P.S. A Column On Things

Testing Students

I just finished writing up the chapter three test last night, and I faced a dilemma. My first two tests were largely fill in the blank, which is not the norm at my school; usually we do multiple choice tests. They are easier to grade, and more like the high-stake STAR and SAT tests that students have to take. When I was a kid, we called them multiple guess tests, and I never felt they had much to do with finding out what you really know. Especially because the distractors on the good tests (as I was brusquely informed by one of my master teachers) are written with great care by people who've actually been trained to write deceptive alternatives. I hate deceptive multiple choice questions, where choosing the right answer hinges on a single word. But that's what our students will face, so am I doing them a favor by attempting authentic assessment? And of course, I want to test their higher thinking skills, not rote memorization of facts, but tests like that are incredibly hard to write and even more difficult to grade fairly. So, chapter three will be half fill in the blank and half multiple choice and we'll see how that goes.

The other question is: do I tell them exactly what will be on the test? Do I tell them a little more than what will be on the test, so they study some extra? Basically, they complain if I don't tell them exactly what's on the test. Do I have to do that? Should I do that? Do I have to do study guides? I don't think so, but other teachers do them and students depend on them.

What a dilemma.

Rush: I Agree With Taliban

Limbaugh on Obama’s Nobel: ‘We all agree with the Taliban’

Confirming what every sentient American has known for about 17 years, Rush Limbaugh (de facto leader of the Republican Party) is anti-American, dedicated to the destruction of America, and by agreeing with them gives aid and comfort to those killing brave patriotic American soldiers, turning their children into orphans, and murdering our allies: Rush Limbaugh using the public airwaves stated he agrees with our enemies.

 

Briefs

• Letterman? What about Coburn and Ensign?
• General's insubordination
• As previously reported by PSACOT, the nation needs competent credit analysis
• This is what the Republicans did.
  This is the financial damage supported by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
• WellPoint Sues Maine To Raise Premiums 18.5%
• Announcing National Use Zazi To Gain New Surveillance Powers Day
• Senate Finance Delays Health Care Vote -- Did Baucus Screw Wyden And Lose His Vote
• Health Care Activists Arrested In Minnesota For Civil Disobedience
• Richard Cohen:Is Obama Man Enough To Win In Afghanistan
• Of course Bush Blocked Efforts To Halt Mortgage Abuse
• Memo to the White House: You Can’t Win an Unpopular War (And Stop Quoting George W. Bush)
• Teddy Kennedy and the End of Noblesse Oblige
• Khadr Case Goes Nowhere at Gitmo (Again)
• Rikyrah: Opt Out States Are Where The Majority Of The Black Population Lives In This Country
• Benchmarked Crudely: Oil Soon To Be Priced In Non-Dollars

The Informant!

4 Stars out of 5

Update Oct. 14, 2009: Because of a senior moment, I forgot that Neal Vitale had already reviewed The Informant on Sept. 24; he gave it 2.5 stars. And that's what makes horse races.

Steven Soderbergh's new film, The Informant! stars Matt Damon in the most entertaining role of his career to date. It is the story of an incredibly complex informant, Mark Whitacre, who was at the center of a price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s. Vicki and I were fascinated by every minute of it. It was shot very weird--not much focus, not much lighting. It almost looks like a documentary. They music is bizarre and inappropriate--on purpose! Soderbergh set out to make the anti-drama about an informant, and he succeeded, wildly.

Craig Reynolds Checks In, Two from Dern, Jon Carroll Cat Column, Dan Grobstein File

Craig Reynolds checks in:

• AT T rumored to allow Skype calls via its network on iPhone
• New ring detected around Saturn and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Discovers Largest Ring Around Saturn
• At some point during my college years there was a "musical staircase" installation (in MIT's Building 7). [Now the Swedish have created piano stairs to make taking the stairs fun]
• Daniel Dern offers what I consider the ultimate proof that some people have too much time on their hands: Fans recut Star Wars IV. Then, he passes along the best rant ever, an attack on the GOP made on the house floor.

Another Jon Carroll Cat Column

Dan Grobstein File

• Roger Ebert on the anger of the festering fringe
• OPINION
| October 05, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist: The Politics of Spite
By PAUL KRUGMAN
If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they're against it - whether or not it's good for America.
• When I was in Japan 5 years ago I brought a special American Express preloaded card which was made for travel. It didn't work in any ATM.
  
  TRAVEL | October 04, 2009
  Practical Traveler: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
  By MICHELLE HIGGINS
  U.S. credit cards lack a special chip, now commonly used in many foreign countries, causing them to be rejected by some merchants and kiosks.
• A lot of our current economic troubles are caused by this sort of thing. Also related to the troubles of the newspapers. The Chicago Tribune for example.
  
  BUSINESS / ECONOMY | October 05, 2009
  Buyout Firms Profited as a Company's Debt Soared
  By JULIE CRESWELL
  Private equity firms, former executives and Wall Street investment banks profited as the Simmons Bedding Company fell into bankruptcy, devastating its bondholders and employees.
• BUSINESS
| October 08, 2009
Next Asset Bubble Could Come Sooner Than You Think
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK (AP) -- The next financial bubble could come sooner than you think.
• OPINION
| October 09, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: A Library to Last Forever
By SERGEY BRIN
Google's books project is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, but the real winners are readers, who will have access to an expanded world of books.
• OPINION
| October 09, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist: The Uneducated American
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Education in America, suffering for years, is about to get much worse thanks to cuts caused by the financial crisis.

Be sure to click over to Dan Grobstein Extra!

End of Oct. 12 Column

Family Wedding

My niece got married at a beautiful home in Sonoma County in September, and we all decamped for Santa Rosa to attend. There was a picnic Friday by the lake, then a wedding Saturday night up the house. My niece and her spouse know their food and wine, so both were excellent on both occasions. The paella was amazing in a number of ways, not least of which was the fact that it was cooked for 50 people, in front of us, from scratch, in the biggest honking paella pan you've ever seen. Alas, it was 103 that say in Healdsburg, so I spent the afternoon running from shady spot to shady spot. And we lacked the time/initiative to find a nice restaurant, so we ended up eating dinner at Marie Callendars-quite a comedown. Evening cocktails were at Barndiva, a bar and art gallery with an outside dining area that was perfect on a boiling hot night. The ceremony was at sunset and it was beautiful. Everything for the dinner was grown within 90 miles of where we sat. There was dancing to a wonderful band, and a chance to catch up with relatives we seldom see, as the whole family gathered to wish my niece well. I love weddings!

Afghan Follies, Just Pay Them Off, Briefs

Afghan Follies

Can you say President Truman and General MacArthur? Is this a put up job? That is, Barack has already decided to commit to the quagmire and the whole series of five or so "meetings" is total theater? Or is it insubordination? Or is Obama too inexperienced to realize that he should immediately retire an insubordinate officer? Or is this an honest mistake by an officer? It is not likely to be an honest mistake. Stan's job and assigned post is to plan, conduct, and supervise military operations as opposed to giving speeches in London. He apparently arranged an insufficiently secure communications channel for his classified reports to the President, such as the one that was provided to a $100 a year sometime writer for The Washington Post by the name of Woodward. Note that when it came time a week or so later for the actual troop request, the request was on paper, the original was hand delivered personally by Stan to Bob at a wholly owned military facility overseas and the only copy was retained by Stan.

Just Pay Them Off

Here's an idea that was occasionally suggested during Vietnam, updated for our latest quagmire. The per capita annual GDP in Afghanistan for 2008 is an estimated $400 for each of about 30,000,000 people which amounts to $12B. The U.S. cost of joint military operations there (which is less than total cost for all coalition nations) is estimated to be about $90B per year (and could be substantially higher if troop levels double). What would happen if the U.S. itself (not through the problematic allegedly corrupt Afghan government and bureaucracy) gave, for example, US$1,000 directly and personally to each Afghan per year. They would receive the money on condition, for example, that the tribes maintain order in their tribal areas and not export controlled substances (note that their income just increased by 150% which should reduce the need to produce non-food crops)? The cost would be $30B leaving the U.S. with at least an extra $60B (less the cost of money distribution). Can 30,000,000 people control a group of malcontents numbering about 15,000 to 20,000?

Briefs

• FDIC sells failed bank assets to private investors
• DNI Cites $75 Billion Intelligence Tab
  By Walter Pincus
  Washington Post Staff Writer
  Thursday, September 17, 2009
  
  The United States spent $75 billion over the past year to finance worldwide intelligence operations that employ 200,000 people, according to an unprecedented disclosure by the nation's top intelligence official.
  
  [What are we getting for this? How much value, if any, is being
  provided (at $375,000 per person per year)?]
• The difference between a gamble and a risk in the Afghan war.
• Former McCain Campaign Manager: Nominating Palin In 2012 Would Be 'Catastrophic'

• Cooked poll numbers, or maybe fraud from Strategic Vision polling firm.

• A Short Question For Senior Officials Of The New York Fed about Goldman Sachs
• The GOP's New Foreign Policy: Undermine American Diplomacy
• Our worthiest newspapers are once again declaring the virtue of bending over so far backwards to prove they don't tilt leftward that they topple over and turn into laughingstocks.

• The government has never ever made a mistake or acted improperly. In other news, for believers in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy: The US Paid Reward To Lockerbie witness
• Journalists outraged
• Jay Rockefeller: better than you think, and here
• Why Obama's White House leaks
• The Fraud Of GOP Tax And School Choice Policy Shown In Arizona
• Law and Order Versus John Yoo
• Alan Grayson Speaks the Language of Morality, Causes Mass Panic. He's the one who said Republicans want you to die quickly.

Mad Men Parody, Dan Grobstein File

I was down the Google hole on another matter entirely one night this week when I hit the Sesame Street parody of Mad Men.

Dan Grobstein File

• From The New York Times:
  
  Seltzer Man Is Out of Action, and Brooklyn Thirsts
  
  Ronny Beberman picked a bad time of year for his first fall from his delivery truck in 40 years on the job.
• BERLIN JOURNAL: Ovens on Feet Beckon Germans to Bratwurst
  
  One-man mobile sausage-cooking machines are so successful in Berlin that a "War of the Wursts" is under way in the city’s busiest areas.
• 10 Best Things We'll Say to Our Grandkids
• Food for thought (and perhaps disagreement); Is Obama the sharpest
  politician since FDR or in over his head?

• I wish I knew why the President doesn't listen to Krugman, Stiglitz Baker.
  
  OPINION | September 30, 2009
  Paul Krugman: Moral decay? Or deregulation?
  By Paul Krugman
  Did we lose our economic morality? No, we were the victims of politics.

• Immigration Stories, From Shadows to Spotlight
  
  A new exhibit at the Museum of Chinese in America illuminates the
  stories of "paper sons," like Tun Funn Hom, who evaded immigration
  laws meant to exclude the Chinese.

• I should say "the more things change the more they stay the same."
  
  Just finished reading "My Life in France" by Julia Child. Fascinating story about how she got into cooking and how she wrote the original cookbook. Her husband worked for the predecessor of the USIA and she tells of the troubles with Sen. McCarthy and Cohn and Schine. Also her father was a reactionary republican and her political interactions with him remind me of today. (She and her husband were Democrats.)
  
  I haven't seen the Meryl Streep movie.
  
  I also just finished "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure" about a road trip he and Bess took in 1953 from Independence to NYC in their new Chrysler. They thought they could do it incognito.
  
  Lots of political parallels to today too.
  
  (Truman had a standing order that he was to be told whenever his plane entered the airspace of Ohio, the home state of senator Robert A. Taft, so he could order the lavatory tanks dumped. A pity the current Air Force One doesn't have that option.)

• Is politics crazier than in the past?
  Might be because the right wing whackos who used to be ignored are
  now getting coverage on tv and radio as if they are serious thinkers.
  
  Father Coughlin may have had a nationwide radio show but he didn't
  have his own network.

• This is impossible; the world is only 6000 years old.
  
  After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveal that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.
  
  The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

• From The New York Times:
  
  At Sold-Out Fenway, a Way in for Patient Fans
  
  The Boston Red Sox have a string of sellouts at Fenway Park dating to 2003, but the club holds back a handful of tickets for sale on every game day.

End of October 5 Column