A very cool gallery of photos from a Marine aviator, here. Shot with a Sony DSC-F707 digital camera. There's a lot of very impressive stuff in his portfolio. Thanks to instapundit.
Apollo and Gemini astronaut Jim Lovell spoke last night at an American Family Children's Hospital Fund Raiser at Monona Terrace VR Scene.
There aren't too many places Jim Lovell hasn't been. (Google) (All The Web) (Teoma) (Yahoo Search)
The 71-year-old former astronaut has made two trips to the moon -- the historic first lunar orbit flight, December 1968's Apollo 8, and the aborted Apollo 13 mission in April 1970.
I posted some photos here.
A first:
I (along with others) received this very nice thank you note from the captain of a UA 737 yesterday.
In 1980, when William Winter became governor of Mississippi, there was no state funded kindergarten. School attendance was not compulsory. Mississippi ranked last in the nation among most educational indicators. And in the more than 25 years that had passed since the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the state had not been able to come to terms with school desegregation.
In 1982, Gov. Winter succeeded, against all odds, in passing the most sweeping education reform the state had ever seen, which among other things established kindergarten for all Mississippians.
Charles Andres posts an interesting look at 1968 vis a vis 2004
Recent comments about how we live in dangerous and chilling times (after 9/11) should be seen in perspective to 1968, when
Rob Thomas interviews Errol Morris on the Fog of War.
"They're the odd couple of American film in 2004, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris.
McNamara is the former U.S. secretary of defense who was one of the prime forces behind the Vietnam War, who ended up hated by both the left and the right."
In May 2001, the professor of law at Georgetown University was tapped by the Justice Department to work for two years as an assistant attorney general, working primarily on judicial nominations for the department.
But three months later the World Trade Center towers collapsed, and Dinh was drafted to work on the USA Patriot Act, a bill that would give the government some of its most controversial surveillance powers. The bill, coupled with the government's subsequent treatment of immigrants and native-born citizens, prompted critics to charge the administration with overthrowing "800 years of democratic tradition." Wired.
Tom Peters posts 16 points on outsourcing/offshoring. Points 6 and 7 are interesting.
6. Americans' "unearned wage advantage" could be erased permanently. ("There is no job which is America's God-given right anymore." -- Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard)
7. The wholesale, upscale entry of 2.5 billion people (China, India) into the global economy at an accelerating rate is almost unfathomable.
His conclusion: we need to train many, many more creative, risk-taking entrepreneurs. That will require a massive shift in how we educate our youth. The only reliable indicator of whether you will be an entrepreneur: you are the son or daughter of an entrepreneur. If that skillset can't be transferred more generally, most people will be left behind.
Thanks to John Robb.
I've lived in the west, and there's no question, that residents in Wisconsin and the Midwest in general need to start to take some business risks, and grow more entrepreneurs (It is truly genetic, I believe).
Acting Milwaukee Mayor Marvin Pratt and Pier Wisconsin officials made public the long-awaited redesign of the $46 million lakefront education center at Municipal Pier. In an earlier interview, Pratt called it "spectacular" and "a wonderful addition to the lakefront."
Doug Erickson profiles Madison Metropolitan School District Administrator Art Rainwater.
Dave Winer (UW Grad and the original blogger) has some useful comments on Nader's run.
PBS's Frontline has an interview with Robert McIntyre, Director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy regarding Federal Tax Policy.
Our current tax system is a mess, with many special interests (ethanol, SUV's) feeding at the trough.
Business Week had an interesting article recently on the "fairness" of the current tax system (including the controversial Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) implications on middle income Americans).
A friend thinks we're better off taxing everything at the cash source....
s objectionable as the idea is, buying off terrible teachers often works better than firing them.
Many times, settlements save taxpayer money and more effectively protect students. But the Madison School Board went too far last week in giving superintendent Art Rainwater sole authority to flash cash to settle employee misconduct cases.
A 4-3 board vote allows school administration to, in essence, pay teachers to quit - without board discussion or approval.
Opinion Page: Wisconsin State Journal
Ms. Heinz Kerry compares her husband to a "good wine," adding, "You know, it takes time to mature, and then it gets really good and you can sip it." DAVID M. HALBFINGER NY Times
Ed Cone interviews John Edward's internet team.
Edwards raised $450K online Thursday, with an average contribution of $79.82.
Aaron Myers, says that the current campaign is far from business as usual. “Things are totally different now from 2000,” he says. “The biggest difference between this year and four years ago is the number of people acting independently, out somebody’s garage, supporting the candidate. That’s exploded.”
Blogger Rex Hammock writes about his brief meeting with the President:
"My Warholian 15/45 minutes: I’m writing this in a cab on my way to BWI for a flight back home to Nashville. I just walked out of the Old Executive Office Building where four other “real people” and I sat down for a 25-minute chat with the President of the United States. Then the five of us stood behind him while he told a room full of people why the tax cuts he has championed should be made permanent....."
Meanwhile, from the Washington Post:
The White House press corps yesterday scrambled to figure out why a hastily-arranged "conversation" between President Bush and some regular Americans about the economy was suddenly closed to reporters -- and what went on behind those closed doors.
If you want to learn about politics at its hardest core, read this article in the Chicago Sun-Times How Democrat fund-raiser scored Dean knockout.
The author of the article, Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet, is currently in residence at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I attended a seminar yesterday in which she introduced David W. Jones, the fund-raiser who produced the attack ads.
Using a "527 committee" which is allowed under the McCain-Feingold law, Jones raised $663,000 from only 26 donors, including $100,000 from a single donor. He used the money to fund a poll to assess Dean's vulnerabilities, and 3 attack ads that went after Dean: Top Grades, Facts, and the notorious Osama ad.
Thanks to Centerfield
David Cay Johnston writes today in the New York Times that a federal grand jury in Manhattan is investigating the sale of tax shelters by KPMG, the big accounting firm, to corporations and wealthy individuals who used them to escape at least $1.4 billion in federal taxes.
I sent this email to letters@nytimes.com today:
Good Morning:
I am writing in response to your periodic coverage of "abusive" tax shelters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/business/20kpmg.html
I believe articles such as this would better serve your readers if they included references to the mess that is the US Tax Code (David Cay Johnston's book includes many useful references). The code is ripe for all sorts of strategies and tactics, many that I'm sure remain to be discovered and exploited.
One of the worst examples, I believe, is the deductibility of vehicles over 6000lbs - which has lead many independent and small business owners who formerly drove sedans to purchase very large, gas guzzling vehicles, simply for tax reasons. What has this policy cost the treasury?
This Edmunds article mentions $17billion over 10 years.
How about ethanol?
Yet another example:
Prior to a 1986 Tax Law change, real estate partnerships (among other examples) were created for the purpose of generating tax losses. Partnerships were created for the sole purpose of selling tax losses.
I find the political grandstanding on this issue absurd. Does Senator Levin disapprove of the massive SUV tax subsidies?
Why has this issue been attractive to some politicians, vs other tax matters? Is there another agenda? Who benefits if the accounting firms are largely taken out of the tax shelter game? Do law firms and investment banks continue to do their deals?
Best wishes -
Jim Zellmer
You can watch, and view transcripts of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs November, 2003 hearings on this matter here [Day 1 | Day 2]
Adam Curry provides more updates on his visit to Iraq with the Dutch Marines. Fascinating stories & photos.
Venerable Cambridge based Rowe Pottery works is operating under a court-appointed receiver and is scheduled to close by May 1, founder Jim Rowe said Thursday.
Steve Schultze reports that a number of traditionally Republican counties supported Edwards in Tuesday's primary.
An assistant state attorney general advised public officials Wednesday not to use e-mails to communicate back and forth with their fellow members on local government bodies because they could be violating Wisconsin's open meetings law.
The use of e-mail is "a thorny issue," Assistant Attorney General Bruce Olsen told an audience of about 100 local government and school board officials, law enforcement officers, attorneys and journalists at a seminar organized by the state Department of Justice.
"Sometimes it looks like a letter and sometimes it looks like a conversation," Olsen said of e-mail correspondence. AMY RINARD - Journal-Sentinel
The Wisconsin AFSCME chapter ran TV ads during tonight's UW-Illinois Men's Basketball game (The Badgers lost in Champaign).
Rather than spending money on TV (expensive and fewer viewers every day), why don't they tell their story online via weblog(s), email lists and search engine placements?
UPDATE: Toyota announced an exclusive auto sponsorship deal with Ebay. There are many marketing/pr and community opportunities on the internet.
In 1979, Christopher Kimball was a gangly 28-year-old getting ready to launch a food magazine out of the garage of his Weston, Conn., home. He didn't have much experience at publishing; he didn't have much training as a cook. What he did have was $110,000 raised from investors, a stubborn dedication to home cooking and a shrewd business sense that his ideas would eventually pay off.
Twenty five years later, they have. Kimball, who at 53 is still gangly and stubborn, heads up a publishing empire that racked up $25 million in sales last year, thanks to its flagship, advertising-free, magazine Cook's Illustrated, a bimonthly that has turned obsessive recipe testing into a gold mine. In the past five years, the magazine has expanded its success with a spinoff public television show, "America's Test Kitchen," plus two subscription Web sites (cooksillustrated.com and americastestkitchen.com), and a steady flow of cookbooks. Washington Post
Dane County & City of Madison 2/17/2004 Election Results are posted here.
The Dane County Casino vote is going down, big.
Speaking of elections, the Washington Post has an interesting article on a 29 year old American, Tobin Bradley who is organizing elections in rural Iraq.
Adam Curry, DJ/VJ and active blogger is in Iraq with the Dutch Marines (he lives in Amsterdam).
Curry's blog has daily updates. He's also posted a photo album.
Fascinating.
Jon Gertner has written a useful article on combining voter databases with other profiles:
So who are they? Where are they? Are they rich, with three kids and a jumbo mortgage? Do they own fly rods and drive minivans? Do they go to church or temple? And maybe most important, who among them has never voted, or rarely voted, or voted in ways that may deserve the special status of swing voter? To do the job right, of course, to really win this thing, you've got to find them, woo them and get them to the polls. Where to start?
These days, the first stop is a comprehensive database of U.S. voters. There are fewer than half a dozen of them. One, named Voter Vault, belongs to the Republican National Committee; another, named Datamart, belongs to the Democratic National Committee. Over the past few years, thanks to technological advances and an escalating arms race between the parties, Republicans and Democrats have gone to great lengths to make campaigning more like commercial marketing. Moreover, both parties have begun to sort through their troves of information in order to identify and then court individual voters.
The result: direct mail and phone calls during the election season...
William J. Wineke writes:
William Gibson is credited with inventing the term "cyberspace" two decades ago and imagining a system he called the "Matrix" long before Al Gore "invented" the Internet. <
He forecast the development of the digital world in his book "Neuromancer," published in 1984, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards for science-fiction writing. No fiction writer in the land is more associated in the public mind with the digital world than is Gibson. <
His latest book, just released in paperback, is "Pattern Recognition" (Berkley: $14). It tells of Cayce Pollard, a market researcher who spends her time trying to recognize cultural and social patterns corporations can turn into cash. She becomes intrigued with a series of anonymous Internet video clips that have become an underground sensation.
Pattern Recognition is an excellent book.
Mike Ivey summarizes Ross DeVol's (director of regional economics at the Milken Institute) presentation at the MGE innovation center.
DeVol recounted the list of negatives facing Wisconsin as it tries to move from a traditional agriculture and manufacturing economy into a more knowledge-based economy. The negatives include a lack of venture capital, the loss of top talent to other states and the failure to lure any big name "anchor" technology companies.
Presentations and meetings are nice, but I think we have too much of that and not enough risk taking (there's plenty of money here).
Fascinating look at national fund raising data.
While it is no secret that New York and Los Angeles are money meccas for both Republicans and Democrats, what about Teton County, Wyo.? Or Greene County, Ga.? Or Blaine County, Idaho?
Candidates reached into all quarters of the country to raise money last year, including some places that are not part of the well-worn money trail that presidential candidates walk every four years. In many cases, candidates found money in unusual places thanks to fund-raisers who happen to live and work there. Glen Justice, New York Times.
An excellent film! (I believe this played briefly at the Orpheum) Available on DVD.
Shortly before World War II, a Jewish couple and their young daughter emigrate to Kenya from Germany to escape the Nazis. Not all members of the family are happy with this drastic change -- but going home isn't an option. Ultimately, they must all come to terms with a new life in a new continent. Director Caroline Link's epic drama won the 2002 Oscar for best foreign film.
UPDATE: Interestingly, the University of Wisconsin Press published the autobiographical novel upon which the film was based.
Fascinating WGBH special on Tupperware.
Here's a site that sells retro tupperware.
Some school systems are starting to equip certain grades with laptops. This article describes a survey Maine's 2 year old 7th & 8th grade program.
There are many challenges to successful technology implementations, including:
The Age: "Online search engine leader Google has banned the ads of an environmental group protesting a major cruise line's sewage treatment methods, casting a spotlight on the policies -- and power -- of the popular Web site's lucrative marketing program."
In a sign that this spring's Madison School Board elections are being taken more seriously than in years past, the debate season has already begun and an independent Web site is tracking the candidates' positions.
Whether the district will pursue another referendum to address its budget problems is certainly a leading issue, but candidates are also pushing curriculum changes to the front, as well asserting that board members have not been sufficiently independent from the district's administration.
I'll be posting video clips and mp3 files here shortly.
NY Times OP-ED Columnist Nick Kristof on the weakness in US science and math education.
Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant specializing in technology, notes that in his native Bangalore, children learn algebra in elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding in math and science than the average kid in the U.S.
The Cato Institute published some very helpful (and illuminating) charts & graphs on the current federal budget.
Stunning, beautiful, visit! (we did last year)
Bridgeport is one of those California places Californians don't think about much. If you drew a line due east from Petaluma, across the valleys and the mountains, you'd hit Bridgeport, about 115 miles south of Reno and 90 miles north of Bishop.
It's as pretty as a postcard, nestled in a wide valley with the Sawtooth range of the Sierra Nevada to the west. The highest peak is the 12,264-foot Matterhorn, named for the Swiss mountain.
Highway 395 is the town's main street, and it runs past old white houses, and a modest business district surrounding the 123-year-old Mono County Courthouse, plunked like a Victorian wedding cake in the middle of town. There is even a cannon on the lawn. Carl Nolte, SF Chronicle.
The government is very close to deciding whether to grant the first licenses for commercial space flights carrying passengers, the chief commercial space regulator said on Monday.
Three teams have applied for permission to send people on suborbital ships, which would fly to an altitude of about 100 kilometers, or 63 miles, and then return near the point of launching.
Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites has posted an extensive library of photos and information from their test flight program (very interesting!). They recently flew faster than the speed of sound.
Former President Jimmy Carter writes a weblog with musings from his current Africa trip.
In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregating students in public schools by race denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law.
Brown vs. Board of Education sparked the civil rights movement that wrought enormous change to America's laws and public schools. Yet 50 years later, most African-American children in Wisconsin remain far behind whites in education, jobs, housing, safety and family stability - further behind, in some measures, than in any other state. Why, in a Northern state with a progressive tradition, have we seen so little progress after so much time?
The Journal Sentinel has an excellent set of articles here.
Herb Kohl at 13. Bud Selig at 13. The solid base of the next generation of Milwaukeeans, not only future senators and baseball commissioners, but future tool-and-die makers and teachers, accountants and business owners, professionals and laborers of all kinds.
That was then at Steuben Middle School.
This is now:
"I have five assignments, I have 33 students. Why do I only have five assignments?" eighth-grade science teacher Yolanda Williams asks her class.
A few more comments from Steuben Middle School.
Sarah Carr writes that a drill-oriented approach to teaching reading is gaining followers in Milwaukee public school classrooms. In 1998, 15 MPS schools used direct instruction. Today, about 47 schools do.
But some critics say drill-based reading method hurts students.
"There's such tremendous pressure on teachers and administrators to advance reading scores that they are literally desperate to try new things they think will bring them success," said Randall Ryder, a professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Last month, Ryder completed a study concluding that students in direct instruction classrooms fared worse than students taught using other reading methods.
But Dolores Mishelow, a former principal and one of the leading backers of direct instruction within MPS, said: "I get really upset when people bash it, because I know that it works."
File sharing, online music sales and high cd prices are taking their toll on record stores. [Washington Post]
The market for legally downloadable music is tiny today, but the success of Apple's iTunes online music store and the rush of rival services to the marketplace is expected to gobble up an ever-larger share of the pop music pie. A recent study by Forrester Research, which examines technology trends, predicts that in five years fully one-third of all music will be delivered through modems, and the CD itself will be passe, if not obsolete, in the years after. This isn't necessarily bad news for the record labels, but it could be lethal for brick-and-mortar stores.
A pair of Californian entrepreneurs want to turn an empty lake bed just east of town into a non-polluting dairy farm for 90,000 cows, and to convert the cows' prodigious produce of manure and flatulence into a renewable form of energy. This “cowtown”, which will cover 1,900 acres, is the brainchild of William Buck Johns and Henry Orlosky.
See also the Harper Lake Energy Project.
McNamara speaks at Berkeley.
Robert McNamara, the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, fielded questions from center stage in a packed auditorium at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, for the first time since graduating in 1937.
Since Errol Morris's (a UW Grad) The Fog of War" was released last year, Mr. McNamara has appeared before several audiences, including those at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and one last month in Washington.
Howard Dean raised $600K online yesterday - for the Wisconsin Primary. However and unfortunately (for the internet), he's raising money on the net and blowing it on TV ads. He (and other politicians) would be far better off investing in the internet, educating voters and growing their base via email, web pages, chats, "social networks" and other emerging tools.
Internet use is growing while TV/newspaper users are declining.
Unfortunately, Dean's new campaign manager is a former telco lobbyist.
Mike Lucas looks back at a few of Elroy Hirsch's "Crazyleg's" memorable moments.
I seem to remember being in a Minneapolis bar years ago after a football game where Elroy bought a round - evidently, this was not unusual.
LaFarge based Organic Valley is a $184 million company with dairy, meat and egg producers in 16 states and one Canadian province. It's the third largest brand name in the entire organic foods industry, according to the latest Mike Ivey Column.
Anne Davis writes: "Wisconsin Connections Academy, Wisconsin Virtual Academy and, in particular, the just-approved iQ Academies at Wisconsin are using paid advertisements, billboards and direct mail to woo students during the state's three-week annual open enrollment period that begins Monday and runs through Feb. 20."
No matter what they spend, Northern Ozaukee school Superintendent Bill Harbron is asking K12 representatives to make some adjustments to their marketing approach this time around to avoid overselling the school.
After a short but intense campaign last year, the virtual academy received more than 1,000 applications. About 455 students actually enrolled, and the enrollment has continued to drop ever since as parents have discovered the program doesn't fit their needs, Harbron said.
"There's no sense recruiting a large number of students (and) then having them enter the program and drop out," Harbron said. "We want parents to make a very realistic choice for their child."
Fascinating Post by Michael Watkins on not getting tenure at the Harvard Business School.
