“"From my own experience - this could get me in trouble - I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one," says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. "It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban."”
That is the most shocking statement from the entire article, in my opinion.
Feeling down? Would you consider yourself depressed? Research suggests that you should get a full-time job!
“The 7% figure isn’t news so much as the fact that if you don’t hold down a full-time job, that figure nearly doubles, to 12.7%. That is, 12.7% of people who don’t hold a full time job in the U.S. have reported an episode of depression from 2004 to 2006.”
That is, of course, if you don’t already have a full-time job.
$2.2 Million Grant Calls for Designing Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable
You ever have one of “those ideas” which, later, someone else is able to make come to fruition? It happens to me all the time, and is one of the more frustrating things about my existence.
Years ago, while serving on active duty as an Air Security Officer I came up with the notion of how to win the lottery or predict the weather. They both could be manifest of the same theory. I hypothesized that an algorithm—or series thereof—could be devised with which to emulate the behavior of certain complex systems with discrete outcomes, eventually “catching up” with the behavior of the system and then outpacing it. Once the algorithm learned the dynamics of the system it could not only tell you what it was doing at this instant, but also it could predict what it would do.
This system could be applied to the lottery and meteorology, I speculated at the time. It’s been years since that thought had occurred to me, but when I read this article I realized that this had boundless opportunities in other fields.
In the post-September 11TH world we are faced with terrorists and unstable regions of the world that rival similar parts of history during the Cold War, but even more savage. The implications of a set of algorithms which could “predict the unpredictable” could revolutionize many, many areas of the world in which we live.
Something to think about.
Researchers have crafted a theory for a "brain radiator" that would help with epileptic siezures:
In severe epileptic fits, over-excited brain cells fire at such a rate they can raise the brain's temperature in that area. This causes more nerves to fire in a feedback mechanism that makes the fit even worse. One way of preventing such escalating fits is to cool the area of the brain that is susceptible.
So Takashi Saito and colleagues at Yamaguchi University in Japan have developed a heat pipe that is surgically implanted into the affected region of the brain and then connected to a heat sink on the outside of the skull. This device carries heat away from the affected area, keeping
John McCain made an interesting remark published today:
"If he's alive or dead it doesn't matter. If he's dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him like, like 'Weekend at Bernie's,'" McCain joked. "Let's get the best minds in America together and fix this tax code."Having served for 18 1/2 years as Fed Chairman, Greenspan is considered at the top of his field of central banking. Obviously some politicians consider him in even much higher regard.
Go figure. The previously-mentioned editor of a student-ran university newspaper in Colorado gets to keep his job.
The punishment was one of the least severe the board could impose. The only lesser penalty was to dismiss the allegations against McSwane.
This isn't indicative of all of them, just a subsect of the next generation which is frightful enough in and of itself.
A screaming 15-year old girl who is resisting arrest after violating a curfew law.
Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.
A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf.
What kind of world do we live in when Britney Spears is ordered to give her kids to ex-husband Kevin Federline?
Come on, I know Britney is the role model for (among other things) being a bad parent...but Kevin Federline...better?
Wow.
Some fascinating stuff about languages around the world.
“a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
A physics principle and a math principle applied to linguistics: Half lives and the 80/20 principle. Great stuff!
While I’ve been working with computers since before the fourth grade, I’ve only been working in the realm of printer repair for about a year and a half. While I came into the job with a background for the mechanical—I served as an engineer in the U.S. Army and spent many of my formative years on a farm—I was coming into what is now my current position in which I repair printers and work with other aspects of Information Technology from what was part administrative, part support, part customer service position with Cingular (now the new AT&T) and my level of confidence in conducting my job was lower than when I had started other job roles.
“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”
—Chris Cornell, “You Know My Name”
It took me several months for a printer not to become daunting, while I gathered my courage and developed my confidence. When confronted with an issue with a printer I found myself, sometimes, reacting like a child struggling in the water, thrown in for one of his or her first times. It wasn’t until I learned to stop panicking and rely on myself to solve the problem.
Because, that’s one of my core competencies: The ability to solve a problem.
Of course, the best way to do this, in my experience, is to learn as much as possible about an
issue and the all bodies of knowledge surrounding it until such time that you can come to a resolution. Appearing contrarian to my perspective of “perfect information” on the surface, this has developed itself over the years in that I try to find the “perfect amount of information” surrounding an issue instead of going in with so much information as to develop prejudices about conclusions that might not be the case. In any situation, however, I develop a core set of scenarios in which I ensure that I have parts available to be able to repair things on sight.
Yeah, something the Boy Scouts taught me: Always be prepared.
There are those situations, though, that I found where I would be confronted with an unruly piece of equipment which would require repair while I was there, even if it worked only partially or temporarily, so that the primary users would have the printer or other piece of equipment at their disposal to print checks, do reports, or whatever else their hearts or jobs desired. I started learning “field expedient” fixes which would carry something until such time that I could see to a proper repair.
That was something the Army taught me.
After I got it through my head something of my own advice—That I am not much more or less than the sum of my experiences—I realized that the best way to solve a problem was to have me be part of it. Why rely on fate, outside circumstances, chaos, or random circumstances dictate what the variables in a given situation would be? Why should I allow for something to turn out in a fashion that was counterintuitive—and counterproductive—to the way which I wanted a situation to turn out?
I learned that in any given situation—be that an office machine or a land war in Eston—if I made myself the determining piece in the situation, then I would have a much better chance of resolving it into my favor.
Rely upon yourself, because you’re the element in your life which makes the most difference.
Bananas, peanuts and peaches have been left as offerings to please the monkey god, sacred in Chinese mythology and Hinduism. A wheel-like device which kneeling gamblers turn by hand in front of the tree to spit out numbered balls has helped fuel the mania.
Dateline Fort Collins, Colorado: The Colorado State University campus there. An editorial ran recently:
"Taser this ... F*** Bush."
The expletive was spelled out.
A brief piece over at The Economist offers some insight into college entry and graduation rates at a cross section of countries. Check it out!
Tonight we’ll be taking a look at some wisdom from elsewhere: How forming a walking path through snow is much like self-engineering a set of favorable habits.
“The process of forming habits [is] as walking home through fresh snow. The first person to go through the snow has to forge a path through the snow, and it’s difficult … but others will follow in that path and it gets easier and easier.
Forming a habit is a matter of forging that initial path until it’s harder not to take the path. Who wants to forge a new path through the snow?
But let’s take that concept a little further: what if you engineered it so that even the initial person forging through the snow would rather take that path than another, because it would be harder not to take the path.
Engineer your habit change so that it’s harder not to form the habit.”
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