Online scamming

Holiday season is a good time for scamming and this article is a good read.

“For this number of marquee merchants to be mixed up in such a questionable gimmick seems unprecedented in the brief history of online commerce. Going into a holiday season that is already supposed to see soft spending, the scandal could undermine confidence in Web shopping, which generated $60 billion in sales during the first half of this year, according to the Senate report.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10403767-261.html

Ubuntu 9.10

Earlier I had tried to dual boot Ubuntu 9.10 beta and Windows 7. I was not successful. So the only alternative was to dual boot 9.04 and Windows 7. However now after the release of 9.10 I have upgraded the 9.04 to 9.10 and everything went well.

Optical Illusions

Beau Lotto

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Ontario Education System – Catch 22

I have been teaching for quite some time and in a few different countries with different cultures and perspectives.

The two major differences in the approach that I have seen is a standardized testing versus the non-standardized testing.
Looking at the outcome of the two systems one would ponder which is better and why.
Ultimately every school board is looking at the success rates of its students and want them to meet the provincial standards.

Education and skills overview here is the link states that Canada is only second to US and its college completion rate and is second to Finland among 17 other nations, but what about the rest of the world and their performance at the universities.This is what I see happening in Canada.
By the year 2000 the new Ontario curriculum was in place and the teachers in the schools put a lot of effort in integrating the 13 year curriculum into a 12 year one. This did matter a lot especially in the sciences and math areas. The province wants a 70 % average for its students, so that is the bench mark. So how are the students really doing in science and math? Universities report that there is a consistent drop in performance in the math and science areas this can be validated from many sources(not mentioned here)

One of the thoughts is that the curriculum is content intense and hence the students do not get a chance to really develop analytical skills and hence resort to memorization, this has an adverse effect on enrollment of students taking physics, math and chemistry as they are unable to process information and ultimately drop the course. The drop out rate for these courses are increasing and will continue to do so. My concern here is that this is typically a Canadian concern as most countries in the world students graduate at 17 from high school and they have been found to do better in math and sciences at the universities. Refer to international students enrollment requirements for many universities. This indicates that there is no parity when comparing Canadian students with the international students. An there is no rationale in saying that our curriculum in content intense.

Socioeconomic, societal and lifestyles have changed quite a bit. Video games and online activity has taken away skills like reading, sports etc. out of their lives. Use of calculators for trivial calculations has become the norm; relation between quantities, space and time do not exist. Creativity is declining, writing papers involves “copy and paste”.

Now the norm is that boards like the ministry wants all schools to attain the provincial average. So how is this to be achieved?
One easy way is lowering standards, how this is done
1. Summer school
2. Night School
3. Modified assessments to meet provincial standards (accommodations) not academic standards
4. Get teachers with incorrect qualifications to teach science and math
5. Incorrect placement of students in the different courses (Guidance is responsible for this)

If you have taught night school or summer school you know what I mean. Recently I had a student who earned a 35% Mark in the semester work for science achieved a 67 % mark from the summer school. The student has no clue of what he is supposed to know and wants to drop the course as s/he has not met the required standard.

How do you deal with a class of wrongly placed students, modify assessment to meet the provincial standards. An applied level student should remain with a group of applied level students to attain his best possible potential, if he is placed along side academic students neither will achieve their fullest potential.

Another interesting fact is, I know teachers with arts qualification teach sciences, how can you justify this. Most European and Asian schools only let subject special teachers to teach a particular program. Here in Canada if you have 2 credits in a subject you can teach the subject and become a specialist, where as in other countries it is 4 credits. Overseas high school students do not learn science but physics, chemistry, biology,ecology etc. This makes it possible for graduates in the relevant disciplines to teach their specialty as it is to be taught. It makes a difference because Asian students do better than the North American counterpart.

The trend among newly qualified teachers is to depend on the web for class work. They do a scavenging of the web for worksheets for a given topic and that is the lesson for the day. Half the time they do not have a clue as to what the intent of the work sheet was.(This is not the case for all the teachers but quite a few who should be forming concrete ideas in the young mind)

At the same time there are exceptional teachers with experience who do an excellent job, if it was not for them the system would have collapsed.

At the same time I should complement the top 5% of students who do an exceptional job they are meant to succeed and a good teacher will only augment their success.

Change is possible if change in perspective is attained, think globally and not locally.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu dual boot

It has been a while trying out the different distros and experimenting with double and triple booting OS. Finally I got to set up windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 to dual boot on my desktop.
Tried to dual boot windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 but that did not work well.Installing karmic beta was a major issue. Had to download the alternate CD more than once all I ended up doing was installing the system but no dual boot and the system would hang running Ubuntu.
So now I reverted back to dual booting Jaunty 9.04 with Windows 7 and everything is fine.
This is what I did.

• Use the ubuntu live cd and partition the hard disk as you would like.
• Log out and install windows in the partition created. Do not allow windows 7 to format the disk for installation.
• Once you are done installing W7 install ubuntu 9.04 import users and files from the windows partition and everything works well.

Updated 13th Oct Triple boot

My laptop Toshiba M70 SR3 had windows XP now I have triple booted it with XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

• Prepared the partitions using GParted using live CD
• Installed Windows as second operating system (use the partition formatted using ubuntu)
• Install ubuntu as the third OS
• The Grub Menu will show ubuntu and Windows Vista (Boot Loader)
• Once you hit windows vista it will give you two options
• Windows 7 and Earlier versions of Windows
• If you choose earlier versions of windows you will get XP

Old – But interesting

This is a youtube video that I came across recently. It did provide an interesting perspective.

Enjoy

Posting from ipod touch / iphone

This is a test post to wordpress from iPod touch / iPhone using wordpress open source application.
Typing is not too comfortable but can be done. With time speed will improve.The good about this little program is that you can write when you are off line and post it when you get on line.
This is great.
That’s it for now

Apple account for free applications without a credit card

How to get a free apple account to download the free applications without using your credit card information.

• Fire up your iTunes Store
• Click App store on left pane  ( If you try to open account with iTunes it will insist on you giving credit card information)
• Choose a free application and double click to download
• A pop up will ask you for your apple account
• Click create new account
• Agree to terms and it will take you to a page with options of setting up account with credit card and “none”
• Choose “none” and proceed
• You will get an email in the email address you have provided
• Verify by clicking the link
• This should take you back to a login in iTunes
• Now you are all set to download all free applications.
• Give a couple of minutes between setting up account and email verification. Now enjoy your free downloads

Interesting

Windows 7 update

Got some time to install windows 7 on Ubuntu 8.04 using xVM virtual machine from sun; as a matter of fact the installation was trouble free and everything went very well with the first installation. Unlike my experience with xVM on windows which I had to do a number of times before I could get it running. Still the windows host is giving me start up issues.

• USB connectivity is fine in the guest operating system, I could access data from my 2.5″ external hard drive without any problems.
• Installed my HP 1012 printer easily again no problems.
• Installed Markbook 2008 and works fine
• Something that does not work too well in the virtual machine is the windows audio it crackles. I think it may be a driver issue, should play around with it to see if it can be changed.

Windows experience index for the virtual machine are as follows.
Processor            3.9
RAM                    3.9
Graphics              1.0
Gaming graphics  1.0
Primary hard disk 5.9
Mind you the video ram was 64 MB and 3D acceleration was not turned on.
So far both xVM 2.1.2 and Windows 7 are working fine and doing things as they should.