August 12:

“My latest information is that the Iranians refuse to comply with the demands of the free world, which is: do not in any way, shape or form have a program that could yield to a nuclear weapon. And the United States and Israel are united in our objective to make sure that Iran does not have a weapon.”

August 28:

“And Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.

”Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late.“

October 17:

”If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it’d be a dangerous threat to world peace. So I told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested“ in ensuring Iran not gain the capacity to develop such weapons.

”I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.“

November 16:

”We discussed Iran. The Prime Minister and I agree that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten the security of the Middle East and beyond. Our two nations are united in our efforts to change the regime’s behavior through diplomacy. We agreed that unless Iran commits to suspend enrichment, international pressure must, and will, grow.“

And, of course, about 24 hours ago, the administration’s NIE report was released, saying that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program three years ago.

This brings up a few questions: first, how could Bush not have been aware of this? Did the intelligence agencies keep this a secret from him? Of course, over the last three weeks, the administration stopped voicing wild threats about World War II and a nuclear holocaust at the hands of Iran. Did the intelligence develop only just then?

Update: According to Kevin Drum, this report has been around for the past year. Think Progress reports that National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said that Bush had been briefed ”in the last few months,“ stating a range from August to October. On reviewing the quotes listed above, they’ll probably try to claim it was late October.

The second question is, why did Bush allow the report to be released, or at least not watered down? Could it be that Democrats in Congress found out and the lid could not be kept on the bottle? From Bush’s past actions, it is only natural to assume that Bush would suppress such data, as he has several times before.

Either way, don’t expect this to completely stifle Bush’s drumbeat against Iran. Most recently, this defense:

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley says Bush’s warnings are still valid since Iran is continuing to enrich uranium and could restart weapons efforts.

The new spin? Iran is still a threat, because they could restart their nuclear program at any time, and have it read by 2010 or 2015, so the claim goes.

There is an incredibly thorough point-by-point comparison between the iPod and Zune 8GB flash players just published at RoughlyDrafted. While the author is recognizably Apple-biased, the review is nevertheless devastating against the Zune (even if you discount for bias), pointing out its flaws and shortcomings in rather gory detail.

One point that I had not been aware of: the depth of the Zune’s WiFi shortcomings. Zune’s WiFi has two features: user-to-user sharing, and wireless syncing. User-to-user sharing has always been an obvious flop; there are too few users, too few real-life opportunities to share even when in the presence of other users, and DRM limitations which make it far less likely that people will share.

Wireless syncing, however, sounded at least partly useful, though I have never been too hot about it. After all, you have to plug in your player almost every day anyway just to charge it up. Wireless syncing would only be useful in limited situations, such as when you get new music on your computer and don’t want to wait for the next charge-up to sync it.

Details in the review, however, completely blew away my illusion that this feature might be even partially useful. Apparently, while it is possible to sync wirelessly, most “wireless” syncing situations demand that a cable of some sort be attached–either a USB cable or a power cable–else the battery gets drained too fast. In which case you need to re-charge anyway. And if you’re going to plug in, then what the hell is the use of WiFi, especially when it is much slower than a direct link?

In short, just that one piece of information shattered one of the few potential advantages of the Zune. Not that this surprises me at all, but the whole article clarifies rather potently the chasm of quality between the two players.

I decided to check out some of those free hard-drive services that MacMerc wrote about this week, and tested out X-Drive first. Run by AOL, they give you 5GB of storage space. Alas, there is no stand-alone app for the Mac (you are relegated to a pop-up window using Javascript, and it requires turning off pop-up blocking in Safari), and advanced features such as syncing are also absent.

What’s worse is that it just ain’t worth the trouble. The uploads are slow–I was getting 6KB/sec., which is roughly dial-up speed. Plus, there are way too many steps… click this folder, click that button, wait for the window, click this, wait for that, click the same button again, then click that button, use a limited-browsing-ability open dialog box to find the file in an unfamiliar fashion, then wait 5 minutes for a few MB to upload.

Maybe the Windows version is faster and easier, but the Mac version, for now at least, is way too much trouble. Far easier to simply get a GMail account and email files to yourself. Unfortunately, the late great Mac app “gDisk” no longer works (even under Tiger), so a direct interface app won’t fly. (At least, not that I know of.) Box.net is also available, though it limits uploads to 10 MB each, and only has 1GB of storage.

There is one more option: Mozy.com. They’re free, have a 2 GB limit, and a Mac-specific client. It’s not so much an online hard drive as it is a backup utility–you don’t store things in a directory and then download them wherever you want. You select files to be backed up, they get uploaded–and then you can restore them, to their original position. It’s more for protection against losing files than it is an online disk drive.

I was not impressed with how they handle people coming in for their advertised free service. They do the usual routine that services like this do, trying to trick you into paying. You have to hunt the free option down–it’s necessary to go to the paid service page, and see the small box in one corner for the free account. When I signed up for them, there was the other routine of “we’re checking to see if that email address you gave us to use for spamming you is real” and asked that I wait “a few minutes” for the email to arrive in my box. So of course, the email doesn’t come for at least an hour. (I used a throwaway email address used only with them–so I’ll know if spam that comes in is from them.)

After you get past that, things seem to work more smoothly. If you’re uncomfortable with someone else residing within your system, or are generally paranoid about privacy, you probably don’t want this: Mozy installs software that requires your admin password to execute, and when it boots up, it starts scanning your drive–being helpful, finding files you might want to upload. Some people might not appreciate that help. But if you trust them and don’t mind, the software is nicely integrated–a menu bar icon allows access to every part of the service.

Once you get sorted out what it can and cannot back up, however, things get better. It first prepares the files, then uploads them. Upload speeds for me hovered around 100 KB/sec, but can go higher, especially the longer your upload takes.

All this would be great–if the software were not in beta. It is, however, and it crashed on me a few times during file prep. I am pretty sure that I am going to uninstall this one–even though it was the best and most successful of the lot.

When it comes down to it, I greatly prefer simply having a private web site on a web host. For about the same price as many of these backup services tout for their higher-end packages (as opposed to their free ones), I get my own domain, web site with tons of features, tech support, and 200 GB of storage, which I can use as an online disk, with full drag-and-drop functionality, using any of several FTP programs.

So if you just want a free backup service and are willing to put up with the headaches involved, the online storage services might be good for you. Otherwise, just bear down and teach yourself how to get and manage your own domain and hosted site.

Put these two stories together. Boldface is mine, to emphasize the primary contrast. First from the Associated Press via MSNBC:

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press. …

The [Homeland Security Department] wanted to provide $3.2 billion to help states and cities protect against terrorist attacks in 2009, but the White House said it would ask Congress for less than half — $1.4 billion, according to a Nov. 26 document.

And then this, from Voice of America News:

But the president’s top priority is to win congressional approval of his $196 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The money is for the 2008 fiscal year, which began October 1. The president and the Pentagon argue that further delays in approving these funds would force cuts in military operations across the United States and ultimately compromise the war on terror.

The administration’s stated reason for slashing counterterrorism funds domestically: he doesn’t think that the money was “well spent.” Because, after all, the trillion and a half dollars the Iraq War has and will cost has been spent very wisely.

Pay careful attention to the last sentence in the second quote: “The president and the Pentagon argue that further delays in approving these funds would force cuts in military operations across the United States and ultimately compromise the war on terror.” Ah. Massively underfunding counterterrorism at home somehow bolsters the “War on Terror,” while not spending 140 times more on a failed war in a country with zero relevance to terrorism would “ultimately compromise” the “War on Terror.” Gotcha.

Just more proof that the Bush administration doesn’t give a rat’s ass about fighting terrorism; it is a pure and flagrant front for massive new military spending, engorging fatcat contributors and cronies, and imposing a neocon agenda on the Middle East (in a remarkably idiotic and incompetent manner).

In other words, money “well spent.”

Here’s a report on a new mini PC put out by Asus:

There only seems to be one possible comparison, namely Apple’s Mac Mini, and while Cupertino may still keep the advantage on aesthetics and OS, Asus takes the win on components. Processing power is provided by a 1.86GHz E6320 Core 2, which is a desktop part, 1GB RAM is included and there is a slot loading DVD drive – a small detail but always a winner in my book.

Ummm… the higher-end Mac Mini comes with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of RAM, and a slot-loading Superdrive. That’s for $800, whereas the Asus Nova will reportedly cost $1,019. While the Mac Mini reportedly uses a mobile version of the Core 2 Duo (I can’t confirm that yet, but that seems to be the claim), the difference between a 2.0 GHz mobile and 1.86 GHz desktop Core 2 Duo hardly seems worth the extra $220 for the Nova. Not to mention that the Nova looks to be more than half again as big as the Mac Mini. But what’s up with the rest of the listed “advantages”? A little anti-Mac bias here? Or did these “news” outlets simply reprint the manufacturer’s bogus claims?

Sachi and I took another of our weekend walks to nearby neighborhoods today. It’s becoming a bit of a new habit of ours; we started with an evening walk to nearby Otsuka Station, and got more ambitious with a walk back from Rikugien, then a walk around Meiji Jingu and Harajuku. Today we followed up by going to Oji, mostly walking around Asukayama Park before walking back home via Meiji Boulevard. Using the Google Maps Distance Calculator, I figure that we walked 4.5 miles (7.2 km) all told. Not bad. As usual, I have photos.

We started by taking the train in–we figure that it’s best to leave the long walk for the return, so we can avoid getting too tired too soon. This time, we used the Toden Arakawa Line, a light rail line that goes from Waseda, through Ikebukuro, all the way over to Arakawa near Minami Senju. The light rail is run like a bus line, with a single price no matter how far you go, paid at the door. Even the interior looks like a bus, from the money box to the stop buzzers.

Asukayama Park, along the west side of Oji Station, is a very nice, largish park with tons of trees (including lots of Cherry Blossom trees, should be pretty in Spring). There’s a historical residence and garden, a large playground for kids, and some nice paths through green-filled areas. They make very good use of what space the park has. And we are still enjoying the Autumn colors, of course.

We spotted some grandpa leading his granddaughter around on a leash.

And there was a little kid running around shooting pigeons and passers-by with his two guns.

Wearing his gang colors, I presume:

There was also a group practicing Taiko drumming:

And we spotted what has to be the nicest-looking public restroom ever:

Then there were the birds. Pigeons all over the place, but we spotted one doing something bizarre in a pond:

The bird was wading in the pond, its belly fully in the water, and was constantly taking one wing and extending it fully over its head, until it rested over its other side. It was like some kind of pigeon yoga. At first we thought it was injured, but it showed no other signs of injury, and alternated between left and right wings. It was really weird to watch.

When we got to the small pond set against the eastern slope of the park, we saw dozens of Mejiro (Japanese White-eyes) and Shijugara (Great Tits) bathing and drinking.

To close out, a snapshot of Sachi and me at the park.

There is news of a big dinner in London tonight where some kind of new “super material” is to be revealed, a material which is supposed to lead to a major lowering of production costs, which will help to greatly reduce climate change. Engadget and a few other sites are buzzing about it. Here’s a quote from the story released in The Independent last week:

Al Gore is to be the star turn at a dinner where guests have paid at least £1,000 a head, and some will have parted with £50,000 for their share of the Aberdeen Angus steak and pink champagne, under the high ornate ceilings of London’s Royal Courts of Justice. The combined wealth of the diners has been estimated at £100bn. But the most unusual aspect of the evening is not the price of the tickets but the nature of the floor show. In place of professional performers, the guests will be regaled by people who are not always thought of as entertainers, though some think they are all mad. They are inventive British boffins who care about climate change. …

“This is something … that’s the accumulation of almost a decade of work,” [Kane Kramer] said. “It’s a new science, a Super Material. It would be 80 per cent cheaper than any alternative means of production, and it will contribute in a major way to reducing climate change.

”I like it because it’s kind of lateral. It will make possible things that weren’t possible before. We have put it through severe ‘due diligence’, with quite a team of people, not just in the UK, and we’re completely 100 per cent sure that this is the way forward.“

Sound familiar? Sounds like Steorn all over again, except the cast listing looks a lot more appealing. The thing is, the story at The Independent seems to be misleading. It seems to be suggesting that the event is centered around this new technology. However, a quick Google News search reveals that there is an event hosted by Al Gore at London’s Royal Courts of Justice tonight, but it’s a fundraiser for various charities. No mention of startling new technology, or any kind of technology showcase by British inventors; the showcase is famous people pitching charities, and then a singing performance by Damien Rice.

The fundraiser should have ended a few hours ago, and there are no news stories about new technology. So, is Kramer joining the ranks of Steorn in the Royal Hall of Vaporware Breakthroughs?

Today, I was going to go down to the electronic shops and pick up a new HDD/DVD recorder because, as I’ve chronicled recently, my 3-year-old Toshiba machine broke down. It started showing an error message signaling a hard disk failure four or five days ago, and refused to start up–even just enough to eject the DVD that was in its drive. Repeated attempts to revive the machine failed, including letting it stay off for a long time, unplugged for a long time, and by pressing every available button I could press. I called customer support and was told that the hard disk would have to be replaced (they finally got back to me and told me it would cost about ¥40,000), and every report I could find on the web from people with the exact same problem suggested that this was the only chance for recovery.

So I decided to get a new unit costing about $700, including a $10/mo. upgrade of our cable box. I was just about to walk out the door to buy the new DVR when I decided, for the hell of it, to try to turn on the old Toshiba one last time. And what do you know, it turned on, and worked fine.

Over the past few days, I’d had the machine turned off while plugged in, and noted that twice, the front panel display had some mysterious message, “D-L-D.” I have no idea if that had anything to do with it, but either way, the old problem disappeared and now seems to work fine. I am busily archiving everything recorded on it to DVD, treating the machine as essentially on its last legs, which, for all I know, it might actually be.

So the new DVR purchase is on the back burner for the time being….

As usual, all of this is unscientific. It has to be, there is no “scientific” research about this kind of stuff. But I was curious about how many people had upgraded to Vista, and how many to Leopard. I found two polls online. The first was run by MacTips:

677 people answered, and of them, 75% said they had already. Compare that with this long-running MSNBC poll that started a few months after Vista’s release, asking similar questions about that OS:

Only 11% said “yes,” or up to 30% if you include the “maybes.” More than half are holding off for the foreseeable future.

This mirrors a lot of what I have seen and heard; I have not yet met a person in the flesh who has said that they actually like Vista. Everyone I have met who has it has some major complaint about it.

And before you dismiss that Vista poll as being too unscientific, note that Net Applications measured Vista use at just under 8% of the total, or about 9% of all WIndows users:

Meanwhile, my own site’s stats put Vista users at just under 13%:

Either way, the number hovers very close to the 11% figure in the MSNBC poll. Which figures. Businesses are “leery” of Vista, and “have no appetite” for the new OS. The recognize what most regular buyers seem to be realizing: Vista brings very little advantage in exchange for the headaches it poses.

Leopard, while it still has its own bad spots, brings a long list of improvements that people are talking about and enjoying. I myself failed to make Time Machine work, and turned off Spaces after having too much trouble with it. I am not enamored of much in the new Spotlight, either. But that’s the end of my troubles–and I very much like a lot of the other improvements. Quick Look is fantastic. I’m still working with Stacks, but find them a solid improvement. Some elements of Spotlight are an improvement despite its other lacks. The dictionary is better than ever. Safari 3 is a major boost up. I plan to get .Mac and make full use of the “Back to My Mac” feature, not to mention getting to use iChat a lot more. Every day, I stumble upon something new in Leopard, and most of the time I am very pleasantly surprised.

Even better, the system runs fast and crisp–even on my 3-year-old pre-Intel PowerBook G4. Vista, on the other hand, is a slow memory hog which usually cannot run at all on computers made more than two years ago. Service Pack 3 (SP3) for XP just came out, and it runs twice as fast as Vista does.

All this reminds me of the old Canadian joke from the 80’s: In America, you have Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Johnny Cash, and Stevie Wonder; in Canada, we have Brian Mulroney–with no hope, no cash, and no wonder!

Microsoft says that “the ‘Wow’ is now,” but all they have is Vista–with no speed, no customers, and no wonder.

Before finalizing a decision on getting a new DVR/DVD recorder, I figured that I’d try calling Toshiba to at least find out what’s going on. And I was quickly reminded of the fact that Toshiba customer support sucks bit fat hairy ones. I called their number, and they now have a “choose one of these three options” voice menus. The first one includes the “RD Series,” so I dial it. They answer right away, but tell me that for my model, the RD-XS53, I have to call again and choose #2 from the menu–and no, they can’t transfer me. So I call again, and choose #2–this time there’s a 5-minute wait, after which a guy gets on the line and says that for my model, the RD-XS53, I need to dial #3.

And it didn’t get much better after that. After a 10-minute wait on hold, I found out that #3 was actually the extension I needed (they didn’t try to send me back to #1, at least), but the person there had a terminal case of polite speech, as is often the case for these people. That is, they use the most polite speech form in Japanese, which is nice and all, except that it uses all kinds of alternate verbs and vocabulary words and I can’t understand a damned word they’re saying. I ask, for example, “can I call the repair center?” and the support person gives me a 60-second answer, and at the end, I have no idea what the hell she just told me. And I’m no slouch in speaking Japanese. I’m not fluent, obviously, but I don’t deal with the ultra-polite speech enough to grasp it.

So I do my usual “I can’t understand what you just said, polite speech confuses me, could you please use normal speech with simple words” request, and as usual, the person is incapable of doing what I ask, so I suffer through yet more incomprehensible yet polite speech. At least I am guessing it is polite. For all I know, she’s cussing me out royally but saying it in a polite and perky tone.

Finally we get to the point where she finally understands that all I want is a ballpark estimate of how much a repair would cost me. She can’t tell me, so I ask, “who can?” And after five or more minutes of more polite speech (I swear I am not exaggerating on the time), she agrees to have a repair guy call me. So all she needs is my name, my phone number, and my address. “Why my address?” I ask. “Because we need to know which repair center will deal with you.” “Will you use the address to send me junk mail?” I ask. She answers politely for about 40 seconds, so I don’t know what she said. I tell her my city, ward, and neighborhood, narrowing it down to an area only about 5 blocks square or so. She asks for the whole address. “Is there more than one repair center in that area?” I ask, and she says no, but keeps pressing me for the whole address. We compromise by me telling her my building address but not the apartment number, and I tell her if the repair guy comes to visit, I’ll give him that when the time comes.

I swear, sometimes it’s not worth even trying with these people. Really, I just want confirmation of what I already suspect–that the repair won’t be worth it. Someone suggested in the comments that I swap out the HDD myself, and I might do that, but I don’t know if the disk needs to have any special software or partitioning or not, so it’s a bit of a risk (I’ll ask the repair guy all the same). Besides which, the DVD drive is bound to crap out sometime soon anyway, and so I face having even more repair expenses soon.

---

So, I’m figuring on getting a new setup. Panasonic seems to be well-rated for these kinds of machines in the U.S., and they happen to be the company that makes the cable tuner box my cable company uses–and one feature I very much want is having to set only one machine to record at a future time; without the connection, I have to set the DVR and the cable box separately, and neither is dead simple to program.

Panasonic has a DVR/DVD recorder in Japan called the XW100, which seems to fit the bill. It has a 250GB HDD, H.264 encoding (triples the amount of video it can save), can write to DVD-R/RW/DL/RAM media, and has compatibility with HDTV should we switch to that before this machine dies as well.

And it can communicate with some cable tuner boxes. Just not the one I have. The one I have is the old, simple box; the cable company did not splurge on the new simple boxes with the special controlling connector. The only one that my cable company offers which will work that way is one that itself has a 250GB DVR built into it. It would cost an extra $10 or so a month to get it, but it would double the capacity I’d have at hand, and supposedly it can transfer video files to the DVR/DVD recorder, so it’d be just like having a 500 GB disk drive. I figure I might go for that setup.

I am, however, running into roadblocks: my cable company has digital broadcasting, as all of Japanese broadcasting must go by 2010 (according to the cable company), and digital video cannot be recorded as a traditional DVD-Video mode; instead, when you make a DVD-R, it creates a Video DVD disc using “VR” mode, as part of CPRM (digital rights management technology). So, will I be able to play the DVDs it makes on my computer? Will it play on my DVD player? Does it still have the same structure as a traditional Video DVD (with a “VIDEO_TS” folder), or something new? Will I run into problems if I record a movie or TV show because it’s DRM-protected? The answers seem a bit hard to find. As far as I know, I could be buying a recorder that’ll make DVDs that only it can play, or that might be hit-and-miss depending on what I do.

Ain’t it fun to shop for technology, especially when DRM is involved? Nobody wants to tell you what problems you’ll face, and so you wind up getting blindsided…

Well, it had to happen. The DVR/DVD recorder I got three years ago finally crapped out. Last night I wanted to record something on the fly, but couldn’t figure out how to make it shut down automatically after a certain period of time. I knew it would eat up all the hard disk space before I cold wake up, but I’d done that before–it just eats up all the time and then shuts down. So I wake up this morning, find it has shut down like I figured; I edit the recording to erase the 4 extra hours it recorded, freeing up a bit of space.

But by the time I returned home this evening, the hard disk was clicking away–as it had some times in the past. I shut it down and restarted–and I got a hard disk error. Tried all kinds of things, but no go–the hard disk looks like it’s fried. Looking it up on the web, it seems that every mention of this error was treated by swapping out the hard drive. And mine was full of stuff I had not yet archived. Oh well.

I got the thing three years ago, for about a thousand bucks (electronics always cost more in Japan, sometimes 30-40% more than they do in the U.S., for some reason), and had always felt that the thing wouldn’t last too long. It had several meltdowns in the first year, most of them in the initial few months. Most of the breakdowns concerned the DVD drive–it failed twice, fortunately both times within warranty. I am actually surprised that it worked smoothly for two years after that. At least, I got a hell of a lot of use out of it–I’ve got hundreds of DVDs to show for it.

Repairing it now isn’t too promising an option; most likely, it’d cost more to repair it than it’s worth. Also, similar machines in Japan have dropped to below $500 (yeah, I know they’re cheaper in the U.S.–like I said), and it’d probably be safer and cheaper to go that route.

The machine I’ve used had already lost one big feature: the ability to switch the satellite tuner. Well, it didn’t lose it–instead, I lost the satellite when I moved to the new place. The new tuner is from a cable company, and it’s not compatible. I’ve been trying to record Boston Legal and Heroes off of Japanese TV for Sachi and I to watch, and half the time I miss them because we forget to set the tuner to the channel we want the DVR to record.

So tomorrow, I’ll have to check quickly with the cable company to see if there’s a model that can interact with their tuner (they rent out DVRs, but not with DVD recording), then check out what Labi, Bic, and maybe even Costco are selling. Oh, boy! An all-new convoluted machine navigation system! New adventures in frustration! Whee!

Today we had several meetings at my college concerning accreditation. When I was a student, I was completely unaware of the process; I just took for granted that colleges got by on reputation or something, and didn’t think about how they got the authority they have. In the U.S., colleges are accredited by one of several regional accreditation agencies, which use thousands of volunteers (educators and administrators from colleges and universities) to observe and investigate institutions, and hand down decisions based upon those observations. This is an oversimplification, but will serve for the time being. Colleges have usually been reviewed every ten years or so; an institution falling short is given warnings and a chance, over several years, to correct itself.

The accreditation agencies derive their authority from the federal government, through the Department of Education. In the past, the DoE has not been overly controlling, and educators have pretty much run the show. It is unsurprising that this has changed under the Bush administration. In another crony hiring, Margaret Spellings was installed as Secretary of Education by Bush at the beginning of his second term. Spellings’ highest degree is a B.A. in Political Science, and was Bush’s political director in his first campaign to become governor of Texas. She has not done any teaching beyond work as a substitute–and she was not even certified for that (Texas, at the time, did not require certification).

Spellings has demonstrated a pretty clear but unstated preference for dismantling the current regional accreditation system and replacing it with direct federal control. Her husband is an advocate for school vouchers, a position which usually claims that government cannot be trusted to manage the education process. Spellings is a big “No Child Left Behind” advocate, and wants to apply the same standardized assessment system to higher education. So now big buzzwords in our accreditation process are “outcome assessments” and “transparency.”

The problem is, no one has assessed the assessment policy. Just as NCLB sounds good in principle and has a lot of support, but is underfunded, the new paradigm of assessment is big on concepts but short on demonstrating how A leads to B. Standardized tests look good in a political campaign, but they do more to encourage “teaching to the test,” which focuses on test scores rather than actual learning. Japan has suffered from this for a long time, producing students with high scores but not as high comprehension of the subject matter. “Transparency” sounds great, but there is no reason to believe that this will lead to lower tuitions.

There’s a rule in education: learning is a personalized experience. Everyone learns differently. It’s hard enough to maintain quality teaching in a class with 20 students, each with individual quirks and styles of learning. The more generalization and standardization there is, the less freedom each individual student enjoys, and the less likely it is that they will be able to learn. Standardized tests veer the lesson away from the student advancing in their skill or understanding, and emphasize instead rote memorization and test-taking strategies. Scores might increase, but that does not mean that learning will increase.

As a teacher, I will have to devote less of my class time to addressing individual student needs, and more time administering tests which are written by people who have never met my students, much less instructed them. We got a taste of that recently, when Writing class teachers had to administer a test in their classes which included questions they felt had little relevance to what the students in the class needed to learn.

Worse is that our students, being mostly non-native speakers learning in an English-only environment in a country where English is not widely spoken, have even more unique needs which will be ill-served by standardization.

And we’re still in the early stages of preparation, with the review coming in two years. A lot of headaches down the road.

Trent Lott is resigning–the sixth Senate Republican to announce so this year. He just got re-elected in 2006 (makes you wonder why he went to that effort until you realize that he ran unopposed), but a special election will be held in 2008 and that term will run until 2012. In the meantime, Mississippi’s Republican governor will fill the spot by appointment. So there not too much chance of a Democrat to take the seat, though there is more of a chance now than there was before. Still, an influential Republican will go and at worst, a weaker one will take his place.

Fred Thompson made irony meters snap into the red when he started complaining that Fox News is biased… against him. Thompson’s words:

This has been a constant mantra of Fox, to tell you the truth. … From day one, they said I got in too late, I couldn’t do it. … So you know, they’re entitled to their opinion, but for you to highlight nothing but the negative in terms of these polls, and then put on your own guys, who have been predicting for four months, really, that I couldn’t do it, you know, kind of skews things a little bit.

Shock! Fox News is political, doesn’t report things in a fair and balanced way, picks and chooses those they want to build up (Giuliani, in this case) and whom they want to tear down!

Say it ain’t so, Fred!

OK, the remains of the images from our walk through Meiji Jingu and Harajuku.

This guy was very much into his dance routine. He had attracted a crowd of onlookers, and either he didn’t care or he was too into his routine to notice. It did not seem to be a performance for the crowd, as he was facing his vehicle the whole time. Kinda creepy, actually.

The “Free Hugs” people were also there, as they often are. Don’t know what their total deal is–whether they’re religious, lonely, or just feel that more hugs will make a better world.

This is Takeshita Street. Many visitors to Harajuku only walk the main street, Omote-Sando; this street is a few blocks to the north, parallel to Omote-Sando. And crowded as hell. Lots of hip designer shops and everything.

One of the shops on a back street near Takeshita. No way of telling whether they intended to describe a piece of furniture, a sexy body part, a double entendre, or if this is just another case of Engrish.

Here’s some definite Engrish from a menu at Lion’s Beer Hall:

I’ve heard people say that the Chef’s Special is great!

The sauce, apparently, did not achieve total saucehood. I opted for the “quasi-sauce” under the “peckish” section of the menu.

During our walk back from Rikugien yesterday, we spotted a blimp and had trouble identifying it. We saw the same blimp today several times. Apparently it makes daily runs over Tokyo; if you live in the area, you may have seen it.

Sachi and I were curious as to how much it would cost to ride the thing. I went to their web site and checked it out. There are nine seats on board, and cruises run from 90 minutes to two hours. The cost, per person, is ¥126,000 to ¥147,000 (about $1150 to $1400). Flying round trip between Japan and the U.S. is cheaper. So, we’ll likely pass on that one.

Apparently, this weekend’s holiday stretch served for some as the year’s Shichi-Go-San (“7-5-3,” literally) celebrations, where 3- and 7-year-old girls and 5-year-old boys are dressed in kimono (the boys’ are called hakama), given special candies, and brought to shrines to pray for their long life and success. Officially on November 15th, it is possible to celebrate the tradition a bit early or late; there was a lot of evidence of families getting it done a bit late.

We also saw some weddings in progress. The bride and groom would follow the priests and shrine maidens leading a procession of family across the center of the shrine every so often–a very public kind of wedding. This is a common thing at the shrine; you see them all the time. It led me to wonder how much it costs to get married there; there are no reports on cost that I can find on the ‘net.

That’s mom holding the bride’s hand.

Here are other miscellaneous images from the shrine:

When you enter a shrine in Japan, you’re supposed to wash your hands in a little purification ritual. Wash one hand with the other, then reverse, then take a sip of the water (usually people pour into their hands first, then sip).

Chrysanthemums on display; there were a lot there, in kind of a show or something. The Chrysanthemum represents the imperial family in Japan.

There was also some kind of produce festival going on, with giant heaps of vegetables and various farm produce from different prefectures around Japan.

Beautiful woodwork on the shrine doors, caught just right in the late afternoon sunlight.

The deepest area of the shrine visitors come to always have the money boxes; you throw in your coins, clap your hands twice, then pray. For the three days at New Year’s, Meiji Shrine is swamped. A special train platform that leads directly into the park is opened, and the crowds are dense for the whole time. It is so hard to get past the crushing throngs at the very front where the money boxes are, many people simply give up trying, and instead toss their coins from several meters back. The shrine lays out tarps around the money boxes to catch the excess, but you have to assume that a lot of people near the front get pelted with coins on the backs of their heads.

The south gardens, requiring a ¥500 yen fee to enter.

Carp in the south garden lake. These things grow to huge sizes. Conditioned to receive food from humans, they cluster when they sense anyone walking up, their gaping maws shoved out above the water in the hopes that some morsel-tossing human has good enough aim.

That’s more than enough for one post. I’ll post Part 3 soon, with some images from after the shrine visit.

There’s a story getting play on TV news and around the Internet about a fuzzy blue shape that appeared on a security monitor tape at a gas station in Parma, Ohio. Awed witnesses who saw the video were convinced they were seeing angels or a ghost, and started talking about Indian burial grounds and such stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if a sizable chunk of the American population isn’t terminally stupid. A quick look at the video makes it so perfectly clear that it’s a bug crawling on the camera lens that the reactions these people display look pitifully clueless. It’s a testament to how people will so quickly believe what their superstitions lead them to. I mean, images of the Virgin Mary are stupid enough, but this?

And it’s not the first time. This June, a security camera outside a Santa Fe courthouse that showed what to me was clearly a small spider crawling across the lens–but again, people broke out in hysteria, claiming that it was a ghost or something. Of course, it was just a bug.

Sachi and I went on another walk-about-town today. This time we chose Meiji Jingu and Harajuku; on the way back home, we stopped at Lion’s Beer Hall and had dinner out.

It was a pretty productive day in several ways. Meiji Jingu turned out to be very good for birdwatching today (especially the open fields at the north end; look for birds along the treeline and the lakeside). I ran into a small flock of colorful Varied Tits in a tree, which often pecked at the tree trunk like woodpeckers and jumped to the ground to forage. There was a Kingfisher in the south gardens, and I spotted a fully-colored male Daurian Redstart, a first for me. At the shrine proper, we saw several marriages in progress, and a lot of people dressed up.

In Harajuku, we looked around for winter stuff for me–gloves, a scarf, and a wool cap–but found too little that was satisfying, and all priced too high. Then we ran across a big Daiso, a shop which is usually 100-yen (like a 99-cent shop), but this one had stuff for more than that, including a wool cap and a pair of gloves for 200 yen each, and a scarf for 300 yen. So, mission accomplished.

The north side of the park. It was nice to sit down and soak up the sun. The rest of the park is in such shade from the trees that it’s easy to think it’s almost evening. There was a police or security guy here whose job, apparently, was to walk up to couples who were snuggling too much and tell them to knock it off.

There were at least half a dozen Varied Tits flitting around and under a tree along the field’s treeline. Usually skittish birds, they were unusually easy to photograph. Several seemed to be pecking away at the trunk and the larger branches.

I was startled to see this Daurian Redstart. I was walking along the edge of the pond and bam, there he was, just sitting there. I’ve spotted females before, but never males in full plumage like this one. And he was very much agreeable to posing for quite some time.

Kind of reminds you of Dennis Rodman, doesn’t he?

These Mallards were okay, but I just like the whole photo, especially how the water turned out. Click this for a larger image.

I caught this Kingfisher at extreme range. He had staked out the lake in the southern gardens (you have to pay ¥500 per person to get in).

I’ll finish up here for today, and post tomorrow with photos of the shrine proper, and a few other things we spotted as well (including some Engrish).

In their continuing streak of never-ending filibusters, Republicans have trashed two important bills in the Senate this week, and then have gone off blaming Democrats for the failure to pass the bills.

The two bills are a five-year, $286 billion farm bill, and a bill that would “patch” the Alternative Minimum Tax, adjusting it for inflation so it would not unintentionally catch millions of people in the middle and upper middle class.

Both bills were stopped dead because Republicans insisted on planting poison pills–volatile political bombs like repealing the estate tax–into both bills, forcing Democrats to either pass legislation they would choke on, or to vote against what Republicans could call “tax cuts” in election-year campaigning. Democrats refused to allow the amendments, so Republicans engaged the filibuster and shut down the vote.

And then blamed the Democrats.

So, what else is new?

Sachi and I visited a nice park a few stations down from where we like. The park, Rikugien, was created in 1695 and donated to Tokyo City in 1938. It costs ¥300 to get in.

A lot of people were taking photos of the trees showing their autumn colors; there were some really beautiful sights in the park. A few of the pictures below have 1000-pixel blow-ups if you click on them.

There were a lot of people at the park today. Probably this was due to the day being the start of a 3-day holiday weekend, along with some sort of evening “light up the park” festival, which Sachi and I did not stick around for.

There were several tea houses in the park; you could buy some tea, and sit and enjoy the view.

I like this one. The sun was setting behind the trees, and made it look like a fire was burning behind them.

This bush is called “Murasaki Shikibu,” in part after the famous author of “The Tale of Genji,” and in part because “murasaki” is Japanese for “purple.”

This single branch stood out, as it alone in the whole area was lit by sunlight.

Birdwatching at the park was not bad, though all the birds were regulars, including tons of Bulbuls and Crows. There were the usual Spot-billeds along with Tufted Ducks and a few Common Pochards like this one.

Sachi and I sat not far from a small water source, and enjoyed this Great Tit coming to drink.

Just as we were leaving, we heard movement in the brush, and I caught this Black-faced Bunting foraging on the ground, as they are apt to do.

All in all, a lovely day. But on our way 2-mile stroll home, we ran across a small local festival, and decided to enjoy the length of it. These are always linear deals, with stalls lining the length of the festival, often repeating. Sachi and I bought a steak shish-kabob (okay but too fatty/gristly), and a small bag of “baby castella,” little bite-sized pound-cake style goodies cooked in a waffle-like grill (tasty!).

Why do those Near Eastern guys always have stands with those huge spits of meat?

Very realistic toy guns are popular with some Japanese; these were sandwiched between video game cartridges.

Umm, okay.

The actual shrine the festival was based upon.