-
What teachers really want to tell parents - CNN.com
(CNN) -- This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession.
I screamed, "You can't leave us," and she quite bluntly replied, "Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us."
Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Today, new teachers remain in our profession an average of just 4.5 years, and many of them list "issues with parents" as one of their reasons for throwing in the towel. Word is spreading, and the more negativity teachers receive from parents, the harder it becomes to recruit the best and the brightest out of colleges.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
load01 09/08/2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
load01 09/07/2011
-
Denied Reviews & Ratings | www.imdb.com | Readability
Unfortunately, the sound mix is so bad that the dialogs are impossible to follow - and they are essential to understanding what is going on.
I found a work-around on my computer: using an equalizer on the audio, I neutralised the low and medium frequencies and enhanced the medium-high frequencies: this made the dialogs followable. Quite amazing that the producers omitted this quality check!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
load01 09/06/2011
-
Chrystia Freeland | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com
You might call it the cognitive divide — the split between an evidence-based worldview and one that is rooted in faith or ideology — and it is one of the most important fault lines in the United States today.
President Barack Obama called attention to the cognitive divide, and reminded us which side he comes down on, at the beginning of this week, when he chose the Princeton University economist Alan Krueger to lead his Council of Economic Advisers. -
The Fatal Distraction - NYTimes.com
Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
Related
Times Topic: Unemployment
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (490) »
One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result. -
Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad - Computerworld
Computerworld - The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.'s MI6 and Israel's Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.
The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates. -
Programming Isn't Fun Any More
A colleague of mine from the Britton Lee days (worth a post of its own) recently sent out a message that hit home. Repeated with permission:
From: Jim Bradford <(deleted)@(deleted).com>
Subject: programming isn't fun anymore
Date: August 23, 2011 4:19:31 PM -0600
I used to enjoy writing programs. I could write lines of code, compile them, link them and run them and they would do things. Useful things. They would solve problems. Or they could take input and produce output. Now all that is ancient history.
I don't write code. I learn tools. Or try to learn tools. Problem is, there are more tools than anyone can keep track of. Some people know some tools and so they can get work done. These people are called "architects" and they expect everyone will know the same tools they know. Or everyone should. If they don't, those people are stupid and should be shunned and ignored. We programmers know a few tools but not the ones the architect knows. That's ok - we've learned lots of tools over the years so we keep quiet and think to ourselves "I don't know what this guy is talking about but I can learn these tools". So when the architect says "exclude slf4j from the library's build sequence or modify the pom file dependency list" we don't say "what the hell are you talking about". We don't say anything. We go to google and spend the next two weeks learning slf4j and Ivy and Maven, and RESTful WebServices and Grails, and the proper syntax for the BuildConfig file. Then we reboot the computer three or four times for good measure; download security patches for the IDE; get the latest version of the JDK; clone a few repositories from GitHub; study the Artifactory website; look for new docs on the wiki; and hope to god someone has figured out why the WAR file doesn't deploy to the 3.2 version of the app server. In all this time no code has been written. No problems have been solved. No user interfaces have been created. But everyone has been terribly busy. And the architect has been studying newer, better versions of the three or four tools we have now almost learned, but which have become obsolete. Eventually, the project is cancelled. Management decides to continue using the prototype version written in Objective-C, even tho the source code has been lost and it doesn't use any of the company-standard tools, because it does 80% of what the one customer wants, and no one else really needs the application anymore.
That's the story of my professional career. Trying to learn things fast enough to create programs to solve problems that go away by themselves or weren't worth spending time on in the first place. Sisyphus had more job satisfaction. -
Become a Good Programmer in Six Really Hard Steps - GameDev.net
One of the more popular topics here on the GDNet forums goes something like this:
"Hi, I just [bought a computer | wrote a simple game | discovered a game engine] and I want to know where to go from here. I'd like to [accomplish some particular goal] eventually. What do I need to learn to get there?"
First of all, understand that Peter Norvig nailed this on the head a long time ago: it takes ten years to learn to be a programmer. There's a glut of "learn X in some small number of days" type books out there; there are hordes of blog posts about "how to improve your programming-fu in a few easy ways"; and in general a lot of people come around looking for advice on how to become a whiz with minimal effort.
Monday, September 5, 2011
load01 09/05/2011
-
Jobs Will Follow a Strengthening of the Middle Class - NYTimes.com
Robert B. Reich is the former secretary of labor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.”
Graphic
Related in Opinion
Sophy Hollington
The Trouble With Work
Those who still have jobs are working longer for less, and don’t like their bosses. Can we do better?
Do Happier People Work Harder? (September 4, 2011)
One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities (September 4, 2011)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (276) »
THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal. -
Freddie Mercury Google Logo (Doodle) - YouTube
Uploaded by websonicnl on Sep 4, 2011
Doodle te honour the 65th birthday of Freddie Mercury, best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. This is maybe the best Doodle from Google so far. A working copy of the doodle can be seen here: http://wbsc.nl/mXcwoy -
Black Market - Big Block Games
Interesting app of flash; hard to tell if it's playable or not, but the forums seem fairly active
-
Quake3Networking - bookofhook - Trac
The Quake3 Networking Model
This article is a reprint/updated version of an e-mail I sent out to the mud-dev mailing list a few years ago, describing the Q3 networking model as described to me by John Carmack. I did this partly out of my own curiousity (since I was firmly entrenched in the graphics side of things) and partly out of a desire to propagate information on the 100% unreliable networking model in Q3 which I felt (and still feel) was fairly groundbreaking due to its simplicity and ease of understanding.
The First Attempt (QTEST/Quake2)
Carmack's first real networking implementation, back in 1995, used TCP for QuakeTest (QTEST). This was fine for LAN play, because the large packets (8K) wouldn't fragment on a LAN (by "fragment", I mean to the point where disassembly and reassembly induced significant overhead), but didn't work so well over the Internet due to fragmentation (where dis/reassembly and lost packets often resulted in very expensive resends). His next iteration involved using UDP with both reliable and unreliable data, pretty much what many would consider a standard networking architecture. However standard mixed reliabled/unreliable implementations tend to generate very hard to find bugs, e.g. sequencing errors where guaranteed messages referenced entities altered through unreliable messages. -
New York's Little Italy fights for its gastronomic reputation - latimes.com
Reporting from New York— A family from the Midwest formed a crescent around the posted menu outside an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, the main (and only) drag of Manhattan's shrinking Little Italy. It didn't take long for the Latino restaurant barker — the guys who stand on the sidewalk trying to lure in the indecisive and hungry — to pounce: "Ciao, bellas," he said, using the Spanish plural of the Italian noun. "Come in and eat," he added, motioning with a sweep of his arm toward the open door. The family, though, thought better of it and moved on.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
load01 09/04/2011
-
Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator - IEEE Spectrum
Imagine that it's 1995 and you're about to make your very first online purchase. You open your Netscape browser, sipping coffee as the home page slowly loads. You then navigate to Amazon.com, a new online bookstore your friend told you about. As you proceed to make your purchase and enter your payment information, the address your browser points to changes from one starting with "http" to one that begins with "https." That signals that your computer has established an encrypted connection with Amazon's server. This allows you to send credit card information to the server without worrying that an identity thief will intercept the transmission.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
load01 09/03/2011
-
Authors@Google: Robert Reich - YouTube
When the nation's economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, one of our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy, suggests another reason for the meltdown. Our real problem, he argues, lies in the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest Americans, while stagnant wages and rising costs have forced the middle class to go deep into debt. Reich's thoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over the next decades—and how we can fix our economic system—is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for restoring America's economy and rebuilding our society.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
load01 09/01/2011
-
Vance Gilbert : resolution, race, and reality…
I’d like to thank everyone that Facebooked, Tweeted, contacted me thru my website, wrote me personally, wrote notes for me, called, stuffed notes in baggies through my door (Irene was raging and a neighbor wanted to make sure…) and just reached out to me in the last week. Your “co-indignation” around my recent travel event was both solace and fuel.
-
Hackers Impersonate Google to Snoop on Users in Iran - NYTimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers passed themselves off as the Internet giant Google with the apparent goal of snooping on people using Google services in Iran, the company said.
It was the latest in a string of breaches that call into question the reliability of certificates that are supposed to verify the authenticity of Web sites. Such breaches make dissidents and human rights workers particularly vulnerable because they can allow repressive regimes, or supporters of those regimes, to spy on their online activities. -
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1 - Wolfire Games Blog
Welcome to the Wolfire Blog! This is where we keep everyone up to date on our progress on Overgrowth and other new stuff. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest news! Also, be sure to check out the forums for even more up to date news - or get on IRC for up to the second updates.
« Overgrowth alpha 33Starting Grass »
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1
65 comments By David Rosen on July 1st, 2009
When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it applies to game development. I decided if I'm going to write about that, I might as well start at the beginning! This will be review to many of you who have written games before or taken classes in kinematic physics, so please bear with me for this introductory post -- I will get to more advanced topics later.