… a devout Muslim!
[A] neighbor, Assetou Kamara, 33, said the woman is a devout Muslim.
… a devout Muslim!
[A] neighbor, Assetou Kamara, 33, said the woman is a devout Muslim.
… is posthumously honored with a molecular bench.
He was witty.
Indiana Tech, an undistinguished, mainly online thing, boasting a ten percent four-year graduation rate, is going to open a law school.
The ABA, which would accredit Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s tool, will certainly accredit the Indiana Tech Law School.
Mayor Marion Barry’s famous statement captures Bernard-Henri Levy’s argument here.
Among the points he makes:
[I]t would be nice to know, and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.
Who knew about the always-two-chambermaids rule?
And – Why didn’t anyone tell DSK that he was one of the most closely watched figures on the planet?
It’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world at Auburn University; but every now and then, under incredible external pressure (lawsuits, legislative boycotts, mass uprisings), a glimmer of sanity appears.
As in : The dread Bobby Lowder has decided not to seek yet another term as an Auburn trustee (he’s been one since 1983).
To be sure, the rest of the trustees are a sad bunch; but getting rid of Lowder is a big first step.
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UD thanks an Auburn reader for the link.
… let’s remind ourselves that the glories of big-class public schools, distance-ed for-profit schools, and computers instead of teachers, are reserved for children of the common people.
Of course, no member of the ruling class, … including [Bill] Gates, [Joel] Klein and [Michael] Bloomberg, would enroll their own children in a school that deprived them of smaller classes, because they want to ensure that their own children have the best chance at success. Indeed, all of them sent their own children to private schools with small classes. Chester Finn enrolled his children at Sidwell Friends (where Obama’s children attend) and Exeter; both schools feature small classes, with Exeter boasting of class sizes of 8-12.
Yet it seems for these same people, it is fine for them to recommend that other people’s children should be relegated to classes of thirty or more, and hooked up to computers for “differentiated” instruction.
Leonie Haimson takes a look at the track record of online learning. It ain’t pretty. But … you know… good enough for the little people.
… Garrett Park Bugle.
… how excited UD was, last spring, to discover a wood thrush nest next to her house, and how much she loved hearing the famous song of that bird.
What they don’t tell you is that it never shuts up. Among the many poems inspired by the thrush, this one has it right:
I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar’s tip,
Singing continuously.
Continuously. Morning, noon, and … no, not night. But I’m asleep at night. And they’re loud. Last year the novelty of the thing charmed me; this year it’s shaddap already.
… reports Market Watch.
(By the way, note that my earlier Strauss-Kahn post, titled Maid in…, has been updated quite a bit over the course of today.)
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Update: David, a reader, sends UD this headline from BoingBoing:
AMID GLOBAL RECESSION, NEW IMF STRATEGY:
RAPING COMMONERS ONE AT A TIME
And as to immunity:
“Acts immunity only covers actions taken in the course of his duties. Coming out of your bathroom stark naked and attacking a chambermaid probably doesn’t qualify,” Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, an associate professor in the Graduate Program in International Studies at Old Dominion University, wrote in a blog post on Sunday.
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A poem to go with the Strauss-Kahn story.
THE EXPENSE OF SPIRIT (129)
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
… known as the Research Foundation, has long been an object of investigation for misuse of funds and general disorganization. And now one particular thing the Foundation recently did with its money has become a big local story: It gave bunches of it to the daughter of an important state politician, but it didn’t ask to her do anything to earn it.
The state’s ethics commission on Friday charged the president of the research foundation of the State University of New York, John J. O’Connor, with giving a no-show job to the daughter of the former Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno.
Bruno’s since been found guilty of federal fraud (not for this; for all sorts of other things); and his daughter has quit her sinecure. But it’s good to remind ourselves that using universities as dumping grounds for politicians and their beloveds is not merely a folkway of America’s deep south.
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A man with a past.
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“Thunderbolt”? Not quite the word.
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From The Economist:
Leave aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty) Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.
You remember Fulvia Morgana, the rich sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World? She explains herself:
Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.
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If true, this was the behavior of the pathologically entitled. Just imagine the effigies and rage from the Portuguese, Greeks and others who will receive IMF lectures about the “moral duty” of paying one’s debts. Lost authority, lost order.
A couple of somewhat similar observations – first, from Ann Althouse:
Let’s assume that the maid’s story is true. When things like this happen, I suspect that this is a man who has had sexual encounters like this before, many times. He’s gotten more cursory and abrupt over time, because he’s been successful in the past. Here is an illustrious man, staying in an extremely expensive hotel room — a room with many amenities. Seems you can get whatever you want. A woman appears. Is she beautiful? He imagines that the woman is another thing the hotel subtly offers to men who pay $3,000 a night for the hotel.
Second, Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker:
[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing not only in the apparent elimination of one of the more plausible alternatives [to Sarkozy], but by what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…
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Strauss-Kahn is proving a sagacious leader.
Joseph Stiglitz writes the worst-timed op/ed of the year.
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The Socialist Party’s Strauss-Kahn
Is a rather bizarre sort of mahn
He takes fancy trips
At his hotels he strips
And tries to play cahtch as cahtch cahn.
Andres Oppenheimer, in the Miami Herald, notes that none of the international university rankings lists a Latin American university among the top one hundred schools. Oppenheimer’s dismayed that Latin America’s response to this result has been to form its own ranking agency, just for its region.
[C]reating a regional ranking that will essentially help make the region’s universities look good is a mistake.
… [T]he region should use [the rankings] as a mobilizing factor to modernize and internationalize its schools, as is already happening in a few major universities in the region.
In China, the communist government has officially set the goal of “internationalizing” its higher education, and has embraced these global rankings with a passion. Latin America should do the same.
Doing the opposite will be the equivalent of withdrawing from the soccer World Cup to compete only within the neighborhood.
And don’t you think someone should have told parents and their children about this before they enrolled in them?
[The] Department of Defense … ranks graduates of traditional high schools … “Tier 1” and those from [online schools] … “Tier 2” … Tier 1 graduates now make up 99 percent of all recruits for all military branches…
Those who’ve opted out of the traditional educational system just don’t stick with military service, [a military spokeswoman] said. That includes students from what she called “any computer-based, virtual-learning program.”
“Years of research and experience show recruits with a traditional high school diploma are more likely to complete their initial three years of service than their alternate credential-holding (Tier 2) peers,” Lainez said. Data collected since 1988 shows only 28 percent of graduates with traditional diplomas leave military service before their first three years in uniform, while those with non-traditional backgrounds have a 39 percent attrition rate, she said.
If you look at why many students drop out of traditional high schools and go online, you can understand why this happens. Of the two students interviewed for this Associated Press story, one was “barred from returning to his public school on a weapons violation.” The other wanted to play tennis. School was just an impediment.
Now the military is, first of all, supposed to believe that by going online – an entirely unsupervised environment – these two learned all their course content fair and square. It’s also supposed to forget the statistics that tell it exactly what you would anticipate. People who can’t stick it out in the relatively undemanding institution of a public high school are unlikely to be able to stick it out in the demanding institution of the military.
The military knows full well that online schools are incentivized to take the lowest performing, least motivated students and keep them in as paying customers until they graduate in some form or another.
Students who’ve learned that you can online your way through life are the least promising candidates for the military, where you actually have to physically show up at set times and interact with actual human beings.
So many online students say they go online because they’re shy, they have trouble speaking up, being with other people. In what way is this supposed to be attractive to the United States military?
And what makes you think your online college is any more attractive to the military? If anything, it’s less.
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…[A] review of [online education] research by the United States Department of Education in 2009 … concluded that few rigorous studies had been done at the K-12 level, and policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.
The fastest growth has been in makeup courses for students who failed a regular class. Advocates say the courses let students who were bored or left behind learn at their own pace.
But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.
“I think many people see online courses as being a way of being able to remove a pain point, and that is, how are they going to increase their graduation rate?” said Liz Pape, president of the Virtual High School Global Consortium. If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.
It’s their sports programs, stupid!