IT HAPPENED.

Someone commented that's not too happy with my blog.
She's not mad, though.
I guess thoughtful?
I dunno.
Also 1/11 there's a comment.
So many fucking comments holy fuck.
Anyway the woman is glad that the blogger I commented on had an outlet.
I agree.
Just don't put it on the internet and not expect people like me to find it.
Commenting on their outlet is my outlet.
What the fuck is a Type Pad?
I don't know but here's one.

There is a STEM crisis in the United States. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. The U.S. ranks 25th in math and 17th in science among the 65 countries participating in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment. 

Is it a crisis when you're still in the top half?
I assume the 65 countries tested where the top 65 economic powers.
25 and 17 would put you in the top 10 percentile.
Is that a crisis?

The STEM crisis is exacerbated by the shifting demographics. Whites make up 73 percent of the STEM workforce. Blacks and Latinos, who represent 28 percent of the U.S. population, make up only seven percent of STEM workers. 

Blacks and Latinos are 28% of the population.
100-28 = 72%.
72% of the population commands 73% of a given category of jobs.
Is that a crisis?

Fast forward to today. The shifting demographics and minority underrepresentation in STEM fields threaten our global competitiveness and national security. To borrow a phrase from President Obama’s election night speech, “We have to fix that.” To do so, we should go back to the future and give STEM a makeover. 

"We have to fix that"-- first uttered by Obama.
Also how is that in any way affecting global competitiveness?
By my reckoning 100% of Chinese jobs are controlled by the Chinese.
Is that a crisis for the Chinese?

I am trying to encourage kids to do something that isn’t yet on their mind because it is not in popular culture. Popular culture tells you “music, music, sports, sports.” It neglects the importance of a STEM education.

An innovator, will.i.am is rebranding STEM and making space history. For the first time, a recorded song was transmitted to Earth from another planet. His song, “Reach for the Stars,” was beamed down from the Mars Curiosity rover to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. How cool is that? 

I really hope there aren't Martians now.
That's their first taste of Terran culture.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know the current approaches to STEM education are not working. According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only four percent of African American 12th graders were proficient in science. By contrast, 27 percent of white seniors and 36 percent of Asian American seniors performed at or above the proficient level. 

By contrast whites and Asians were less shitty.
That sounds like a problem in general, not just for black people.

I plan a fresh start in 2013 with Philly Phresh Start, a project to promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among African American youth. I will apply the lessons learned from my year as a civic innovator to connect STEM to students’ day-to-day realities and interests.

Civic innovator.
That's a career path.
That is a job you can have.

I’m a policy wonk and doer. This time last year, I didn’t have a clue what happened at a hackathon. I associated hackers with bad guys who stole identities and broke into websites. So you can imagine my delight to be introduced to a community of civic-minded hackers. Hackathons provide a platform for problem-solvers and do-gooders to collaborate and create interesting things. 

That doesn't sound like hacking.
Hacking has a fairly narrow definition.

My first hackathon was Random Hacks of Kindness in December 2011 at Drexel University. There, my team developed a prototype for the Cost of Freedom App to help users navigate their state’s voter ID application process. The app was reengineered by a hacker who works for Google at the Voting Information Project (VIP) Hackathon. 

Sounds like software engineering to me.

A lot of awesome prototypes are developed at hackathons. But to have an impact, the project must be sustained beyond the weekend. Like romance, a prototype without finance doesn’t stand a chance. 

All bitches care about is money.
This is coming from a PC liberal hippie woman.
Proof.
1000000 posts about the election--
Wonder if I count as a civil innovator since I post about this bullshit on my blog no one reads too--

Last week, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. Newsweek has since labeled Obama “The First Gay President.”

... I don't think that's how that works.
Well he did get a Nobel Peace Prize for using unmanned drones to kill people so I guess it is how that works when you're Obama.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate “changed little” in April. The jobless rate fell from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent.

The black unemployment rate was 13 percent in April, down from 14 percent in March.

This is terrible.
I wish there was something more I could say.

The jobs report don't tell the whole story. While private sector added 130,000 jobs in April, state and local governments shed 15,000 employees. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that African Americans and women are hit hardest by downsizing in the public sector

... Blacks and women can't cut it in the private sector, what?

Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the equal, if not main, breadwinner in four out of ten families. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men.

Let's apply some PC logic and say that it's fair men make more because they're underprivileged in the degree category.
Here's a post saying technology is racist (really)--

I am a doer or in the jargon of programmers, a problem-solver.

So it is an honor to be named one of the “Top Ten Race & Civil Liberties Bloggers on Twitter.” After all, in the age of Obama, race still matters.

Yeah me too but unlike you I actually solve real problems people have.
Anyway fuck blogs.

Migraine ahoy

Let's make this quick because I can't look at while screen too long.
This is Engaged Intellectuals.
If you can figure out how to read this shit please tell me because I don't understand it.
Usually you read left to right and up to down but we seem to be subscribing to some sort of high bronze age reading logic.

Words fail me when I hear of violence in schools, and the unspeakable events that unfolded yesterday in Connecticut seem like a horrible nightmare – a dream gone terribly wrong. 

Dream gone wrong?
When I think "Dream gone wrong" I think "I was about to bang every member of Girls' Generation but then my alarm got me up" not "30 1st graders getting shot"

Children and adults – likely trying to protect the children – victims of the most horrific kind of events we can’t even imagine. My cousin’s 4th grade child was in a nearby school under lockdown. Some of you may have connections to this devastating event too, but even those who have no concrete ties find themselves weeping or staring silently – some things we do when our language fails us.

Yeah I was standing in a class when it happened.
Had no idea it had happened until well after the fact though.

This morning I received an Open Letter to the President of the United States (see below). The letter might hit home for some of you like it did me. How can we make school about creating “winners” of all children and youth?

The shooter was a 30 year old grown ass man. What the fuck are you talking about?
What follows is a whining post about school achievement that I'll just summarize with this:

Once they have destroyed children’s intrinsic motivation and trust in school sufficiently, albeit unintentionally, educational leaders have only extrinsic motivators — ironically, more competition, reward programs, motivational speakers, role models, school reform, high expectations, zero tolerance, accountability, etc. — to address the problem.

You know you can undo all that shit by talking to them for five goddamn seconds like a human being and not some brainwashed PC robot.
Like just today
"look guys you were really misbehaved I need you to do better tomorrow because I know you're capable of better" and that's really all it takes.
If you act like an asshole
I'll treat you like an asshole.
Tomorrow they'll do better.
I could have written their names on a list and gotten them in trouble when their real teacher got back but what the fuck good is that?
That's another thing you can do to motivate them.
I'm not keeping some goddamn naughty list like Santa Claus. If you fuck up the penalty will be immediate.
Heavy reliance upon extrinsic motivation reflects a failure to understand that children were born motivated to learn.
Shut the fuck up you PC robot.
Kids don't give a fuck about learning.
Think back to school for a second. Did you care about learning?
No you fucking didn't. If the teacher seemed cool you were interested in what he had to tell you.
You learned without him having to beat you over the head with it.
School is like a popularity contest that you have to win.
Kids aren't these magical snowflakes that come wanting their heads filled with knowledge.
I know that doesn't sound very teacher of me to say but it's the fucking truth.
Have you seen the average person?
Anti-intellectual.
You can convince them, though, to learn basic shit so they won't wind up mixing concrete.
I'd love it if these punks would come to appreciate The Odyssey the way I do but then again I also recognize there are probably about five people alive today that appreciate it like I do.
I'm unlikely to run into another so instead I'll have to settle for some critical thinking related to The Odyssey.

Hence, high on educational leaders’ list of obnoxious utterances should be “every child can learn” and such.  Of course, every child can learn. That should never be an issue.

They can learn.
Never mind the host of lies we indoctrinate into them.

To be literate is to live a wide-awake life in this world – wide-awake to the tiny details that come together to create the predictable and unpredictable. To be literate is to know you are a meaning-maker and a world-maker, and you use all the creative tools at your disposal to make life more humane for yourself and with others.

Jesus Christ.
I remember having to read bullshit like this in pussy sensitivity.
I remember the looks of almost terror I got when I said "being literate is to be a meaning-maker? What the fuck does that mean? Don't you know writing is just a stand in for the spoken word?"
It is. Writing is an unnatural action meant to be an abstract representation of what comes naturally to us.
Nothing about writing is elegant or sensible.
Why are we pretending it is?

To expand our literacies, then, we need time and space, we need to dwell with others cultivating their artistic/literate lives, and we need to tend to – and deconstruct and reconstruct – the literacies we’ve learned that use us to perpetuate injustice (classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism, judgment, hatred, and the list goes on).

Here's a fucking comma
this is how it works
I don't give a shit if you're a special snowflake this is how a comma works.
You can write your special snowflake thoughts in proper English.
There's my gift to you. You can form a coherent thought.

What is inquiry? This question has haunted me for quite awhile as I hear folks talk about inquiry-based education, inquiry-focused curriculum, and what is and is not inquiry.

If only you had a dictionary.
Protip: inquest, inquiry, inquisition all have the same root word.
Wonder if there's a connection holy shit there is it's amazing.

Can silence be inquiry?

God I remember the rhetorical questions with answers in pussy sensitivity.
Yes, silence can be inquiry because an inquiry just means an investigation.
You can investigate silently.

As I sit in a large unfamiliar room right now at the National Council of Teachers of English, I am silent, and I am wondering. How does a room like this get built? Why is it that so many people have arrived early for this session? 

Bunch of pretentious fucks like you have to get together and jerk each other off.

Why is it that something like “inquiry” is linked to a particular way of using our body and our language? Couldn’t it be a way of living in the world? That we can inquire into the topic or issue at hand, that we can inquire into our own imagination and thoughts, that we can inquire into the words and actions of someone else?

I am an inquirer. Whether or not that fits within the educational term inquiry is left unknown.
I'm an inquisitor.
Be judged.

Find power where you are, learn to deconstruct power and privilege based on economic resources that were determined long before you were born, and be savvy and smart about navigating the social and political terrain where you are and where you want to go.

No
sorry
don't care how poor or rich you are
that's how a comma works.
If you're poor it would behoove you to learn this shit so you don't stay that way.

 Now that the Common Core Standards includes writing, people all over the country are scurrying around to knock down the cobwebs of good writing instruction from years past in an effort to be in compliance with new requirements. Of course we should have been focusing on writing in schools all along during the torturous decade when phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (sponsored by The National Reading Panel and No Child Left Behind) high-jacked literacy in every school across America.

>phonics
>hijacking literacy
>2013
That proves you live in either a parallel dimension or you really do have your head that far up your own ass.
If only these punks knew some phonics.
I still remember that argument.
"Phonics are fundamentally unfair to students."
"What's unfair?"
"It doesn't support all learners."
"What doesn't? How the English language works?'
"The English language isn't built on phonics."
THEN WHY
THE FUCK
ARE ALL THE EARLIEST WRITINGS WRITTEN IN METER WHICH REQUIRES A FIRM GRASP OF SYLLABLES WHICH MEANS YOU KNOW PHONICS?
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?

If we make the desires of “future employers” the focus of our work rather than the students in front of us, we will fail from the beginning.

Look I don't care what you do with this knowledge.
More to the point I have no say what you do with it after you leave.
 But I worked at Harris Teeter. If you have any goddamn sense you'll use what you've learned to avoid working there.
Anyway fuck blogs.
Fuck pussy sensitivity.
Fuck migraines.

What

Wow this blog looks like a mess.
This woman is some sort of health speaker or something--
that's a job you can have, incidentally--
and I guess we're going to be educated about healthy living or something.

One of the fastest-growing segments at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is digital health. And within that segment, there’s a battle brewing for what technology companies seem to think is the most valuable part of real estate on the human body: the wrist.

It is the most valuable place to put something that you need quick and easy access to that also isn't a major pain in the ass to have something strapped to it.

I counted at least fifty products as I cruised aisles 26000-27000 in the South Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center that had wristbands, usually black, plastic or rubbery, and often able to click in and out of the band for use in-hand, in pocket, or in a few cases, on a lanyard or pendant device.

Pendant device reminds me of the early 90s when everyone was trying to copyright every computer term imaginable and Microsoft tried to claim they owned the concept of the mouse so on a lot of games in the early 90s the phrase "mouse or Microsoft compatible pointing device" would appear.
Microsoft compatible pointing device.

But it’s the wrist that is the body-part favorite for the category. And this trend falls into the category of a herd mentality that Michael Yang of Comcast Ventures spoke about in a session on Tuesday when he discussed the investment climate for digital health. 

Oh.
Good.
Comcast is watching my back when it comes to health.
That reminds me of that Exon commercial where they said they were looking out for teachers.
Comcast watching out for my health, Exon watching out for my job and OJ trying to find the real killer.
I feel so safe.
This woman has no point outside of "things you can attach to your wrist exist!"
Thanks for wasting my fucking time.
DID YOU KNOW I TURNED DOWN A HALF DAY AT THE SCHOOL I INTERNED AT TO UPDATE THIS BLOG TODAY!?
No I would have turned that job down anyway I'm just kidding.

Over one-third of U.S. consumers plan to buy a new fitness technology in the next year, especially women. They’ll buy these at mass merchants (females in particular, shopping at Target and Walmart), sporting goods retailers (more male buyers here), online and at electronics stores like Best Buy.

Women buy treadmills.
Men buy weights.
Let's just cut the bullshit.
And 90% won't do shit with them.

What Americans Want in 2013: Money, Health, and Family Time, in that order

Wow what a fucking surprise.
Someone spent money to find this out?
I could have told you that for nothing.
Man this blog is really fucking stupid. She's just linking news stories.
Imagine if this blog were just me linking other blogs and then telling you to read it and make your own jokes.
That's now how this works.

One in two doctors is burned out. Physicians are seeing more patients in a day and spend less time with each of them. This leads to job burnout, and greater probability for medical errors and eventual liability challenges, along with feeling pushed toward early retirement.

I don't see a problem with pushing highly trained people into early retirement.
Is there a solitary thing this country does in 2013 that isn't stupid?

While a severe personal problem for each of these physicians, the bird’s eye view over this finding reveals a problem with and for the U.S. health system. Greater administrative burdens, higher proportions of patient bad-debt, health plan scrutiny over clinical decisions, and more demanding patients challenging physician hegemony converge to drive doctors toward exhaustion.

Fucking
all right.
Monday while I'm teaching a subject I'm not qualified to teach I'll fix this issue, too.
Christ all mighty, people. Can't you solve your own problems for once?

Reducing health care costs far outranks improving quality and safety, improving the public’s health, and upping the customer experience as Americans’ top priority for President Obama’s health care agenda, according to a post-election poll conducted by PwC’s Health Research Institute. 

>Obama
>reducing cost
yeah not gonna happen.
You know I have my own problems in life now.
I can't solve everyone's problems, too.
I just noticed this is this woman's bio:

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a health economist and management consultant that serves clients at the intersection of health and technology. 

Maybe part of the problem is you can make money as a health economist and management consultant.

The patent cliff represents about $290 billion worth of sales losses to the pharmaceutical industry between 2012 and 2018. 

Oh no.
Pharmaceutical companies losing money.
This is terrible.
Holy shit this blog is boring as fuck.
Why did I pick this one?
It's about nothing but how much money people don't have to spend on healthcare.
Here's what'll happen: slowly doctors will go out of business because they can't afford how much money the government takes in taxes and how much insurance companies rob from them (not to mention their own greed) and they'll go under and then medicine will be cheap because it'll be back to "goat piss is the cure for everything".

Kraft Foods is reinventing itself as a health brand,

Do I have to trot out that image that demonstrates that all of the food you eat and all of your healthcare products are made by like 5 companies?
Am I the only person that sees the problem with that?

These retail food entities are an integral and growing part of the retail health segment and larger health ecosystem.

Trusting Kraft to keep you healthy seems like a misstep of logic to me but what the fuck can you do?
 It's either Kraft or Nestle so pick your poison, idiots.

Americans find health insurance decisions the second most difficult major life decision only behind saving for retirement (36%) and slightly more difficult than purchasing a car (23%), via Aetna’s Empowered Health Index Survey. 

I TRUST A COMPANY NAMED AFTER AN ACTIVE VOLCANO.
Also where Zeus had his lightning bolts made in mythology.

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” wrote Robert Heinlein, science fiction writer of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in 1966.

Ah yes.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Definitely the first writing one thinks of when the name "Robert Heinlein" is thrown around.
Starship Troopers?
Nah.
Stephen King author of THE RUNNING MAN.
Isaac Asimov, author of THE CAVES OF STEEL.
Jesus Christ this blog. I'm really sorry about this.
I just saw the bitchy picture and figured this'd be some bitch whining about granola. Not like a serious survey on the state of medicine in the US.
Fucking
all right I'm padding this with shit that's unrelated.
Started playing TERA since that shit is going free to play and FFXIV is in limbo until summer or some shit.
Fucking
goddamn it.
Gotta get my PVP on.
GOTTA GET
MY PVP ON
GETTING KILLED IN ONE HIT BY ARYANS
ARYANS