CPS: your neighborhood is classified

In the Chicago Public School system, the city is divided into 4 socio-economic tiers. See http://cpstiers.opencityapps.org/. This map tells you where the richer, more educated people are and those who are poorer. Where you live may affect which school your children can go to.

The ideal world should be this: everyone goes to their neighborhood school. It is easy to get there... should be able to go on foot. Who needs to sing the wheel-on-the-bus? What if your neighborhood school is struggling with ultra low scores year after years and 90% of a single ethnic group? Now, really, failing scores of previous year should have nothing to do with first grade students just entering into a school? But if statistics is of any value, those school that show failure as far back as there was record just likely to fail also even if you send your smart child there.

So in this system, here is what parents do: take their 5-year-olds to tests of arbitrary things and the score will have lasting effect of their life. Can't-go-to-good-school most likely mean failure for rest of life, some are afraid.

Look, what if my 5 year old just won't cooperate with the tester? Just what sort of reading and math ability do you expect out of a 5 year old? To get to a relatively good school you need to get score of 99%+ and a good lottery number. Close to mission impossible for most, I believe.

Alternatively, you can also put up with outrageous expensive private schools, or move to an outrageous neighborhood so a good school is your neighborhood school (which will take you without lottery and test)

Waita minute, that is a wacky system. how come so many of the schools do so poorly, especially the school around my neighborhood?. Do the teachers do anything?

Answer I heard: it is the union. Poor teachers get paid even if they don't teach anything. And poverty have the vicious cycle of poverty->poor school grades->more poverty. Oh now that's sad. Waita minute then why is there any good school then? How do the winning schools work? Oh and there is magnet and charter school types too... adding more complexity...

Spring MVC + Hibernate

I found this CRUD example and got it to run locally on tomcat:

http://www.journaldev.com/3531/spring-mvc-hibernate-mysql-integration-crud-example-tutorial.

with local database of postgresql instead... I needed to put the postgresql jdbc jar onto tomcat's lib, and change that servlet-context file. Also need to update the CREATE TABLE statement as follows for postgres:

CREATE TABLE Person ( "id" serial, "name" varchar(20) NOT NULL, "country" varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY ("id") );

A running example is worth more than a thousand (if not a million) words.

Thanks to the gentleman who wrote that article. Thanks for writing that maven file. hard to crank that out from scratch. All that configuration files needed... thanks to spring.

Scribble Revisited

In school we learn simple programming... Ok, nowadays maybe Java. I was learning C and C++. And in the "real world" back then, Visual C++ was hot new item back then. Programming in Windows was HARD in those days. And Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) is supposed to be there to save the day? You may have remember this Scribble example. Gosh did I panic: real world programming is so hard and ugly!

See http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/vcpp/scribble.html.

Download that source code and see how UGLY and DIFFICULT this mess is. SO MUCH work to get a scribble going.

HTML5 can do it in so few lines and so straight forward. See http://fahadmustafa.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/scribble-app-with-html5/

Depression Kills

The death of Robin Williams sparked world wide mourning, tidal waves of tributes and special magazine issues dedicated to the great comedian/actor.

I especially liked President Obama's tribute, highlighting Robin's various roles:

Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our lives as an alien but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit. He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most — from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets.

He was able to make huge crowd of audience to laugh... except himself. Who can understand the pain he's been going through?

He has a very successful career, probably plenty of money, and a loving family. I can see why some people get depressed without a good career, without money, and without a loving family. Oh he has early Parkinson’s... anxiety and depression... Life is just getting too hard for Robin Williams.

He is not the only celebrity ending his own life. This is quite sad.
Doctors and medicines cost tremendous amount of money but still of no help. That's sadder.

Just what can alleviate sadness? I suppose the best thing would be talk it out with friends who are good listeners. But be kind to them. Don't keep repeating your concerns (which to your listeners are simply not concerns). Friends don't just tell them to shut up.

Don't have one? now that's probably the saddest.

Formula found on a Children's book

No, I found a formula not a children's math book... but a children book about HEAVEN.

Here on earth, one way to get to know God is by studying His creation. In our forever home, we will have all the time and tools we need to discover, to explore, to experiment, to create, to design.

Ok, I agree with that first sentence.
Look at that picture, there is the Combinatorics formula. n choose r = n!/ (n-r)!r!. What is this other formula?

Ok, just why is this here?

Now is it formula a creation item? You say so? How come I don't see that in the list of things God made in first thin pages describing the Creation week?

Now, where in the Bible does it say you get to have time to discover, experiment, to create and design?

If heaven is there and you can get there, you get to praise the Lord endlessly and not need to even bother to combinatorics. That formula is human creation (and it is actually pretty easy to derive this yourself).

I think it is scary to put words in God's mouth.