Links for May 30th
New York: How Not to Talk to Your KidsPo Bronson summarizes research on self-esteem, praise, and children. Kids who are praised for their intelligence freeze when faced with tasks beyond their intelligence. But kids who are praised for their effort quickly learn to relish challenges, and their learning improves accordingly. I was definitely in the [...]
Links for May 25th
Gratiot County Herald Letters To The EditorIthaca, Michigan school superintendent Nathan Bootz wrote an open letter to the governor to ask that his school system be converted to a prison, noting that Michigan spends $30,000–$40,000/year on each prisoner, but only $7,000/year on each student. WVEC: Taxpayers foot the bill when the governor flies on state [...]
Links for May 22nd
Wikipedia: List of predicted dates of the end of the worldI'm pretty sure none of them worked out. New York: The Elephant in the Green RoomThe conditions under which Glenn Beck left Fox News turn out to be pretty fascinating. Roger Ailes brought Beck on to fire up the conservative base after their 2008 defeat, [...]
Claudia Tucker, Wilkins’ eavesdropper, is running for senate.
Claudia Tucker is running for state senate. Does that name ring a bell? RPV executive director Ed Matricardi fingered Tucker in the Republican eavesdropping scandal, back in 2003, rolling over on her and four other Republican leaders as having orchestrated and participated in the illegal monitoring of DPVA phone calls. (After serving prison time, Matricardi [...]
Links for May 18th
New York Times: At Preakness, Not Everybody’s Idea of FunIt sounds like the Preakness has gone to shit. Their new mascot is "Kegasus," half horse, half beer-bellied man. His slogan is "a ten-hour party to celebrate a two-minute race." That's an event you won't be catching me at. Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: Walker seeks to stop [...]
Links for May 16th
Discovery Channel: Mike Rowe Senate TestimonyThe host of "Dirty Jobs" provided an important argument to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about why our education system needs to emphasize skilled trades. College is not for everybody. Way too many kids are going to college—it doesn't make economic sense, for them or for [...]
Links for May 13th
PolitiFact Virginia: Jamie Radtke says George Allen had 40,000 earmarks while senatorDoes anybody take this woman seriously anymore? CNN: Conservative group sues over bin Laden death photosAlthough I think it would be politically unwise and generally disgusting to release the photos of Osama bin Laden's corpse, I think there's a good argument to be made [...]
Links for May 13th
New York Times: Vitaly Borker of DecorMyEyes Pleads GuiltyYou'll remember this jackass as the guy who ran a series of scam businesses, physically threatened anybody who complained, and bragged to the Times that he loved web-based complaints because they helped his Google ranking. He received the Google death penalty a few days later, he was [...]
On trying to buy American-made jeans: A success story.
At some point, “Made in America” passed from the realm of Sam Walton and into the realm of yuppies. As a young kid in the eighties, I remember seeing TV ads that promoted American-made goods. Like this one: These ads confused me. I recall asking my parents to explain it. The talk of economics was [...]
Links for May 11th
Slate: More than half of Republican voters still doubt President Obama was born in the U.S.34% of Republicans are convinced that the president was not born in the United States. I think this gives us a good baseline of the percentage of the Republican Party that is racist and/or mentally ill. Another 18% just aren't [...]
Links for May 10th
IBM Many Bills: A Visual Bill ExplorerIBM is doing some really interesting work with legislation here. In my own work on Richmond Sunlight, I've long treated the text of the bill as a black box, doing very little with the text of bills. IBM demonstrates here that there's actually some valuable data to be gleaned [...]
Most Virginians support gay marriage.
Just over five years ago I wrote this about the Virginia constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage: So we’re going to spend a lot of time and effort into passing a constitutional amendment to ban something that’s already illegal, only to have the state collectively slap itself on the forehead in 5-10 years when everybody [...]
Links for May 8th
NPR: Florida Bill Could Muzzle Doctors On Gun SafetyAn NRA-written bill has passed the Florida legislature, and is likely to be signed by the governor, that will make it illegal for doctors to advise patients on gun safety. (Pediatricians frequently advise new parents on how to store firearms safely, and doctors concerned about teenagers' mental [...]
Links for May 6th
New York Times: Tornado Leaves Couple With Nothing, but Not for LongThis is a simple, sweet story about a poor couple from rural Alabama who lost the little that they owned in last week's tornadoes. Their (rented) mobile home was destroyed. In the week since, though, people keep showing up and helping in ways large [...]
Links for May 5th
Snopes: Obama Lends $2 Billion to Brazilian Oil CompanyHeard the one about how the President Obama is spending billions on offshore drilling…in Brazil? Snopes rates it “mostly false.” This is another case of conservatives getting riled up about something that's not true and dates from President Bush's time in the White House. ThinkProgress: Exxon Makes [...]
Links for May 5th
Wikipedia: Timeline of Web BrowsersA family tree for web browsers. There are a lot of browsers here I hadn't thought of for years. HotJava, ViolaWWW, and Cello, in particular. Voice of America: Historian Recounts Role of Chinese Americans Who Fought in US Civil WarIn 1861, there were only 200 Asians living in the Eastern U.S. [...]
Links for May 4th
Washington Post: Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft joining security company once known as BlackwaterGood Lord, I'm glad that Bush is no longer president. A Computer Scientist in a Business School: An ingenious application of crowdsourcingAfter discovering that product sales increase when reviews are well-written, Zappos has been using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to copyedit reviews [...]
Links for May 2nd
New York Times: A Tipping Point for Gay Marriage?With the government unable to muster a legally defensible argument against gay marriage, it's amazing that the House of Representatives went ahead and hired their own private law firm to carry on the right. But it's more amazing still that the law firm dropped the case, finding [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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