Remind the President about how he promised "Not on my watch" for allowing genocide to occur in the world. (Link, an interesting article in itself on war)

Call the President and leave a message urging him to take action in Darfur. DarfurPledge.org (Don't dig too far on this website....)

Kristof on Education

Nicholas Kristof's column in Sunday's New York Times argues for public schools in the US to lower the requirements for teacher certification. In order to keep the current teacher-to-student ratios, there needs to be a 35% increase in the number of people entering teaching.

Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the best private high schools in the nation, says that 85% of its faculty have advanced degrees but only a handful have teaching certificates.

Teach For America is another example Kristof uses to indicate how alternative routes into teaching not requiring normal certification can be successful. 17,000 applicants vied for 2,000 spots this past year with 12% of Yale seniors applying and 8% in both Harvard and Princeton's seniors.

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.

Alas, they would be ''unqualified'' for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification.

That's an absurd snarl in our education bureaucracy. Let's relax the barriers so people can enter teaching more easily, either right out of college or later as a midcareer switch.

Sure, there are lots of other problems in the U.S. education system. But this is one of the easiest to solve.

Save Darfur

From the Washington Post

Despite the attention, the United Nations has been unable to raise enough money to support its operations in Sudan. On Friday, the U.N. World Food Program announced that it had received only 32 percent of its appeal for $746 million for its operations in Sudan, and that food rations to the camps would be cut in half.

"It's really our worst nightmare," said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, who was with me during one of my first trips into Sudan. Behind the headlines, he said, there is little hope.

Donate to the UN World Food Program here.

Amazing 3D Site

Some modules are better than others. tekhna3d.com

From digg.com.

Save Darfur

Join the Virtual March to end Genocide in Darfur. 400,000 people have already died.

Join a real march in DC, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Seattle, etc.

I say (on the coattails of Holmes):

Being unaware of the tragedies of our world shields us from the sadness, the guilt, and most importantly the responsibility.

Amazing what you can think of in the bathroom.

Stanford and Berkeley iTunes Courses

Berkeley's and Stanford's iTunes University like MIT's Open Courseware are amazing resources.

Capital Punishment

According to Amnesty International capital punishment was reported to have occurred at least 2,148 times in 2005 in 22 different countries. 94% of all executions occurred in four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US with 1,770, 94, 86, and 60, respectively. This map shows which countries have abolished the death penalty (blue), abolished the death penalty except for exceptional circumstances (yellow), abolished the death penalty in practice (orange), and retained the use of the death penalty (red).

We're in good company, huh?

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics from US Department of Justice we are moving towards less executions:


The Innocence Project states that 14 people so far have been exonerated from death row using post-conviction DNA evidence. One must immediately assume that many convicts sentenced to death are innocent now, and many convicts have been wrongfully put to death. At what percentage error is the irreversible state punishment of death acceptable?

Map from Wikipedia

One Red Paper Clip

This is nuts. One Red Paper Clip

From Hans.

Save Darfur

Nicholas D. Kristof from the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize on Commentary, "for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."

Go to this website and send a postcard: SaveDarfur.org

• Pulitzer Prize
• NyTimes Kristof Columns from 2005
• More Kristof Columns
• UN information on Sudan
• UN news on Sudan
  

The Da Vinci Code Quest

Looks pretty cool.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

William Sloane Coffin

Reverend William Sloane Coffin was a political activist, a scholar, and a minister. He passed away last week and countless articles have been written about him. He seemed a noble man that fought against the injustices of his time. A peace activist during the Vietnam War and a civil rights activist during the 60s, Coffin preached a religion that I could believe. Quotes from the NPR story:

My view of the faith is it should make it possible for you to live with uncertainty.

The integrity of love is much more important than the impurity of dogma. You'll find that those who are really law and order Christians are more impressed with God's power than they are with God's love.

The cruelty that fundamentalists as a rule show to homosexuals is to me quite abhorrent. I also think they are quite ignorant. I know the Bible as well as they do. Maybe there's more to be learned than what's to be found in one or two Biblical passages.

People have some very goofy ideas about how the will of God operates. People think that God goes around the world with fingers on triggers, His hands on steering wheels...People say how can God let that happen? God is not in the event but in the response to the event.

We really do have free will. You have to have freedom if love's the name of the game. To blame God with what people do with their freedom is not fair....You can blame God for giving us human freedom, maybe we're not ready....It seems to be about where the blame stops.

I can't bear to be bored and I think a lot of the people that live safe, sterile lives are bored to death. Oliver Wendell Holmes: "If you do not share in the action and passion of your times you must count yourself as not having lived."

From Scotty McLennan's Boston Globe piece:

Coffin's contention was: ''Many of us are eager to respond to injustice, as long as we can do so without having to confront the causes of it. There's the great pitfall of charity. Handouts to needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice. And that is why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity; it is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy! Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling us troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleships."

• New York Times Obituary
• Boston Globe article (by Stanford Dean of Religious Life, who in conjunction with Coffin is the inspiration for the Rev. Scotty Sloan in Doonesbury)
• Wikipedia article
• NPR Story

Pork-Barrel Projects

The watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste has come with their 2006 Congressional Pig Book which compiles the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The report includes the Oinker Awards, State Rankings, Historical Trends, and a searchable index.

All of the pork-barrel projects meet at least one of the following criteria:

1. Requested by only one chamber of Congress
2. Not specifically authorized
3. Not competitively awarded
4. Not requested by the President
5. Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding
6. Not the subject of congressional hearings
7. Serves only a local or special interest

Each of the listed designated projects includes the cost, the state, a description, and an indication why it was a pork-barrel project.

While some of the projects are amusing, such as the $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, North Carolina, and other maybe appropriate uses of money, such as the $1,000,000 for the Ohio State University 4-H Green Building Project, all of these appropriations circumvent normal budgetary procedures.

Other highlights from the website include the "Byrd Droppings" and a sortable list of Congresspeople and their pork ranking.

Best Sites on the Web

Web 2.0 Awards and Webby Awards are two website that categorize and rank the best websites available. For example:

• Blogniscient ranks the best and most popular blogs.
• Esnips is a web storage site that allows you to store up to a Gig of information for free.
• Pageflakes, if you don't use Google homepage, then this site is a great as a start page.
• The Smoking Gun has 100% authentic documents from courts, law enforcement, and government files. (I especially like the one where the DEA agent shoots himself in the foot.)

Google

Google has just started calendar.google. finance.google is pretty cool too.

Ohio English Unity Act

State Representative Courtney Combs introduced an act into the Ohio Revised Code that would require all government documents and meetings to be only in English. Combs wants to unite Ohioans with this new legislation and to encourage Ohioans to learn and speak English. The Hamilton Republican has said the following on the subject:

It makes us, in my opinion, all Americans if we speak the same language.

I do not want to see the U.S. as a bilingual nation; it divides it. The business language of the world is English. If we go down the line and have different pockets of different people speaking different dialogues, it creates a problem.

Arguments for English-only:

1. Unless we accommodate every language are we giving some immigrants an advantage?
2. The state will save tens of thousands of tax payers money.
3. Encourages assimilation into American culture because current social pressures are not high enough.
4. Helps bolster English dominance in America and in world business.

Outside of the possibility of justifying blatant acts of racism arguments against English-only include:

1. Restriction on suffrage as ballots will only be printed in English.
2. Reduction in safety as Columbus now provides smoke-alarm testing information in Spanish.
3. Economic loss due to the loss of future non-English speaking workers.

Are the motives of State Rep. Combs just? What is governments role in social assimilation? Are non-punitive solutions to encouraging unity and the English language possible?

Resources:

• The Ohio English Unity Act
• Columbus Dispatch 10/31/05
• Columbus Dispatch 4/11/06
• U.S. English Inc. Resource Room loaded with interesting information
• ACLU Brief on English Only

Calculate How Far You Run or Bike

This site is amazing.

Gmap-pedometer.com is based on googlemaps and you can double-click to make waypoints and then it calculates the distance between the points. It even can calculate caloric usage and elevation change. Once you've made you route you can even save it for future reference.

Too Much Music? How to Organize it.

I have too much music on my Ipod and I find it cumbersome and annoying to get a good mix of music that's outside of my well-worn tracks. Here is a great blog about how to set up good smart playlists to get control of your musical selection.

Scott McClellan: Sucks to be you.

This morning I saw Scott McClellan’s forehead glisten as he was getting hammered with questions involving the President’s role in releasing classified information. “Again it is this administrations policy not to comment on ongoing investigations.”

What strikes me about the issue is that the President has the ability when he sees fit to release bit by bit classified information at his discretion, to bolster his case, for his (political) gain, but can simply not disclose classified information that counters his arguments. This I believe is at the heart of the administrations arguments for getting into the Iraq war.

Ayn Rand Institute Response to Prayer Study

A Harvard Medical School study on the effects of prayer on patients undergoing bypass surgery showed that patients receiving prayer faired no better than those not receiving prayer.

1,800 patients were used in the study, split into three groups, 1) were told they might or might not receive prayers and did receive prayers, 2) were told they might or might not receive prayers and did not receive prayers, and 3) were told they would receive prayers and did receive prayers. In group 1 52% of the patients had post-surgical complications, group 2 51% had complications, and in group 3 59% had complications.

The Ayn Rand Institute commented in this study with the following:

The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking. It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer.

Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?

Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.

From Boingboing

01:02:03 04/05/06

This Wednesday...happens every one hundred years...varies in different parts of the world. Sounds like a reason to party.
(From BoingBoing).

Climate Change

Although the media and politicians often portray dissenting scientific views about climate change, this is an incorrect depiction of the scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), looks at peer-reviewed published scientific literature and "states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities." (Science Magazine Link)

In agreement with the IPCC, the National Science Foundation, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all have issued statements stating that humans have played a role in climate change.

Are there dissenting scientific opinions that are being overshadowed by these organizations? Not published in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed articles labeled "climate change" during 1993 to 2003 totaled 928. Of these 928 articles, none disagreed with the consensus opinion.

Dissenting opinions often come from "[i]ndustry-financed groups like the Global Climate Coalition and the Western Fuels Association [who are] quick to send out press releases, giving the impression that there [is] an active debate within the scientific community about the threat of climate change. Mainstream media's notion of journalistic balance resulted in stories that gave the naysayers equal time to dispute the notion of catatsrophic (sic) climate change, setting the standard for all future climate change narratives." (The Nation Link)

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it. (Science Magazine Link)