Michigan's best: Kalamazoo College says Forbes Magazine

Kalamazoo College offers better education than either the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) or Michigan State, says this article in MLive quoting Forbes Magazine's college ratings.

"If you’re in Michigan, Forbes magazines says it’s — in top-to-bottom order: Kalamazoo College, University of Michigan, Hillsdale College, Albion College, Hope College, Calvin College, Michigan State University, Michigan Technological University, Grand Valley State University, Wayne State University, Oakland University, Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University and Eastern Michigan University." [MLive/Jackson]

Whoa. My alma mater is dead-fucking-last? Yikes. That's disappointing.

Dropping paper text books instead of trees

And replacing them with PC tablets or iPads.  For college students this should save them a fortune on overpriced dead-tree edition textbooks. For secondary students maybe not..unless they're neigh indestructible and include tracking software for when the kids lose them.

You can lead a horse to water...

Abandon all hope ye who enter here

...but you cannot make them drink it. Michigan's education bureaucracy is considering withholding badly needed funds from Detroit Public Schools because of their persistently high rate of truancy it has been reported. Threats and sanctions such as this are likely futile though; if there were anything the DPS could do about this chronic problem they would have done it already.

The Internet will eventually kill public schools

Boy that would be nice.

Public dollars ought to go toward degrees that make you employable

So says Florida Governor Rick Scott. Why run up huge student loan debts to get degrees in anthropology, art history, comparative literature, philosophy, or political science? I agree. If you run up a student loan tab in the five figure range and all you have to show for it is a degree in Women's Studies or Comparative Religion (albeit with a fancy diploma from a good school) but that will hang like a millstone around your neck forever, what good did it really do for you or the rest of society?

One memory I have from my misspent youth was reading Ayn Rand bitching, as reported by one of her biographers,  about the way that the newly installed Soviet regime cut funding massively for the liberal arts departments at their universities after the revolution was secure in order to beef up the fields of engineering, the sciences, and the practical arts while she was a student majoring in history and philosophy. That was one of the few good moves they made in my humble opinion.

What alternative do you have if you don't want to study accounting, nursing, medicine, mathematics, geology, or some practical subject if you can't get financial aid to study that stuff? Paying for your education yourself seem like a decent option to me but in any case asking the taxpayers to fund your study of Egyptology, renaissance poetry or mass communications should be off the table.

Ann Arbor Pioneer High-school sent 20 kids home for delinquent book fines

That'll learn 'em! What they'll learn from it remains to be seen. Probably learn the proper lesson better if do-gooder types don't pay their fines for them though.

Politically correct high school home coming "event" scheduled at NW

From MLive in re the homecoming "event" at Northwest School  district (Jackson, MI area) this week. No floats, no candy, and apparently no fun either.

"Northwest High School students will not ride on floats in the homecoming parade or throw candy to the crowd.
But they will create lip dubs — videos of people lip-synching to songs — before homecoming and play capture the flag and have a water balloon war homecoming week.
Teacher Marnie Hade, the student government adviser, told the Northwest School Board on Wednesday that parade participants may hand out healthy snacks and items such as mini footballs in the grass along the parade route.
But Hade said participants may not throw candy because it violates the school’s wellness policy.
'There will not be any candy of any kind,' Hade said." [emphasis added]

Sounds like big fun, eh?

Declining school enrollments in Michigan is news?

For some media outlets here in Michigan it seems to be. I wonder where they've been since 2000 or so? With few or no jobs available and unemployment over ten percent (and that's just the bullshit official Washington number) why would a family with kids to raise stay here? And so they leave and take their education dollars with them when they go. Again this is news?

Lincoln, Ypsilanti and Willow Run on "lowest performing" list

"Willow Run High School and Ypsilanti High School again made the state’s Persistently Lowest Achieving (PLA) list while Lincoln High School was added to the 2011 list, released this morning by the Michigan Department of Education" says Janet Miller the education reporter @ annarbor.com.

One word: Demographics. Just sayin'.

Weblog

Wayne State University considers stricter admissions standards
A good idea perhaps if your graduation rates are among the worst when compared to other Michigan public universities, and well below the 49 percent national average.
Boisterous public employee union protesters jam-pack Michigan capitol building
Objecting to legislation to give state-appointed emergency financial managers more power to resolve fiscal crises, including dissolving employee contracts.
Ohio State University's football coach suspended for two games for NCAA violations
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Unless you get caught, eh Jim?
The Bully Depot: Breeding, buying and selling Detroit's unofficial canine favorite
"The pit bull might just be the unofficial dog of the city. They're everywhere here — walking down streets on the ends of leashes, peering out of shabby dog houses in neighborhood back yards, barking with a fury from behind iron-barred front doors. They're protection for some, pets for others, reputation builders for many."
The legacy of UK white nationalist Enoch Powell
"Enoch Powell was a great patriot, a man of immense courage and decency. Still he was ignored. Courage and decency are not enough. Victory will only come from a radical approach that tackles the fundamental causes of our malaise. White activists should learn from Enoch Powell’s errors as well as his achievements."
NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller resigns 
After the release of that secretly made video of that other Schiller yesterday this should come as no surprise.

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Bloomy's bubble bursts: New York City voters finally realize -- there's no there there 
NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg that is.
Officials sympathetic to Ann Arbor residents' concerns about noise on Division Street
Comments on this story show absolutely no sympathy either.
Rick Haglund: History doesn't prove that lower business taxes create jobs
A Michigan based business columnist claims to debunk that little bit of neo-liberal ideology.
When test scores don't add up: 32 metro Detroit schools show improvements too good to be true
Cheating, gaming the system, and lies probably account for it.
Ann Arbor Board of Ed picks new superintendent: Patricia Green
To be paid around $300K with benefits included. Nice work if you can get it.
Judge rules Wal-Mart can fire medical marijuana patient formerly employed at Battle Creek store
Sad what federal judges can do.
The Enigma of American Fascism in the 1930s
Interesting.
Why is the human brain so hard to copy?
Good question. A better question is "why do we want to"?
A view of war from main street America: Burying a 19 year-old Afghan war casualty
"Likewise, Brandon’s father and grandfather were expendable. They followed the rules and the system had sent their jobs overseas and left them in the lurch, to fend for themselves. They were expendable, too. No one cared that their lives had been wrecked, their hopes and plans destroyed. They were all three, son, father and grandfather, refugees from the American Dream; stunned wanderers in a world they never made. And their government didn’t seem to care. No one did. Brandon was in the coffin, but all three of them were casualties."

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Your tax dollars at work: "A Jackson Community College (Jackson, MI) student who failed more than 20 classes in the mid-1990s is receiving a federal Pell Grant after all."  MLive (Jackson)

Did anyone even notice he was gone?: Detroit city councilman back after five month "leave of absence" Det Free Press

Counter-culture history: How a volatile junkie named Cheetah Chrome survived Cleveland's notorious punk scene back in the day - Detroit Metro Times

LSU's Les Miles not gonna coach Michigan football either - Michigan Daily
After Jim Harbaugh declined the position first. All this kind of reminds me of the search for Lloyd Carr's replacement after he quit in '07. And we all know how well that turned out.

Post-Affluence Anarchy: A Dialogue (Murray Bookchin and Jeremy Brecher) -The Anarchist Library
"By the end of the 1960s, the discontent remained, but much of the opportunity for experimentation had vanished. Students began to knuckle down for grades and eschewed political activity that might get them thrown out of school; dropouts, no longer able to live off the scraps of a booming economy, were forced to look for work and face the problems of any other workers. The romantic exuberance and sense of possibility that marked the 1960s became a matter of history."

Sign of the Times...

This NY Times story about the cost of higher education has been wending its way through the innards of the blogosphere lately and I thought I'd chime in too. What sort of egoism or value system would recommend going into debt to the tune of a $100K to obtain a degree in religious & women's studies? The subject of the article is one such person did in fact make such a choice. And NYU, while not exactly an Ivy League school, is very, very good. But still though, is it a hundred grand worth of debt "good"? I doubt it. The poor girl is never gonna pay this debt off.

The prevailing American Dream ethos tells people: Go to college. Get a dream job. Buy a house. = Life will be good. But as we've seen with other debunked features of the American Dream, this ain't necessarily so. That NYU diploma is now revealed to have come at a really high price for what it is. I wonder what it is she learned there that she couldn't have learned at a far cheaper state college, community college, night school, or just reading on her own? Or was it all, first and foremost, about having that NYU sheepskin on the wall?

This reminds me of the stories I'd hear as a kid about how in some societies the family of a bride would go into ruinous debt to moneylenders in order to impress their village with spectacular wedding celebrations. I thought this was very foolish, ancient custom or not. Now it appears that many worldly and sophisticated Americans who ought to know better are going the same route. I just shake my head.

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Hiding prOn on your computer - Gizmodo (J. Herman)

Space rays causing Toyota's "sudden acceleration" phenomenon? -Detroit Free Press (J. Hyde)

NYC's schools "rubber room" for teachers - NY Post

Just like a jail cell except that they get full salary and benefits and can go home at night.

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When the Army stopped Niagara Falls. - io9
The pictures from 1969 are amazing.
A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness - Escape Pod
A really interesting podcast about what it means to want what you want. NSFW
Detroit Board of Ed Chairman is a functional illiterate. - Detroit News (Laura Berman)
He even admits it too.
Random junk pieced together to make a city-wide WI-FI network - Gizmodo
"On the surface this is a tale of some clever University MacGyvers, a small place in Afghanistan, and a makeshift Wi-Fi network, but the greater idea is that people came together to provide a new method of communication to an area where Skype calls and quick Google searches weren't a common luxury. Sure, now the area is exposed to time wasters and Internet porn, but it's also been provided some new opportunities to learn and explore." How cool is that?

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The Case Against College Education - Time
"The benefits of putting more people in college are also oversold. Part of the college wage premium is an illusion. People who go to college are, on average, smarter than people who don't. In an economy that increasingly rewards intelligence, you'd expect college grads to pull ahead of the pack even if their diplomas signified nothing but their smarts."
Cyborg classical composer is as good as Mozart?-Miller-McCune
Samples of the music on this site too. It ain't half bad. But let's see write a folk song or some blues. Then we'll see.
More foreshadowing of the coming race war - Taki's Magazine
U.K. edition.

Losing the culture war.- NY Review of Books
"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible."
I surely hope not. We are moving (some of us anyhow) to libraries that are merely stored, licensed, DRMed, copies of media, books, and data sets that technically are owned not by the possessor but by corporations in perpetuity. So we'll always be needing to upgrade our hardware, software, and re-buying licenses for stuff we already have. And any time some monopolist publisher or government bureaucrat wants to, they can make whatever we've obtained already, (I won't say purchased, since we don't actually own it in the real sense of the term) unreadable whenever and for whatever reason they want.
The results are in on Cuba's revolution - Telos
"A superficial overview of social behavior however, raises the question of whether the Cubans—after decades of forced-fed altruism—have not lost their appetite for solidarity as well as the initiative for entrepreneurship that East Asians managed to retain. Travelers from Brazil to Cuba these days report that, although the two populations live in the tropics, Brazilians exude and exalt life, but Cubans seem numb." Sad. It could have gone a lot better.
Orwellian headline of the year- NY Times
Originally it was:"Gates Calls Europe Anti-War Mood Danger to Peace." The Times later changed it to a more palatable "Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace".
GM kills off Hummer - BoingBoing
"This car was like the high-fructose corn syrup of automobiles, something that concentrated everything bad about motoring until it underwent a phase-change and somehow became an object of desire." Too bad. For a special use land vehicle it wasn't so bad. But as an everyday form of transport, not so much.
Lawmakers blow off workplace safety law they write - The Hill
70 percent of them too.
World's Coral Reefs Could Disintegrate by 2100 - American Scientist

Some really fast bolt-action rifle shooting. - YouTube
So maybe I don't have to have a semi-auto after all? But then again I wonder what his target looks like. Heh.

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A photo essay about an abandoned island city - Mg Photo Agency
"The feeling of being in some far off post-apocalyptic land is immense. To experience a place where every way you turn is abandoned desolation, immediately overwhelms; you do not need to imagine what it would be like to stand in a once occupied city after a plague, The Bomb, or at the end of time."


Airborne Laser zaps in-flight missile- CNET
A flying Maginot Line. Very expensive, and very impressive too, (in a geez-whiz! kinda way), but largely worthless unless you have it deployed exactly where and when the NorKs, Iran, China, India or Pakistan or whoever else are about to launch a nuke at the U.S.
Secession In The Air - Taki's Magazine
"The secession taking place in America is a secession of the heart—of people who have come to believe the government is 'them', and not 'us'." Heh.
Australian Judge Rules Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted - Slashdot.org/
Regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them.
Why Tenure Harms Education - American Thinker
Backpack-style rifle slings - Gun Slings Direct.com/
What biathlon competitors use to hold their rifles securely while downhill skiing.
Not all fun & games at Olympics - Washington Post
Mob smashes windows in downtown Vancouver shopping area. Friday night too.

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The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment - Freedom to Tinker blog
Botnets increasingly wielded for ideological uses - Ars Technica
This was bound to happen.
How to use a touch screen with gloves on: use a sausage - BoingBoing
"Algebra for All" Working as Should Have Been Expected - iSteve blog
The faces of meth: before & after photos from mugshots - LA Times
What is the best pocket tool? - Outside
Whatever one you pick you still need to carry a sturdy fixed blade sheath knife too though.
New Armored Wall System Assembles Like Legos, Could Replace Sandbags in Afghanistan-Popular Science
Pro/con: Shields-Expensive and have to be trucked or choppered in. Sand bags and rocks- Free, universally available and are time-tested protection. But the mil-ind complex doesn't make any money from local sand and rocks though. Heh.
Why are political elites so condescending? - Washington Post
OpenOffice Ships Version 3.2 - TechCrunch
Yeah!
4000 year-old human hair from museum basement allows genome to be sequenced. - Technology Review
The Bone Conduction Music Show- Thayrone X
The best rhythm & blues show on the net.
Anthrax, science is on to you! - Scientific American
"... anthrax manages to persist in soil for hundreds of years despite environmental extremes, including wind and rain, and even go undetected during outbreaks in humans and livestock has puzzled scientists." But how?
Apocalyptic Future Civil War Myths Catch Fire - Wired
Blame it on DMZ comics. I like that the disassociation and secession tropes are getting out there though. Heh.



Eco-defense: A field guide to monkey-wrenching - Anarchist Library (Edward Abbey)
"If a stranger batters your door down with an axe, threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants, he is committing what is universally recognized — by law and morality — as a crime. In such a situation the householder has both the right and the obligation to defend himself, his family, and his property by whatever means are necessary. This right and this obligation is universally recognized, justified and even praised by all civilized human communities. Self-defense against attack is one of the basic laws not only of human society but of life itself, not only of human life but of all life."