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Nuns On The Run

Nothing to do with education or Brandywine except I guess you have to learn not to trust anyone.

FIFTY-five nuns were on the run last night after racking up debts of £400,000.

The women — all called Maria — had secretly run a knitwear company on the side for ten years.

Their convent supplied 25 shops and they blew a fortune travelling to fashion shows across Europe to keep up with trends.

But the order of St Kyrikos and Ioulite in Northern Greece hit a cashflow crisis after spending huge sums on new machinery.

More

COW Highlights

At next monday's board meeting Brandywine alumni Andrew Potteiger will be voted on to be the next principal of Longswamp/Rockland replacing Kaye Smith who retired in December.

But What About They Yankee Flag Of Occupation

Display of international flags outside Georgia high school to be moved inside because residents say it encourages illegal immigration and stuff.

“Human beings are equal; cultures are not.”

“A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils. A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love. A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once.” - Ayaan Hirsi — the iron lady of Somalia

*** NEW SPORTS SECTION ***

Started a related Brandywine blog for sports . The topic section just becomes too crowded and has a tendency to go off topic. Big difference is that any interested party can be a sports reporter. Just send an email to:

admin@brandywineparents.com

You will receive an invitation and directions on how to register. All you need is an email address and a sign on nickname to start submitting articles. If you use a email service like MSN, Yahoo or Google you can remain autonomous so people won't ridicule your spelling and grammar.

General Guidelines for being a B.A.D. (Benevolent Associate Dictator)
Pictures Are great just keep them small under 400 pixels in width 72 dpi. Nobody can see it if it takes all day to load up.

Only good remarks concerning players. If they stunk up the joint keep it to yourself.

Don't bad mouth the coaches, they are volunteering their time and doing the best they can. Referees are fair game. :)

Correct spelling would be nice but you can make it educational and teach people how to spell old words with new letters.

If you are linking to a published article just a brief paragraph and a link. Copy the whole article takes up space and some site owners get their underwear all knotted up about copyright infringements.

Just Say NO

Two Reading Eagle article on the mandated Act 1 ballot question. The Act does nothing to improve education, hurts new families and does little to help seniors. If the Governor thinks it is such a great idea then why didn't Harrisburg mandate the change. It is a lousy bill and they don't have the backbone to take responsibility for it. First they tried to pass it off on local school boards where it was overwhelming rejected, now they want it on the ballot in an off year primary election, where historically mostly seniors vote. Passing this proposal will only keep meaningful tax reform off the table for the foreseeable future.

Berks County residents could save or lose hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of dollars under tax-shift proposals school boards will present to voters in the May primary.

Under the new tax structure, property tax savings in Berks districts would range from $301 per household in Conrad Weiser to $1,368 in Wyomissing.

But in exchange for that property-tax relief, wage earners in most districts would see more of their pay go to local schools through income tax increases. MORE

******

Though some school board and tax-study commission members have complained that the law does nothing to improve school funding and urged voters to reject the swaps, Allwein said the association is advising school boards to remain neutral.

“The (ballot) question is not something that districts should be rooting for or against,” he said. “We've told members that their job is to inform residents of what the purpose of this income tax is, why it is on the ballot and what this will mean to their residents.”

Still, Allwein said that if voters in a majority of districts reject the swap, it may send a message to the Legislature to consider new methods of school funding. More

No Pixs with these two article

Seems to be a lot of job loss due to nakidness.

In Yonkers Middle school health teacher could lose his job after instructing his class how to draw the male form, complete with an anatomically correct danglething.

And In Maine

BRUNSWICK — District 1 Town Councilor David Watson resigned from his position as council vice chairman Tuesday for unintentionally forwarding a personal and impolitic e-mail to a town committee on Jan. 14.

The e-mail, which Watson described as "at best politically incorrect and at worst very offensive" in a public apology on Jan. 16, contains nine embedded images of topless women under the heading "This is National Women's Breast Awareness Day." The only other text reads, "Beats ... Martin Luther King Day, doesn't it?"

The e-mail landed in the in boxes of 18 members of the New Elementary School Building Committee and to an individual with an Elmira College e-mail address on Jan. 14. Watson, who received the e-mail from a friend, maintains he doesn't know how the e-mail was forwarded.

Manufacturing Union Membership All Time Low

For the first time in modern history the number of manufacturing workers in unions fell below the percentage of American workers in unions. In manufacturing, which had long been the heart of organized labor, the percentage of workers in unions sank to 11.7 percent, from 13 percent. Perhaps the brightest spot for labor was the extent of government workers in unions, 36.2 percent, although that, too, was down, from 36.5 percent in 2005. More

Coorelation does not prove causation but The high union states—New York, New Jersey, Washington, etc—also happen to be high tax, slow growth, population losing, states (PA is at 13.6%).

On the other hand, the low union states—places like Utah, Virginia, and both Carolinas—are low tax, pro business, population growing states, with strong economic growth. Could jut be a coincidence.

Who Didn't See This Coming

PA schools featured in the NY Times concerning the use of fat meters and chubby rank on report cards.

Six-year-old Karlind Dunbar barely touched her dinner, but not for time-honored 6-year-old reasons. The pasta was not the wrong shape. She did not have an urgent date with her dolls.
The problem was the letter Karlind discovered, tucked inside her report card, saying that she had a body mass index in the 80th percentile. The first grader did not know what “index” or “percentile” meant, or that children scoring in the 5th through 85th percentiles are considered normal, while those scoring higher are at risk of being or already overweight.

Yet she became convinced that her teachers were chastising her for overeating.

Since the letter arrived, “my 2-year-old eats more than she does,” said Georgeanna Dunbar, Karlind’s mother, who complained to the school and is trying to help her confused child. “She’s afraid she’s going to get in trouble,” Ms. Dunbar said.

The Patrotic Terrorist

Greg Gutfeld at the Huffington Post
What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy's success against said country. It is a person who gets deeply offended if you question their patriotism, while also appearing to share the same ideals of the more spirited folk who like to blow up innocent people.

Patriotic terrorists love America with so much intensity that it appears to the untrained eye that they hate it. But it's actually the most powerful form of "tough love" known to man, woman and Rosie O'Donnell. Patriotic terrorists love America so much that they realize it needs an intervention - and real terror is the only way to enable that intervention. In fact, to keep a mammoth, arrogant superpower like America in check, terrorism is the only thing we've got. Noam Chomsky knew this from the start, making him a patriotic terrorist of the highest order.

...
Are you a patriotic terrorist?

If you are intensely critical of the US, while tolerating homicidal enemies who condemn everything you previously claimed you are for - human rights, voting rights, gay rights, women's rights, porn - then you're a patriotic terrorist.

If you talk about tolerance constantly - and hilariously tolerate genocide and suicide bombers because those actions undermine your more intimate opposition, the American right - then you're a patriotic terrorist.

The only difference between a patriotic terrorist and a real one? Real terrorists are simply patriotic terrorists who've taken the extra step - choosing to actually die for their beliefs - rather than simply talking about them at Spago. If Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and their ilk had real cojones, they'd all be wearing cute black vests - but stuffed with more than dog-eared copies of Deterring Democracy.

Principal Thwarts Murder of Energizer Bunny

Really hard to argue about the celebrities they had listed.

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Six girls at a rural high school were charged with homicide conspiracy after their principal found a list of 300 names and officials discovered online postings suggesting they kill people, authorities said Thursday.

School officials said the list, discovered in a classroom trash can, mostly named students and faculty members but also included Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey and the Energizer bunny.

Sequatchie County High School Principal Tommy Layne said that he initially considered it a joke, but that authorities then found the ninth-graders' online MySpace pages and postings that included the word "kill." More

Don't Zap Your Granny

Discipling children can cause family issues. If your mother-in-law objects to your methods no male jury would convict you of tasering her but zapping your granny-in-law is beyond the pale.

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — A man who zapped his wife's grandmother with a Taser tells a Washington newspaper that if he had it to do over again he wouldn't have used it.
Aaron de Bruyn was arrested after a dispute earlier this week over how to discipline his seven-month-old son.
He gave the baby a swat on his diapered rear-end to stop him from grabbing electrical wires. The wife's grandmother, who was visiting, called that child abuse and said she'd have the child taken away.That's when de Bruyn told her to leave the house. When she refused, he got out the Taser and gave her a 60-second countdown and then used the stun gun on her right shoulder.
Police say the grandmother was not injured. De Bruyn was arrested and spent a night in jail.

Just One Club Card

If you have a wallet full of store club cards, you can consolidate them using a web application. It will print out the store name and bar codes on one handy card for up to 8 stores.

State of Marriage

You might have seen the article last week about 51% of women being unmarried. Well if you look at the details to reach that number they included females between 15 and 19 years old. With 37% of the children born in this country out of wedlock, among college educated women only around 4% are unmarried when they have their children.

A discussion on the state of marriage in the US with Kay Hymowitz the author of , Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.

Broadway Show Rub Some People The Wrong Way

Can't wait till somebody proposes this for a middle school class trip.

Adapted from German playwright Frank Wedekind's then-scandalous 1891 play, Spring Awakening looks at the angst of high school students and their sexual awakening in repressed 19th-century Germany.

You Can't Be Too Careful

Guess this store has been plagued by 2 year olds gone bad.

A boy has been banned from a shop because he was wearing a hood - at the age of two.

Jay Cowper was muffled up against the cold but he and his grandfather were told they had to leave their local store.

The same shop in York recently banned a middle-aged nurse for wearing a hooded top when she went to collect her morning newspaper.

Staff at Monkton Road Stores say they have a clear "no hoods" policy because of problems caused by troublemakers. Article

A Different View of The Bell Curve

Arnold King take on the recent series on education reform by Charles Murray published in the Wall Street Journal and linked on this site.

I believe that education is ripe for reform, and I agree with Charles Murray that there is a mismatch between the mission and practices of the typical college and the needs of many students. However, in many respects, I find his diagnosis and recommendations too simplistic. He argues for limiting educational expectations for children with modest IQ levels and for reviving the notion of a "classical education" for the elite.

Murray's analysis reflects IQ-ism. That is, it reduces human talent to a one-dimensional measure, IQ.

One problem with IQ-ism is that it does not explain how people come to acquire particular talents, in chess or art or salesmanship. If one really takes seriously the one-dimensional concept of IQ, then the clay of a high-IQ child could be molded into a genius in any field. Yet many otherwise-talented people are severely limited in some dimensions. Even within a specific subject such as mathematics, different sub-fields come more easily to different experts. I am willing to talk about IQ as a measure of general ability. That does not make it the measure of ability. Article

The Eternal Optimist

Should save this one for Valentine Day.

Hugh Hefner wants to become a father again - at the age of 80.

The legendary lothario also insists that after years of searching he has finally found true love with Holly.

He said: "This is the one. It's fascinating - I mean, with all the years and the romantic adventures and the marriages and so on - to find something as special as this at this stage in my life is a miracle." Article

He had better hurry Holly biological clock is ticking she is already 27.

Zero Tolerance Nonsense

Rhode Island's education commissioner ordered a high school on Friday to publish a yearbook photo showing a teenage medieval enthusiast with a sword.

Portsmouth High School authorities can regulate editorial content in the yearbook, but they acted unreasonably by rejecting Patrick Agin's photo, hearing officer Paul Pontarelli wrote in a ruling approved by Education Commissioner Peter McWalters.

In the ruling, state education officials wrote that school officials offered to publish Agin's photo if it was part of a paid yearbook advertisement.

"Tolerance for weapons can be purchased," Pontarelli wrote. "This is illogical."

HAPPY 200th BIRTHDAY BOBBY

The Last Knight
Robert E. Lee
(January 19, 1807 - October 12, 1870)

No Results No Tenure

A school in Little Rock offered bonuses to teachers for improved student testing. Naturally, students' scores jumped 29 percent. Even more naturally, parents love it. Most natural of all: Teachers' unions are forcing them to stop. NY city proposes making teachers actually earn tenure one way by improved test scores. Not likely to pass
schools are a drug free, gun free and logic free zone.

Another Nominee For Mom Of The Year

Competition is becoming stiff. Even the hillbillies in Tennessee should have some standards.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A sheriff's department employee is charged with paying a woman for sex with her 8-year-old daughter, and a special judge was called from out of town for a bond hearing Wednesday because the accused is engaged to a Memphis judge.Details

Smack Then While You Still Can

A bill recently introduced in CA will outlaw spanking for children under 3.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, wants to outlaw spanking children up to 3 years old. If she succeeds, California would become the first state in the nation to explicitly ban parents from smacking their kids.

Making a swat on the behind a misdemeanor might seem a bit much for some -- and the chances of the idea becoming law appear slim, at best -- but Lieber begs to differ.

``I think it's pretty hard to argue you need to beat a child 3 years old or younger,'' Lieber said. ``Is it OK to whip a 1-year-old or a 6-month-old or a newborn?''

The bill, which is still being drafted, will be written broadly, she added, prohibiting ``any striking of a child, any corporal punishment, smacking, hitting, punching, any of that.'' Lieber said it would be a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail or a fine up to $1,000, although a legal expert advising her on the proposal said first-time offenders would probably only have to attend parenting classes.

Now the money quote

For the record, she does not have children and says she was not slapped as a child. But she does have a cat named Snoop, which her veterinarian told her never to hit.

``And if you never hit a cat,'' Lieber said, ``you should never hit a kid.''

An Alternative Career Path

Are you about to graduate or tired of your current career path. If you are the high bidder on E-Bay, currently the price of one year in a good college, you can become an Australian Surfer Dude.

Winning bidder will take ownership of my:

- Name

- Phone number

- All my possessions which includes the following

- Clothes,

- Roughly 300 CDs

- Surfboard

- Laptop (minus certain information with my discretion),

- Pushbike (Has wonky handlebars, may need some work)

- Books,

- Bed

- CD player

- Backpack

- Tennis racquets

- Golf Clubs(which you will have no idea how to use)

- Childhood photos

- Skateboard

- Nice lamp which your ex-girlfriend bought you.

- I will teach you my skills which include the following

- Surfing (Expert)

- Climbing (Intermediate)

- Skateboarding (Novice)

- Handstand Skills (Expert)

- Fire Twirling Skills (Intermediate)

- Devil Stick Twirling (Expert)

(Plus many more)

- Will introduce to all my friends & potential lovers (around 8 which I have been flirting with)

- I have around 15 close friends and around 170 other friends

- I have 2 nemeses.

- Lifestyle is very social. It includes a lot of going out.

An STD Vaccine For All Girls?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently advised parents to have their middle-school-aged daughters vaccinated against a common sexually transmitted disease closely linked to cervical cancer. But legislators in 10 states are seeking to go one step further and require vaccinations against the human papillomavirus (HPV) for all girls entering middle school.

But not everyone is happy with the move by state legislators to make the vaccines mandatory.

"I had no idea that this would engender the kind of uproar that it has," says Kentucky state Rep. Kathy Stein, a Democrat who this month became the Bluegrass State's first woman to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee. "Some parents might be cautious before giving a vaccine that is fairly new to a child and I can understand that. But many, many conservative groups — and I won't say Christian groups, but many of them are — say it is the parents who have a right to decide what happens to [their] children. They argue that if you are good folks who raise your daughter to be chaste and pure until she reaches her marriage bed, she won't need this."

Just make sure the guy she marries is also chaste and pure. The odds aren't in your favor betting on that combination.

Religious Freedom Day

Today is

National Religious Freedom Day to commemorate the freedom of and from religion that Americans citizens enjoy. As the Supreme Court noted in 1969, public school students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." There is often confusion on this point. The schools cannot organize religious activity but they also cannot keep the students from practicing their beliefs.

The U.S. Department of Education sums them up this way:

•Students can pray, read their Bible or other religious books and talk about their faith at school during school hours.

•Students can organize prayer groups and religious clubs and announce their meetings.

•Students can express their faith in their class work and homework.

•Teachers can organize prayer groups and Bible studies.

•Students may be able to go off campus to have a Bible study during school hours.

•Students can express their faith at a school event, including graduation ceremonies.

Part III Charles Murray On Education

The final instllment of Charles Murray series on education looks at teaching the students with higher IQs to be wise.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.
...
The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.
...
The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
...
In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
...
The aim here is not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.

The List of Things Caused By Global Warming

At 15 degrees this morning seemed like a good day to remind people all of the troubles caused by global warming. Here are only the A items go here for a complete list with links.

Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated, African aid threatened, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), ancient forests dramatically changed, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Asthma, atmospheric defiance, atmospheric circulation modified, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased...

Does anyone want to bet that the only cure for global warming is the election of a liberal democrat in 2008. The topic will be dropped faster then the plight of the homeless by big media.

Part II - Charles Murray On Education

Today Mr. Murry ask what wrong with attending Vo-Tech schools.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.

... college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

A Non-Boring Use For Math

Ryan Daut didn't expect to come back to college this semester as a millionaire.

Daut, a 22-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics at Penn State, went to the Bahamas to play in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, which started Jan. 4 at the Atlantis Resort and Casino in Nassau.

The New Jersey native was the last man standing Wednesday -- beating 936 opponents and walking away with the tournament's $1.5 million grand prize.

The Actor or 24 Practices Torture In Real Life

The reason there were no Jack Bauer action figures this Christmas.

KIEFER SUTHERLAND only has himself to blame for the delay of his 24 action figure - he set fire to the prototype during a drunken night out. The action man's new figure has been developed by MCFarlane Toys and will hit stores later this year (07), but the mini-JACK BAUER should have hit shelves much earlier. Sutherland explains, "They tried to come out with one a couple of years ago and they had sent me the doll for my approval... We took the doll out for a night to have some fun and we'd had some drinks. We sat it on the corner of the table. "We started torturing him around 11 o'clock at night, and, by two o'clock in the morning, we had set him on fire in the parking lot. "We got up the next day and there was just this puddle of wax. His clothes didn't burn, which I thought was pretty cool... and then I got a call the next day saying, 'Did you like the doll?' I said, 'Yeah, it was great.' And they said, 'Well, OK, good, you gotta send it back to us because that was the prototype... It took that guy a year to make it.' "I said, 'Well, let me look for it, I think I left it in the trailer.' This went on for about a week and then I had to just kinda come clean

Last 24 post for awhile.

News Flash: Half Of Our Children Are Below Average

And it is not all the school's fault. First of a three part series in the Wall St. Journal on Intelligence In The Classroom. In sports there is a common saying that you can't coach speed. Well in the classroom you can't teach intelligence.

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
...
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

Winter Blahs

Maybe you just need a change in Latitude.

Party with a purpose

Who: Berks County Parrot Head club.

What: Annual Winter Cabin Fever Festival.

When: Sunday, Jan. 28, from 1 to 6 p.m.

Where: Reading Country Club ballroom, Perkiomen Avenue at Shelbourne Road, Exeter Township.

Why: Benefit for Opportunity House, a homeless shelter in Reading.

How: Activities, silent auction, dancing and music by John Hain and the Mango Summers.

Tickets: $10 at Opportunity House, Berkshire Bank, Tina's Salon or e-mail Jodi Blatt at meandmyboz@aol.com.

The More Things Change,..

Good to see that hyprocracy in politics does not depend on the party or the sex of the politican. Pushed by Speaker Granny Pelosi the House recently passed a mininmum wage increase for the betterment of the American worker in the 50 states and all the terrorities, except it turns out American Samoa.

Raising the federal minimum wage would devastate the local tuna industry, Delegate Eni Faleomavaega, a Democrat who represents the Pacific island territories in the House said in a statement last week, noting that American Samoa's economy is "more than 80 percent" dependent on two U.S. tuna processors, Chicken of the Sea and StarKist.

By chance Star Kist is owned by Del Monte headquarted in Granny Pelosi home district in San Francisco and Chicken Of the Sea is also California based. So in summary raising the minimum wage is good for workers and business, except for the tuna business.

Title IX and The Law of Unintended Consequences

Pravada On The Hudson looks at the effects of a recent court ruling that girls have to cheer for girls.

WHITNEY POINT, N.Y. — Thirty girls signed up for the cheerleading squad this winter at Whitney Point High School in upstate New York. But upon learning they would be waving their pompoms for the girls’ basketball team as well as the boys’, more than half of the aspiring cheerleaders dropped out.

The eight remaining cheerleaders now awkwardly adjust their routines for whichever team is playing here on the home court — “Hands Up You Guys” becomes “Hands Up You Girls”— to comply with a new ruling from federal education officials interpreting Title IX, the law intended to guarantee gender equality in student sports.

“It feels funny when we do it,” said Amanda Cummings, 15, the cheerleading co-captain, who forgot the name of a female basketball player mid-cheer last month.

Whitney Point is one of 14 high schools in the Binghamton area that began sending cheerleaders to girls’ games in late November, after the mother of a female basketball player in Johnson City, N.Y., filed a discrimination complaint with the United States Department of Education. She said the lack of official sideline support made the girls seem like second-string, and violated Title IX’s promise of equal playing fields for both sexes.

But the ruling has left many people here and across the New York region booing, as dozens of schools have chosen to stop sending cheerleaders to away games, as part of an effort to squeeze all the home girls’ games into the cheerleading schedule.

Have em Jumping Thru Hoops

Author quits nagging and starts using techniques from exotic animal trainers to train her spouse. Maybe the techniques could be used for controlling teenagers but exotic animals have a logical brain so may not work. Article

Don't Hold Your Wee for A Wii

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- A woman who competed in a radio station's contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday.

Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead Friday in her suburban Rancho Cordova home hours after taking part in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest in which KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system for the winner.

"She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad," said Laura Rios, one of Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. "She was crying, and that was the last that anyone had heard from her." Article

8 Important Lessons Learned from '80s Cartoons

Don't Need No Troop Surge

Jack can handle it. Starting tonight 2 nights 4 hour premiere of season 6.

Happy Playoff Day

While most of you will be pulling for the Eagles, some of us will be in agony waiting for the big choke.

From a Sports Bulletin Board:
there is no misery near as painful as being a die hard, life long fan of the complete 'suck'-fecta that contains Miss State, the Saints and the Cubs. However hope does spring eternal.

Cool Site

If you are planning your next vacation or a class project. A map where you have been.

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Utah may not really count since my only visit there was walking around the Four Corner Area. My goal is to see Oregon and Montana and continue to avoid Nebraska.

CN Teacher Faces 40 Years in Porn Case

What appears to be a verdict rendered by a jury, judge and a prosecutor that never owned a computer infested with malware, a Connecticut substitute teacher faces 40 years in prison for turning on a computer that started popping up porn sites. She could have just pulled the plug as the prosecutor contended but she was probably just preoccupied and frazzled when they started appearing, close one and another one pops up. The school did have content filtering but the license was expired. If she really wanted to show porn to the 7th grade class all she had to do was ask them for suggestions. Article

Mother of The Year Nominations Starting

There are a lot of potential candidates but it is going to take some effort to beat this mom. She took time off her busy schedule to drive her previously suspended 13 year old daughter to school so she could fight another girl. The resulting brawl ended up with two moms being arrested and a busybody do-gooder teacher being assaulted. Article

Noodle Guy Dead At 96

He might have been dead sooner but was just well preserved. College kids everywhere should mourn his passing.

The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Article

Farmers Almanac

1818 Original












2007 Version with a green and orange cover.











Even the Farmers Almanac can change over time.

Brandywine Unveils New Computer System

At last night board meeting Brandywine unveild its upgraded computer system.
Ross McGovern stated that computers are not just another passing fad and the new addition will allow adminstrators to make "fact-powered" decisions. Dr. "Gramps" Curtin explained that previously they had to make truthiness decisions. (All the facts, without the annoying fact finding part).



The relatively new 1952 UNIVAC I uses 5,200 of those new fangled vacuum tubes, weighs a mere 29,000 pounds , consumes 125 kW, and can preform an amazing 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock. A few of those annoying students may have to be moved to trailers to allow for the 350 ft² required by the system. The processor and memory unit alone is 14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high.

Happy Birthday NCLB

The No Child Left Behind turns 5 years old today. A former member of the Dept. of Education and a former NCLB Cheerleader takes a critical look at the program.

Here’s the crux of the matter: when it’s time for reauthorization, can we overhaul the law itself without letting go of its powerful ideas? Two other outcomes are more likely. One is the tweak regimen: the law gets renewed but remains mostly unchanged, and we continue to muddle through, driving even well-intentioned educators crazy and not achieving the results we seek. (This is the prediction of most “education insiders.” It amounts to ostrich-like stubbornness in the face of evidence that an overhaul is what’s needed. The second is bathtub emptying: Throw the baby out along with the murky water and give up on the law and its ideals. Then we go back to the days when schools felt little pressure to get all of their students prepared for college and life and democratic participation, and we declare No Child Left Behind another failed experiment. More

Pluto Wins Respect

Pluto is finally getting some respect - not from astronomers, but from wordsmiths.

"Plutoed" was chosen 2006's Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society at its annual meeting Friday.

To "pluto" is "to demote or devalue someone or something," much like what happened to the former planet last year when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto didn't meet its definition of a planet.

"Our members believe the great emotional reaction of the public to the demotion of Pluto shows the importance of Pluto as a name," said society president Cleveland Evans. "We may no longer believe in the Roman god Pluto, but we still have a sense of personal connection with the former planet." More

Early Entries For Parents Of The Year

If you are going to give your 12 year old marijuana and cocaine, make sure she doesn't write about it on the internet.

A 12-year-old girl's account on her MySpace.com page led to her father and stepmother's arrests yesterday on child abuse charges, Maryland State Police said.

The girl, who lives in Florida, wrote on the Internet site that the couple had given her cocaine and marijuana several times while she was visiting them over the holidays at their home in Kent County, according to police.

State police Sgt. Russell Newell said that when the girl returned home, her mother grew suspicious about what had happened during the visit. She then read the MySpace account and confronted her daughter, who confirmed what she had written. More

Topic Sort Order Revised

All the post are now shown from the original to the newest. Started to do it the other way but scrolling is fast and some of us could use the exercise.

Attend MIT For Free

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. Article

To Help With Your New Year Resolution

What 200 calories look like

Carrots

Peanut Butter

Appears They Already Did

Headline in the Salt Lake City Tribune: Utah risks loosing its best teachers.

Superior Temporal Sulcus - The Teenage Brain

Using MRIs on different age groups British scientist have discovered that teenagers use a different part of their brain in making decisions then humans. The part of the brain that takes into account the feelings of other people and consequences of possible actions does not fully develop till they are in their 20's.

Adolescents do not put the part of the brain that considers others' feelings to full use, scientists have found. It seems our neural decision-making processes mature quite slowly, and researchers think this might help to explain typical teenage behavior. The adolescent brain undergoes massive changes and does not reach maturity until 20 or 30 years old.
...
The volunteers were asked to think about what they would do in certain situations that involved their own actions. For example, the researchers might say: "You want to go to the cinema. Do you look at the newspaper?"

When thinking about what they would do, both age groups used the same neural pathway; but different parts of the pathway were most active in the two groups.Adults used a brain area towards the front of the pathway, called the medial prefrontal cortex, to come up with their answers. Adolescents showed more brain activity in the superior temporal sulcus - an area at the rear.
...
The new research shows that hormones may not be fully to blame for typical teenage behaviour.

Teenage brains undergo large structural changes during adolescence, and do not reach full maturity until at least 20 or 30 years of age.

I Hope The Kid Learned A Good Lesson

PITTSBURGH (AP) — It's said the pen is mightier than the sword. And it can also hold its own pretty well against the law. A teenager who sued his school district after being expelled for writing violent rap songs has settled with two townships over the charges against him.

Fourteen-year-old Anthony Latour, who was taken out of his middle school in handcuffs, has reached a 60-thousand dollar settlement with the North Sewickley and Franklin townships. He had been charged with terroristic threats and other counts — all based on his lyrics.

A federal judge overturned the expulsion in August of 2005, ruling that the rap songs contained images of violence but did not amount to true threats against the school. Latour also reached a settlement for 90-thousand dollars with the Riverside Beaver County School District in November. Article