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The Facebook Movie
I really enjoyed The Social Network, although I doubt it had much connection to the real people involved. I don’t doubt the events as such, but I doubt the interpretation. I noticed one thing in particular. One of the motivations of the Mark Zuckerberg character was that he really wanted to get into a Finals…
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Foreclosures
There have been steadily growing reports of invalid paperwork being used to foreclose on mortgages. This has now built up to the point where some large banks are suspending their foreclosure proceedings pending a review of the paperwork. This seems to be a legacy of the fast moving mortgage market before the crash; the banks…
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The Town
Ben Affleck has directed a second movie with a real sense of place in Boston, The Town. Since I grew up outside of Boston, it’s really nice to see a movie which is set in Boston and has characters whom one can believe actually grew up there. Plus it has several scenes in Cambridge, where…
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School Testing
I always did extremely well on standardized tests in school, which convinces me that the standardized tests are almost completely useless for assessing knowledge or intelligence or the skills of one’s teacher. Success at standardized tests does not require general intelligence, it requires the particular ability to think like the people who create the tests.…
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School Balance
Both Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkeley, California have made efforts to balance the public elementary schools by family income. They do this by dropping the idea of the neighborhood school and instead sending some children to schools across the city, in order to get the average family income roughly equal at every elementary school. They do…