Flicker

I don't think I've ever seen as many of these around as I have this spring. We've got one that pecks the ground outside my window half the day and spends the rest in a tree loudly calling anyone who will answer.

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Required Reading

As someone who has advocated for ten years to get school funding removed from the property tax and reassigned to less regressive taxes, I find what's going on in California extremely distressing--and eye-opening. So does Jay Gallagher.

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I Told You Things Were Bad

PZ sends this article about BookExpo in NYC. In school publishing, we used to have convention parties where companies commandeered entire museums and the shrimp and champagne just kept coming. It seems incredible today.

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Outsourcing Education

For decades, students from India have come to the U.S. to attend college. Now it appears likely that U.S. students will receive at least part of their K-12 education via India.

Back in 1977, Macmillan established an offshore unit in India to aid with production of four-color books. Today, outsourcing of book production to India is growing by 50 percent per year, with industries such as bpo offering everything from illustration and layout to writing, editing, and printing. You can make a book in India for less than half of what it costs in the States. As this article suggests, outsourcing of publishing will be a $1.1 billion industry in India by next year.

The result is inexpensive, speedily published books that look very nice. However, as an editor friend points out, they are written "in a language that sounds like it could be English, but it’s not. Instead it’s in a language that's just enough like English to make you think you understand what they’re saying, but you really don’t." The books are also, according to everyone I know in U.S. publishing who works with India, riddled with errors. If you view either of the two websites I cited, you can see what I mean.

Could this improve over time, as Indian writers learn to Americanize their language? Probably. But right now, today, your child is probably working with at least one textbook that contains materials produced in India, often with minimal oversight from U.S. publishers. That's a lot of power to cede to another country, even if it didn't directly affect my personal bottom line.

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Sotomayor and the Supremes

She's Puerto Rican by way of New York, and she's approximately like Souter in liberal bent. She has a reputation as being not-that-bright (see Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic), but even he concedes that she's generally competent and can stand up to the big boys.

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Required Reading

Krugman on CA: a cautionary tale about capping property taxes and relying on income taxes (among other things).

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New Right-Wing Blog

This anonymous blog lays out GOP talking points for our county and the city of Ithaca. It's an interesting, if somewhat demented, view of the place where we live.

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