Some Straights Can Go Gay, Study Says SF Gate

High Cost for Low Grades

“Kansas City is a very, very sad story,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard

University sociologist who has studied the district for years. “They really

can’t show much of anything, though they spent $2 billion.”

To Orfield, the lesson from Kansas City is clear: Money can’t buy

good schools. Not, at least, in shattered urban districts where poverty

leaves many children ill-equipped to learn.

When students come to class hungry, exhausted or afraid, when they

bounce from school to school as their families face eviction, when they

have no one at home to wake them up for the bus, much less look over

their homework, not even the snazziest facilities, the strongest curricula

and the best-paid teachers can ensure success, he argues. LA Times

David Anderson, on his always stimulating Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for? points to President Carter’s commentary on comparisons between the current energy shortage and the one Carter faced. David says, “Nice to hear from an honest man who brings an engineer’s mind to bear on a problem, rather than hearsay,

propaganda and superstition. In particular I like the fact he nails the administration on its bullshit labeling

of conservation as just ‘private virtue.’ ” I was struck by the quote he pulls out from Carter; certainly the understatement of the week: “Exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality.”

Crack comes from Colombia, and Colombian cracks come from Letterman Yahoo!

Dan Hartung’s excellent lake effect is going on a reduced posting schedule for at least a couple of weeks, he says. “I’ve never wanted to make updating lake effect a crisis,” he says, but reassuringly adds, “No fear, I am coming back.” Good thing, too, or I’d be going after him…

Update on the Bremerton, Wash. keyless remote dysfunction about which I first blogged several months ago. “A federal investigation into two mass

outages of keyless remote entry

devices in the Bremerton area could

be complete in about 30 days, officials

said.

But the Federal Communications

Commission, which is conducting the

probe, is staying tight-lipped about

what it has found so far.

At the same time, other information

has come to light — some of it

contradictory — pointing to a number

of possible causes. One of those is a

section of radio frequency that the

military shares with many keyless

devices.” [via Robot Wisdom]