90% on the contract, he would get 90% of the 45 points, or 40.5 points for that project.
Group projects were highly complex, far more so than what could be assessed in class. The were also case-based, and therefore contextual, which leads us to the next issue.
Contextual assignments, individual or work, out-of-class or in-class, are often designed so that the output or answers from one section feed into following questions. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it raises the issue of cascading error. In other words, if Mary gets the first question wrong and her answer for succeeding questions depends on getting the first question correct, should she be docked for those suceeding questions?
My position is that it depends on the purpose of the assessment. If the purpose of the assessment is to judge Mary’s knowledge of each of those tasks covered, then Mary should only be docked for what she did not learn. If, however, Mary has already been assessed on those tasks, and the project is analogous to, say, a comprehensive final exam, then I would be more comfortable with cascading errors — provided that she is given partial credit.
And that brings us back around to the article that started this. My first reaction, as I said, was that this AP was spouting nonsense. Partial credit may not be applicable in the real world, but it’s a necessity for teaching, even in a math class. Carl may not have gotten the right answer because he started out right, but veered off in the wrong directions, but he started out right, and he should get credit for that. Partial credit reflects partial learning, and as such, partial credit is more accurate assessment.
But partial credit should never be given unless it reflects partial knowledge. “You get five points just for writing something down for the question” isn’t partial credit. It’s educational welfare. Such practices should be forbidden, and the assessments of teachers who employ such practices cannot be trusted.
The final question, of course, is weighting assessments. How an instructor weights assessments depends on what type of course he teaches and what types of assessments he uses. But the weights assigned should be designed so that the advantages and disdavantages balance one another. So for example, if I am teaching the same course with others and assessments must be decided by the group, I insist on a 60-75% range for in-class exams so that at least that amount of the grade is not an assessment of someone other than the student’s.
But I do not give still-warm-and-breathing assessments. If such work is assigned, it should never form enough of the total score to raise a student’s grade more than a grade sign. That’s no more than 3% of the total grade. Anything more distorts the assessment to the point that it no longer reflects how well the student has learned.
For more on fair, performance-based assessment, see here.
Not at all unusual, as Jules Crittenden writes:
Witness account suggests there was nothing unusual about Andrew Meyer as Kerry supporters go — foulmouthed, paranoid, and subject to the delusion that the simple rules of civil society don’t apply to him.
The moral of the story here is that if you’re speaking at a university and you want campus security to do something other than stand there and watch (even if you’re being physically assaulted by filthy little leftist thugs who belong in prison), bring along John Kerry.
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Previous free threads are here.
Yeah, I care, but no, I don’t want to hear about it. I heard way too much about OJ during the trial. Lock the SOB up, tell me how many decades he’ll be behind bars, then shut up about him.
Anybody who’s ever had a dog could have told them this:
For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. “Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered,” says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
It is precisely their proximity to people — which disqualified our four-legged friends as a model for so long — that now makes them interesting to animal researchers. “When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog,” says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.
The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately, while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were often perplexed by the pointing finger.
That’s not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the researcher’s gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.
Cat lovers won’t like what the researchers found. Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.
Don’t ask. Just. Read. This. Now.
Forty men signed the Constitution of the United States and it became the law of the new nation.
I’ve known some pretty st00pid people and had a few incredibly st00pid students, but I have never had a st00dent so st00pid she didn’t know that military academies are run by the …
wait for it …
military!
A Columbia student, and no doubt, an education major. I don’t even think a folklore department would let anybody this st00pid in. Just as st00pid, if not more so, is that the university paper allowed this drivel to be printed.
As Bugs Bunny would say, “Wotta maroon!”
Hat tip: Purple Avenger.
I really am going to have to create that category just for idjits.
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Previous free threads are here.
Sifting through some old photos I found this snapshot of an Indiana eagle:
You don’t see many hawks here. You see hawks all over everytime you’re on the highways in Indiana. They swoop low back and forth, I understand because dinner is easier to see against the blacktop.
I’m thinking seriously of migrating the sidebar entirely to widgets — and I’m a bit puzzled why a theme designer would include archives, posts, etc. code in the sidebar.php file in a widget-friendly theme, when all of them (and more) are available as widgets. The problem with using both is that all of the widgets have to go together (if I’m mistaken, please tell me). The RSS feeds, currently at the bottom of the sidebar, are widgets. If I wanted to use the calendar widget, it would have to go at the bottom with the RSS feed widgets, instead of where the archives are now.
We’ll see. I’m just learning about widgets because until I changed hosting providers, I was stuck with wordpress 1.5.2.
Veal chops were on sale, so I got two. Veal chops — sauteed in butter, rosemary, and some chardonnay — with creamed potatoes.
Tomorrow: Fried chicken. It’s Sunday.
The confusion of switching hosting providers, trying to install wordpress, etc., is this poignant essay by Kim du Toit: Turning Point. No excerpt. Read the whole thing.
Looks like it, thanks to the folks at Dreamhost. Let’s test it and make sure.
I’m having permalink problems. I had to switch to the default (/?p=xxxx) to get categories and single articles to work. My pages, however, don’t. I’m working on figuring this out, but if anybody has an idea what’s going on, feel free to give me a holler. I get “input not specified” when I try to access one of my pages.
Privacy today is the exception; Google (GOOG) on Friday called for privacy to be the rule.
In a post on the Google Public Policy blog on Friday, Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, said that privacy standards need to be harmonized worldwide.
“As I’ve noted before, everyone has a right to privacy online — and governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe,” said Fleischer.
Is this the same Google that turned over info on users to the Chinese government?
Thought so.
Bruce Willis goes green!
The Chancellor at UC Irvine had offered the deanship of UCI’s brand new law school to Erwin Chemerinsky, then abruptly withdrew the offer. The reason?
Chemerinsky’s political views would make him a target for criticism from conservatives.
But the point here is, well, who’s objecting to this? Here’s a list:
So what do all of the above have in common? Class? Anybody?
They’re conservatives.
I get the Inside Higher Ed RSS feed every day (I only subject myself to the idiocy printed there if I see something intriguing on the feed), and although there may be some objection there, it hasn’t been in the feeds.
So let me chime in on the issue. This is crap. Drake made the offer, all the way to negotiating the salary and telling Chemerinsky he was hired. Drake had damned well better apologize, and give Chemerinsky the job. I don’t care how nutso-batso left the man is.
Let’s see if the show/hide plugin works on this version of wordpress.