the EIC

hiatus

Shaj Mathew — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:26:39 +0000

dearest eic-ers,

profuse apologies for the dearth of posts. its summer vacation and kyle and I have jobs and AP/SAT scores to exult in/mourn. alas, this leaves little time for blogging.

expect new blogs in the coming school year to correspond better with Hurricane Nation’s sections, such as ones on sports, arts, and others. also, the current hurricane nation website will be completely redesigned.

enjoy the summer. we’ll check back intermittently over the summer and when school starts up again in late august.

Widget

Shaj Mathew — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:22:53 +0000

Widget

what we’re reading

kahutzler — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:01:42 +0000

The Smithsonian explores the march towards absolute zero – while NOVA asks if an absolute maximum temperature exists. / The Wall Street Journal on expecting families who are giving their first baby (read: dog) sensitivity training. / Theyrule offers an interactive guide to the networks that connect the directors of the world’s largest corporations.

Red Devils Rejoice

Shaj Mathew — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:51:38 +0000

Manchester United hoisted its 3rd UEFA Champions League trophy in Moscow today after narrowly defeating bete noire Cheslea FC 6-5 on penalty kicks, after a 1-1 stalemate in normal and extra time. The scoreline, however, belied Chelsea’s increasing domination of the game, especially towards the latter stages of normal and extra time.

Soccernet’s Richard Jolly comments on Chelsea’s loss and, in his eyes, United’s deserved the accolades. He points out eloquently,

“Tradition triumphed as, in a country overflowing with new money, the nouveau riche came off second best.”

Hubbard, one of Soccernet’s many erduite and insightful writers, is, of course, referring to Chelsea and its billionaire owner/oil magnate Roman Abramovich. Abramovich has spent truly inordinate amounts on new players during each of the transfer periods he has oversaw, and after this heartbreaking loss, this close-season will surely prove no exception, with beleagured Israeli boss Avram Grant eying a discontented Ronaldinho and Kaka.

Grant deserves more plaudits than his effusively praised counterpart, Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson. Admittedly lacking a personality comparable to charismatic predecessor Jose Mourinho, Grant has attained something the celebrated Mourinho never did: an appearance in the Champions League final. Although falling to United, Grant steadied the unsettled dark-blue London outfit to remarkable second place finish in the Barclay’s Premier League as well. In first place? Ferguson’s Manchester United.

Obviously winning the hallowed double, a Champions League and Premier League trophy, is no simple feat. Nevertheless, the more hands-off approach employed by the Glazer family has proved far easier for coaches to work with, juxtaposed against Abramovich’s intrusive, meddling methods towards managing his expensive team. Facing scrutiny from Abramovich and the media, former Chelsea boss Mourinho found his job untenable and and himself unable to develope the type of rapport with his aloof Russian boss that the Glazers and Ferguson have enjoyed.

what we’re reading

kahutzler — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:25:25 +0000

Newsweek released their 2008 rankings of the best high schools in America. Huntingtown slipped to 568th, 144 positions below last year’s rank of 424th (which was a marked improvement on 2006′s 891st ranking). Jay Mathews explains the methodology behind the rankings here.

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We’re also following the Washington Post’s weeklong series on chidlhood obesity: poor diets and sedentary lifestyles have pushed more than one third of all children into the ranks of the overweight or obese, triple what they had been a generation ago. Elementary school children, the Post writes, are now subject to high blood pressure, cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes – creating the very real possibility that our generation will live far shorter than our parents. Read the reports on PE classes, school lunches, and a ‘fat school‘ where tuition costs upwards of $6000 per month to help students lose weight.

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And, TechCrunch reports on Facebook‘s upcoming changes to profile designs. The company, TechCrunch writes, wishes to make profiles more refined and easier to manage.

Milestone.

Shaj Mathew — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:29:39 +0000

On this rainy, unglamorous Sunday, as I began to restore some of the lost content/widgets on the blog (they’re all back now!), I thought to myself, how long have we been doing this?

So I peered through the archives and encountered an interesting statistic:

Today marks nearly the 6th month the EIC has been in business!

I started the blog at late on a Saturday night (or I guess Sunday morning) and proceeded to write post number one (click Nov. 2007 on the archives button on the column farthest right) at a truly obscene hour, even for mystandards – 4am I believe, on November 18, 2007. It’s been an interesting six months, and I think we’ve attained a certain credibility around the school with teachers and students that I didn’t envision when it all started that night. Our mission has changed however - as the whole blogging concept never caught on with most of the editors, Kyle and I have made it our own portal to disseminate snippets of what we’re reading, thinking, and doing.

what we’re reading

kahutzler — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:24:30 +0000

The Wall Street Journal on how elementary school fundraisers have perverted our childhood. / With less than a third of teenagers with real jobs this summer, a profile of teenagers who are making as much as $2,000 per month as virtual contractors and designers on Second Life for their summer job. / GameDaily speculates that PS3 and Xbox 360 price cuts are near – with perhaps a Blu-ray enabled 360 even closer. / Inside Higher Ed on the future of foreign language education in the United States.

Best Advert of the Year

Shaj Mathew — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:15:22 +0000

Created by Madonna’s husband, Guy Ritchie, for Nike. Really unique: this was shot using a microscopic camera on a players head: what you see is what the player sees during a match. (I’m going to guess they used Theo Walcott or Robin van Persie as the player.) If your not attuned to soccer at all here’s a short primer to help you understand: Most players start off playing in lower leagues (there are several in a country like England, and teams get promoted and relegated each year based on performance) and get recognized by scouts. Arsene Wenger, who boasts an unequalled eye for talent, watches this player and signs him for his team, the world famous Arsenal FC…the player’s learning curve is profiled against teams like Manchester United and Barcelona…and culminates horatio alger style when he gets called up to play for his home country (im assuming), the netherlands – next to klaas jan huntelaar and against Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Nani. enjoy:

what we’re reading

kahutzler — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:52:05 +0000

On The New Republic’s The Plank, a how-to guide on how to survive a Colbert interview. To put Colbert on the defensive, Thomas Schaller writes, make some of your answers less than a sentence to throw him off. Colbert has to ad-lib the transition from one question to the next. The more you say, the greater the potential folly.

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It’s a great time to be a kid says the nonprofit Foundation for Child Development: mortality rates among kids are down, we feel safer at school, parents are reading to their children more, television is being restricted and obesity is up. By all means, draw your own conclusions if you must.

Is too much AP bad for everyone? Is senioritis actually good? Jay Mathews knows all.

Shaj Mathew — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:32:54 +0000

Jay Mathews is probably the first person I’ve ever heard to extol the benefits of senioritis! Mathews, the creator of the renowned Challenge Index - a ranking system of high schools based on the number of kids taking AP and IB classes (but not taking into account if they pass or fail)- calls for seniors, who have already got into college and studied into inordinate hours of the night during their 3 and half years of high school to…have fun. This might be anathema to educators, who have tried to combat senioritis like the UN Food Program fights poverty and the starving in Africa.

Mathews also advocates slowing the growth on AP enrollment in another article of his for the Washington Post. He notes that, with the continued rise in enrollment nationwide, the percentage of students passing is decreasing and all classes with the “AP” nomenclature aren’t taught at the same level. For example, he juxtaposes an AP Literature class at the storied St. Albans School in DC to one in an inner city school – St. Albans’ is most likely the more rigorous of the two, but are the kids in the city schools benefiting from the class as well, even if they don’t pass? Mathews says yes. What do you think?