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The Real Immigration Problem

I don’t talk about the whole “illegal immigration” thing here much, mostly because I think it’s a tad bit silly.  But now I’ve got my own immigration story.

800 miles ($100 in fuel and two days of driving) to Memphis and back

$400 (paid before the price was increased) fee to fill out a lot of paperwork

A 15 minute interview, and viola…

The Missus is going to get her citizenship.  Hopefully the swearing in will be a little closer than Memphis.  Of course we’re happy, but there are a couple of things about the whole process that I don’t understand.

She’s been here for 23 years.  She went to college here.  She went to grad school here.  She’s taught in multiple school systems.  She’s been paying taxes for a looooong time.  No problem letting her mold young minds, but issue her a passport?  No way.

Her brother has been here for 25 years.  He also went to college and grad school here.  He’s paid taxes (and lots of them) for a long time too, and he was only recently able to get his green card so that he isn’t dependent on the work visa he had through his current employer.  They both speak without accents and write English better than most people who were born here.

Why do people like this have to drive 800 miles for 15 minute interviews and practically beg to be a part of this country?  Isn’t there some way we could use ball bearings or lasers or computers or something to determine who is here (legally) and being productive?  Wouldn’t it be easier to simply send them a letter:

“Hey!  We noticed that you work your ass off, don’t break the law, and are a perfect example of everything that is right with this country.  We also noticed that you haven’t joined officially, and we’d really like for you too.  Get back to us and let’s make this happen–we’d love to have you!”

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WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate

I am very crunched for time today, but tonight I’ll be installing the WordPress 2.5 release candidate on one of my development blogs and give a full report here–probably posted sometime very early Wednesday morning.

WordPress new interface

From the looks of it, the “Write” section of the dashboard is going to be much improved, which is an area I think WP needed to catch up.  Another great new feature will be a customizable dashboard.  Both of these features should work out great for me, as one of my projects in the works is going to have scores of contributers.  I want to be able to limit the functionality for experienced users and also make it as easy as possible for newer users to contribute using WordPress.

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I Can Take a Hint

Either I’m off the radar or my blog design is average at best, which isn’t good enough.  Either way, I’d rather make this list than not.

I’ve got work to do on both fronts.  I’m a little behind on some other stuff right now, but hope to improve on both fronts by the end of Q2.

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Time For SNL To Get Beat Down By the Hansons

SlapshotA couple of weeks ago I watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in a long time. It was the first show after the writers’ strike ended, and Tina Fey was hosting. It was one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen. I didn’t get to see last week’s episode, but I started watching tonight thinking they’d gotten back on track.

Nope. Honestly, I think it may be time to end this show. Just a few reasons why…

Weekend Update

Weekend Update, when it was good, worked because of the snarky commentary on current events. But it doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because by the time I watch the Weekend Update snarky commentary on Tuesday’s primaries, I’ve already been reading snarky commentary on blogs for five days.

The Intro Skit

This skit is almost always political in nature, and because of that it is much like Weekend Update…played out by the time Saturday rolls around. This week they did a spoof of Hillary’s “3 am phone call” commercial. That’s great. It was even better on YouTube this week when everybody else did it.

Musical Guests

I know I’m old, but geez. Does anyone care about these musical guests anymore? They had Tom Petty in his prime, The Cars in their prime, and next week’s musical guest is…Janet Jackson? She was on Tyra Banks this week…’nuff said.

Anyway, I turned SNL off and am watching Slapshot for the upteenth time instead. It’s still funny. Besides the digital shorts there’s nothing left worth watching on SNL.

Time to put on the foil coach.

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Speech to Text Software

We’ve been contemplating buying the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software so that The Missus can “write” content for our new project while holding a baby.  It would also be a lot easier for her to dictate everything–she’s an excellent speaker–as fast as she want to go.  I can go back in later and edit if needed, but the reviews I’ve read of NaturallySpeaking say it does a good job of punctuating on its own.

I’m also thinking it would be great for my dad.  He’s losing his eyesight rapidly, and can hardly read a computer screen anymore.  I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this software.  A guy I used to work with swears by it, just because he can’t type.  It says it can handle over 100 words per minute of human speech.  Being from the South, that should be plenty for my family and me.  🙂

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Homeschooling Ruled Illegal in California–Seriously

Last month I posted about a proposal in Nebraska that would mandate testing to homeschooling families.  Today, thanks to Reason, I read an article in the LA Times stating that homeschooling has been ruled illegal by a California appellate court.

“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court.

Hold on.  WHAT?!  Excuse me?  Did I read that correctly?  They don’t have the constitutional right?  Pause for a second to digest that.

You know who loves this ruling, right?

Teachers union officials will also be closely monitoring the appeal. A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said he agrees with the ruling.

“What’s best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher,” he said.

Credentialed by the State, right?  No conflict of interest there.  Relax Teachers Union people.  Good teachers have been in demand since ancient times, way before unions.  They’ll always be in demand and are in no danger of ever being out of work.

Notice something I’m not discussing here is religion, which the Times article mentions frequently.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to make this a religious issue, which it obviously isn’t.  It just so happens that many people homeschool their children for religious reasons, but that’s not the only reason.

This will surely be overturned, but is it something the State would be willing to take to the limit.  Are they willing to line up tanks outside of someone’s home and threaten them with bullets for refusing to send their kids to gov’ment indoctrination camps schools?

California, if you’re still wondering why the rest of the country unfairly labels you a bunch of crazies…

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Sort The Viewers, Not The Movies

My buddy IB sent this article to me…very interesting.  Netflix is running a contest for data crunchers and offering $1M to anyone (or any team) that can beat their current recommendation system by 10%.  One of the leaders is a psychologist working by himself who is looking less at raw data and more at human nature.

One such phenomenon is the anchoring effect, a problem endemic to any numerical rating scheme. If a customer watches three movies in a row that merit four stars — say, the Star Wars trilogy — and then sees one that’s a bit better — say, Blade Runner — they’ll likely give the last movie five stars. But if they started the week with one-star stinkers like the Star Wars prequels, Blade Runner might get only a 4 or even a 3. Anchoring suggests that rating systems need to take account of inertia — a user who has recently given a lot of above-average ratings is likely to continue to do so.

I think this guy is onto something, and I’d like to see this move a step further.  Associating movies using k nearest neighbor is relatively straightforward, but attacking the other side of the equation (the viewer) is a lot tougher.  Here’s an example…

“The Outlaw Josie Wales” is one of my favorite movies, but that doesn’t mean that an algorithm could spit out a bunch of westerns and give me something I like.  Clint Eastwood movies wouldn’t do it either, but it would be a little closer.  The real way to suggest movies for me would be to look at some other factors that aren’t so obvious.  You need to be able to draw conclusions from my other favorites–“Fight Club”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Smoky and the Bandit”, and “Swingers”.  You may peg all of these as “guy movies”, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to like “Gladiator”.  In fact, I hated “Gladiator”.  A movie like “Thelma and Louise” is a much better suggestion for me than “Gladiator”.  Why?  Because it is much more quotable, and that’s something my favorite movies suggest that I like.

Just an example, but that’s the direction we’re going.  In order to make a powerful suggester for anything (books, movies, music, raincoats, etc.), it is now necessary to consider the individual making the purchase instead of a one-size-fits all approach.  How else can you help a guy like me who hates sci-fi but loved “The Matrix” and can’t stand to watch horror flicks but has seen “Scream” several times?

I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but this is a very difficult problem.  You’re basically tasked with generalizing a solution which has to consider literally millions of individual problems within the problem.  It’s very tough to quantify so many parameters in so many dimensions.

What amazes me most is that this is such a simple task for us to complete in our heads.  Computers are still so far behind us in our ability to do something as simple as watch a movie and think to ourselves, “That movie sucked, but my buddy really likes movies like this…I think I’ll suggest it to him.”

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Me a Social Entrepreneur? Well, Kinda Sorta

This weekend we took advantage of my newly found unemployment opportunity for real advancement by traveling over to the midstate to visit some friends and my parents. I seldom read the Tennessean (much improved site), but I saw this article at my folks’ house this morning, and it almost describes something The Missus and I have been working on lately.

Several surveys have found that many people in this generation don’t believe that government is the most effective means to solve many of today’s social problems — the private sector offers more efficient and effective solutions.

They no longer believe that massive programs work. Instead, they hope to create solutions that solve one small problem at a time.

That pretty much describes us. The only difference between what we’re doing and what is described in the article is that we aren’t going the non-profit route, at least not yet. Are we being unrealistic to hope that we can make a living working from home while helping people all at the same time? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Besides, if we fall short of that goal and end up only helping thousands of people and only supplementing our income doing so, that’s not such a bad thing either, right?

The issue we’re addressing is education, and our project involves putting a huge amount of educational power into parents’ hands. Right now we’re gathering information from groups of parents about what they really need and building content. One thing that is becoming evident to us in this process is that no matter how much free information is out there–it is out there, and it is free–the web is really lacking qualified people who can gather up that information and put it into an easily digestible form for everyone else.

By the way, sorry for any perceived secrecy. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know about our project. Quite the opposite, I want to make sure we’re good and ready before we open it up for launch. I promise you guys will be the first to know, and you’ll probably hear more about it than you ever wanted to!

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Miami Drivers Unite!

Quick!  Take the opportunity this power outage has provided you to prove to the world once and for all that you are the biggest collection of jackasses alive.

We were just watching Fox News here at work and they’re showing a busy intersection (79th and 10th I think) where the stoplights are out.  People are just cruising right through at high speeds like total morons.

And what the hell is the police department doing?  They showed a couple of motorcycle cops cruise through exactly like the rest of the drivers.  It doesn’t take a PR genius to realize that this exact intersection is on worldwide TV and that you need to get this one taken care of–force the, ahem, “news” people to find another intersection to film idiot drivers.  Then again, I guess they’d only have to go a block or so to get the exact same footage.

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All Your Children Are Belong To Us

At least one state senator, DiAnna Schimek, in Nebraska thinks so.

Her bill would require home-school students to take state-mandated tests or have their schoolwork assessed by an outside evaluator. If students‘ progress falls short academically, they would be sent to public or private schools.

That’s ironic.  One major factor in parents’ decision to homeschool in the first place is that the State doesn’t seem to measure up to their standards.  This would actually make sense if the schools and parents swapped roles–parents should be mandating standards to the State, not the other way around.

“Our responsibility is to see that the children of the state do have access to an education,” she said. “That’s a constitutional responsibility.”

The children of the state?  I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt–I’m sure she misspoke and meant to say “the children who live in our state”.  Surely.  And while I’m sure Nebraska is constitutionally bound to provide access, are they constitutionally bound to force participation?  My guess is no.

I don’t know anything about the governor of Nebraska except that he is correct in his assessment of the bill:

“The bill presents a heavy-handed, state government regulatory approach to this issue which, in my view, is not warranted,” Heineman said in a statement. “It dramatically infringes on Nebraska parents’ choices regarding the education of their children.”

According to the article, this lady’s husband is a lobbyist for a teachers’ union, but that doesn’t influence her.  Right.

She said her concern comes from the stories she hears about students who are kept out of public or private schools but receive little to no schooling.

She heard some stories.  She should have said that in the beginning.  My bad.  Never mind–totally justified.  It now makes perfect sense.