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A study by Penn State researchers is being revised after test results apparently linking increased bromide in some water wells to Marcellus Shale gas drilling were traced instead to a lab error. An error notice was published on Nov. 22 on the website of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, which funded the study and released it in late October. According to the notice, an accredited laboratory contracted by the researchers incorrectly reported the bromide concentration data that was used in the original report. Updated data showed that increased bromide levels were recorded in one of 42 water wells, not seven...

The stress was overwhelming. For years, this veteran teacher had received exemplary evaluations but now was feeling pressured to raise her students' test scores. Her principal criticized her teaching and would show up to take notes on her class. She knew the material would be used against her one day. "My principal told me right to my face that she — she was feeling sorry for me because I don't know how to teach," the instructor said. The Los Angeles educator, who did not want to be identified, is one of about three dozen in the state accused this year...

RESEDA, LOS ANGELES -- The scores are in for Southern California students who took the annual STAR exam. Despite cutbacks and layoffs, scores are up for the ninth straight year. They're at their highest levels since the testing began. At a 10th-grade physiology class at Reseda High School, reading and language skills are combined with mathematics, and there are improved results in the latest statewide Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) examinations given to nearly 5 million students in grades 2 through 11. "Despite the cuts we are seeing that kind of significant progress. It's been steady over the last nine...

According to a declassified 2005 report released last week, China had been testing the effects of an electromagnetic pulse attack–the detonation of a nuclear device at high altitude to maximize the area affected by the EMP–possibly meant for Taiwan. According to the report, China was actually testing two kinds of nuclear blasts and the effects the resulting radiation would have on humans. (China was testing them on animals, which experienced “high mortality rates.”) The point of an EMP attack (all nuclear explosions result in an EMP), however, is to disrupt the electronics devices within range of the blast.

Should we require people who receive taxpayer money welfare handouts to submit to random drug testing? As with most social-fiscal issues, this is a divisive one. Opponents claim this would be a violation of Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search, and of course, some of them play the race card as well and insist that this would be a racist thing to do (do they understand how very old the race card is?). Supporters claim this would save millions in taxpayer dollars and help people get off drugs. We already see that many employers require their employees to submit to...

Ed Wood is on a mission to change state laws regarding drugged driving. Wood has a very personal stake in the issue. His son, 33-year-old Brian Wood, was among three people killed in a Sept. 3, 2010, car crash on North Whidbey last fall. Evidence introduced at trial showed the two Oak Harbor women responsible for the collision had illegal drugs in their systems. Wood, a Colorado resident, wasn't happy about the sentences handed down this month to the women. But he hopes his story of loss and injustice will spur a law change in this and other states. "It...

We don’t buy tickets or recordings of mediocre or worse musicians but we keep paying for and sending our kids to exactly such teachers; the No Child Left Behind mandated testing shows it. Of course, the teachers’ unions object and the Obamans intend to satisfy them by dumping such effective testing. In Part (1) of this article, the questions were: the necessity of locking up all the kids every day and were it found necessary, should it be done by the government or could the private sector do it better? We postponed looking much at the means for delivering education....

We don’t buy tickets or recordings of mediocre or worse musicians but we keep paying for and sending our kids to exactly such teachers; the No Child Left Behind mandated testing shows it. Of course, the teachers’ unions object and the Obamans intend to satisfy them by dumping such effective testing. In Part (1) of this article, the questions were: the necessity of locking up all the kids every day and were it found necessary, should it be done by the government or could the private sector do it better? We postponed looking much at the means for delivering education....

A long-anticipated conflict between the FCAT and Passover starts on Tuesday, but local public schools are accommodating observant students by offering alternative test times and makeup exams. The Jewish holiday begins at sundown on Monday and ends on April 26. In Palm Beach and Broward counties on Tuesday, fifth-grade students are scheduled to take the first of two days of the science portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Jewish students usually do not miss school throughout Passover, but some may be absent for a couple of days. When the testing schedule was published last year, some parents complained that...

Some Maricopa County workers are burned up about a new health-plan requiring them to submit saliva for nicotine analysis.

Come April, Illinois 11th-graders will need to sweat through two days of state testing before they can advance to the senior class. Illinois education officials approved the new rules Thursday, taking aim at a loophole some schools used to keep academically weak juniors from taking the test, thereby avoiding accountability for their scores under federal law. The new regulations would allow local schools to continue to determine what it means to be a junior, whether by counting a student's years at high school or the number of academic credits earned. But students must sit for the Prairie State Achievement Exam...

Nine years into the war in Afghanistan, a handful of U.S. soldiers have a new weapon in hand, a lethal combination of technology and explosives that the Army has called a "game changer." Looking like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, the XM-25 fires highly specialized rounds that can be programmed to explode at the precise location where the enemy is hiding behind cover. (Snip) Though the XM-25 has tested well in the United States, military brass will be watching the weapon's performance in real-life combat to assess not only how well it performs, but also what weapons

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds. The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again. Then there was radiation. While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps. Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to...

Multimedia artwork "2053" - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe.*Profile of the artist: Isao HASHIMOTO Born in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan in 1959. Worked for 17 years in financial industry as a foreign exchange dealer. Studied at Department of Arts, Policy and Management of Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Currently working for Lalique Museum, Hakone, Japan as a curator. Created artwork series expressing, in the artist's view, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons": "1945-1998" © 2003"Overkilled""The Names of Experiments" About "1945-1998" ©2003 "This piece of work is a bird's eye view of...

TRENTON — The U.S. Department of Education today awarded a total of $330 million to two coalitions of states — both of which include New Jersey — to create a new generation of standardized tests that will assess national standards for what students should learn in school. The U.S. DOE is awarding funding for the new assessments through its $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition. The federal government awarded nearly all of its Race to the Top funding through an education reform competition that New Jersey narrowly lost last week. But $425 million was left over to create better...

NEW ORLEANS – BP is delaying critical tests on a new well cap designed to finally stop the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico after government officials said more analysis was needed on the plan. ... National Incident Commander Thad Allen said in a statement Tuesday night the process "may benefit from additional analysis" that would be performed overnight and Wednesday. He did not say when the tests would start.

NOTE: The original article is in Danish; since not too many FReepers speak Danish, I've included a link to, and excerpts from, the Google translation of the page. "Its never been done before. And its really cool engineering.” And its really cool engineering. "How Steve Jobs introduced the metal frame on the new iPhone because the phone the other day was revealed to the wondering world. The frame serves as the phone antenna. But the fact is the principle behind the iPhone 4-antenna system is far from new. And possibly it is even so problematic that it will reduce the...

Gov. Rick Perry, reiterating his concerns about a federal takeover of education, gave the final word today that Texas will not apply for the second round of a federal grant worth up to $700 million for local schools. Perry refused to compete for the first round of the Race to the Top grant in January, but had not definitively said the state would sit out round two. The Republican governor repeatedly has criticized President Barack Obama's education grant because it favors states that adopt common curriculum standards. “This administration's attempt to bait states into adopting national standards is an effort...

WASHINGTON – For all the primaries testing tea party clout and veteran senators' ability to survive, a special House election in southwestern Pennsylvania is the multimillion-dollar battleground of choice Tuesday for the two political parties, previewing themes for a fall campaign shadowed by recession and voter discontent. Competing economic prescriptions, the appeal of President Barack Obama's health care legislation, the Republicans' ability to woo crossover support from independents and Democrats all are at issue, according to officials in both parties, in a race that also features a struggle for the political high ground as Washington outsider. The House race features...

Milwaukee, WI – Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin, the Children's Research Institute, and the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin have developed a rapid, automated system to differentiate strains of influenza. The related report by Beck et al, "Development of a rapid automated influenza A, influenza B, and RSV A/B multiplex real-time RT-PCR assay and its use during the 2009 H1N1 swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) epidemic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," appears in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. In pandemic infection, such as the present H1N1 influenza outbreak, rapid automated tests are needed in order to make...

SNIPPET: "Discussion: I first observed discussion of binary explosives on the al-Firdaws forum in January of 2007. In light of recent events I will post here my archive:" SNIPPET: "Implementation: On Christmas Day, 2009, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab boards a flight in Amsterdam, bound for Detroit, and on final descent he attempts to set off what was most likely a binary explosive. Thank goodness he either screwed up or had bad instructions, because the chemicals he was working with were evidently quite good."

Tracking for Success Bethany Stotts, December 15, 2009 At a recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference on “Increasing Accountability in American Higher Education,” panelists argued that the key to increased postsecondary accountability lies with better tracking-systems for student learning outcomes and increasing use of standardized tests. “For those of you who don’t know it [a student unit record system] basically is a data system maintained at the state or system level which contains one record per student containing information about enrollments, behaviors, and so on,” explained Peter Ewell, Vice President of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS)....

BAGHDAD — A Nov. 18 ribbon-cutting ceremony here in the International Zone marked the opening of a new English language testing facility for Iraqis. The mission of the facility is to provide an improved environment for English language testing and to allow military and civilian candidates from the Government of Iraq to achieve their full performance potential. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Judith Resendiz, test control officer, said, "This new facility will support Iraqis who need to validate their English proficiency so they can participate in specialized schooling and pursue opportunities in other English speaking environments that will help them get...

Latino immigrants considered at risk for HIV are less likely to be tested or to have access to healthcare services if they are in the country illegally and have not fully adapted to U.S. culture, according to a new study. The findings underscore the need for more targeted education and prevention programs within the diverse Latino community, which accounts for a disproportionate number of new HIV and AIDS cases in the U.S., said Janni Kinsler, one of six UCLA researchers who conducted the study. “HIV is not declining, and it should be,” Kinsler said. “If you don’t know that you...

British scientists are examining the strain of swine flu behind a deadly Ukrainian outbreak to see if the virus has mutated. A total of 189 people have died and more than one million have been infected in the country. Some doctors have likened the symptoms to those seen in many of the victims of the Spanish flu which caused millions of deaths world-wide after the World War One. An unnamed doctor in western Ukraine told of the alarming effects of the virus. He said: 'We have carried out post mortems on two victims and found their lungs are as black...

In August 2009, CBS News made a simple request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for public documents, e-mails and other materials CDC used to communicate to states the decision to stop testing individual cases of Novel H1N1, or “swine flu.” When the public affairs folks at CDC refused to produce the documents and quit responding to my queries altogether, I filed a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the materials. Members of the news media are entitled to expedited access, which I requested, since this was for a pending news report and on an issue of...

By John Gever, Senior Editor Military doctors can use a portable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing device to diagnose novel H1N1 flu infections in troops overseas, the FDA announced. The emergency authorization was approved "to better protect our troops," said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, MD, in a statement. The device, called JBAIDS (Joint Biological Agent Identification and Diagnostic System), is a rugged, suitcase-sized instrument that can run PCR-based molecular diagnostic tests. It has been under development for several years by a consortium of military health research centers, the CDC, and academic medical laboratories. The development program began in the...

“Homeschooling is the sleeping giant of the American education system,” is the opening line of a recent article by Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews. He’s right. He’s also right when he says, “All surveys of home-schooled students so far indicate they have higher achievement rates on average than regular students,” and when he dismisses the claim that homeschoolers might not be properly socialized by saying, “Homeschoolers go outside often and get just as big a dose of pain and joy and ignorance and wisdom as regular school kids.” Where Mathews goes wrong is his support for a recommendation by...

This year's Harry & Louise looks pretty effective.

A gathering at an Atlanta elementary school last summer planted the seeds for a cheating scandal. Fifth-graders from five public schools had attended summer classes together at Deerwood Academy in southwestern Atlanta. Then they all had retaken the standardized test each had failed in the spring: the math portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT. Officials from the five schools came to Deerwood to collect answer sheets from their respective students and send them off for automated grading. But state investigators say the test papers from one group of students apparently took a detour. When the results came back,...

Locker Room Bell Curve by: Deborah Lambert, April 27, 2009 A recent study by a Swarthmore College economist showed that students may perform worse on exams if they “think about their jock identities before they take the test.” Researcher Thomas Dee asked athletes about their sports activities before they answered a series of Graduate Record exam questions. Results showed that the “pre-test reminders of their athletic identities hurt the athletes’ test performance by up to nine percentage points,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stereotype threat is apparently a hot topic in some circles, which “suggests that anxiety can...

I've been having digestive problems and am going in for an abdominal CAT scan tomorrow morning. Please pray for me. Thanks and God Bless!

THE Melbourne Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican recommendation to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Under the guidelines, potential priests who "appear" to be gay must be banned. The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ‘‘a type of deviation’’. Archdiocese of Melbourne spokesman James O’Farrell confirmed Carlton’s Corpus Christi Catholic seminary had started adhering to the guidelines, but refused to comment further.

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests. The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive. But there could be a downside. The...

CAIRO (AFP) – Arabs were hopeful on Wednesday that President Barack Obama will amend US policy on the Middle East, while Israel expects little change in the wake of its deadly assault on Gaza. Egypt, a close Washington ally with ties both to Israel and Palestinians, urged Obama to place the Palestinian cause at the top of his agenda as the Islamist Hamas faction said it will judge Obama by his acts. "We will judge him by his policies and actions on the ground and how he will learn lessons from the mistakes of the previous administrations, especially that of...

No Loophole Left Behind by: Bethany Stotts, October 09, 2008 Just as the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was passed under bipartisan leadership, so too criticisms of its flawed structure span the gambit of political persuasions. As previously documented, opposition to the NCLB provisions on annual yearly progress (AYP) and school sanctions have raised significant ire from some conservative policy analysts such as Michael J. Petrilli and CATO’s Neal McClusky, as well as representatives from the progressive National Education Association (NEA). Daniel Koretz, Harvard Professor of Education and author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, recently...

For the second consecutive year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, according to results released Tuesday. But the College Board, which owns the exam, attributes the lower averages of late to a more positive development: a broader array of students are taking the test, from more first-generation college students to a record number of students — nearly one in seven — whose family income qualifies them to take the test for free.

President Bush has often spoken about education reform as a civil rights issue. So we're not entirely surprised to see civil rights groups now defending the No Child Left Behind law against attempts to gut its most effective provisions. Last month, Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, introduced the NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, which would essentially suspend the law's accountability provisions but not the funding. Under Mr. Graves's bill, schools would no longer have to file progress reports that expose achievement gaps between kids of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. Since NCLB passed in 2002, minority parents in...

Students are performing better on state reading and math tests since enactment of the landmark No Child Left Behind law six years ago, according to an independent study [by the District-based Center on Education Policy] released yesterday.[snip]Because standards vary from state to state, some analysts have questioned the reliability of state tests as a gauge of academic performance. The study, which included data from 50 states, found that achievement on state reading and math exams has improved in most of them. The trend is largely mirrored on national exams, the study found, although the gains tend to be smaller. One...

His experience reflects a challenge felt in classrooms nationwide. Six years after the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, the lowest-performing students continue to improve while children in the top tier have hit a plateau, according to a report due out Wednesday. The findings renew concerns about how schools challenge their brightest students at a time when federal law, backed by sanctions and financial consequences, forces many districts to focus time and money on students at the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut, went to great lengths to devise a firefighter test that would not have "disparate impact" on minority applicants, but when the results of the 2003 test-taking came in, applying the city's "Rule of Three" which required selection from among the highest scorers, "no blacks and at most two Hispanics would have been eligible for promotion to captain and no blacks or Hispanics would have been eligible to make lieutenant". So the city civil service board vacated the results, frankly acknowledging that it was in search of better minority hiring numbers. White applicants sued and...

For Massachusetts’ worst public schools, failure is not an option. Literally. The Department of Education is considering a request to drop the label “underperforming” for failing schools in places like Randolph, Lawrence and Holyoke. Instead Massachusetts would declare these schools “Commonwealth Priority” institutions. For those institutions that truly excel at incompetence, currently known as “Chronically Underperforming,” the new title would be “Priority One” schools. You can just imagine the delight in the hallways of Lawrence High. “Our school’s a ‘Commonwealth Priority!’ I wish I could spell that.” “Don’t worry, they’re going to grade our spelling tests on the ‘Commonwealth Curve’...

Subject: Devotional "Genuine Faith" Date: Feb 19, 2008 9:53 AM 1 Peter 1:7 "So that the genuineness of your faith, which is much more precious than gold which perishes though it is tested by fire - nevertheless might be found unto praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." The Psalmist tells us that the Word is "more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold" and that "he loves the commandments above gold, above fine gold." It is common knowledge that gold is tested by fire in order to bring about the genuine evidence of...

RALEIGH - A state commission agreed today on a draft report saying “there is too much time spent on testing” and that several exams should be eliminated or no longer counted in the state’s testing program. The Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accounting agreed to recommend to the state Board of Education that the fourth-, seventh- and 10th-grade writing tests and the eighth-grade computer skills tests be eliminated. The commission also agreed that the number of end-of-course exams used to measure how high schools are doing in the state testing program be cut from 10 to five. They no...

     Could a strange substance found by an Ark-La-Tex man be part of secret government testing program?  That's the question at the heart of a phenomenon called "Chemtrails."  In a KSLA News 12 investigation, Reporter Jeff Ferrell shows us the results of testing we had done about what's in our skies.     "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky.  It was just like a giant checkerboard," described Bill Nichols.  He snapped several photos of the strange clouds from his home in Stamps, in southwest Arkansas.  Nichols said these unusual clouds begin as normal contrails from a jet engine.  But...

"[Rowan's] been on this planet for 18 months, and he's loaded with a chemical I've never heard of," Holland, 37, said. "He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that's been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats." The technology to test for these flame retardants -- known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) -- and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it "body burden" testing, an allusion to the chemical "burden," or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as "biomonitoring." Most Americans...

TUCSON, Ariz. – Defense contractor Boeing Co. has told the government it believes it has solved most of the problems that have delayed use of the first section of a high-tech “virtual fence” along the nation's borders for months. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, however, said they'll wait until acceptance testing now set for late October is done before passing judgment. The 28-mile section of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona is the first of thousands of miles planned on the nation's southern and northern borders. Boeing personnel who briefed federal officials “sounded real optimistic” about the...

The Michigan Department of Agriculture inspectors were back at Greg Niewendorp’s Michigan farm this morning to gauge the results of their test for bovine tuberculosis administered Monday, and he says they found two cattle that had positive responses.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture at long last force-tested and tagged Greg Niewendorp’s twenty head of cattle today. About twenty supporters and six media representatives were in attendance, Charlevoix County Sheriff George Lasater told me late this afternoon.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant. The test wouldn't be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country. Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.