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June 30, 2004

Matt's thoughts: A similar thing is hopefully happening in Harlem, according to the <a href="http://www.nuatc.... >>

This SEED Needs Money To Grow

The SEED Public Charter School in D.C. is a public boarding school (!) that just sent its first graduating class to college. All of it. Here's the demographics, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor:

Ninety percent come from homes below the poverty line; 88 percent come from single parent or no parent households, and 93 percent are the first generation in their families to go to college.

Plenty more in the CSM about SEED's program, and a more personal view in The Washington Post (in an article titled "SEED's Harvest" -- clearly this school was named expressly for the benefit of headline writers everywhere).

Now, this boarding-school goodness doesn't come cheap: It's about 25 grand per year, per student. Some critics say that invalidates the SEED model; if it needs grants from Bill Gates and Oprah to make ends meet, it clearly isn't applicable to other urban public school systems. That was my initial reaction as well.

But, as some commenters on JoanneJacobs.com (link via Eduwonk) point out,

... the best way to get more funding is to show that more funding actually helps if used correctly-- which this program seems to do.

Hmm. Oh yeah.

So basically what you're telling me, SEED, is that you are Hogwarts, and with just a little bit of moolah (and come on, we can spare it -- here in Florida we pay $18,000 to incarcerate somebody for a year), you can transform kids with few prospects into college-bound wizards and witches?

I can't believe I ever scoffed at that. Since when did the central challenge of public education become finding ways to stretch a measly $4000 (the average expenditure per public school student in the U.S., more or less)? We oughtta be encouraging experiments like SEED and then trumpeting their successes -- to policymakers, yes, but also to philanthropists.

Sure enough, Eduwonk reports that SEED is planting-- err, planning to set up shop in some new communities. (Har har!)

Robin-sig.gif
Posted June 30, 2004 at 7:19 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Society/Culture
Tim's thoughts: Rob's blog made me do something I try to do only when absolutely necessary. It made me bust out m... >>

Sam Raimi's Big Idea

Okay, so Sam Raimi's idea might seem flaky...

The proposal: Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame -- a 24th of a second of film -- each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city's development.

"It's the same idea of all time-lapse photography, but over an outrageous amount of time," Raimi told The Associated Press in an interview to promote "Spider-Man 2." "So you could watch the city of Los Angeles rise, and maybe an earthquake might come in 300 years or a tidal wave."

...but how cool would it be it someone had started this 50 years ago? It would be fascinating to see the last half-century of human habitation in LA -- ooh, or Detroit, I wanna see Detroit -- condensed like this.

Is he imagining a satellite, though, or just a camera bolted to the top of a hill?

I think the aerial view would be more interesting -- maybe it could be a blimp or a balloon or something, not a satellite -- 'cause you'd really get to see the macro patterns of growth, the rings of development (leaving orbits of decrepitude in their wake).

It's all very Long Now, you know?

Robin-sig.gif
Posted June 30, 2004 at 3:46 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Society/Culture

June 29, 2004

Stu's thoughts: Hmmm mozilla firefox is really good these days... never got on too well with openoffice (although... >>

Future of Open Source

Skip this month's sensationally-headlined Wired article "The Linux Killer." But check out its sidebar, an article about how Linus Torvald's laissez-faire approach to sourcing Linux is causing the enterprise legal headaches today.

To put Linux on more solid intellectual property footing in the future, the company has to become a little more corporate and a little less Dangermouse. It has to be a lot more meticulous about making sure all of its code is properly licensed to and by developers, keeping a thorough library of who-coded-what. In fact, the company may send Torvalds and the developers to re-write all the code that's already been written, making sure to pull any proprietary code out of there.

My experiences with open-source technology have been dim so far. I tried working with OpenOffice for several months on my last computer, because Microsoft Works documents only work in MS Works and MS Office was too rich for my blood. The software just had an amateurish feel about it, it crashed my computer regularly, and the interface was unintuitive (it was a little too open-source; i.e., I felt like I had to code a macro to get it to register a carriage return). MS Word may be a fascist, irrational piece of crap technology that mucks up my documents twice as often as it improves them, but at least it deceives me into feeling I have a modicum of stability there.

Open-source browsers have been a mixed bag. There's nothing wrong with Opera or Mozilla, per se, and especially on my old computer, I would go through weeks of heavy Opera usage, but the tangible advantages I would get from making them my primary browser and customizing them to fit snugly with Windows the way IE does (yes, yes, another proof that MS is eee-vil) seem small. It's not all that inconvenient to me to download yet another patch to fix yet another gaping security flaw every few weeks. Ha ha.

I love the idea of open-source