Wacky Weather
Today, as I am checking the blog, I see that the Weather Underground sticker I have shows the weather in Kuwait as being 39°F / 4°C . . . .
I am guessing it is around 107°F . . . but sometimes these statistics go a little whacky.
10,000 Steps Continued
As you know, I began an exercise program a few weeks ago called 10,000 Steps – you can find out more about it here: 10,000 Steps. I don’t have very good luck with gyms . . . it’s just a waste of money for me; I sign up all enthusiastic, and by the second day at the gym I am already trying to find ways to get out of it. I get bored. Exercise is BORING!
But I love walking. Actually I love water aerobics, too, when there aren’t a bunch of googly-eyed guys watching, and when I have a gaggle of girlfriends to laugh and pass the time with while we exercise and I just don’t have that opportunity in Kuwait.
So I got sick and tired of myself NOT exercising and decided to work on 10,000 steps. I’ve been doing pretty well, too, worked up to running 6,000 steps before I left, and it only takes me about 35 minutes.
The other day I bought a pedometer. Today I put it on for the first time.
You have to understand, when I come back to Seattle, I have THE LIST with me. The list is all the things that are hard to get or impossible to get in Kuwait, or just annoying to have to track down. Occasionally, like this time, I also have things to get for friends. . . just a little thing here and there, but it all goes on THE LIST.
Around noon I called my Mom and said I would be by in about an hour with lunch. When I got there, I remembered I had my pedometer on, and I checked it – I was already at 9,081 steps! By the time I got back to my hotel, it had started over.
I love it. I am tired at the end of each day from running around, my legs even ache and my feet hurt and I love it. Even the hot days – there were two of them, and now it is cloudy and it is going to rain and they just don’t get it at all that I LOVE the rain – the hot days weren’t that bad.
I am going to be in PAIN when I get back to Kuwait and face days of 115°F again! It is 70°F / 21° C in Seattle today.
Thank you, Safat
Can you see the difference? Yousef, at Some Contrast says his stats sank a little, overall, but that individual post hits were fairly normal.
For me, on the other hand, Safat made a difference of about 400 hits a day!
Thank you, Safat, for solving the problem.
Army Audits: Official Sites, Not Blogs, Breach Security
This report came out in August of 2007, on WIRED so it is not new news.
What it IS, is something for those who are considering monitoring blogs in Kuwait, to think about.
It isn’t bloggers complaining about roads, or complaining about a do-nothing-but-hold-a-grill-party Parliament, or about laws not being enforced. If bloggers are blogging and comlaining, people are grumbling. Bloggers might be considered a weather-vane, but bloggers are not creating the weather, if you catch my drift.
The US Army was blaming bloggers – until a study showed that it was their own OFFICIAL websites that gave away important information.
I used to ask AdventureMan about things and he would snap “Where did you hear that? It’s classified!” and I would tell him I read it in the New York Times – or in the Stars and Stripes.
We bloggers aren’t your problem. We bloggers are mostly geeks and nerds who love our computers, love thinking about things, and we are not out there rabble raising . . . we are sharing ideas. We don’t all agree. We are not your problem.
For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers’ blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.
The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.
The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
“It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,” said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It’s a pretty major disparity.” The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.
Election Fever
I have a very dear friend who will say “I don’t have a dog in that fight” and that is the way I feel about your upcoming elections. You (Kuwait, Kuwait leadership, Kuwait people) are in our prayers for a fair election, and that you elect good leadership. You know what a mess it has been; it would be nice to elect people who can work with the government to get things done.
So I don’t have a clue who those people would be, but I know YOU do.
Here is what tickles me, what I can’t resist commenting on from this morning’s Kuwait Times:
ELECTION FEVER GRIPS STATE
Tribes, groups move to chose candidates • Eligible voters rise to 361,000 including 200,000 women
Holy Smokes! Almost FORTY THOUSAND more women voters than men voters??? Woooo HOOOOOO, Kuwaiti women!
Education and No Child Left Behind
One of the most cynical education programs ever put into place, in my opinion, is the No Child Left Behind program. It’s impact, while claiming lofty goals, in actuality forced schools to exclude students who would fail, so as not to have them on their statistical base.
Quote from article: If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.
In this story from the New York Times you can read how US schools fudge statistics to have a respectable high school graduation rate for federal funding purposes, while the truth is far less positive.
JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.
One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.
“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”
Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.
The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.
The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.
“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”
Furthermore, although the law requires schools to make only minimal annual improvements in their rates, reporting lower rates to Washington could nevertheless cause more high schools to be labeled failing — a disincentive for accurate reporting. With Congressional efforts to rewrite the law stalled, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has begun using her executive powers to correct the weaknesses in it. Ms. Spellings’s efforts started Tuesday with a measure aimed at focusing resources on the nation’s worst schools. Graduation rates are also on her agenda.
You can read the rest of the story HERE.
Our young people are the leaders and decision makers of tomorrow. My generation thought we were going to change the world, and here the world continues on it’s merry way to pollution, desolation and degradation. I hope the young people of today can do what we have failed to do – create a better world.
5KD = LLLOOOLLLL
I have seen opinions, and heard people talking about how Kuwait has more important things to do than to penalize people who are using their mobile phones. They are outraged! Clean up the highways first, they say, give us better schools, enforce the laws already on the books (but leave our cell phones alone!)
I am sorry. I know I am going to get killed for this opinion, but have you ever followed someone driving while talking on a cell phone? Do you watch them wobble out of their lane, try to steer the car with their knee because they have the phone in one hand and they need to adjust the volume of the radio? In countries where mobile phone use has been monitored and statistics kept, they attribute a huge rise in inattentive driving to cell phone use. They have statistics. They can prove that cell phone use is linked to a rise in accidents.
Brave Qatar brought in a team of experts who interviewed seriously injured accident victims. Every single one of them was on a cell phone when involved in the accident.
My rant is this: a 5KD fine? In Kuwait, that is just laughable. A 5 KD fine (about $20 with the dollar diving into the cellar) is not a deterrent. I want to see a sliding scale: start at 50KD for the first incidence, double it for the second, double it again for the third, etc. Make it hurt.
There are too many drivers for the roads, even with the ongoing improvements. The drivers are ill experienced, and careless. Driving in Kuwait is lethal enough without the additional factor of cell phones. If you need to ask directions, pull over. It’s not that hard, you’re smart, you can figure it out.
Trivial
Any time I start to get all puffed up about readers complimenting me on my blog, I just take a look at the search terms that bring them in.
You know, I would love to think it is our discussions about political and social issues, the books I review, the travel destinations I recommend, the human experiences we share . . . I would love to think that.
It just isn’t the truth. Here is what brings the most people to look at Here There and Everywhere. It is truly, truly humbling.
Cell Phone or Drunk?
From AOL News:
Using Cell Phone While Driving Akin to Driving Drunk, Say Researchers
Posted Mar 7th 2008 11:24AM by Evan Shamoon
According to a new study, talking on your cell phone while driving could be as dangerous as being under the influence of alcohol. Carnegie-Mellon University researchers used brain imaging to show how mobile phone use alone reduces 37 percent of brain activity engaged in driving. The findings were published in the latest gotta-have-it issue of the journal ‘Brain Research,’ and also suggest that using a hands-free headset doesn’t make much of a difference.
Basically, the study found that drivers who spoke on their phones while driving tended to make many of the same driving mistakes as those who just got finished speaking to the bottle.
So to speak.
Comment: I always thought using a headset solved the problem – guess I was wrong. 😦 The Kuwait Ministry of Traffic is currently considering a law against using cell phones while driving in Kuwait. If enforced, it’s going to make a big difference in the lives of a lot of people in Kuwait. I wonder if it will mean fewer pedestrians killed?
Drama Queen Sunrise
Drama drama drama – there was a thick band of something on the horizon today, and then gorgeous fluffy clouds above. The sun couldn’t even fight it’s way through the sludge of the thick band, but finally, it began to rise above:
It is a warm 54°F/12°C early this morning and going up to 77°F/25°C at its peak today. Just warm enough – nor warmer, please!
Recent Comments
ExpatAlien on What Country am I Living … intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 