Month: November 2002

if the schools flunk, how can kids succeed?

CNN.com – Voucher students going back to public schools – Nov. 4, 2002

More than one in four students who took a voucher to attend private school in Florida this semester have transferred back to public education, a newspaper reported.
[ . . .. ]
Critics of vouchers, a cornerstone of the education policies implemented by Gov. Jeb Bush, said the returning students show that vouchers are misguided.

But a spokeswoman for Bush called the trend a triumph of school choice.

“No longer are these children trapped in failing schools,” Katie Muniz said. “Now they have a choice — and some prefer to stay in their home school. These were choices they never had before.”

Can anyone explain how the existence of failed schools is a triumph of any kind? It’s easy to take the position that their lack of ambition reflects the quality of their political leaders, but leaving that aside for the moment, I’d like to know why they return to schools that the state government itself claims are substandard. If they opt to go the voucher-funded route and then go back, why? Is it the lack of peers? A more rigorous curriculum? Did no one prepare them for this?

The real Adam Smith was in favor of competition

Lawrence Lessig

So if Smith is being principled, then properly stated, Smith’s principle comes down to this: That the government should not fund any research that results in code that some companies could not, consistent with their business model, adopt.

If that is his principle, then it follows that the government can’t fund projects that result in proprietary code (since there are some entities (say, the Free Software Foundation) that can’t, consistent with their business model, accept that code), or more radically, it means that the government can’t fund research that results in patents (since there are some business models that can’t pay the price of a patent). The only research the government could support, on this theory, is research that produces work in the public domain.That is an interesting but radical principle. The government funds all sorts of research that results in patents, and in proprietary code. So the real question for Congressman Smith is this: Does he believe the government can’t support proprietary or patented work if he believes it can’t support GPLd work? Is he advancing a principle, or just FUD about GPL[?]

If I had known this was what a career in law was all about, I might have gone that route: I just figured I’d end up spending a lot of time around criminals, and I was brought up better than that.

I think the horse is out of the barn on this one: NASA has been funding Linux driver development for years and IBM can bring its muscle to bear on the notion that corporations can coexist with the GPL.

Incidentally, I have looked on the MSFT packaging for the required mention of the Regents of the State of California, given WIN2k and XP used (and maybe still do use) the BSD networking implementation.

an ad delivery model that works

Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – Google’s Next Runaway Success

This is interesting: advertising is the necessary evil of media (more evil that necessary in too many cases). But the bright boys at Google have a new way of looking at the problem that works for advertisers and viewers within their parameters of text-only ads.


But AdWords Select’s real genius is the unheard-of value it provides to advertisers. They pay for actual clicks on their advertisements, not each appearance of the ad. The price of an ad, as well as its position on the page (top, middle, or bottom), depends in part on how often the ad is clicked by users. In effect, the better the ad, the less it can cost and the higher on the page it appears. Yes, that’s right. Google wants to make sure that advertising is relevant to searchers, so it rewards advertisers who draw clicks by giving them better positioning. Average clickthrough is about 2 percent, the company claims, five times that of comparable online ads.

Couple that with the online ad insertion system (a credit card and some keywords gets your ad placed without dealing with a sales type) and this is something we may see more of.

media companies and RSS feeds

AmphetaDesk 0.93.1

CNN
Added: 2002-11-04 16:24:57. Last Downloaded: 2002-11-04 16:24:57
The world’s news leader (By http://www.newsisfree.com/syndicate.php – FOR PERSONAL AND NON COMMERCIAL USE ONLY!)

So, OK, CNN doesn’t want to make the partners/affiliates edgy about paying for things they can get for free. But the feeds already exist: I know of two instances. I’m still of the opinion any media company with valuable content (ie, stuff they use to make money) should do their own feeds, adding value by making them available more frequently or with better quality information (better summaries or related links with the site).