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.”
Wasabi!
Dinner tonight at Wasabi on State Street. Excellent as always.
School Board Debate
Lee Sensenbrenner writes:
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.
Watching the Jobs Go By
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.
Federal Red Ink
The Cato Institute published some very helpful (and illuminating) charts & graphs on the current federal budget.
Two Cars to Save Detroit
The Eastern Sierra, CA
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.
X Prize
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.
Carter on Mali
Former President Jimmy Carter writes a weblog with musings from his current Africa trip.
1954 – 2004 Brown vs. Board of Education
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.