Cheese Heads Rejoice

We're psyched about the new cheese cellar in Roslindale. Last Sunday Melissa and I oogled all the cheeses, tasted some manchego and chevre, sipped hot chocolat, sampled the evoo... There was a guy at the cheese counter that was ecstatic, like a little kid in the candy shop... Call us if you're coming. We'll meet you for some cheesy poofs

Smoking Addiction Solved

Los Angeles, CA - A new study by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) has shown that damage to a small sacagawea dollar-sized portion in brain may completely erase humans' urges to smoke. Researchers are hopeful the findings will help reveal the mystery behind other addictions and feel confident they have discovered a new way to control them.

"One of the most difficult problems in any form of addiction is the difficulty in stopping the urge to smoke, to take a drug, or to eat for that matter. My early research, which involved duck taping obese people to extremely heavy objects and depriving them of food, showed that addicts will go to some pretty extreme measures to satistfy their cravings. Now we have identified a brain target for further research into dealing with nicotine urges, and these stroke patients have performed radically different in the duck tape scenarios," says Antoine Bechara of USC and the University of Iowa, author of the study.

Brain scans of 69 stroke victims revealed that 19 patients sustained damage to a specific region deep in the brain called the insula. Thirteen of the insula-damaged patients had quit smoking with very little effort.

Since these patients reported losing the urge to smoke so abruptly with little or no effort, the USC team concluded that insula damage reduced the patients' actual urge to smoke. The study suggests brain damage as a possible option for people trying to kick the habit. USC is reviewing plans to open a free clinic to perform outpatient insulotomies.

castro's anus doesn't take

Castro minions may be looking a little weary these days.

So does Castro. His fake anus operation was unsuccessful.

Ode to Haggis

Last night, David and Kate threw a smashing Robert Burns Party.
Some of the night's performances were captured on video. If the embedded video below doesn't start, you can watch it on youtube.
Unfortunately, I didn't record Melissa and my poem/"song". Doubt Melissa is sad about that one. We have reprinted it here for your pleasure. Try to contain yourself.

Ode to Haggis
Haggis. Oh haggis. You are truly the ruler of the pudding race.
If you were vegetable, I would eat you out.
But you’re stomach so I can’t even think about.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, we mean no disrespect
But your odor makes us wish we had no sense of scent.

Dave’s haggis comes packed with the spice of kings
Its skin has a lovely pale, creamy texture,
That gives way to a tender oaty mixture,
Just the kind of thing to get the night going.
Our innards start turning and the wine keeps flowing.

Haggis. Oh haggis. You are truly the ruler of the pudding race.
If you were vegetable, I would eat you out.
But you’re stomach so I can’t even think about.

So raise your cup and join us in cheer.
Be it whisky or wine, soda or beer.
Drink and be silly, let us celebrate
For when all is said and done
We hid our haggis in your pocket, mate.

Haggis. Oh haggis. You are truly the ruler of the pudding race.
If you were vegetable, I would eat you out.
But you’re stomach so I can’t even think about.

Eat your heart out Unz. Oh wait, he already did that.

After years of momentum against bilingual education in the U.S., New Jersey education officials are promoting research that concludes bilingual education methods are superior to English-only methods in teaching English language learners to read. New Jersey is to be the only state to write into its Reading First grant that students with no proficiency in English need to be taught in their native language. (EdWeek article is posted in full below)

N.J. Bucks Tide on Reading for English-Learners
By Mary Ann Zehr (Orange, N.J.)

Taking a position that is unusual these days, New Jersey officials are promoting research that says bilingual education methods have an edge over English-only methods in teaching English-language learners to read.

Recent U.S. Department of Education publications with “research-based recommendations” for teaching English-learners have avoided addressing the same research that Garden State officials are endorsing. And many school districts in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts have abandoned bilingual education after voters approved state ballot measures to curtail the educational approach.

Since 1976, New Jersey has required bilingual education—in which students are taught some subjects in their native language while learning English—for school districts with at least 20 students in the same language group. Over the past three years, the state has added requirements for districts to provide Spanish instruction for several early-reading initiatives, including state implementation of the federal Reading First program.

Now, New Jersey appears to be the only state that has written into its Reading First grant application to the federal government that native-language instruction is required, with some exceptions, for children who arrive at school with no proficiency in English.

Districts in Illinois and Texas, which also have state laws requiring bilingual education, are also using Reading First money for Spanish materials. But those states haven’t required bilingual education in their Reading First applications.

Russell W. Rumberger, the director of the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, applauded New Jersey officials for taking what he views as an evidence-based approach.

“The research is increasingly supporting the idea that bilingual education is not only not bad, but is beneficial,” he said.

A Blended Approach

At Lincoln Avenue School here in Orange, a gritty suburb of Newark, the state’s push for bilingual reading instruction means that on a recent day, Latino 1st graders who didn’t know much English first read a story about a rat in English, and then followed it up with a different story about a rat in Spanish.

During the 120-minute literacy block, Enid Shapiro Unger, an English-as-a-second-language teacher, and Maria Albuquerque-Malaman, a 1st grade classroom teacher, used the same theme—animals and their homes—to teach in both English and Spanish. Under Reading First, the state requires that at least 30 minutes of that block be in English.

With bilingual education, said Ms. Albuquerque-Malaman, “the transition from the mother language to the second language goes more smoothly” than with English-only instruction.

First-grade teacher Maria Albuquerque-Malaman delivers a counting lesson in Spanish to a small group of students, including Joshua Cespedes, in front of her, and Mauricio Aguilar, to her right, at Lincoln Avenue School in Orange, N.J.

—Emile Wamsteker for Education Week

Not all New Jersey teachers agree. “I feel that bilingual methods hold the students back,” Charmaine Della Bella, the ESL teacher for Norwood Public School, a K-8 school with 650 students that makes up the Norwood school district, wrote in an e-mail message. She said ESL techniques have worked for the 17 English-learners in her school, all of whom are Korean. The district can get a waiver from using bilingual education because of the difficulty of finding teachers who speak Korean.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, which governs the Reading First program, doesn’t say anything about what language must be used for reading instruction, Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, noted in an e-mail message.

But regional and national meetings for Reading First paid for by the federal department tend to feature English-only programs as models, said Jeffrey Cohen, the lead consultant for Reading First for the California Department of Education.

California initially wrote in its plan that Reading First money could be used only for English instruction, but the state had to change that stance after losing a lawsuit in 2003 brought by districts that demanded to use the money for Spanish instruction and materials as well. About 10 percent of the state’s Reading First classrooms provide instruction in Spanish, Mr. Cohen said.

Research Cited

In New Jersey, Fred Carrigg, the special assistant for literacy to the state education commissioner, is the engine behind the policy that essentially calls for Spanish instruction for early reading.

In 2003, the state started requiring certain school districts—those with a concentration of Latino English-learners that receive Reading First grants or that get court-ordered extra aid to offset their disadvantages—to provide two years of Spanish instruction in kindergarten through grade 3.

New Jersey’s Reading First application for federal funding provides two exceptions to the general requirement for bilingual education: if districts don’t have enough children to warrant such a program, or if they don’t have adequate teachers or materials to carry one out. Mr. Carrigg said the second exception isn’t valid for Spanish-speaking students.

“Our attitude is that if we are going to accept scientifically based reading research for the general population, we must accept that same research base for children who speak a language other than English,” Mr. Carrigg said.

He cites findings from two reviews of research to back the state’s requirements. The first is Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, written by a panel headed by Harvard University reading expert Catherine Snow and published by the National Research Council in 1998. The other is Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, edited by second-language-acquisition expert Diane August and reading expert Timothy Shanahan, and published last year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

The National Research Council report says that if appropriate learning materials and bilingual teachers are available, it’s best for children who don’t know English to be taught to read in their native language while acquiring oral proficiency in English. Then they can transfer their reading skills from the native language to English.

The National Literacy Panel report contains a chapter with a review of studies that concludes there is a “small to moderate” advantage for bilingual education over English-only methods.

The federal Department of Education paid $1.8 million for the National Literacy Panel to write that study, but then declined to publish it; department officials said it didn’t stand up to the peer-review process. ("Not for Publication," Aug. 31, 2005.)

When asked why he puts stock in that publication, Mr. Carrigg said that the federal government’s criticism of the study concerned procedures and process, not “recommendations or results.” He added: “We note that fine line.”

Implementation Varies

But elsewhere, some officials have disregarded the literacy panel’s finding that favors bilingual education. Margaret Garcia Dugan, for example, who oversees programs for English-language learners for the Arizona Department of Education and opposes bilingual education, said the federal department’s decision not to publish the study raised “a red flag” for her, pointing to potential questions about its validity.

How New Jersey educators meet the state’s requirements for bilingual education varies.

In the 5,400-student Orange district, Latino kindergartners through 6th graders who are learning English are concentrated in a bilingual track in a single elementary school, in which classes are made up only of Latino children.

In the 1st grade bilingual class in Orange, children sound out words in English and Spanish during each morning’s literacy block.

By contrast, in the 9,900-student Perth Amboy district, teachers generally focus on teaching reading only in Spanish, complemented with instruction only in oral English, for the first couple of years that a child with limited proficiency in English is learning to read.

Meanwhile, the 2,700-student Englewood district has 57 percent of its 290 English-learners in a dual-language program in which children who are dominant in either English or Spanish learn both languages in the same classroom.

As evidence that the state’s policies are working, Mr. Carrigg says 50 percent of English-learners in 3rd grade are scoring at the proficient level or above on the state’s language arts test, which they must take in English. He added that 75 percent of former 3rd grade English-learners are scoring at those levels. Among all 3rd graders, 82 percent scored at least proficient on the test.

Statewide, only 22 percent of 11th grade English-learners are testing as proficient or above on New Jersey’s language arts exam.

The scores aren’t surprising, Mr. Carrigg said, because so many of those students are new to the country. The state’s focus on having students learn to read in Spanish is concentrated at the K-2 level, he added, and thus test scores for 3rd or 4th graders give a good indication of how those efforts are working.

The state’s next steps, Mr. Carrigg says, “are focused on expanding successful practices from the elementary experience” into the middle grades.

At the same time, he said, “New Jersey has not made any efforts to publicize our primary language policies. We are very cognizant of each state having different policies and attitudes about the use of languages other than English.”

Coverage of education research is supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Vol. 26, Issue 18, Pages 1,12

walkabout

Scams Scams

Who falls for this crap?  Apparently a lot of people.

DR.SANOU BELLO

Dear SUCKA,

I am the head of Accounts and Audit Department of Bank of Africa,
Ouagadougou . I decided to contact you after a careful thought that you
may be capable of handling this business transaction which i explained
below;

In my department we discovered an abandoned sum of $10.5m US dollars
(Ten million, five hundred thousand US dollars). In an account that belongs
to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family in
2001 in a plane crash.

Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of kin
to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless somebody
applies for it as next of kin or relation to the deceased as indicated in our banking
guidelines but unfortunately we learnt that his supposed next of kin(his son and wife)
died alongside with him at the plane crash leaving nobody behind for the claim.

It is therefore upon this discovery that I and other officials in my department
now decided to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you
as the next of kin (We want to present you as his busines asociate)to the deceased
for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and we don't
want this money to go into the Bank treasury as unclaimed Bill.

The Banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained
UNclaimed after seven years, the money will be transferred into the
Bank treasury as unclaimed fund. The request of foreigner as next of kin in
this business is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner
and a Burkinabe cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner.

We agree that 30% of this money will be for you as foreign partner, in
respect to the provision of a foreign account, 10 % will be set aside
for expenses incurred during the business and 60% would be for me and my
colleagues. There after I and my colleagues will visit your country for
disbursement according to the percentages indicated.

Therefore to enable the immediate transfer of this fund to your account
as arranged,you must apply first to the bank as next of kin of the
deceased customer. Upon receipt of your reply, I will send to you by fax or
email the text of the application. I will not fail to bring to your notice that
this transaction is hitch free and that you should not entertain any atom of
fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer.

I expect that you contact me immediately as soon as you receive this letter.

Hoping to hear from you immediately.

Yours faithfully,
DR. SANOU BELLO
Accounts & Audit Department ,
Bank of Africa

Nb.also give me your telephone and fax numbers for easy comunication with you.

Just getting back into the whole blog thing. It was good to disconnect the USB line from my brain for a few weeks, but I suppose a net junkie must eventually return for a fix. Seriously though, here's a handful of pics over the last few weeks.
On Xmas eve, I went to the Bills-Titans game at the stadium formally known as Rich Stadium. Thanks to Brett for the invite. Check out the Buffalo fashion at the game. Jamal and I tried to buy the coat of of her, but she wasn't having it without an all-you-can eat night out at Anchor Bar. The deal seemed too uncertain.




















We celebrated 1st and 31st birthdays at the Milky Way. There were a few missing party goers that night, victims of a deadly stomach virus (If it seems like there's a spike in viruses this year, you are observing a likley bi-product of global warming, but that's for another blog). Heather and Josh came up from Providence to touch the babies for good luck.

Meg and Hector tied the knot yesterday. This photo tells all. They were positively beaming.

As it should be in Vegas, they had a rock star pastor. Though sadly, no Elvis.