This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would provide monster profits for the private business sector?

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Not sure why this isn't in my bookmarks already

"What is special about the number 8,549,176,320? As Mr. Gardner explained in “The Incredible Dr. Matrix” (1976), the number is the 10 natural integers arranged in English alphabetical order."

if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated. The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix.

on developing executive function in children. short version: dramatic play is deeply powerful.

Great story of recycling "To him, almost anything discarded and durable is potential building material. Standing in one of his houses and pointing to a colorful, zigzag-patterned ceiling he made out of thousands of picture frame corners, Mr. Phillips said, “A frame shop was getting rid of old samples, and I was there waiting.” So far, he has built 14 homes in Huntsville, which is his hometown, on lots either purchased or received as a donation. A self-taught carpenter, electrician and plumber, Mr. Phillips said 80 percent of the materials are salvaged from other construction projects, hauled out of trash heaps or just picked up from the side of the road. “You can’t defy the laws of physics or building codes,” he said, “but beyond that, the possibilities are endless.”"

chat with The New York Times Co.’s general counsel, Ken Richieri, who considers whether news aggregators are protected by “fair use,” the legal standard that permits reproduction of copyrighted material under guidelines that, as Richieri says, “work a lot better in the analog world than they do in a digital world.” He ends up largely dissenting from the view of other media companies in suggesting that while news aggregation might constitute unfair competition, it isn’t really a copyright issue: “The AP’s saying, ‘Well, if all of these facts are listed in the same place [on an unlicensed site], that’s a substitute.’ And that may well be, but I’m not sure it’s a substitute for the expression, which is what copyright protects.” He also observes that “traditionally, newspapers were the users of fair use, and pretty much that’s all they did and saw themselves as.”

"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary."

"educators see the lessons as grooming children to be better citizens and leaders by making them think twice before engaging in the name-calling, gossip and other forms of social humiliation that usually go unpunished. “As a school, we’ve done a lot of work with human rights,” said Michael McDermott, the middle school principal. “But you can’t have kids saving Darfur and isolating a peer in the lunchroom. It all has to go together.”"

"Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network. The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence."

"pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning." "'There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,' said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. 'It was the students’ job to figure it out.'" All teaching should aspire to be as engaging as possible. The old way is the reason I left 15 years ago.

"What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it."

"It’s a stirring call to arms when Doctorow writes: “Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.” The framers of the American Constitution were in a sense a bunch of political science nerds too, pulling all-nighters to hack together the code for a government without tyranny. “Little Brother” argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

"there’s no doubt that it is remarkably powerful. For example, when you put out a fake, like the Kerry/Fonda one.[2] And even like this missile one. You start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it. "We should remember that the power of photographs comes not only from their ability to copy reality, but also to alter reality. Photographs can be used — to borrow Heartfield’s phrase — as weapons. They can be used to warn us about the dangers of impending war. They can also be used to ratchet up the blind forces of rage and unreason that drag us into conflict."

Covering several popular foreign language social networks. (Naver, Baidu, Mixi, Mediapart.fr)

fantastic visualization of how demographics scattered by state

In a few weeks, the first wispy stems will appear. The first spears will take much longer; it will be two or three years before your first harvest.

nice quick intro to microformats

"[use] short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again."

Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months.

As Bobby Kennedy said in a speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968, the nation’s gross national product measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.” (Bhutan anyone?)

Photographs preserve information. They record data. They present evidence. Not because of our intentions but often in spite of them.

making. There’s this strange collapsing of perspective that he gets because of the footpath that’s trodden into the left hand side of the road that connects up in the further distance to the main track as it disappears over the horizon. They have a pa

just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents

Anytime you're on an NYT page, just click it