Shack Attack

Rocketship Education: Blasting Off in the Bay Area

The teacher on camera in the beginning  is my girlfriend Lauren, exemplifying awesome classroom management with her 2nd graders.

Rocketship in a nutshell (my take, at least):

• Teachers specialize in either math or literacy, enabling them to delve deeper into their subject area than most elementary school teachers.
• As long as they're used intelligently and for an appropriate part of each day, computers can be more personal, differentiated, and effective than a single teacher trying to serve 30+ students.
• Money savings from the learning lab enables more professional development, more administrative support, and performance incentives.
• High standards and consistent behavior expectations across the board create a culture of passionate, inspired learning.

Rocketship is one of the only charter networks out there that passionately serves any student that wants to be there, including (and this is a rarity among charters) special needs students. They've opened up at least one new school every year since they started, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start to branch out beyond the Bay Area soon.

$95 in Ten Minutes: Negotiating with the Credit Card Companies

If you look around, there are some awesome credit card deals out there, worth hundreds of dollars or a few free plane trips for spending a set amount of money in the first 1-3 months. Assuming you never carry a balance and your credit score can take the occasional hard pull*, there's not much of a downside.

However, many of the cards charge an annual fee after the first year. You could always cancel them once your bonus miles have posted, but why not try negotiating?

CitiBank: How can I help you?

Me: I already earned the bonus miles from this card, so it's no longer worth the $95 annual fee to me. Can you waive the fee, drop more miles in my account to compensate, or cancel the card?

CitiBank: Bleep bloop, transferring you to a retention specialist.

Retention Specialist: We'll take care of that fee for you, and as a thank you for staying with us, we'll give you double miles for the next sixteen months.

Bam! Call them up, lay out the three options, and let the cards fall where they may.

* Credit inquiries are far down on the credit-score hierarchy. Open lines, credit utilization, and credit history length are much more important. I've had dozens of pulls over the last year and I'm still holding over 750. If you're curious about your credit score, go to Credit Karma

Bezos Thinks he's Steve Jobs

Haven't we seen this Keynote deck before? Quick take on the releases:

• The new $79/99 Kindles are the ultimate holiday presents this year. Small, light, idiotproof, month-long battery life, and reading-focused. Can't argue with free global internet either.
• The Kindle Fire is kind of meh if you already have a smartphone or other tablet, but is a testament to Amazon's market power and a first strike in capturing the low end of the tablet market.

Amazon to Restart CA Associates Program: Back to Reaping my $15/month Blogging Riches

Via Mark's Hangout:

On June 29, 2011 California Governor Jerry Brown signed a tax bill that forced out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on purchases made by California residents if those retailers had a "nexus" within California.  Upon the signing of the bill, Amazon immediately terminated its thousands of California-based Associates thus elminating the "nexus".  Shortly thereafter, Amazon began a referendum process to allow California voters to overturn the new law.

More recently, Amazon extended an olive branch to Governor Brown and the California legislature and a compromise bill was introduced.  Assembly Bill 155 requires Amazon to start collecting sales tax on purchases made by California residents starting in September 2012 if the Amazon is unable to come up with a federal deal in which a uniform online sales tax policy is adopted by Congress by next July.  On September 23, 2011 Governor Brown signed AB 155.

 

Gamers Help Scientists with Major Step to AIDS Cure

From Ars Technica:

The players of the online protein-folding game Foldit (which we’ve reported on before) outperformed scientists by discovering the structure of a protein involved in the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV). The M-PMV is a retrovirus, like HIV, that causes AIDS in monkeys and apes. Understanding its structure will help researchers develop antiretroviral drugs that can fight HIV—but this has been a mystery for over a decade.

Proteins consist of long chains of amino acids, molecules made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Figuring out the order of the amino acids is easy, but that's only part of the story—the amino acid chain folds into complex shapes that determine the function of the protein. Due to the incredibly high number of degrees of freedom, understanding this structure is one of the hardest problems in modern science. A lot of research has focused on designing programs dedicated to solving this problem, which is mainly an energy minimization task (the correct shape is the most stable, the one with the lowest energy).

The Foldit players were given ten different, incorrect models as a starting place. Over the course of sixteen days, players tweaked the designs, coming up with tens of thousands of variations. Then, the breakthroughs: a player named "spvincent" came up with a structure much better than any previous iteration, and two more players ("grabhorn" and "mimi") quickly improved on it. With a few more days of work, the researchers completed the solution. Achievement unlocked, indeed.

So. Freaking. Cool.