Free Republic

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...