Nearly 80% of New York City Public High-School Grads at CUNY Community Colleges Require Remedial English or Math Classes
March 8th, 2013Via: New York Post:
Nearly 80 percent of city public high-school graduates who enrolled in a City University of New York community college last year had to relearn the basics of reading, writing or math — the highest percentage in years.
A stunning 79.3 percent of city public-school grads who went to CUNY’s six two-year colleges arrived without having mastered the basics, up from 71.4 percent in 2007.
The ballooning numbers come despite the state having raised the requirements to graduate from high school in each of the past five years.
In 2012, this meant that roughly 10,700 students who earned high- school diplomas and enrolled at two-year CUNY schools weren’t prepared for college-level work — most of them because of math.
Those students were then forced to shell out money for non- credit-bearing courses — for as much as $1,000 a pop, they said — before they could start making their way toward a college degree.
Holder: Some Banks Too Big to Prosecute
March 7th, 2013Via: New York Magazine:
GRASSLEY: OK. On the issue of bank prosecution, I’m concerned that we have a mentality of too-big-to-jail in the financial sector of spreading from fraud cases to terrorist financing and money laundering cases — and I cite HSBC. So I think we’re on a slippery slope.
So then that’s background for this question. I don’t — I don’t have recollection of DOJ prosecuting any high-profile financial criminal convictions in either companies or individuals. Assistant General — Attorney General Breuer said that one reason why DOJ has not brought these prosecutions is that it reaches out to, quote/unquote, “experts” to see what effect the prosecutions would have on the financial markets.
So then on January 29th, Senator Brown and I requested details on who these so-called experts are. So far, we’ve not received any information. Maybe you’re going to, but why have we not yet have been provided the names of the experts that DOJ consults with as we requested on January 29th? Because we need to the find out why we aren’t having these high profile cases.
And then I got one follow-up. But maybe you can answer that quickly.
HOLDER: Well, we’ll endeavor to answer your letter, Senator. We did not, as I understand it, retain experts outside of the government in making — in making determinations with regard to HSBC. Now, if we could just put that aside for a minute, though. The concern that you have raised is one that I, frankly, share. And I’m not talking about HSBC now. That would not be appropriate.
But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.
Again, I’m not talking about HSBC. This is just a – a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence — impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. And I think that is something that we — you all need to — need to consider. So the concern that you raised is actually one that I share.
Mexico: The Country That Stopped Reading
March 7th, 2013Via: New York Times:
EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
New York: Government Emergency Alert Test Interrupts Rand Paul Filibuster
March 7th, 2013Via: YouTube / CSPAN:
Tighten It Until It Strips, Then Back It Off a Quarter Turn: Microsoft Restores Transfer Rights for Office 2013
March 7th, 2013Via: ZDnet:
As part of its shift to a subscription model, Microsoft introduced a controversial “no transfer” restriction with Office 2013. Now, after an intense outcry from customers, the company has reversed course and agreed to allow users to transfer retail Office licenses between devices.
Great Free Alternative: LibreOffice
Afghanistan: U.S.-NATO to Stop Reporting Number of Taliban Attacks
March 6th, 2013Via: Wired:
One of the major metrics for the decade-long Afghanistan war is seriously flawed. Rather than fix the problem, the U.S.-NATO military command in Kabul has decided that you simply shouldn’t see the data.
Late last month, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) conceded that it misreported the 2012 statistics on Taliban attacks. Its explanation was that a data-entry error had discounted attacks reported by Afghan forces — so much so that a statistically insignificant change in the level of so-called “enemy initiated attacks” became a seven percent decline from 2011 levels.
ISAF’s response, the Associated Press recounts, is to end public reporting on enemy-initiated attacks. It’ll still record attack levels, according to spokesman Jamie Graybeal, but it won’t publish any of the data it collects — all because it’s losing confidence in the veracity of its information. As Afghan forces take increasing control of the war, ISAF will cede control of overseeing the attack data collection. “We have determined that our databases will become increasingly inaccurate in reflecting the entirety of enemy initiated attacks,” Graybeal told the Associated Press’ Bob Burns, who broke the story.
Holder: Drone Strikes in U.S. Possible in Response to ‘Extraordinary Circumstance’
March 6th, 2013Via: NBC:
The Obama administration has “no intention” of carrying out drone strikes against suspected terrorists in the United States, but could use them in response to “an extraordinary circumstance” such as the 9/11 terror attacks, according to a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder obtained by NBC News.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who received the March 4 letter from Holder, called the attorney general’s refusal to rule out drone strikes in the U.S. “more than frightening.”
China: Concept for Cairn-Shaped Farmscrapers
March 6th, 2013While I definitely wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for any of these to be built, my guess is that you would be hard pressed to find a better gallery of sci-fi cityscapes to look at while you waste time at work.
Via: Vincent Callebaut Architectures:
Vincent Callebaut Architectures
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Secret Organic Gardens for China’s Elite
China Acknowledges ‘Cancer Villages’
Micro 3-D Printer
March 6th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,” says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe.
…
Printing microstructures with features a few hundred nanometers in size could be useful for making heart stents, microneedles for painless shots, gecko adhesives, parts for microfluidics chips, and scaffolds for growing cells and tissue. Another important application could be in the electronics industry, where patterning nanoscale features on chips currently involves slow, expensive techniques. 3-D printing would quickly and cheaply yield polymer templates that could be used to make metallic structures.
So far, 3-D microprinting has been used only in research laboratories because it’s pretty slow. In fact, many research labs around the world use Nanoscribe’s first-generation printer. The new, faster machine will also find commercial use. Thiel says numerous medical, life sciences, and nanotechnology companies are interested in the new machine.
Robot Warriors: Lethal Machines Coming of Age
March 6th, 2013Via: BBC:
The era of drone wars is already upon us. The era of robot wars could be fast approaching.
Already there are unmanned aircraft demonstrators like the arrow-head shaped X-47B that can pretty-well fly a mission by itself with no involvement of a ground-based “pilot”.
There are missile systems like the Patriot that can identify and engage targets automatically.
And from here it is not such a jump to a fully-fledged armed robot warrior, a development with huge implications for the way we conduct and even conceive of war-fighting.
On a carpet in a laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Professor Henrik Christensen’s robots are hunting for insurgents. They look like cake-stands on wheels as they scuttle about.
Christensen and his team at Georgia Tech are working on a project funded by the defence company BAE systems.
Their aim is to create unmanned vehicles programmed to map an enemy hideout, allowing human soldiers to get vital information about a building from a safe distance.
“These robots will basically spread out,” says Christensen, “they’ll go through the environment and map out what it looks like, so that by the time you have humans entering the building you have a lot of intelligence about what’s happening there.”
The emphasis in this project is reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. But the scientific literature has raised the possibility of armed robots, programmed to behave like locusts or other insects that will swarm together in clouds as enemy targets appear on the battlefield. Each member of the robotic swarm could carry a small warhead or use its kinetic energy to attack a target.
