:: Event Horizon ::

:: Friday, May 23, 2003 ::

States Are Relaxing Standards on Tests to Avoid Sanctions
This link from the New York Times is a follow-up to the entry I posted a few days ago, the report suggests that the effort to raise national academic standards is actually lowering them. I'm something of a pragmatist when it comes to public policy, and although I'm as idealistic as the next guy, when the policy obviously doesn't work as originally intended, perhaps it's time to try a different approach?

:: Joel 2:53 PM [+] ::
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Mars Global Surveyor Snaps a Picture of Earth

I’m a child of the space age, so this kind of thing fascinates me. I may never live on Mars at the rate we are going (we can’t even get a decent space station going), but at least I can enjoy the view. As Carl Sagan observed, it's good to look back on our Earth as a pale blue dot and remember, "that's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." Thank you NASA for the step forward and the look back.

:: Joel 2:24 PM [+] ::
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A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams
Let me see if I can understand this. On the off chance that terrorists might do something suspicious, the Pentagon plans to spy on everyone all the time in order to catch them. It has a sort of twisted logic to it, but it seems fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a free society. Isn't it the job of the Pentagon to defend freedom? I think privacy and data security should be a major campaign issue in the next presidential election. I know that I will be paying close attention to what the candidates have to say about privacy issues.

:: Joel 4:54 PM [+] ::
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