Category: General

Except a little bit of breaking news: weddings can quickly grow to be expensive propositions. Eloping remains an option.

Back to blogging tomorrow, folks.

Shuttle returns to space

Discovery roared into orbit Tuesday in NASA’s first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster, and afterward engineers began evaluating pictures of falling debris to determine the chances of another mishap.

A new battery of cameras trained on the shuttle during launch showed a small piece of debris falling from the underside of the orbiter, which NASA officials say could have come from a tile near a door covering the nose landing gear.

But NASA’s flight operations manager, John Shannon, said it was too soon to determine the source of the debris, how large any possible defect might be and whether it poses any safety threat for the spacecraft.

“We did not come into this flight expecting to eliminate” all falling debris, he said at an evening news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “But we knew that we had the tools available to us to characterize it.”

Best wishes and best speed to the crew of Discovery.

Blogs of War‘s John Little, a former NASA employee, has the best collection of links I’ve seen of the launch and the mission.

I’ll blog after I finish this fascinating story of a cave dive below 800 feet to recover a body. Hat tip to Florida Cracker, who appropriately calls it a “creepy tale.”

UPDATE: Whoa! I just thought the story was creepy where I was at the time. Well … it got creepier.

There was a lingering little hiccup related to last weekend’s WordPress upgrade that was resolved today. Commenters are once again able to enter their names and websites whenever they choose to throw in their two cents.

For those considerings WordPress, the support forums are an excellent resource.

The University of California system has decided to halt its participation in the National Merit scholarship program, one of the more prestigious such scholarships in the nation, based on the program’s reliance upon standardized tests. In actuality, the problem is that the results of the scholarship competition are not politically correct enough for the likes of California.

Staring [sic] in fall 2006, University of California campuses no longer will award National Merit Scholarships because the program relies exclusively on a high-stakes standardized test to determine students’ academic merit, university officials announced today.

Note the word “exclusively” there. I point that out because, well, it’s either a lie or poor journalistic research, as I will show later.

The move is expected to affect hundreds of students whose performance as juniors on the PSAT, a precursor to the SAT college entrance exam, determines whether they are eligible for the National Merit program. The test is used as a first cut to eliminate about 99 percent of the more than 1 million students who take it each year.

UC will continue awarding scholarships to National Merit students to whom it already has promised awards. It had about 600 of them last year and they received about $735,000 in scholarships.

It is kind of them to not immediately welsh on money they promised to current scholars.

The decision by chancellors of the six UC campuses to drop out of the prestigious program follows a recommendation by the Academic Council, the faculty’s executive body, to stop awarding scholarships and admissions preferences to National Merit winners. The faculty body rejected the program saying that using only one test, which has no demonstrated ability to predict college success, is inconsistent with how UC defines merit.

Again the one-test lie. Truth will follow.

“We believe we have better standards for measuring academic merit,” said UC Santa Cruz astronomy professor George Blumenthal, Academic Senate chairman. Those standards include using grades, test scores and a broad array of other factors that make up a student’s entire academic record.

UC Berkeley and Riverside did not participate in the National Merit program. The newest campus, Merced, decided not to take part in advance of its opening this fall.

Berkeley. No surprise there.

“We honor and respect academic achievement, and we are very proud to have many National Merit scholars apply to the University of California,” said UC Provost M.R.C. Greenwood. “The decision is not meant to diminish those students or their accomplishments in any way. This is an issue of ensuring that when the university uses its own resources to fund merit-based scholarships, it does so in a way that is consistent with its own policies.”

I respect the fact that the state university system rightly has the power to decide how to relegate its own funding. I disagree that this decision does not diminish current scholars, as it blatantly states the Cali system believes the current recipients were selected through an unfair process and others more deserving were probably omitted. That has to be the statement or there would be no change.

This is nothing more than political correctness because the California collegiate folks aren’t happy with the make-up of the scholarship recipients, as this story makes clear.

Among University of California undergraduates, for example, 3.1 percent are black and 13.8 percent are Latino. But only 1 percent of the system’s winners of National Merit Scholarships are black and only 2 percent are Latino. Asian and white students received 45.3 and 39.8 percent of the scholarships, respectively, more than their share of the student body.

Similarly, while 18 percent of University of California students come from families with incomes over $120,000, 33.8 percent of the university’s National Merit Scholarship winners come from such families.

PC BS carries the day in California, and the one-test lie is used as its foundation. Perhaps it’s time we finally address that repeated falsehood.

The PSAT is taken by more than a million high school juniors each year. About 50,000 of the highest scorers are eligible for the merit awards. Other criteria such as essays, grades and letters of recommendation are used to select winners.

The PSAT is a gateway to semifinalist status. The SAT establishes the threshold towards finalist status, and then recipients are selected based upon prior academic performance, personal communication skills and the input of others. The scholarship is most assuredly not based “exclusively on a high-stakes standardized test.”

I am unhappy with the decision of country’s largest state university system in this matter and fear the effect it may have on the National Merit scholarship program. Oh yeah, I feel I must make the disclaimer that I attended Texas A&M University, at least the first four years, on a National Merit scholarship, the value of which was adjusted upwards because of my low family income. I am white, though, so please feel free to disregard my opinion.

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3 and converted my previous style to a theme. Overall, it was an easier task than I had expected. As a side note, I really need to toy around with the new theme feature.

To fight the spam, I’ve installed Bad Behavior on the hearty recommendation of Quincy over at News, the Universe and Everything. So far, Bad Behavior seems to be effective, having already stopped a dozen spam comments in the fifteen minutes since it was activated.

Please feel free to let me know of any glitches. Hopefully, regular blogging will resume later today.