Links to interesting postings - 16 Dec 05

This one isn't related to homeschooling or education, but I found it fun. On Slashdot someone mentioned that scientists have figured out the emotions of the girl posing for the Mona Lisa. A study at a University of Amsterdam compared her face to a library of neutral faces images of young women. The software determined that Mona Lisa was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry. (No rounding errors?)

Slashdot also had a post on what many blogs have had problems recently, the rapid growth have caught some hosting companies unprepared. Bloglines and TypePad were specifically mentioned. Both are working hard to handle the growth. Some interesting numbers on TypePad, they are pushing about three terabytes a day of network traffice, and it is growing by 10-20% a month. Last month they got seven million hits. Coyote Blog mentions TypePad was recently down for 20 hours.

EduWonk has a post which links to an interivew of Joe Williams who wrote Cheating Our Kids : How Politics and Greed Ruin Education. The book came out in October of this year and is already being reprinted. It appears the book documents many of the problems with public education. The closing line of the interview is "I'm not suggesting that parents be out there running schools, but if they were a little more demanding, we wouldn't be in this mess." There are a lot of parents who are demanding more, we have laws demanding more. It doesn't seem to be helping.

EduWonk has this great quote about some of the problems with getting charter schools started: "Deborah Driver, one of the organizers, said the obstacles to opening a charter school in the county are immense because the school system wields power of approval over a would-be competitor. 'It's like you make an application to McDonald's to see if you can open up a Burger King,' Driver said." This was taken from a Washington Post article.

On Enter Stage Right Nancy Salvato talks about some issues on school choice. She clears up some of the myths about vouchers. She argues that vouchers would improve education. I still don't think they will happen, but I would love to be wrong on this issue.