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No one wants a more rapid transition to better math instruction and student skills than I and others at the UW. We see firsthand the impact of poor math skills and preparation. But it is absolutely unfair to threaten and deny graduation to our high school seniors when we have provided them with an inferior math education.

The math standards have just recently been changed..they are improved but really not good enough. Many of our districts are using terrible textbooks—long on talk and short on real math. Seattle has extraordinarily poor “discovery” math books at all three levels, and major districts like Issaquah are determined to use books found to be unsound by state mathematicians. Many teachers, and particularly elementary school teachers, don’t have sufficient math backgrounds. Fixing these problems and changing the attitudes in our problematic Ed schools will take time.

I don’t think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don’t think they realize how much it matters that it’s broken.

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

The global temperature-monitoring network consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region with the help of supercomputers. Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic, where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area. Climatologists refer to the problem as the “Arctic hole.”

The scientists at the Hadley Center simply used the global average value for the hole, ignoring the fact that it has become significantly warmer in the Arctic, says Rahmstorf. But a NASA team from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which does make the kinds of adjustments for the Arctic data that Rahmstorf believes are necessary, arrives at a flat temperature curve for the last five years that is similar to that of their British colleagues.

That the Emerald City is home to one of the country’s foremost weather academics is very Seattle. Yet stylistically, the Long Island–reared Mass is anything but. A passionate “math activist” who would like to return to the days of calculator-free “explicit instruction” in elementary, middle, and secondary schools, Mass and a pair of co-plaintiffs currently have a lawsuit pending against Seattle Public Schools, in which they claim the District’s shift to a “Discovery Math” curriculum has widened the achievement gap between Caucasian and minority students. (A January court date has been set.)

“Instead of getting the answer right, it’s far more important to write an essay about your thought process,” says Mass of an instructional movement he claims has led to a severe deterioration of math skills among his collegiate students. “I’ve had students in my office crying because they’ve had to give up their dream of becoming meteorologists. They couldn’t pass the math. The most demanding aspects of my field are being dominated by people overseas.”

Not surprisingly, they often get asked to code for equity instead of cash. Todd (Sampson) particularly wants to say yes but our group knows that doing so too easily leads to three scenarios:

- Bad: owning a pile of worthless stock in early stage deals that never happened.

- Worse: owning early stage stock in a phenomenal startup but not making any money because all the returns are derived from pro rata participation in later rounds.

- Terrible: making money solely via later pro rata participation as described in Worse, and therefore being an accomplice in crushing the Common, knocking down the Series A, and firing the Founder.

The nation is set to begin an ambitious program, backed by $19 billion in government incentives, to accelerate the adoption of computerized patient records in doctors’ offices and hospitals, replacing ink and paper. There is wide agreement that the conversion will bring better care and lower costs, saving the American health care system up to $100 billion a year by some estimates.

But a new study comparing 3,000 hospitals at various stages in the adoption of computerized health records has found little difference in the cost and quality of care. “The way electronic medical records are used now has not yet had a real impact on the quality or cost of health care,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the research project.

The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more “choice” and “competition”) to expand government power. But why would a plan tied to Medicare control health spending, when Medicare hasn’t? From 1970 to 2007, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose 9.2 percent annually compared to the 10.4 percent of private insurers — and the small difference partly reflects cost shifting. Congress periodically improves Medicare benefits, and there’s a limit to how much squeezing reimbursement rates can check costs. Doctors and hospitals already complain that low payments limit services or discourage physicians from taking Medicare patients.

Even [Yale Political Scientist and Public Plan idea creator Jacob] Hacker concedes that without reimbursement rates close to Medicare’s, the public plan would founder. If it had to “negotiate rates directly with providers” — do what private insurers do — the public plan could have “a very hard time” making inroads, he writes. Hacker opposes such weakened versions of the public plan.

By contrast, a favored public plan would probably doom today’s private insurance. Although some congressional proposals limit enrollment eligibility in the public plan, pressures to liberalize would be overwhelming. Why should some under-65 Americans enjoy lower premiums and others not? In one study that assumed widespread eligibility, the Lewin Group estimated that 103 million people — half the number with private insurance — would switch to the public plan. Private insurance might become a specialty product.

Many would say: Whoopee! Get rid of the sinister insurers. Bring on a government single-payer system. But if that’s the agenda, why not debate it directly? It’s not insurers that cause high health costs; they’re simply the middlemen. It’s the fragmented delivery system and open-ended reimbursement. Would strict regulation of doctors, hospitals and patients under a single-payer system provide control? Or would genuine competition among health plans over price and quality work better?

That’s the debate we need, but in truth, doctors, hospitals and patients don’t want to be limited, whether by government or markets. Congress reflects public opinion. Fearing a real debate, we fake it.

“Along the way, here we are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring,” said Bartz, who said the company’s 6 percent operating margins were “pathetic” and “unacceptable.”

“Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect,” Bartz said.

Yahoo executives said the company would invest in editorial staff to produce more original features and tweak its online products to keep users on the site longer and boost advertising revenue.