Eideard

The next time children in some elementary schools in Texas try to sneak extra french fries onto their tray in the cafeteria line, the eye in the sky will be watching them.

Using a $2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino…”When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”

The goal of the program is to cut down on childhood obesity by providing parents and school nutrition specialists with information on what types of food elementary students are eating…

“We will be able to determine whether current programs that are aimed at preventing obesity work, and whether they are really changing students’ behavior,” Trevino said…

The technology will identify the food, capture the nutrient levels and measure the food that children eat, according to Dr. Roger Echon of the center, who designed the program…

He said the program can break down the data into total monounsaturated fatty acids, soluble dietary fiber, and more than 100 other specific measures.

Trevino said the children will not be photographed, and only children who have the permission of their parents or guardians will be allowed to participate.

He said that if the effort is successful in San Antonio, the plan is to implement similar programs in elementary schools nationwide.

Even though the food police have permission, even though their goal is admirable – the Big Brother aspect is troubling. Especially with Texas’ history of morality police.

If it works at cafeteria checkouts and trash cans, where’s the next place, the next reason for spying on the little angels, eh?

I seem to have bumped into more than the usual number of looneybirds, dumb crooks and foolishly dangerous human beings in my reading around the world, around the Web, today. But, I think I’ll ignore ‘em for a nice guy-tale from General Motors.

Yes, you read that right. General Motors has indeed taken scrap battery covers that would otherwise have been discarded and, with the help of a team of youngsters from the Lasky Recreation Center in Detroit, turned them into duck houses.

Seems odd, no doubt, but we’d certainly rather see creative recycling such as this instead of sending off the scrap bits and pieces to rot for hundreds of years in a landfill or some other ignominious end-of-life scenario.

According to The General, these homes “will provide a safe place for wood ducks and even screech owls to lay their eggs.” For what it’s worth, this is the second such creative recycling project we’ve heard about from the team behind the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the first being the reuse of oil-soaked boom material from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made into underhood plastic Volt parts. Nice work, GM.

I agree.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday his department estimates that four out of five schools in the United States will not make their “No Child Left Behind” benchmarks by the law’s target year of 2014 — and when the test scores are counted for the current school year, numbers could show that U.S. schools are already at that failure rate.

He blamed that failure rate on the law itself, not on schools.

“This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk,” Duncan told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Duncan pointed out that federal law requires states and districts to “implement the same set of interventions in every school that is not meeting AYP [adequate yearly progress], regardless of the individual needs and circumstances of those schools…”

“By mandating and prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, No Child Left Behind took away the ability of local and state educators to tailor solutions to the unique needs of their students,” Duncan said calling the concept “fundamentally flawed.”

Republicans on the committee questioned any increase in the budget in the current economic climate.

The few Republicans who think there should be public education, that is.

Unfunded mandates, of course. No beancounter is ever going to propose paying for their demands.

A scientific paper written by British schoolchildren about bees’ ability to recognize colour patterns and spatial characteristics has appeared in a prominent journal. The paper, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, includes handwritten data tables and coloured-pencil diagrams.

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the paper said. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

The paper was prepared by 28 boys and girls, ages eight to 10, at Blackawton Primary School in the village of Blackawton, Devon, England, under the direction of their head teacher, Dave Strudwick, and Beau Lotto, a researcher at the University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology.

“The aim was to get it published because it was an original finding, not because it was written by kids,” Lotto said Wednesday. “I wanted to challenge the idea of science and who can do science and who can make a genuine contribution to science.”

The research found that bumblebees looking for food seem to take into account colour patterns and the placement of food sources representing flowers. It showed that some bees chose the “flowers” based on a familiar colour pattern while others chose them based on where the food sources were located after taking both colour and location into account…

He insisted that because the paper was written by kids, it was something the scientific journals needed to take into account when evaluating it. Unlike other scientific papers, it doesn’t include any detailed statistical analyses or references, but Lotto believes those are not crucial elements.

Finally, he got the paper reviewed by four independent researchers, and submitted the reviews and the paper together to Biology Letters. He suggested publishing the paper with a commentary from two of the reviewers.

Brian Charlesworth, editor of Biology Letters, admitted it was difficult to persuade scientists to review the paper, but he believes the journal’s extra efforts were worthwhile.

“We did feel that it’s something we want to involve people in — seeing that science is something that’s fun to do, not just something you read about in text books,” Charlesworth said. “We feel quite pleased for having done this…”

“The experiments are modest in scope but cleverly and correctly designed and carried out,” it said. “The resulting article is a remarkable demonstration of how natural scientific reasoning is for us.”

Bravo!

The shipment of laptop computers that arrived in Iraq’s main seaport in February was a small but important part of the American military’s mission here to win hearts and minds. What happened afterward is a tale of good intentions mugged by Iraq’s reality.

The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.

Corruption is so rampant here — and American reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend. Iraq, after all, ranks above only Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia on Transparency International’s annual corruption index.

But the American military commander in southern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, was clearly furious. Even if the culprits are not exactly known, the victims are: Iraqi children and American taxpayers. He issued a rare and stinging public rebuke of a government that the United States hopes to treat as an equal, strategic partner — flawed, perhaps, but getting better.

In a statement, he demanded an investigation into the actions of “a senior Umm Qasr official,” who, even now, has not been identified…

Then, in August, Iraqis auctioned off 4,200 of the computers — for $45,700. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown…

In early September, the auctioned computers were recovered, according to Iraqi officials, who nevertheless declined to discuss how or where. They had been sold to a businessman in Basra, Hussein Nuri al-Hassan. He could not be found last week at the address he gave when buying the computers..

None of the officials, most of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity, could explain what happened to the rest of the computers…

RTFA. There’s lots of detail before the disappearance – and after. You should be able to imagine most of it.

I don’t think things were especially different before we started on this neocon, nation-building adventure in the Middle East. Not in my experience, anyway. But, watching our government trying week after week to put a shiny coat of wax on a rusty 1957 Plymouth – and call it a Chrysler Imperial – is a farce.

Please, please, tell him to let go of my cojones, now!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Coalition plans to remove free milk for the under-fives were summarily dropped by David Cameron today amid fears it would remind voters of the “Thatcher milk snatcher” episode of the 1970s.

Cameron moved so quickly that David Willetts, the higher education minister, was on live television defending the idea of removing free milk when the prime minister announced the U-turn, leaving broadcasters to tell Willetts of the change.

The idea of removing free milk had been the brainchild of the junior health minister, Anne Milton, who today received the full backing of both the prime minister and the health secretary. The government expected opposition to the measure from the media, parents, nurseries, childminders and the dairy sector…

However, she added: “This should not prevent us from ending an ineffective universal measure – and this would clearly be the best time to do it, given the state of public finances and the need to make savings…”

But even as the minister spoke, Downing Street was making clear to reporters that the idea would not be going ahead.

When this information was conveyed to Willetts on-screen, he replied: “We have to look at a whole range of options. Of course they have to be looked at on their merits.”

He added: “We have an endless process of assessing options. Of course, it is inevitable that if you go through those decisions some options go ahead and others don’t. That is how decisions are taken.”

Couldn’t find any video, yet, of Willett changing horses in mid-stream. Should be hilarious.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

India has come up with the world’s cheapest “laptop,” a touch-screen computing device that costs $35.

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal this week unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production.

“We have reached a (developmental) stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything,” he told a news conference.

He said the touchscreen gadget was packed with Internet browsers, PDF reader and video conferencing facilities but its hardware was created with sufficient flexibility to incorporate new components according to user requirement…

The device was developed by research teams at India’s premier technological institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

Go for it, folks. Every step may feel like a First Step; but, the goal of improving the knowledge and skills of your nation’s children is admirable.

Some countries seem to have forgotten about it.

The probiotic yogurt-like drink DanActive reduced the rate of common sicknesses such as ear infections, sinusitis, the flu and diarrhea in daycare children, say researchers who studied the drink in the largest known probiotic clinical trial to be conducted in the United States. An additional finding, however, showed no reduction in the number school days missed. The study led by Daniel Merenstein, MD, of Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM), was funded by The Dannon Company, Inc., and published online [.pdf] in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Probiotic foods are continuing to increase in popularity and some are marketed for the potential benefits of probiotics such as Lactobacillus casei (L. casei) DN-114 001, the probiotic in DanActive. Studies in other countries have found that probiotics, which are live micro-organisms, produce positive health benefits in children, including the reduction of school days missed due to infections. However, most of the research was conducted outside the United States in structured conditions not comparable to normal everyday living…

“…To our knowledge this is the largest probiotic clinical trial conducted in the U.S. and provides much needed data,” say the authors of the study. “We studied a functional food, not a medicinal product; parents will thus feed their children without any physician input and we felt it was best to assess [the drink] under similar conditions.”

The study…was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study – the gold standard in clinical research design. It included 638 healthy children, aged three to six, who attended school five days a week. Parents were asked to give their child a daily strawberry yogurt-like drink for 90 consecutive days. Some of the drinks were supplemented with the probiotic strain L. casei DN-114 001 (DanActive), while others had no probiotics (placebo). Neither the study coordinators, the children, nor the parents knew which drink was given to which participant until the study ended. In addition to phone interviews with researchers, parents kept daily diaries of their child’s health and the number of drinks consumed.

Researchers found a 19 percent decrease of common infections among the children who drank the yogurt-like drink with L. casei DN-114 001 compared to those whose drink did not have the probiotic. More specifically, those who drank DanActive had 24 percent fewer gastrointestinal infections (such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting), and 18 percent fewer upper respiratory tract infections (such as ear infections, sinusitis and strep). However, the reduction in infections did not result in fewer missed school days or activities – also a primary outcome of the study.

I haven’t any special hangups about company-sponsored tests when the institute performing the tests has a reputation for peer-review and maintains standards. Georgetown University not only does both – they’re in the limelight enough that I would expect peer communities in other schools to keep an eye on those standards.

Interesting study.

It is a cost-cutting measure that could have come from the era of Frank McCourt’s misery memoir of poverty and deprivation, Angela’s Ashes. As the Irish government tries to plug the black hole in the country’s public’s finances, a school in Cork, which declares itself strapped for cash, has asked its pupils to bring in their own lavatory paper.

Parents with children at St John’s Girls’ national school, in Carrigaline, County Cork, received the request last week.

The school’s principal, Catherine O’Neill, wrote: “Dear parent, from time to time we will request your daughter to bring in a toilet roll to her class teacher. These rolls will be specifically for your daughter’s class and will be dispensed by the class teacher. We would also request that your daughter has tissues in her sack at all times.”

Ireland’s public finances have been battered in the economic downturn, and education has not escaped savage cuts in funding.

O’Neill said the voluntary measure was taken because of the cutbacks. “We are endeavouring to trim down expenses and ensure we use our grants towards [educational needs] ,” she said.

The notoriously poor quality of some school toilet paper has long been the butt of many jokes, but the move angered parents.

The butt of many jokes. Har!

Governor Bill has so pledged; but, the predictable clot of Blue Dog Democrats and Conservative Republicans could care less about education and what it means for the future of the children of New Mexico – though we don’t even reach the dismal national average for graduating students.

Laura Bush at Texas Book Festival, last week. Yes – books.
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Former first lady Laura Bush praised the performance of her husband’s successor, breaking with many Republicans in telling CNN that she thinks President Obama is doing a good job under tough circumstances.

She also criticized Washington’s sharp political divide during an interview covering a range of topics including her thoughts on first lady Michelle Obama, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the situation in Afghanistan and Myanmar, and life after eight tumultuous years in the White House.

Bush sat down with CNN on Monday during a United Nations meeting in Paris, France, where she was promoting global literacy, a cause she trumpeted during her husband’s administration.

The typically reserved former first lady defended Obama’s decision to deliver a back-to-school speech to students, putting her at odds with many conservatives afraid that the president will use the opportunity to advance his political agenda…

“I think there is a place for the president … to talk to schoolchildren and encourage” them, she said. Parents should follow his example and “encourage their own children to stay in school and to study hard and to try to achieve the dream that they have.”

Bush indicated that she didn’t think it was fair for Obama to be labeled a “socialist” by critics and expressed her disappointment with the intensely polarized nature of contemporary American politics.

RTFA. Interesting stuff – pleasing to see that she’s keeping on with her support for literacy programs.

And here’s the text of President Obama’s speech.