Alabama Common Core Math

According to Dr. Tommy Bice, Alabama State Superintendent of Education, high schools in the state have achieved an 80% graduation rate. While that sounds impressive, there is an underlying problem, which is this:

How do we know that the children being graduated are competent?

Competency is exemplified as being able to do something successfully. So if merely graduating high school was sufficient demonstration of competence, everyone with a high school diploma would be competent. But sadly, we know that is NOT the case. For example, one need only look to private high schools to so illustrate. Very few private high schools have any such problems. And, it is not to say that all public schools suffer problems. And yet, it is evidence as well that many courses taught in 1960, or even 1860 at the “high school” level are more advanced than those taught today.

For example, consider the following courses of study were required for a diploma of graduation from Middletown City High School, Connecticut in 1848:

Yahoo! Marissa Mayer, employee #20 at Google, to be new Yahoo! CEO

Congratulations to both!

Now, perhaps Yahoo! can move ahead.

Here’s hoping!

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July 16, 2012, 4:00 pm

Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and EVELYN M. RUSLI

Marissa Mayer, New CEO of Yahoo!

Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next C.E.O. of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America.

The appointment of Ms. Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like Google and Facebook.

Ms. Mayer, 37, had for years been responsible for the look and feel of Google’s most popular products: the famously unadorned white search homepage, Gmail, Google News and Google Images. More recently, Ms. Mayer, an engineer by training whose first job at Google included computer programming, was put in charge of the company’s location and local services, including Google Maps, overseeing more than 1,000 product managers. She also sat on Google’s operating committee, part of a small circle of senior executives who had the ear of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

With her appointment as the president and chief executive of Yahoo, Ms. Mayer joins a short list of women in Silicon Valley to hold the top spot. The elite club includes

WordPress CrashBlog: “We created new bugs that made things worse.”

By most accounts – including my own – WordPress 2.6 for the iOS is an abysmal failure. While this blog entry (http://ios.wordpress.org/2010/09/29/introducing-version-2-6/) lauds many “new and improved” features, reports from the users’ community – as read on the Apple app store – are anything but complimentary, and instead reveal a miasmatic cornucopia of problems, not the least of which is “crashing,” the unexpected and sudden failure if the app. Equally concerning among the complainants is the perception that

Apple confesses: iPhone Signal Strength Indicator “totally wrong”

Apple Computer (NYSE: AAPL), stunned the world today by announcing a critical error in the design of their iPhones, which has been present since the devices were first manufactured and sold in 2007.

It seems that the “bars” indicator – which has been used as a signal strength indicator, albeit an inaccurate and faulty one – is even more faulty than previously thought! In fact, it’s AFU – All Fouled Up. (That’s nice parlance.)

For those of you who do not know how to read radio signal strength indicators (and that’s very likely most folks), they’re expressed in negative numbers. The higher the negative number, e.g., -108, the weaker the signal. Conversely, the opposite is true: The lower the negative number, e.g., -16, the stronger the signal.

My iPhone 3GS is jailbroken, and one feature I have employed on it is a numerical signal strength indicator for the Cellular and WiFi signals. Here are two screenshots to illustrate.

UPPER LEFT CORNER: Cellular signal strength indicator using "Bars" - Note also, the WiFi signal (on the RIGHT of the AT&T) is much stronger than the cellular signal.

UPPER LEFT CORNER: Cellular strength indicator using the accepted numerical standard - Note also, the WiFi signal (on the RIGHT of the AT&T) is much stronger than the cellular signal.

Oh!

And if you’re looking for a job…

Apple Computer is looking for Antenna Engineers, too!

Read on to see their mea culpa and want ad.