All I remember of one of the few records I owned as a child is a line that ended one of the songs.
Save your Confederate credit cards. The South’s gonna rise again.
For some reason that stuck with me. I thought it was funny since the Confederacy didn’t have credit cards. I wonder what song that was, and who sang it.
As a former employee of The Associated Press, it’s been somewhat embarrassing to watch their plodding attempts to control data which has already escaped from their control. I recall some discussions with graphics and photo editors in 1996 or so about the feasibility of preventing unauthorized copying of images, while still allowing authorized copies. We were in the business of distributing the news, after all. The discussion eventually shifted to watermarking in order to identify material from the A.P.
(While you can make copies extremely expensive to produce, that itself is expensive — and thus not feasible for most. In case anyone is still wondering, not only is it not feasible to prevent copies, it’s not possible.)
The Associated Press began in the cooperation of several publishers in the task of quickly delivering news dispatches from the Mexican War:
an 1846 arrangement whereby Mexican war reports arriving at Mobile, Ala., by boat were rushed by special pony express to Montgomery, then 700 miles by U.S. mail stagecoach to the southern terminus of the telegraph near Richmond, Va. That express gave the [New York] Sun an edge of 24 hours or more on papers using the regular mail.
But Moses Yale Beach relinquished that advantage by inviting other New York publishers to join the Sun in a cooperative venture. Five papers joined in the agreement: the Sun, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Herald and the Express.
….
Moses Yale Beach’s decision to share news with rivals was “neither altruistic nor cost-driven,” but recognized that “nothing could compete with the telegraph for speed, and all newspapers, rich or poor, would now be on a par,” historian Menahem Blondheim [author of News Over the Wires: the telegraph and the flow of public information in America, 1844-1897] said. [emphasis mine]
There are two aspects to the A.P.: gathering the news, and distributing it. The gathering of news involves the collection and analysis of data as well as the direct observation of events. For example, election returns are publicly available, but broadly distributed, disjointed, and officially slow. After the news is gathered, it is distributed. News gathering can be done by everybody, but there’s some sifting to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is distributing the news that is most disrupted by the Internet.
When you can go directly to the source, what need is there for someone to bring the news to you?
The advantage of wire services has been time. The speedy delivery of information to a third-party, whether television, radio, or print, who can then bring it to you. That advantage is lost when the whole world is connected.
When you can find out now, why wait until tomorrow?
The Internet shortens time and shrinks space. And in that environment, any business that relies on the scarcity of either must find some other means to survive.
It is not that the cooperative did not recognize the threat and the promise of the Internet. Many of us there did. But like many long-lived organizations, there’s an institutional bias in favor of the status quo. How would A.P. serve its member organizations if it adapted to the changed environment?
Now it seems that the Associated Press will fill the role for newspapers that the R.I.A.A. and the M.P.A.A. have for their respective industries. I do not wish them luck.
Certain laws and regulations, and policies related to those, have a non-trivial impact on statistics which are not normally thought of in concert with those laws. For example, mandatory sentencing increases incarceration rates, which in turn will decrease the employable population. Child labor laws directly impact the employable population, but so do mandatory attendance requirements for high school.
How does the unemployment rate of the United States compare to other nations when differences in incarceration rates and school attendance are taken into account?
Or, where do these people find the time to riot?
IBM has a way of making software that looks like it would be really helpful and of great utility — if it didn’t totally suck.
Stick to hardware, guys.
What the fuck?
We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they’re under investigation for something. They have to wait in this room all day, every day, until the matter is cleared up. They call this bureaucratic purgatory “the rubber room.” Some teachers have been stuck in it for years.
… long time passing …
This video comparison of Barcelona in 1908 and in 2008 by Fotos de Barcelona is striking, and not just in the differences in the built environment. What I find most striking, and disturbing, is the sheer lack of people in 2008, as if they were filming a ghost town.
Suppose that I go to Vegas to gamble.
Further suppose that someone gives me $100, which I then increase to $1000 at the slot machines.
Further suppose that I wander over to the roullette wheel, where I proceed to lose $900.
How much money have I lost?
You’d better have a damn good reason for waking me up. Ask yourself this: “Is somebody dying?” No? Then it can wait until morning.
With the office abuzz with rumors that IBM might purchase Sun, I’m tempted to ask myself if I really needed any reminders why I don’t read trade publications.
As previously mentioned, the school district needs to trim about $18.5 million in order to avoid a tax increase. Poughkeepsie Journal on the most recent school board meeting contained some interesting trivia.
[T]he school board is asking all its 1,500 employees to agree to a salary freeze next year. … District Superintendent Frank Pepe has estimated the district would save about $3.75 million if all the district’s employees agreed to salary freezes in 2009-10. [emphasis mine]
That’s a big number but only $2,500 per employee.
Now where will you find the other $14.75 million?
There are 726 teachers, and 91 “other professionals,” whatever that means. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that those are employees whose salaries are counted in the $125 million “program component” of the budget. Roughly, very roughly, speaking, that’s $153,000 per person, which is a tidy sum even for the New York metropolitan area. Perhaps if we ask nicely, the district will say what the median salary is.
Really, the cover of a compact disc should not be any reason to purchase it, and yet for some reason I want to get this one instead of the several that are recommended as having better performances.
This is not the sort of problem that one runs into when buying music downloads.
Really it’s not the shift in noon that I’m against — though there is a certain rightness to being able to look up at the sun and say, “ah, yes, it’s mid-day” — but that there’s a change at all. Just pick one and stick with it. This business of switching the clock around in order to alter behavior has been driving me nuts since 1971.
It seems to me that accidents would increase during the transitional period surrounding the switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. And apparently others have asked this question, and looked at the data to see if what effect the transition has. The paper Daylight Savings Time and Traffic Accidents, with related discussion of the results, is, unfortunately, behind the New England Journal of Medicine‘s paywall. Fortunately, Stanley Coren presented on the subject at INABIS 98, and so the work is available online at McMaster University.
Other studies argue that, overall, DST reduces traffic fatalities because more driving is done in daylight. No shit, Sherlock; the day is longer because of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, not because the clock changed. However, it just boggles the mind why the arguments proffered for DST are considered sufficient. Why not impose a curfew and forbid driving at night, then? Or remove headlamps from cars so that night driving becomes more hazardous and is thus avoided?
Worried about energy consumption and think it saves energy? Why not increase the price of candles, or kerosene, or whale oil, or electricity? Or, if you must compel the rest of us to do something, then forbid the use of electricity when it is dark. That will surely reduce consumption.
You want to use more of the daylight? Wake up when the sun rises, or leave the office earlier. Hell, work from home or live closer to your work location. But don’t move the clocks back and forth and pretend that you have more time. We may as well as call an inch a foot and pretend like penis enlargement pills work.
I’ve added Google Friend Connect. I see that Feedburner says that there are 164 subscribers today, so I expect to have more than two members on the site. 😀
The Big Sister had an informed response to the President’s suggestion that we send our children to school all year.
They’d have to buy air conditioners!
Well this is interesting. I was looking at the deficits in this table, and noticed something: the receipts.
That, and the title clearly says from T. Roosevelt, but the data only extends back to C. Coolidge.
Apparently President Obama remarked on education yesterday.
For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline.
Obviously Washington hasn’t been involved enough in education, so he proposes more interference. The specific policy proposals are not horrible, except for the increased Federal interference in a local matter, though others could probably cite studies contrary to the studies he mentions. Unfortunately for the President, I happen to have numbers to hand about one proposal in particular: the length of the school day and year.
[L]et’s also foster innovation in when our children are learning. We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children — listen to this — our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea — every year. That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That’s why I’m calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time -– whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it. (Applause.)
Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. (Laughter.) Not with Malia and Sasha — (laughter) — not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.
Education at a Glance 2008: OECD Indicators has more comparative data than you might ever want to wade through, which makes it helpful for validating assertions like the above. Let’s look at Indicator D1: How much time do students spend in the classroom? Oh, wait, data is not available for the United States. So, Mr. President, how do you make the claim that South Korean students sit at their desks longer than American students?
I expect the U.S. Department of Education provided some numbers. I’ve found the statistics for private schools, but nothing yet for public schools; the Digest of Education Statistics 2007 is not exactly well-organized. If we take the average of the private school data, we’re sitting about 200 hours longer each year than the Koreans. Interestingly enough, Korea is on the low end of the OECD’s comparisons of classroom time.
What we can look at in in the OECD data is Indicator D4: How much time do teachers spend teaching?, which contains this helpful chart.
Whoa! Leader of the Pack!
So what, exactly, is it that we’re short on?
John Battelle made some comment about Facebook and Twitter that Rick Klau shared in Google Reader the other day, and which I’m too lazy to find the link to at the moment, but the gist of which was that sites are starting to see Facebook drive as much traffic as search engines — that is, Google — do. There’s a different quality to the traffic because of its origin.
I suppose this is obvious, but I like to state the obvious.
Supposing that I want more intelligent comments here than the spam I get, then my site should be more visible to the networked communities of readers using Facebook and Twitter so that word can get around. But I should still write more interesting stuff that’s worth sharing.
During a depression, wages are sticky downward. That is, they do not drop quickly, though prices do. Instead, jobs are lost.
Fine.
I’m going to pretend I’m John McCain and take a chainsaw to the Arlington budget. In order to see no increase in taxation over the previous fiscal year, the district needs to reduce costs by about $18.4 million. The current instructional expenses — that is, salaries and benefits for teachers — are roughly $125 million, while administrative expenses are about $14.5 million. Take .5 million from the administrative line and 18 million from the instructional line. The choice is to accept lower salaries or a workforce reduction. We’d prefer the former, but the union contract requires the latter.
Sorry.
The Arlington Central School District is treating this budget planning a bit differently than the past few, because of the severe fiscal pressures. This is a good thing, and long overdue. Too bad they didn’t do this during the fat years. One of the improvements has been more and more frequent meetings where the administration presents budget scenarios to the citizens and the school budget, and solicits our opinions. It’s nice to be heard before we decline to approve the budget at the ballot box.
They do appear to making a genuine effort to reduce costs, and I appreciate that too. Unfortunately, most of the costs of the district are in the people. And the time to consider the consequences of those costs is during contract negotiations, when the union can be presented with the choice between lost jobs or lower wages. Instead, the voters are asked how much more we want to pay in taxes.
Well, at least they asked.
My personal preference is that there be no increase in taxes over last year. This does, however, entail a reduction in the overall budget from the current fiscal year’s. The district has provided a nice outline of some proposed cuts, in various tiers, so that we can see what would need to be cut. In order to keep the tax levy the same, approximately $1,840 per student needs to be trimmed. The district is presenting this in terms of “balancing sacrifices.”
I too need to balance my books. For each increase in taxes, by whatever entity, we will need to reduce our costs elsewhere. In anticipation of increases we’ve already taken steps to do so. The high fuel costs last summer helped start the ball rolling. We anticipated high fuel prices this winter, and installed a wood-burning fireplace capable of heating the house. We changed DirecTV packages to the minimal one, and are fully prepared to drop DirecTV entirely. The girls stopped their dance lessons. We eat out less often. When we eat out, we buy pizza — half the price of other options. The kids are starting to dislike pizza. We had leased a van in 2006; when the lease ended, we bought it at a favorable rate, more cheaply than we could have bought a new one, and reduced our monthly expenses by $50. We are refinancing the mortgage on our home, which we anticipate will save another $200 per month. Our total costs are not much lower, we’re not saving more, but we’re spending less on discretionary items.
Instead of working up from no increase, to see what we can afford, the district is working down from the existing budget, to see if we can reduce the increase. That’s backwards. It must be nice to be able to spend as much as you want and just take the money for it.
