Why We Need School
Posted 5:23 AM

Anyone who plans on sending a child to school or who is engaged in the process of schooling a child should read Ivan Illich's essay Deschooling Society. Of course, only the well-educated will read this essay and will agree with many or most of its arguments. What's more, they will vaccinate their children from the detrimental effects of schooling before sending them by teaching them to respect their own opinions over that of school authority, etc. It is highly unlikely that the people who would benefit the most from reading this essay will be presented with its text.

Labels: education

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Postgres synchronizer
Posted 1:01 PM

Database replication has a lot of overhead. Sometimes I just want to copy a half-dozen rows that change every once in a while. pg_comparator seemed like it would be helpful. It's analogous rsync for Postgres, albeit less efficient. But the version that was out there had a very ambitious version number. I wrote a patch to fix the program, and add the feature of actually performing the update/delete/insert as needed. Hopefully someone finds this useful.

Labels: programming, web development

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Firefox, Ajax, Google and IE 7.0
Posted 10:46 AM

Internet Explorer 7.0 running Gmail is painfully slow, and slowly consumes all available RAM if left running for a couple days. I've verified this on 2 machines. Has anyone else seen this? In my tests, I've found that IE7 has major problems with AJAX apps that are "always on", and are constantly updating the screen by replacing the src attribute of blocks.

Did Microsoft deliberately cripple AJAX applications in IE 7? They have a huge financial incentive to do so. In order to continue using Gmail under Windows Vista, I now have to run Firefox. Firefox on Vista works great, and installing it greatly reduced my browser latency.

It's interesting to see how the market prices of the two are strongly negatively correlated. I'm clearly not the only one who's noticed the relationship - Google is being predicted by NASDAQ investors as the loser in this browser war.

Labels: google

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

E-Coli Vaccine Threatens Food Supply
Posted 12:04 AM

The presence of high levels E. Coli bacteria is an excellent indicator of poor health conditions at farms, lack of proper sanitation, and compromised immune systems in farm animals. This bacteria is easy to detect in cattle feces, and although the underlying problems are often hard to find, they are always problems that need to be found and fixed.

E. Coli is found in everyday food and water supplies, and there's plenty of it living in your own intestines right now. The problem is that when there's too much of it, especially of the strains found in cattle, it can be dangerous. The good thing is that when there's a lot of the bacteria in cattle, it raises much needed alarms about farm health practices.

Now, the U.S. Dept of Agriculture is sponsoring a program to vaccinate cattle against the bacteria - reducing the ability of E. Coli to proliferate in the intestines of the vaccinated animals.

Wait. Shouldn't they be sponsoring a program for randomized testing of cattle feces in order to find farms that may be committing health violations? I mean, with the recent spinach contamination linked to cattle runoff, it would behoove the government to step in. This is one clear case where government oversight is needed and is in the best interests of America's health.

Enter the USDA vaccination program. Rather than improve the health, sanitation and overall well being of the plants and livestock we eat, we can just try to kill off the bacteria using modern biotechnology. A successful vaccination program would allow livestock to eat low quality, high-grain, low-fiber diets which, not coincidentally, make cows grow faster for less money. (Why work to improve farm conditions when you can save money with a federally-funded injection?)

Yet another government program masked as something for the public good that's actually just good for the bottom-line of industrial cattle farmers. And yet another good reason to stick with grass-fed, or, better yet, to go vegan.

Labels: science

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Simple Way to Improve the Education System
Posted 10:59 PM

I thought of a way to improve, perhaps greatly, all of the schools in this country with a single action by the Federal government.

It would require approximately $10 million dollars to administrate, a cost of less than $0.50 per student, and it would be a one-time action, or perhaps repeated every 10-20 years. The effects would be an immediate and very long lasting improvement in test scores, a reduction in school violence, an improvement in parent-teacher relationships, and a reduction in overall expenses on schooling, which will more than pay for the cost of the action.

The plan has some hurdles that would difficult to overcome:

1. the entire action would have to be a secret, known only to a few people and of course to a team of acknowledged experts in education, who would be sworn to secrecy.
   
   
2. it would also require unwavering participation of the U.S. Dept of Education. It cannot be done on a trial basis with a smaller group.
   
   
3. it will be very controversial, involving political risk
   

Fortunately, I think it would be trivial to convince top sociologists and educators of the efficacy, but I think the hardest part to overcome is the political risk.

What I'm wondering, hearing about this can you *guess* what it is that I'm planning, because if you *can* than it would make the plan unworkable, since if it's easy to guess, it implicitly violates provision 1. I'll tell you if you're right.

Labels: education

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]