Up-twix: what a dentist sees in his business following Halloween.
EditGrid
Apparently EditGrid let their domain name (editgrid.com) expire, and at present, anyone using their excellent shared spreadsheets is without access to them. What gets returned when someone currently visits www.EditGrid.com has been a 403, a parking page, and a 404 in the past 24 hours.
This morning, I did some sleuthing and found the working IP address of the www.editgrid.com web site. I have regained access to my spreadsheets by adding this little tidbit to my /etc/hosts file:
209.157.66.183 www.editgrid.com
What if we had declared war on cancer instead of Iraq?
Who among us has not lost a friend or loved one to cancer?
Measures of Effective Teaching
Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:
- Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
- My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
- Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
- In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
- In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.
When Ferguson and Kane shared these five statements at conferences, teachers were surprised. They had typically thought it most important to care about kids, but what mattered more, according to the study, was whether teachers had control over the classroom and made it a challenging place to be. As most of us remember from our own school days, those two conditions did not always coexist: some teachers had high levels of control, but low levels of rigor.
From the Atlantic article, Why Kids Should Grade Teachers.
Which mobile phone carrier?
I have 4 lines with AT&T and am less than pleased. While data speeds are excellent, any call longer than 20 minutes will drop at least once. Coverage at my house is poor. AT&T’s voice quality is poor and has been for years.
My other major objection is their unlock policy. While AT&T will finally unlock iPhones after their contract is up, that still requires that I keep a 2-year old phone around for international travel. While exploring my options, I put together this TCO (total cost of ownership) comparison chart of the major US carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) and a few resellers.
The larger PDF also compares plans from Cricket, Virgin, and Ting. Pricing is shown for each plan with 1, 2, 3, or 4 phones.
Notes:
- The One Time Net value assumes the value of an iPhone 5 in two years is $250. If you purchased an iPhone 4 two years ago, that’s about what your handset is worth today.
- Ting with 3,000 minutes looks outlandish, compared to 1200-1,600 for everyone other plan. That’s because Ting and Virgin have no nights-and-weekends, or mobile-to-mobile. I looked at my past 12-months phone bills to determine how many minutes we’d need.
- An excellent related post, Which iPhone 5 for a Global Traveller
Are charter schools good public policy?
From the paper How the worlds best performing schools come out on top by McKinsey:
Though the best charter schools demonstrated significant improvements in student outcomes were possible, and certain chains of charter schools showed that reliable models could consistently deliver improvements in a succession of schools, in the aggregate, the results of the charter schools did not significantly outperform those of other schools. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) went so far as to suggest that students in charter schools slightly underperformed their counterparts in public schools, even after allowing for student background (Exhibit 4).
The most compelling argument against charter schools is that they don’t deliver better outcomes. Even after cherry picking the best (or as often, wealthiest) students out of the public school system.
They also measured the effect of simple fixes like throwing money at the problem (in the form of teachers) to reduce student teacher ratios.
Reduced student teacher ratios didn’t help. Other attempts at decentralizing educational policy ranged from ineffective to disastrous. So what does wok?
The highlights of the study are that, “To improve instruction, these high-performing school systems consistently do three things well:”
- They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers).
- They develop those people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction).
- They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to reach the highest performance is to raise the standard of every student).
This paper highlights findings I’ve read elsewhere–Finland and Singapore didn’t create the best educational systems in the world by segregating the students. They focused on improving the quality of instruction for every student. The difference between the best performing students in Finland and any OECD nation are comparable. The top systems are better because of how far up they bring their lowest performing students.
Our National Debt
This graph makes it easy to see what’s driving our increasing national debt.
Being able to visualize the causes makes it easier to understand what a proper solution would be. Ending the Bush tax cuts as soon as economic conditions allow would have the biggest impact. Ending the wars is the next biggest fiscal gain.
Money Mischief, By Milton Friedman
In the first chapter Friedman compares using gold as the basis for money to using stone discs:
For a century and more, the civilized world regarded as a concrete manifestation of its wealth a metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great labor, transported great distances, and buried again in elaborate vaults deep in the ground. Is this one practice really more rational than the other?
Then he spends all but the final chapter detailing the pain and suffering inflicted upon societies using silver or bi-metal standards. I felt like much of the data (some in works with no citations) was cherry picked or tortured to fit his conclusions. If his conclusions are sound, and the evidence is so clear, then why does he need to work so hard to prove them? I nearly gave up the book. But the the last chapter turned out to be quite good, containing this little pearl:
It is natural for individuals to generalize from their personal experience, to believe that what is true for them is true for the community. I believe that that confusion is at the bottom the most widely held economic fallacies-whether about money or as an example just discussed, or about other economic or social phenomena.
The first and last chapters of the book are good. I think that only economists that drink from the same Kool-aid pitcher as Milton Friedman will enjoy the rest of the book.
tacomole definition
ta•co•mo•lo
noun
a selection of taco leftovers, all mixed together in the same bowl, ready to spread on a taco shell.
Adventures in legacy software
Today I opened M.Y.O.B. accounting files from 1999-2001. The files cannot be upgraded because they experienced some data corruption. The only way to access the files is to run the versions of M.Y.O.B. that they were created with.
The solution was to run Mac OS 10.6 inside a VM, which unfortunately, is a violation of the Apple EULA for Mac OS 10.6. Oops. The reason for using 10.6 is that it’s the last version of Mac OS X with support for Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator that lets Mac OS X apps written for PowerPC run on newer Macs with Intel CPUs.
Rosetta allows AccountEdge (the versions of MYOB written for Mac OS X) to run, but one of the files I wanted to access was from 1999, and it requires MYOB Accounting Plus v9, which is a classic application. For that, I turned to SheepShaver, a Mac OS Classic emulator, running Mac OS 9 within the 10.6 VM.
In summary, the solution was to run two emulators within a VM. With that, I’m able to run every version of MYOB within a single VM.
I also have a VM that runs AppleWorks, for those rare occasions when I stumble across a very old file that I would like to upgrade to the latest version of AppleWorks, so that I can further upgrade it to something that’ll run on Mac OS X Lion.
Also, since I couldn’t find one online, I also created a table of the MYOB versions, their marketing names, release numbers, and year of release.
Name | Version | Release | DB ver. | Year | Company |
MYOB | 5 | 5.0.8 | 5 | 1994 | Best! Ware |
MYOB | 6 | 6.0.1 | 1996 | Best! Ware | |
MYOB | 7 | 7.0.3 | 7 | 1996 | Best! Ware |
MYOB Plus | 8 | 2.0.5 | 2 | 1999 | Best! Ware |
MYOB Accounting Plus | 9 | 3.0.4 | 3.5 | 1999 | MYOB LImited |
AccountEdge | 1 | 4.7.0 | 2001 | MYOB Limited | |
AccountEdge | 2 | 5.5.3 | 2001 | MYOB Limited | |
AccountEdge | 3 | 6.5.3 | 2002 | MYOB Limited | |
AccountEdge 2004 | 4 | 7.5.0 | 2003 | MYOB Technology Pty Ltd | |
AccountEdge 2008 | 8 | 12.0.6 | 2008 | ||
AccountEdge Pro 2012 | 12 | 16.1.4C | 2012 | Acclivity Group LLC |