Exams, contracts, and nuclear research: stupid, stupid, stupid
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GCSE physics scandal shakes mailbag Letters A secondary school physics teacher sent an open letter to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the AQA exam board. He accused the board of putting forward a paper which contained questions that were vague, stupid, insultingly easy, political, and non-scientific. Your thoughts:â¦
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Some scientists are thinking twice about doing or reporting certain research, reacting to political and social controversy in addition to legal restrictions.
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Introducing The 404s, Wired's contest to find the least-informative sites on the military web. Strike a blow for open government (and win prizes).  In Danger Room.
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By Peter Eisler  WASHINGTON -- The federal government is sanctioning agreements that cost whistle-blowers their jobs after they expose safety and security lapses at nuclear facilities and toxic waste sites, Labor Department records show.
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Bush won. Thatâs the bad news for stem cell researchers. The good news: California&#39;s Prop. 71 passed. The science is already seeing the election&#39;s fallout.
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I just came home after working five hours overtime without pay. I'll likely do the same tomorrow, and the next day, which is often my routine. Why? Because with 240 students in my English classes, overtime is unavoidable to grade all the papers and tests.
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Time to put on those tin foil hats again
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By Adam Smeltz, The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.  Sep.
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Cannibalistic Cabbage Patch Kids vie with the Atomic Energy Lab for Kids containing real U-238 and BB-firing belt buckles for the worst toys sold to gullible mommies and daddies looking for something different for junior. In Table of Malcontents.
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No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the âI didnât know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doingâ defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just wonât do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future.
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Academic journals control whose research gets published and influence who wins research funding and contracts. Frustrated by the delays and power in the traditional peer-review system, some scientists are turning to an online open review system.
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Let's make a deal: Door Number 1? Door Number 2? Or Door Number 3? The choice is yours when you try to rack up points in an experiment being run by Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at M.I.T. &#8212; who, by the way, is not trying to bring back Monty Hall's "Let's Make [...].
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Though just teenagers, the applicants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are a scarily accomplished lot. They have started businesses and published academic research. One built a working nuclear reactor in his garage. In their high schools, they have led every extracurricular club and mastered the SAT.
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Asking questions about the quantum universe is a fool's game: one cannot get a single answer, only a probability. A committee of particle physicists bounced this concept around a table to pose the top nine questions, and a probable path to answering them.
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Sometimes really smart people say really dumb things. Here's a case in point.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??