Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (032706)
Free Links:
- This Terror Tactic Would Unite a Country pretty quickly (HT S.O.B. Alliance member Large Bill).
- Yes I’m Flogging Somebody’s Book — and no, I haven’t read it. How’s that for brutal honesty? No matter, because what I have visited often enough to appreciate is Joanne Jacobs’ blog, which focuses on education issues, and does so in a way the average person can relate to.
Joanne has a new new book, “Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds.” It’s about a college-prep charter high school for “at risk” kids in San Jose that (mostly) succeeds. I’ve read the reviews at Amazon, and it seems that if you’re a conscientious educator, especially one in a high-poverty area, and want to make things better, whether or not you’re in a charter-school setting, it would be well worth the investment.
- Of all the objections to evolving elections technology, the one that I believe merits the most attention is the concern about the presence or lack of an audit trail. A town in New Hampshire (HT Techdirt) had problems when the vote-tallying technology threw out ballots with multiple votes, even though multiple votes were allowed — i.e., a major programming error. I’m not in the camp that believes things are presently out of control, but the potential is there, and to pretend it’s not is disingenuous at best, and an open invitation to fraud at worst. Would the New Hampshire problem have been caught without a paper trail? Maybe, maybe not.
If you believe is tinfoil material, think these four steps through:- Open Excel, enter a series of numbers and then enter a summation formula below them.
- Then go in and change the formula to the “Sum” plus 1. Any programmer can do the same thing in a more complicated situation.
- Ask yourself how many people would (or could) catch this if you handed them a report with the error in it. Then ask yourself how many people would try to recreate what you just did if you refused to show them your original “programming” (the cell entries and the formula).
- Finally, ask yourself, “What are the chances I would get caught if my list had thousands or millions of entries, and I had just told everyone from the beginning to “just trust me” (as the e-voting companies appear in some cases to be insisting on), and produced no paper or othewise auditable trail?
This is not pleasant, needs to be handled, and surely should not be an ideological issue. Related story: A voter group has sued to block Diebold’s unexpected e-voting approval by the California Secretary of State. The story says he had rejected Diebold previously, set conditions for possible reconsideration, but then whipped through the approval without the conditions being met. Ugh.
- Speaking of secret processes that are out of control:
SAT Problems Even Larger Than Reported
The College Board disclosed yesterday that the problems resulting from the misscoring of its October SAT examination were larger than it had previously reported.
In a statement, the organization said it discovered last weekend that 27,000 of the 495,000 October tests had not been rechecked for errors. It said that after checking those exams and one other overlooked set, it had found that 400 more students than previously reported had received scores that were too low.
A board official added that the maximum error was 450 points, not 400.
This is the third time in two weeks that the board, which administers the exam, has acknowledged that its earlier assessment of the problems was wrong. In its statement, the board also outlined steps it planned to avoid mistakes.
The College Board needs to hire an outside auditing firm on a ongoing basis to, at a minimum, prove that all the verfication it thought had been done was indeed done, and on top of that to statistically sample supposedly “blessed” test results, before issuing them.
- Does writing a book about a video game and how to play it better violate copyright law (HT Techdirt)? Public Citizen is striking back with a lawsuit against the makers of World of Warcraft, who have tried to prevent the creator of a gamer’s guidebook from selling it.
- Another Day, Another Delay — This time it’s Microsoft’s upgrade to its Office Suite.
