Recently in Education News Category

Jasmine Roberts, 12, won a top prize in Florida's Hillsborough County's regional science fair Wednesday for her project "How Safe Is Fast-Food Restaurants' Ice?" She compared bacteria found in ice from fast-food restaurants with toilet water from the same restaurants. Her results showed 70 percent of the time, the ice held more bacteria than the toilet water, the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Tribune reported Thursday.

From United Press International - Florida kids win science fair top prizes. Read about it from here.

BEAVER FALLS, Pa. (AP) -- A 17-year-old high school student said he was humiliated when a teacher made him sit on the floor during a midterm exam in his ethnicity class -- for wearing a Denver Broncos jersey.

Read about it here.

It's old news. I know. I just found it. I also like how this professor has saved the entire webpage, including the adverts for his class.

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Would Shakespeare really blow the new SAT? Some Princeton Review people talk about what it takes to ace the new essay section of the SAT.

"To receive a high score a student should write a long essay of three or more paragraphs, with each paragraph containing topic and concluding sentences and at least one sentence that includes the words "for example." Whenever possible the student should use polysyllabic words where shorter, clearer words would suffice. The SAT essay will not be a place to take rhetorical chances. Flair will win no points; the highest-scoring essays will be earnest, long-winded, and predictable."

They then proceed to analyze writing samples by Hemingway, Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein (who does particularly badly), and the Unabomber. Of course, the Unabomber's writing style is what the "holistic" graders at the SAT will be looking for. Very amusing, but should we worry that something is terribly wrong with the test?

Read more here

`Rules Kids Won't Learn in School.' by Charles J. Sykes, author of the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add:

Rule 1:
Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2:
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3:
You will not make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity.

Rule 6:
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7:
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8:
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

Rule 9:
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10:
Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11:
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

Found this paper on the net: Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance. It's an interesting read as I've always thought that blocking via just IP addresses would never work.

It's also cool to note that the number one IP address with the most websites hosted is 209.67.50.203, a Register.com "Holding the domain name for future use" site.

Abstract: More than 87% of active domain names are found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains, and more than two third of active domain names share their addresses with fifty or more additional domains. While this IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it causes complications for those who seek to filter the Internet, restrict users' ability to access certain controversial content on the basis of the IP address used to host that content. With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking" -- accidental and often unanticipated denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules.

Granted it's out of date having been written in 2002 but it's an interesting read.