Free Republic

We don’t buy tickets or recordings of mediocre or worse musicians but we keep paying for and sending our kids to exactly such teachers; the No Child Left Behind mandated testing shows it. Of course, the teachers’ unions object and the Obamans intend to satisfy them by dumping such effective testing. In Part (1) of this article, the questions were: the necessity of locking up all the kids every day and were it found necessary, should it be done by the government or could the private sector do it better? We postponed looking much at the means for delivering education....

A long-anticipated conflict between the FCAT and Passover starts on Tuesday, but local public schools are accommodating observant students by offering alternative test times and makeup exams. The Jewish holiday begins at sundown on Monday and ends on April 26. In Palm Beach and Broward counties on Tuesday, fifth-grade students are scheduled to take the first of two days of the science portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Jewish students usually do not miss school throughout Passover, but some may be absent for a couple of days. When the testing schedule was published last year, some parents complained that...

Some Maricopa County workers are burned up about a new health-plan requiring them to submit saliva for nicotine analysis.

Come April, Illinois 11th-graders will need to sweat through two days of state testing before they can advance to the senior class. Illinois education officials approved the new rules Thursday, taking aim at a loophole some schools used to keep academically weak juniors from taking the test, thereby avoiding accountability for their scores under federal law. The new regulations would allow local schools to continue to determine what it means to be a junior, whether by counting a student's years at high school or the number of academic credits earned. But students must sit for the Prairie State Achievement Exam...

Nine years into the war in Afghanistan, a handful of U.S. soldiers have a new weapon in hand, a lethal combination of technology and explosives that the Army has called a "game changer." Looking like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, the XM-25 fires highly specialized rounds that can be programmed to explode at the precise location where the enemy is hiding behind cover. (Snip) Though the XM-25 has tested well in the United States, military brass will be watching the weapon's performance in real-life combat to assess not only how well it performs, but also what weapons

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds. The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again. Then there was radiation. While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps. Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to...

Multimedia artwork "2053" - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe.*Profile of the artist: Isao HASHIMOTO Born in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan in 1959. Worked for 17 years in financial industry as a foreign exchange dealer. Studied at Department of Arts, Policy and Management of Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Currently working for Lalique Museum, Hakone, Japan as a curator. Created artwork series expressing, in the artist's view, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons": "1945-1998" © 2003"Overkilled""The Names of Experiments" About "1945-1998" ©2003 "This piece of work is a bird's eye view of...

TRENTON — The U.S. Department of Education today awarded a total of $330 million to two coalitions of states — both of which include New Jersey — to create a new generation of standardized tests that will assess national standards for what students should learn in school. The U.S. DOE is awarding funding for the new assessments through its $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition. The federal government awarded nearly all of its Race to the Top funding through an education reform competition that New Jersey narrowly lost last week. But $425 million was left over to create better...

NEW ORLEANS – BP is delaying critical tests on a new well cap designed to finally stop the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico after government officials said more analysis was needed on the plan. ... National Incident Commander Thad Allen said in a statement Tuesday night the process "may benefit from additional analysis" that would be performed overnight and Wednesday. He did not say when the tests would start.

NOTE: The original article is in Danish; since not too many FReepers speak Danish, I've included a link to, and excerpts from, the Google translation of the page. "Its never been done before. And its really cool engineering.” And its really cool engineering. "How Steve Jobs introduced the metal frame on the new iPhone because the phone the other day was revealed to the wondering world. The frame serves as the phone antenna. But the fact is the principle behind the iPhone 4-antenna system is far from new. And possibly it is even so problematic that it will reduce the...

Gov. Rick Perry, reiterating his concerns about a federal takeover of education, gave the final word today that Texas will not apply for the second round of a federal grant worth up to $700 million for local schools. Perry refused to compete for the first round of the Race to the Top grant in January, but had not definitively said the state would sit out round two. The Republican governor repeatedly has criticized President Barack Obama's education grant because it favors states that adopt common curriculum standards. “This administration's attempt to bait states into adopting national standards is an effort...

WASHINGTON – For all the primaries testing tea party clout and veteran senators' ability to survive, a special House election in southwestern Pennsylvania is the multimillion-dollar battleground of choice Tuesday for the two political parties, previewing themes for a fall campaign shadowed by recession and voter discontent. Competing economic prescriptions, the appeal of President Barack Obama's health care legislation, the Republicans' ability to woo crossover support from independents and Democrats all are at issue, according to officials in both parties, in a race that also features a struggle for the political high ground as Washington outsider. The House race features...

Milwaukee, WI – Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin, the Children's Research Institute, and the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin have developed a rapid, automated system to differentiate strains of influenza. The related report by Beck et al, "Development of a rapid automated influenza A, influenza B, and RSV A/B multiplex real-time RT-PCR assay and its use during the 2009 H1N1 swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) epidemic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," appears in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. In pandemic infection, such as the present H1N1 influenza outbreak, rapid automated tests are needed in order to make...

SNIPPET: "Discussion: I first observed discussion of binary explosives on the al-Firdaws forum in January of 2007. In light of recent events I will post here my archive:" SNIPPET: "Implementation: On Christmas Day, 2009, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab boards a flight in Amsterdam, bound for Detroit, and on final descent he attempts to set off what was most likely a binary explosive. Thank goodness he either screwed up or had bad instructions, because the chemicals he was working with were evidently quite good."

Tracking for Success Bethany Stotts, December 15, 2009 At a recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference on “Increasing Accountability in American Higher Education,” panelists argued that the key to increased postsecondary accountability lies with better tracking-systems for student learning outcomes and increasing use of standardized tests. “For those of you who don’t know it [a student unit record system] basically is a data system maintained at the state or system level which contains one record per student containing information about enrollments, behaviors, and so on,” explained Peter Ewell, Vice President of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS)....

BAGHDAD — A Nov. 18 ribbon-cutting ceremony here in the International Zone marked the opening of a new English language testing facility for Iraqis. The mission of the facility is to provide an improved environment for English language testing and to allow military and civilian candidates from the Government of Iraq to achieve their full performance potential. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Judith Resendiz, test control officer, said, "This new facility will support Iraqis who need to validate their English proficiency so they can participate in specialized schooling and pursue opportunities in other English speaking environments that will help them get...

Latino immigrants considered at risk for HIV are less likely to be tested or to have access to healthcare services if they are in the country illegally and have not fully adapted to U.S. culture, according to a new study. The findings underscore the need for more targeted education and prevention programs within the diverse Latino community, which accounts for a disproportionate number of new HIV and AIDS cases in the U.S., said Janni Kinsler, one of six UCLA researchers who conducted the study. “HIV is not declining, and it should be,” Kinsler said. “If you don’t know that you...

British scientists are examining the strain of swine flu behind a deadly Ukrainian outbreak to see if the virus has mutated. A total of 189 people have died and more than one million have been infected in the country. Some doctors have likened the symptoms to those seen in many of the victims of the Spanish flu which caused millions of deaths world-wide after the World War One. An unnamed doctor in western Ukraine told of the alarming effects of the virus. He said: 'We have carried out post mortems on two victims and found their lungs are as black...

In August 2009, CBS News made a simple request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for public documents, e-mails and other materials CDC used to communicate to states the decision to stop testing individual cases of Novel H1N1, or “swine flu.” When the public affairs folks at CDC refused to produce the documents and quit responding to my queries altogether, I filed a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the materials. Members of the news media are entitled to expedited access, which I requested, since this was for a pending news report and on an issue of...

By John Gever, Senior Editor Military doctors can use a portable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing device to diagnose novel H1N1 flu infections in troops overseas, the FDA announced. The emergency authorization was approved "to better protect our troops," said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, MD, in a statement. The device, called JBAIDS (Joint Biological Agent Identification and Diagnostic System), is a rugged, suitcase-sized instrument that can run PCR-based molecular diagnostic tests. It has been under development for several years by a consortium of military health research centers, the CDC, and academic medical laboratories. The development program began in the...