Paul M. Jones

The Core Knowledge Foundation outlines preschool and K-8 curricula. My God, this is fantastic. Take a look at the 6/7/8th grade outline. At first I thought it was 10/11/12th grade. I mean, Shakespeare and Mythology in the 6th grade? I didn’t get that until 10th. Just awesome!

Ian Eure just provided a patch to DB_Table that is genius in its simplicity. While I have not tested it, the patch looks like it will cause no trouble. In short, in your predefined SQL queries, you can specify that the query should return in DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC, DB_FETCHMODE_ORDERED, or any other fetchmode. For [...]

The inestimable Rum Smuggler contacted me via private channels to point out Paying for Performance from the Marginal Revolution.
Every three weeks students are tested and if they improve they are paid on the order of $20.  Control groups are also tested.  Early results are very encouraging.  No other reform has anywhere near the bang for [...]

Visit the Americans for Fair Tax site right now. It’s essentially a 24% national sales tax with a very high “deductible” (effectively, you don’t have to pay it if you are at or below poverty level). Here’s a thumbnail sketch:
The FairTax is a federal retail sales tax that replaces the entire federal income [...]

YaWiki 0.18 alpha is ready for download. The change notes are:
* updated to take advantage of Text_Wiki 0.22 and later
* configuration change: Text_Wiki parsing and rendering is much more configurable via [Text_Wiki_*] groups in Yawp.conf.php (instead of via the [yawiki] group)
* now supports RSS feeds for all pages in all areas, all pages [...]

A response to RevJim, who has a thoughtful and intelligent critique of Savant, especially as regards Smarty.

If you use the Text_Wiki package you can now subscribe to its dedicated mailing list at users-subscribe@textwiki.tigris.org.
One of the inconveniences of PEAR is that is has no package-specific mailing lists. Thus, if you want to talk about a specific package and no other, you have to get all the traffic whether or not it [...]

Clay Shirky at Many-to-Many link to The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The article points out that there is no such thing as a “structureless” group. This has implications for emergent phenomena, which I have blogged about before (c.f. the post on the environment of emergence).

This release covers for the broken 2.3.0 release and adds a few minor bugfixes; also, why I agree with Coggeshall-2000, not Coggeshall-2004.

For as powerful Oracle is reputed to be, it seems to have one awful restriction: 30-character max for table, field, index, and sequence names. Are other RDBMSes this way?