monkey nonsense

Some Asian Americans Say Colleges Expect More From Them

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page A10

Robert Shaw, an educational consultant based in Garden City, N.Y., was working with a very bright Chinese American student who feared the Ivy League would not notice her at New Jersey’s Holmdel High, where 22 percent of the students were Asian American, and she was only in the top 20 percent of her high-scoring class.

So, Shaw said, she and her parents took his daring advice to change their address. They moved 10 miles north to Keyport, N.J., where the average SAT score was 300 points lower and there were almost no Asians. She also entered, at his suggestion, the Miss Teen New Jersey contest, not a typical activity for the budding scholar.

It worked, Shaw said. His client became class valedictorian, won the talent portion of the Miss Teen competition playing piano and got into Yale and MIT.

“As admissions strategists, our experience is that Asian Americans must meet higher objective standards, such as SAT scores and GPAs, and higher subjective standards than the rest of the applicant pool,” he said. “Our students need to do a lot more in order to stand out.”

Asian American students have higher average SAT scores than any other government-monitored ethnic group, and selective colleges routinely reject them in favor of African American, Hispanic and even white applicants with lower scores in order to have more diverse campuses and make up for past discrimination.

Many Asian Americans and some educators wonder: Is that fair? Why shouldn’t young people of Asian descent have more of an advantage in the selective college admissions system for being violin-playing, science-fair winning, high-scoring achievers?

“Chinese and all Asian Americans are penalized for their values on academic excellence by being required to have a higher level of achievement, academic and non-academic, than any other demographic group,” said Ed Chin, a New Jersey physician who has campaigned for years for a change in college admissions procedures.

Yet, Chin notes, Harvard humanities professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently estimated that two-thirds of blacks at Harvard are not descendants of American slaves but the middle-class children of relatively recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. “Why should they deserve admission with lowered standards — relatively speaking — based solely on the color of their skin over a high-achieving Asian American living in a Chinatown ghetto or a black ghetto, or a poor white from the slums of New York City?” Chin asked.

At some selective colleges, the percentage of Asians on the admittance list is reportedly significantly lower than the percentage of Asians who applied. But colleges usually do not release the ethnic breakdown of their applicants, so there has been little research on the matter.

Stanford University and Brown University, however, studied their admissions data in the late 1980s and found enough evidence of cultural bias and stereotypes to alter procedures.

“Since then, the Stanford staff has been very careful to guard against all kinds of bias in the selection process,” said Robin Mamlet, Stanford’s dean of admissions. For several years, admissions staff members were trained annually on such issues as shyness to be sure as little bias as possible affected the decision process, she said.

About 25 percent of Stanford undergraduates are of Asian descent, higher than most other such similarly selective colleges as Georgetown, 10 percent; Princeton, 12 percent; Yale, 13 percent; and Columbia, 14 percent. But Mamlet said she cannot be sure if Stanford’s higher percentage is a result of different admissions procedures or its location in Northern California, with a large population of high-performing Asian Americans. More than 40 percent of undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, are of Asian descent.

Harvard admissions director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said: “We have no evidence that our admissions committee disadvantages Asian American applicants.” Seventeen percent of its undergraduates are of Asian descent, and the university was cleared in 1990 of alleged racial discrimination against Asians. The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said whites were admitted at a higher rate but because they included more recruited athletes and children of alumni.

Scholars say Asian cultures tend to emphasize education and say they are not surprised that Asian Americans, who make up 4 percent of the U.S. population, are found in much higher concentrations in selective colleges. In their 1996 book “Beyond the Classroom,” Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown and Sanford M. Dornbusch said that “of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, ethnicity was the most important. . . . In terms of school achievement, it is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents, or to have a mother who is able to stay at home full time.”

Many Americans, including some of Asian descent, have grown accustomed to seemingly irrational and unfair admissions decisions by selective colleges and shrug off the Asian numbers as something that can’t be helped.

But Arun Mantri, born in India with children at Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, said he thinks the system should change. Asian American applicants’ chances “would improve dramatically if race was not used as a factor in admissions, perhaps at the cost of the white applicants, something that only a few selective schools have dared to do,” he said.

Victoria Hsiao, who works with Shaw at the admissions strategy firm Ivy Success, said that when she attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, “my Asian friends and I all tried to make ourselves stand out, as we did not want to be stereotyped as Asians with good grades, playing the piano and doing scientific research.” She joined the debate team instead of the math team and got into Cornell.

Shaw said about 40 percent of his clients are Asian, but he tells all that they need to learn about great but lesser-known colleges. “Students can get a quality education at hundreds of colleges throughout the country,” he said, “so parents should definitely expand their horizons to other target competitive institutions beyond the Ivy League.”

That is not enough for Chin, who compares the limits on Asian admissions to the quotas that Ivy League colleges used to place on Jewish admissions. “There obviously needs to be a change to level the playing field,” Chin said. Some estimates put the enrollment of Jews at Harvard as high as 30 percent, he said, “and admissions for them is indeed race and ethnic-group blind.”

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55160-2005Mar21.html

i won’t be running in the pittsburgh race for the cure this year . i had wanted to go back up specifically for the race and see if we couldn’t have good ole Team PMONK back for another year. yes, that would’ve meant going away for mother’s day weekend… my mom would’ve been so rawr! but i was hoping to leave saturday evening, sleep in pittsburgh, run and be home in time for sunday’s dinner. not the bestest plan, but now it turns out my grandparents and cousin from taiwan who rarely visit will be staying with my family after my cousin’s marriage (yay!) before we hand them off to my uncle and aunt up in pittsburgh for my other cousin’s graduation (yay!)

i’m sad i won’t be running this year… anyone interested in running the race for the cure in DC? it’s in early june (maybe the first sunday of the month). in some ways, it could be better than pittsburgh’s! no crazy hills, scenic monuments/buildings/parks to run around, warmer weather (i hope it won’t be too hot by then, i fear it may) tho i guess it’s more of an effort to get to the race route (downtown DC) than in pittsburgh (right by CMU)

let me know. i’d like to still try to run

apparently i am a different race than i think i am…

Are you a different race than you think you are?
created with QuizFarm.com

Gap Stokes Debate Over Teaching Approaches, Curricula

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A12

Jerilynn Hoffman couldn’t get her young son to read much until she found a book that wasn’t her cup of tea but definitely was his: “The Day My Butt Went Psycho.”

Sharon Grover had a different problem: Her son loved books early in elementary school but mysteriously lost interest at about third grade, declaring: “My mother is a librarian, but I hate to read.” He did, however, start reading again for pleasure — in his twenties.

Enticing boys to read — and to keep reading — is the flip side of the sometimes fierce debate about girls and their math and science abilities, and both issues are receiving new attention as educators focus on how boys and girls learn differently.

The controversy about gender and learning was stoked anew when Harvard University President Larry Summers recently questioned girls’ intrinsic abilities in math and science. Then first lady Laura Bush spoke about her new effort to help boys, who she said are falling dangerously behind girls in such areas as literacy.

Some educators have said that the concern over boys is exaggerated and that boys end up doing just fine, holding top jobs and being paid higher average salaries than women. Others, however, have said boys face an unprecedented literary crisis that limits their opportunities, citing studies showing that the gap between the sexes — dating back to the 19th century — has increased markedly.

“Part of it is biological and part of it is sociological, but boys are definitely drifting down,” said Jon Scieszka, author of the “The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales,” and founder of the Web site www.guysread.com, which is aimed at helping interest boys in reading. “We’ve been testing kids in America for the last 25 years and finding out that boys are doing worse than girls,” he said. “But we don’t do enough to change that.”

Exactly what should be done, however, is unclear, because there is no consensus on how much genetics, environment and culture are responsible for the gap. And it is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon: Stephen Gorard, education professor at the University of York in England, reviewed scores for 22 countries and discovered gaps in every one, despite differences in school setups and curricula.

What is known is that boys generally take longer to learn to read than girls; they read less and are less enthusiastic about it; and they have more trouble understanding narrative texts yet are better at absorbing informational texts. Those findings are from a literacy study done in 2002, “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys,” by Michael W. Smith, a Temple University professor, and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Boise State University English education professor.

Scientists have said that boys are born with smaller language centers in their brains — and larger spatial centers — than girls and that boys develop language abilities at a slower rate, though eventually they catch up.

Girls generally learn to read and understand language sooner than boys, which helps to explain why early remedial reading classes are most often heavily populated with boys, teachers say.

The new push to have children learn key skills earlier — reading in kindergarten and first grade, for instance — works against boys, some educators say.

“It goes totally against the brain research showing how young boys and girls develop,” said JoAnn Deak, a school psychologist and co-author of “Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters.”

Most teachers are not schooled in dealing with children’s biological differences, experts say, and many teachers beyond the third-grade level do not understand that they can do a lot to build up students’ reading skills and confidence.

“If we don’t teach reading and writing to boys in a boy-friendly way, they will continue to fall behind,” said Michael Gurian, author and co-founder of the Spokane, Wash.-based Gurian Institute, which trains educators in gender differences in learning.

The notion of confidence in reading is central to the issue, said Smith, the Temple professor. He said that people like to do what they are good at and that when boys stumble early in learning to read, it is often a skill they never warm to.

Another factor, said Hoffman, a reading specialist at Pattie Elementary School in Prince William County, is that it is more difficult for many boys to sit still for classes, much less to “cuddle up with a book.”

“They are just more active,” she said.

Many schools have made an effort to incorporate into their curricula more books thought to appeal to boys, but Smith said he doubts that book choice will make the difference without changing the context in which boys are taught.

Meanwhile, a growing number of experts have said that what constitutes “good reading” might need redefining — much of what boys often like to read is not highly respected by the English teachers trying to get their students to love “King Lear.” Perhaps, Hoffman and other educators said, the very definition of literacy needs to be rewritten.

“A lot of teachers think of reading as reading stories,” said Lee Galda, professor of children’s literature at the University of Minnesota. “And in fact, a lot of boys, and not just boys, like nonfiction. But we keep concentrating on novels or short stories and sometimes don’t think of reading nonfiction as reading. But in fact it is, and it is extremely important.”

Teachers and parents have said boys generally prefer stories with adventure, suspense and fantasy and tend toward reading nonfiction stories and non-narrative informational books, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Young boys revel in what Hoffman calls “potty humor,” material many parents don’t think is appropriate but that helped get her son interested in books. Boys like graphic novels, too, but not stories about relationships.

In a middle-school reading group that Grover runs at the Arlington Public Library, where she is youth services selections specialist, boys and girls challenged each other to read outside their preferred genres. “One of the boys read ‘The Princess Diaries,’ and he just couldn’t understand what anybody would see to like in that.”

Aaron Katz, 12, a sixth-grader in Montgomery County, said he “never liked reading books — and I still don’t.” But he does devour car magazines and likes the sports pages of newspapers. Somehow, though, he doesn’t consider that reading.

from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35057-2005Mar14.html

would u be interested in having a crappy movie marathon? you KNOW you are!!!

if so:
a. what movies would you like to see? so far movie ideas include: from justin to kelly, crossroads, glitter, you got served, gigli. please suggest others =D

b. how long should the marathon be? in other words, how many crappy movies would be tolerable in one sitting- 2, 3, 13?

c. when would be a good time to hold it? possible dates: july 4th weekend, random weekend during the summer, please specify a couple of dates that would work for you.

and if you are not interested in a crappy movie marathon, i cannot be your friend =( jk

“Gizoogle is the illegitimate, thugged-out cousin of Google that translates its search results into Snoop Dogg slang, or izzle-speak, a sort of nuevo pig Latin. ”

link to article

hahaha, fo shizzle. Fo realizzle. It’d be awesome if newspapers/news broadcasters actually referred to the VP as “Vizzy President Dizzle Cheney” and Condoleezza Rice as “Condoleezza Rizzle.” There’s also full translations of MSN and CNN’s main news pages hahaha. Pretty funny to read.

gizoogle.com

By Stephen A. Crockett Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2005; Page C01

There are words and phrases that manipulate their way into the collective language of coolness — making them so uncool.

“You da man!” is one such phrase. A few years ago, it had 50-year-old guys in office slacks pointing finger guns.

And who can forget “Wassup?!”

After this story, we can add all things “izzle.”

Fo shizzle. Fo realizzle.

Because now, for the Internet gangsta inside us all, there is Gizoogle.

Reader be warned: This isn’t a family-friendly Web site.

Gizoogle is the illegitimate, thugged-out cousin of Google that translates its search results into Snoop Dogg slang, or izzle-speak, a sort of nuevo pig Latin. Enter “Vice President Dick Cheney” in the search field and it turns up “Vizzy President Dizzle Cheney.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is “Condoleezza Rizzle.” It then supplies the same information on the subjects as Google does — except it’s izzle-filled and obscenity laden.

We can thank MTV for this.

MTV is the hub for izzle-isms and Snoop Dogg’s sketch comedy show, “Doggy Fizzle Televizzle.” Thus, giz-illions of izzles reach places like York, Pa., and people like John Beatty, who created Gizoogle.

“I started the site a few weeks ago,” says Beatty, a 28-year-old Web designer. “I was talking to my buddy on AOL Instant Messenger and he always talks in that izzle-speak, and I do it to my wife all the time and she hates it. I was thinking that it might be cool if there was a site that searched and all of the answers came up in that format.”

It started as a joke and a homage to Snoop Dogg for bringing izzle-speak back to the hip lexicon. But now the Web site is clocking 60,000 hits a day, according to Beatty. In February, the site landed at No. 4 on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List.” Only U2′s “All Because of You” video, Patricia Arquette in “Medium” and the movie “Aliens of the Deep” were rated cooler.

The roots of izzle-speak are fuzzizzle. But it might trace back to 1981 and a Philly songwriter named Frankie Smith, who released “Double Dutch Bus,” a version of the children’s jump rope game. Smith’s original song started out as an expletive-laced freestyle diss aimed at SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) for turning him down for a job as a bus driver. When Smith played the song for studio engineers, they told him to clean it up. He did, and even brought in neighborhood kids to the studio to add pig Latin. At the end of the song, he calls out his own version of the “Name Game” — “Bilzarbra, Mitzery, Milzetty . . .” And he and the children can be heard changing “Double Dutch” to “Dilzzouble Dizzutch.” The song stayed at the top of the Billboard charts for almost six weeks and sold more than 4 million copies.

Throughout the years, other hip-hop artists would add -izzle suffixes or “iz” infixes to their lyrics. Retired-yet-still-recording rapper Jay-Z spouted in Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot (Remix)”: “Got haters on my jizzock / plus the frickin cizzops / all of whom want to hit me with shizzots til I drizzop.” Then Snoop D-O-Double Gizzle, as he sometimes calls himself, added fuelizzle to the fizire with “Doggy Fizzle Televizzle,” which began airing in 2003 with characters such as schoolteacher Mr. Dizzle.

Now we have Gizoogle.

In geek-speak, here is how the site works: Using a programming language called PHP, the program counts the syllables and vowels and adds “izzle” whenever possible and also throws in some of Snoop’s lyrics. As a homage to Snoop’s show, “I made it so that television pops up as televizzle every time,” says Beatty, whose full-time job is running Originalicons.com, a Web site that provides instant-messaging buddy icons.

The Gizoogle site also offers a translator called a “textilizer.” If you input the words to something, say, sweet and innocent, such as the “Barney” theme song, and hit enter you get something like: I love you / you love me / we’re one stoked family / witta bootylicious big hug and a kiss fizzle from me ta you / won’t you say you love me, too?

The Gizoogle site mirrors Google’s multicolored lettering, but the O’s in Gizoogle are filled with chromed-out wheel rims.

“When I first put the site up, I had these crappy gold spoke rims on there and then my friend was like, you have got to get some spinners on there,” Beatty says.

Google officials aren’t commenting, but this isn’t the first time Google has had to deal with folks biting its style. In 2004, lawyers for Google challenged Booble, a porn search engine. Booble changed its look and is still up and running.

And Beatty isn’t the only one out there izzilating. The master himself, Snoop Dogg, has his own version on his Web site, SnoopDogg.com. “After I put the site up, someone called me and told about Snoop’s thing,” Beatty says.

Gizoogle “is a parody site,” he says. ” . . . I think that the people at Google have a pretty good sense of humor. It is all in good fun. . . . I look at this like a science project. I am just trying to see how far I can take it.”

from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21771-2005Mar9.html

Tuesday, March 8, 2005 Posted: 12:13 PM EST (1713 GMT)

COTTONWOOD, Idaho (AP) — Some of the best views in the tiny farming community of Cottonwood can be seen through the eyes of a dog.

Well, technically, through the temples of a giant, dog-shaped bed-and-breakfast.

The big dog, known as Sweet Willy Colton to his owners, opened for business last summer southeast of Lewiston.

“He was originally going to be a billboard, but over dinner one night in 1998 one of us said, ‘What if it was a bed-and- breakfast?”‘ said Dennis Sullivan, Sweet Willy’s creator and owner of Dog Bark Park. “We scribbled some plans out on a napkin that night.”

Dennis and his wife, Frances Conklin, built the 35-foot beagle over the next several years, while maintaining their primary business, an unusual gift shop where they sell wooden dogs carved with a chain saw.

Sweet Willy’s accommodations are bigger than they appear from the outside. Weary travelers can freshen up in the bathroom, appropriately housed in Willy’s hindquarters. A bed, bookshelf, table and breakfast bar take up Willy’s stomach.

And those who climb the ladder to Willy’s nose find a loft, complete with board games and another sleeping space snuggled in the snout.

“When honeymooners come, we might put in a bottle of champagne or some bubble bath, and when anniversary couples come we might put in flowers,” Conklin said. “We try to keep sort of personal little treats around.”

The beagle bed-and-breakfast grew out of the sales of their carved dogs.

“I carve the head and tail and Frances does everything in between,” Sullivan said. “I started about 20 years ago. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis, I just didn’t want to be a general contractor anymore.”

Sullivan was interested in the folksy craft of chain saw art, but found most artists were making bears or eagles. He chose to carve dogs instead, starting with the beagle.

He branched out into Labradors, spaniels, shepherds and sheep dogs, even carving a series of chain saw sculptures depicting Seaman, Meriwether Lewis’ beloved pet Newfoundland.

Now Sullivan and Conklin are veterans of home shopping network QVC, selling thousands of the carved canines when featured on the show a few years ago, he said. Visitors to their gift shop can have their own pet immortalized through a personalized carving.

Their dogs are identifiable through an obedience tag and a red bandanna, Conklin said.

“The dog tag shows they’re licensed, and the bandanna shows they’ve been through obedience training — they’ll stay and be quiet,” she said.

The couple moves through the carvings quickly. Each dog is cut from a wooden slab, using a template and a scroll saw. Then, using a chain saw, Conklin cuts out the legs and shapes the back before passing the piece to Sullivan, who saws the head and tail. The sculpture is painted, licensed and set out for display with the rest of the animals at Dog Bark Park.

They decided to build a bigger dog to draw travelers to the business, which sits on property bordering U.S. Highway 95.

Sweet Willy’s predecessor, 12-foot Toby, still watches over the business. But to Sullivan and Conklin, bigger is always better — at least when it comes to beagles.

“Once word got out that we were planning to build a bigger one, people kept asking when it would be finished,” Sullivan said. “Part of the reason for building it was the process. I wanted to enjoy building the dog. So I used to say it was guaranteed to be finished by 2050, or two weeks earlier if the weather holds.”

“The ears are made out of carpet and they’re 14 feet long. You have to tie them down when you’re up there, or they’ll push you off the scaffolding if they catch a breeze,” he said.

Conklin and Sullivan kept the inside rooms of the dog rounded, mimicking the outside of the structure. The rounded shape made interior construction especially difficult, Sullivan said.

“I’d get frustrated, but one visitor told me that if you ever get discouraged, think of the people driving buy with a smile when they see your dog,” Sullivan said. “It brought me back to what this should be. Of course, we’re in this business to make money, but we could use a little smile once in a while too.”

from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/03/08/dog.bark.park.ap/index.html

cleaning out my xanga… i found an old entry i posted. it was an email my mom sent me and my sister before she went to taiwan. i found it hilarious:

Subject: phone in Taiwan

hi Mei and jei

there has phone in Taiwan, please flowing the steps:

First- Dial ###-###-####, they will ask you what you want to use English (Dial 1) or Chinese (dial 2)

Then- Dial Card Number ###-####-####

Then- Dial ###-###-###-######,
### -### is country code, ### is area code, ###### is phone
Number.

Then- you mon will Jump Out!

get it?

If there is no more minutes, ask dad give you other card, and the steps may be difference, it’s depend on which phone company.

Sometime, we’ll stay in Taichung apartment, you can try to call Taichung apartment Phone (###) area cord, ####### is phone Number. (I will check A-MA is this right number nor not, and let you know tonight, ok?) For sure, A-MA have knee surgeons on October 21, I will stay with her at hospital a week, after check out we will stay Taichung Apartment.

I can’t tell you exactly where am I at that moment, but you can try both phone number. Small uncle said may be loan me a cell phone, if so, i will call you.

Love you,

mom

Wednesday, March 9, 2005 Posted: 1:36 PM EST (1836 GMT)

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas (AP) — Prosecutors hoping for a witness in a murder case to roll over were barking up the wrong tree.

They sent out a batch of subpoenas for anyone who had contact with Albert K. Smith while he was jailed awaiting his murder trial. One of those subpoenas went out to 5-year-old Murphy Smith — Smith’s dog, it turned out.

The defendant had written his dog a letter from his cell, and that is how the shih tzu’s name got on the witness list.

Prosecutors realized the mistake on Tuesday after the defendant’s brother brought in Murphy to answer the subpoena and a deputy would not let them into the courthouse because no dogs were allowed.

Prosecutor Robin Green said she apologized to the brother for any inconvenience, and added: “The dog was friendly enough and probably would have been a very cooperative witness.”

Albert Smith is accused of shooting to death his ex-wife’s boyfriend.

from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/09/dog.subpoenaed.ap/index.html