Category: obscure pursuits

more on “the Maine experiment”

Laptops Win Over the Skeptics, Even in Maine

By some measures, Maine’s public schools are considered quite good: the National Center for Education Statistics ranks Maine as having one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country. But when it comes to students going on to college, Maine ranks low in the region. And in term of Ph.D.s earned in the state, Maine ranks dead last among states and Puerto Rico, according to a recent report from the National Science Foundation.

Improved college attendance five years from now would be a measure of the program’s success, but for now, educators are collecting all the information they can and are awaiting year-end test scores. In other parts of the country, smaller programs have had a significant effect: In Henrico County, Va., where 24,000 students in grades 6 through 12, have laptops, test scores have risen and dropout rates have fallen.

I hate to be self-referential, but I wrote about this here.

eventful day

Last night was made memorable by my son testing the mixability of skipping, stocking feet, and hardwood floors. I think we’ve verified that you can safely choose any two. He now has the faint imprint of the edge of a wooden table running from his cheekbone to his lower jaw, like a chinstrap, along with some lingering pain in the TMJ area if he tries to open his mouth too wide.

I spent last night waking every two hours to test him for a possible concussion (I did 11 PM, 1 AM and 3 AM: Mom got 5 AM as she went to work), and there seems to be no lasting damage to skull or table.

Today was his first ever baseball practice with his pony league team (the Yankees: sadly, only black uniforms. no pinstripes). He did quite well, even when he stopped a chopper with his chest. He did pick it up and throw it back in before he realized “hey, that hurts!” He came to see me, in tears, and before I could do very much in the way of consoling, he recovered his poise, his glove, and ran back on the field, chasing a grounder with the rest of them.

He took some good cuts at the tee as well, so this should be fun.

Tonight a birthday party for a classmate who shares the exact same birthday (he’s had that happen in every school he’s attended: it never happened to me once). Tomorrow, we take it easy.

creative commons licensing?

I noticed that MovableType 2.6 has Creative Commons licensing built in, so thought I should take a look.

It seems I have been using the licence denoted by the symbol above for awhile: I just used the text “Reproduction with attribution encouraged” which seems to mean the same thing. Ahead of my time?

I think I may make it official though and sign up for the license. I’m feeling like I need to contribute something and all I have seems a small enough token.

As it turns out, all this stuff is available under a non-commercial, with-attribution, share-and-share-alike license.

And as an additional karmic gift, I took down my totally ineffective Amazon tipjar.

the day job

So I suppose I have something worth mentioning here. The UW will be hosting a rare field hearing by the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, all arranged by your humble scribe. I didn’t invite them — I work for someone well connected enough to do that, though — but the rest of the arrangements have been mine to manage.

It’s been interesting, to say the least. How interesing, you ask? Well, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic is on one of the witness panels, for one thing. More as it all unfolds.

contemporaria

Ben Hammersley.com: Blended to perfection, over time

So my continuing quest to be downright steampunk continues apace. With all this craving for another age, I’ve been thinking a lot lately – prodded into it by Tom Coates – about the temporal nature of blog posts. About how their very self contained nature removes them from the wider world. Or some such nicotine-addled rantings. Anyway, click on the permalink below to see a new section to my Individual Entry template: the Contemporaria. Built automatically from, at the moment, 6 different data sources, it’s a nifty Weblog Hack.

It is that: I wish I was clever enough to think of these things.

another great use of mod_rewrite

www-archive@w3.org from December 2002: Serving XHTML as applica

XHTML is a great way forward to avoid the infamous tag soup that many web sites have deployed over the time. But for this, and as described by http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#application-xhtml-xml it ought to be served as application/xhtml xml. But some browsers do not recognize this mime-type, and for instance, IE proposes to download a page served with this mime-type instead of displaying it. Here is a solution to workaround this.