Linked List: May 19, 2008

Monday, 19 May 2008

USA Today story on “minimum 50” grading policies, whereby any test score lower than 50 is rounded up to 50:

Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.”

This is so profoundly stupid it’s hard to believe it isn’t from The Onion. That F covers 0-59 doesn’t make it six times more likely that a student will get an F than any other grade, unless test scores are based on random numbers rather than actual performance.

Update: Clearly, when you’re talking about what to do with grades lower than 50, you’re dealing with students who need help. Maybe this “minimum 50” policy is a good way to do that; I don’t know. What I’m saying is stupid is this Reeves fellow’s argument about it being a “classic mathematical dilemma”.

BlackBerry Bold’s Similarities to iPhone Purely Coincidental, Apparently ★

RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, regarding the glossy-black-front-with-silver-bevel-edge BlackBerry Bold:

This is three years in the making. So I’m sorry but this wasn’t a response to another device. Either that or we have a time machine somewhere, or some kind of magic crystal ball or something. This was actually designed three years ago and the actual physical design of this product — I have the original models from 2006.

Perhaps Apple copied the iPhone design from them.

A Cruel and Shallow Money Trench, a Long Plastic Hallway Where Thieves and Pimps Run Free, and Good Men Die Like Dogs ★

Saul Hansell, in a report for the NYT Bits Blog on current negotiations between Apple and the major music labels:

Also under discussion is whether Apple can sell songs from its iTunes store directly to iPhones over the cell-phone broadband network. With the next generation of phone expected to use much faster 3G technology, this is technically feasible. Here too, music labels argue that they should be paid more for an over-the-air download than a standard track bought over the internet, where the wholesale price is about 70 cents.

So let’s get this straight. The music labels think we should pay more for a song downloaded from a server that isn’t theirs, over a network that isn’t theirs, because, well, just because. One gets the feeling that, if given the chance, music executives would just hire thugs to mug anyone on the street wearing white earbuds.

Favrd ★

Splendid new best-of-Twitter tracker by Dean Allen. Bookmark and prepare to be amused. Love the About page:

FAVRD runs on a no-webcock algorithm. If you see Twitter as a venue for public relations or marketing, or as an audience eager to hear news of a post on your ‘blog’, or a rich hot sticky vertical, or if you consider yourself a web strategist, or if you talk earnestly about social media, or if you can read Techcrunch or listen to the Gillmor gang with a straight face, it’s very unlikely the things you say on Twitter will show up here.