Tag Archives: education

Internet of Things

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…and default passwords.  Default passwords are foolish in any device, but here’s a particularly failing example.  A laundromat in Colorado had a security camera connected to the Internet (as is typical of security cameras), and it began hosting a particularly malicious bit of malware.

Bill Knapp, owner of Security Solutions LLC, whose firm installed the laundromat’s surveillance system, which included the security camera:

One of the hardest parts of this business is that everyone loses their passwords[.]

And when the camera manufacturer was called upon to reset the password, it could only reset it to the default password, which is well-known, as that’s how the consumer gets in to set up his system—which should include resetting the default password to an individual, hard-to-break one.

Steve McGregory, a researcher at security firm Ixia, about poorly secured devices:

Within nine seconds of turning on these things, they get hit[.]

There’s a hint there.

A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

Notice that: shared history.  This is not the same thing as possessing the same history.  Assimilation is what bridges the gap; assimilation is what brings people with widely differing histories—as widely different as English from Germans from Russians from Chinese from Japanese from…—into the jurisdictional boundary of a polity to become part of the nation that exists there.  Assimilation is what lets those folks with and from those differing histories obtain a shared history, the common history of the nation to which they’ve come and of which so many of them wish to become a part.

Assimilation is critical to nationhood because

a random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos.

Is the Department of Education Living on Borrowed Time?

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Probably not but Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY) has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to eliminate it.  It’s unlikely to pass, more’s the pity, but we can hope.  Massie’s bill is short and sweet, too, consisting of this in its entirety:

The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.

I’d add a second sentence, though: “All employees and associates of the Department of Education shall be returned to the private sector and not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government.”  I’d also add a third sentence: “All rules and letters promulgated by the Department of Education shall be null and void.”  The third one may be unnecessary from a strictly legal standpoint, but I think it’s necessary for absolute clarity.

The Wall Street Journal, in the op-ed at the link, had a slightly different view:

Our view would be to put Representative Massie’s close-down bill on hold for at least four years, while the rest of us give Mrs DeVos a chance at making good on reforms that put the students at the front of the line.

I disagree. As long as it exists, the DoEd will be a Progressive-Democrat threat to our children.  More, the Federal government has no place in our education system; eliminate its presence in altogether—no matter the good intentions of an incumbent Secretary.

There’s not even a need for a rump Department to issu[e] block grants to states based on population and performance of education systems at state level, as one commenter at the op-ed suggested.  There should be no Department, rump or full-up, and there should be no Federal money transfers at all. Aside from those block “grants” never appearing without Federal strings, there’s no reason a New York tax payer should be paying into Texas’ education system, or a Californian paying into Illinois’, or….

Senator Collins Misunderstands

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Senator Susan Collins (R, ME), in explaining her decision to vote against Betsy DeVos’ confirmation as Secretary of Education, said

She has, no doubt, done valuable work.  Her concentration on charter schools and vouchers, however, raises the question about whether or not she fully appreciates that the secretary of education’s primary focus must be on helping states and communities, parents, teachers, school board administrators, school board members, and administrators strengthen our public schools.

What a monumental lack of understanding of the primary focus of the DoEd.  The DoEd, to the extent the Federal government should be involved in non-secondary education at all, must be focused on aiding states and communities, parents, [and] teachers improve the quality of education available to the local jurisdictions’ children.  That will include, necessarily, public schools and their management, but it cannot—just as necessarily—be limited to public schools.

Full stop.

Federal Education Fail

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Reason enough to gut, if not dismantle altogether, the Department of Education is this bit of waste [emphasis in the original].  I disagree, though, that there was no effect.  Those $7 billion clearly had an effect of Arne Duncan’s cronies and those of his staffers in the upper reaches of the DoE.

Despite its gargantuan price tag, [School Improvement Grant program] SIG generated no academic gains for the students it was meant to help. Failing schools that received multi-year grants from the program to “turn around” ended up with results no better than similar schools that received zero dollars from the program. To be clear: billions spent had no effect.

From The Washington Post:

Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program—the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools—than in schools that did not.

Suspiciously,

The Education Department did not track how the money was spent, other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.

Andy Smarick, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow:

Think of what all that money could have been spent on instead.

Indeed.