text:
This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org
Testing for Brute Force (OWASP-AT-004)
OWASP Testing Guide v3 Table of Contents
This article is part of the OWASP Testing Guide v3. The entire OWASP Testing Guide v3 can be downloaded here.
OWASP at the moment is working at the OWASP Testing Guide v4: you can browse the Guide here
Brief Summary
Brute forcing consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's statement. In web application testing, the problem we are going to face with the most is very often connected with the need of having a valid user account to access the inner part of the application. Therefore we are going to check different types of authentication schema and the effectiveness of different brute-force attacks.
Related Security Activities
Description of Brute Force Vulnerabilities
See the OWASP article on Brute Force Attacks.
Description of the Issue
A great majority of web applications provide a way for users to authenticate themselves. By having knowledge of user's identity it's possible to create protected areas or, more generally, to have the application behave differently upon the logon of different users. In general, there are several methods for a user to authenticate to a system, like certificates, biometric devices, OTP (One Time Password) tokens. However, in web applications, we usually find a combination of user ID and password. Therefore, it's possible to carry out an attack to retrieve a valid user account and password, by trying to enumerate many (i.e., dictionary attack) or all the possible candidates.
After a successful brute force attack, a malicious user could have access to:
- Confidential information / data;
- Private sections of a web application could disclose confidential documents, users' profile data, financial status, bank details, users' relationships, etc.
- Administration panels;
- These sections are used by webmasters to manage (modify, delete, add) web application content, manage user provisioning, assign different privileges to the users, etc.
- Availability of further attack vectors;
- Private sections of a web application could hide dangerous vulnerabilities and contain advanced functionalities not available to public users.
Black Box testing and example
To leverage different brute forcing attacks, it's important to discover the type of authentication method used by the application, because the techniques and the tools to be used may change accordingly.
Discovery Authentication Methods
Unless an entity decides to apply a sophisticated web authentication, the two most commonly seen methods are as follows:
- HTTP Authentication;
- Basic Access Authentication
- Digest Access Authentication
- HTML Form-based Authentication;
The following sections provide some good information on identifying the authentication mechanism employed during a blackbox test.
HTTP authentication
There are two native HTTP access authentication schemes available to an organization – Basic and Digest.
- Basic Access Authentication
Basic Access Authentication assumes clients will identify themselves with a login name (e.g., "owasp") and password (e.g., "password"). When the client browser initially accesses a site using this scheme, the web server will reply with a 401 response containing a "WWW-Authenticate" header, containing a value of "Basic" and the name of the protected realm (e.g., WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="wwwProtectedSite"). The client browser will then prompt the user for her login name and password for that realm. The client browser then responds to the web server with an "Authorization" header, containing the value "Basic" and the base64-encoded concatenation of the login name, a colon, and the password (e.g., Authorization: Basic b3dhc3A6cGFzc3dvcmQ=). Unfortunately, the authentication reply can be easily decoded should an attacker sniff the transmission.
Request and Response Test:
1. Client sends standard HTTP request for resource:
GET /members/docs/file.pdf HTTP/1.1 Host: target
2. The web server states that the requested resource is located in a protected directory.
3. Server sends response with HTTP 401 Authorization Required:
HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2006 12:52:40 GMT WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="User Realm" Content-Length: 401 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
4. Browser displays challenge pop-up for username and password data entry.
5. Client resubmits HTTP Request with credentials included:
GET /members/docs/file.pdf HTTP/1.1 Host: target Authorization: Basic b3dhc3A6cGFzc3dvcmQ=
6. Server compares client information to its credentials list.
7. If the credentials are valid, the server sends the requested content. If the authorization fails, the server resends HTTP status code 401. If the user clicks Cancel the browser will likely display an error message. If an attacker is able to intercept the request from step 5, the string
could simply be base64 decoded as follows (Base64 Decoded):
If the tester is able to intercept the HTTP request of a basic authentication request, it is not necessary to apply brute-force techniques to uncover the credentials. Simply use a base64 decoder on the sniffed request. However, if the tester is unable to intercept the HTTP request, the tester should use brute force tools.
- Digest Access Authentication
Digest Access Authentication expands upon the security of Basic Access Authentication by using a one-way cryptographic hashing algorithm (MD5) to encrypt authentication data and, secondly, adding a single use (connection unique) "nonce" value set by the web server. This value is used by the client browser in the calculation of a hashed password response. While the password is obscured by the use of the cryptographic hashing and the use of the nonce value precludes the threat of a replay attack, the login name is submitted in clear text.
Request and Response Test:
1. Here is an example of the initial Response header when handling an HTTP Digest target:
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized WWW-Authenticate: Digest realm="OwaspSample", nonce="Ny8yLzIwMDIgMzoyNjoyNCBQTQ", opaque="0000000000000000", \ stale=false, algorithm=MD5, qop="auth"
2. The Subsequent response headers with valid credentials would look like this:
GET /example/owasp/test.asmx HTTP/1.1 Accept: */* Authorization: Digest username="owasp", realm="OwaspSample", qop="auth", algorithm="MD5", uri="/example/owasp/test.asmx", nonce="Ny8yLzIwMDIgMzoyNjoyNCBQTQ", nc=00000001, cnonce="c51b5139556f939768f770dab8e5277a", opaque="0000000000000000", response="2275a9ca7b2dadf252afc79923cd3823"
HTML Form-based Authentication
While both HTTP access authentication schemes may appear suitable for commercial use over the Internet, particularly when used over an SSL encrypted session, many organizations have chosen to utilize custom HTML and application level authentication procedures, in order to provide a more sophisticated authentication procedure.
Source code taken from a HTML form:
<form method="POST" action="login"> <input type="text" name="username"> <input type="password" name="password"> </form>
Brute force Attacks
After having listed the different types of authentication methods for a web application, we will explain several types of brute force attacks.
- Dictionary Attack
Dictionary-based attacks consist of automated scripts and tools that will try to guess usernames and passwords from a dictionary file. A dictionary file can be tuned and compiled to cover words probably used by the owner of the account that a malicious user is going to attack. The attacker can gather information (via active/passive reconnaissance, competitive intelligence, dumpster diving, social engineering) to understand the user, or build a list of all unique words available on the website.
- Search Attacks
Search attacks will try to cover all possible combinations of a given character set and a given password length range. This kind of attack is very slow because the space of possible candidates is quite big. For example, given a known user ID, the total number of passwords to try, up to 8 characters in length, is equal to 26^(8) in a lower alpha charset (more than 200 billion possible passwords!).
- Rule-based search attacks
To increase the combination space coverage without slowing too much of the process, it's suggested to create good rules to generate candidates. For example, "John the Ripper" can generate password variations from part of the username or modify through a preconfigured mask words in the input (e.g., 1st round "pen" --> 2nd round "p3n" --> 3rd round "p3np3n").
Bruteforcing HTTP Basic Authentication
raven@blackbox /hydra $ ./hydra -L users.txt -P words.txt www.site.com http-head /private/ Hydra v5.3 (c) 2006 by van Hauser / THC - use allowed only for legal purposes. Hydra (http://www.thc.org) starting at 2009-07-04 18:15:17 [DATA] 16 tasks, 1 servers, 1638 login tries (l:2/p:819), ~102 tries per task [DATA] attacking service http-head on port 80 [STATUS] 792.00 tries/min, 792 tries in 00:01h, 846 todo in 00:02h [80][www] host: 10.0.0.1 login: owasp password: password [STATUS] attack finished for www.site.com (waiting for childs to finish) Hydra (http://www.thc.org) finished at 2009-07-04 18:16:34
Bruteforcing HTTP Digest Authentication
za@think/$ hydra -l zaki -P test.txt -vV localhost http-get /forbidden-d2 Hydra v6.5 (c) 2011 by van Hauser / THC and David Maciejak - use allowed only for legal purposes. Hydra (http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra) starting at 2011-08-26 14:30:09 [VERBOSE] More tasks defined than login/pass pairs exist. Tasks reduced to 5. [DATA] 5 tasks, 1 servers, 5 login tries (l:1/p:5), ~1 tries per task [DATA] attacking service http-head on port 80 [VERBOSE] Resolving addresses ... done C:HEAD /~za/forbidden-d2 HTTP/1.0 Host: localhost Authorization: Digest username="zaki", realm="realm", response="f7cfc5844e0ca7fffdd38be2c89fccc5", nonce="vg/mg2OrBAA=544ece2e647da521b6adebed9b7cc678adff0bb7", cnonce="hydra", nc=00000001, algorithm=MD5, qop=auth, uri="/~za/forbidden-d2" User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (Hydra) S:HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:30:09 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Ubuntu) Location: http://localhost/~za/forbidden-d2/ Vary: Accept-Encoding Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 A [80][www] host: 127.0.0.1 login: zaki password: zaki Hydra (http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra) finished at 2011-08-26 14:30:09
Bruteforcing HTML Form Based Authentication
raven@blackbox /hydra $ ./hydra -L users.txt -P words.txt www.site.com https-post-form "/index.cgi:login&name=^USER^&password=^PASS^&login=Login:Not allowed" & Hydra v5.3 (c) 2006 by van Hauser / THC - use allowed only for legal purposes. Hydra (http://www.thc.org)starting at 2009-07-04 19:16:17 [DATA] 16 tasks, 1 servers, 1638 login tries (l:2/p:819), ~102 tries per task [DATA] attacking service http-post-form on port 443 [STATUS] attack finished for wiki.intranet (waiting for childs to finish) [443] host: 10.0.0.1 login: owasp password: password [STATUS] attack finished for www.site.com (waiting for childs to finish) Hydra (http://www.thc.org) finished at 2009-07-04 19:18:34
Gray Box testing and example
Partial knowledge of password and account details
When a tester has some information about length or password (account) structure, it's possible to perform a bruteforce attack with a higher probability of success. In fact, by limiting the number of characters and defining the password length, the total number of password values significantly decreases.
Memory Trade Off Attacks
To perform a Memory Trade Off Attack, the tester needs at least a password hash previously obtained by the tester by exploiting flaws in the application (e.g., SQL Injection) or sniffing HTTP traffic. Nowadays, the most common attacks of this kind are based on Rainbow Tables, a special type of lookup table used in recovering the plaintext password from a ciphertext generated by a one-way hash.
Rainbow tables are an optimization of Hellman's Memory Trade Off Attack, where the reduction algorithm is used to create chains with the purpose to compress the data output generated by computing all possible candidates.
Tables are specific to the hash function they were created for, e.g., MD5 tables can only crack MD5 hashes. The powerful RainbowCrack program was later developed that can generate and use rainbow tables for a variety of character sets and hashing algorithms, including LM hash, MD5, SHA1, etc.
- Philippe Oechslin: Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off - http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/pub/lasec/doc/Oech03.pdf
- OPHCRACK (the time-memory-trade-off-cracker) - http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/~oechslin/projects/ophcrack/
- Project RainbowCrack - http://www.antsight.com/zsl/rainbowcrack/
- Bruter: http://sourceforge.net/projects/worawita/
- THC Hydra: http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra/
- John the Ripper: http://www.openwall.com/john/
- Brutus: http://www.hoobie.net/brutus/
- Basic Auth Bruteforcer: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.firebird.basicauthbruteforcer
- Cain & Abel: http://www.oxid.it/cain.html


text:
Show only items with MIT Guide Specificity Score at or above: (range: 0 to 100) Display data as a density graph:
This track shows the DNA sequences targetable by CRISPR RNA guides using the Cas9 enzyme from S. pyogenes (PAM: NGG) over the entire mouse (mm39) genome. CRISPR target sites were annotated with predicted specificity (off-target effects) and predicted efficiency (on-target cleavage) by various algorithms through the tool CRISPOR. Sp-Cas9 usually cuts double-stranded DNA three or four base pairs 5' of the PAM site.
The track "CRISPR Targets" shows all potential -NGG target sites across the genome. The target sequence of the guide is shown with a thick (exon) bar. The PAM motif match (NGG) is shown with a thinner bar. Guides are colored to reflect both predicted specificity and efficiency. Specificity reflects the "uniqueness" of a 20mer sequence in the genome; the less unique a sequence is, the more likely it is to cleave other locations of the genome (off-target effects). Efficiency is the frequency of cleavage at the target site (on-target efficiency).
Shades of gray stand for sites that are hard to target specifically, as the 20mer is not very unique in the genome:
Colors highlight targets that are specific in the genome (MIT specificity > 50) but have different predicted efficiencies:
Mouse-over a target site to show predicted specificity and efficiency scores:
Click onto features to show all scores and predicted off-targets with up to four mismatches. The Out-of-Frame score by Bae et al. 2014 is correlated with the probability that mutations induced by the guide RNA will disrupt the open reading frame. The authors recommend out-of-frame scores > 66 to create knock-outs with a single guide efficiently.
Off-target sites are sorted by the CFD (Cutting Frequency Determination) score (Doench et al. 2016). The higher the CFD score, the more likely there is off-target cleavage at that site. Off-targets with a CFD score < 0.023 are not shown on this page, but are available when following the link to the external CRISPOR tool. When compared against experimentally validated off-targets by Haeussler et al. 2016, the large majority of predicted off-targets with CFD scores < 0.023 were false-positives. For storage and performance reasons, on the level of individual off-targets, only CFD scores are available.
Like most algorithms, the MIT specificity score is not always a perfect predictor of off-target effects. Despite low scores, many tested guides caused few and/or weak off-target cleavage when tested with whole-genome assays (Figure 2 from Haeussler et al. 2016), as shown below, and the published data contains few data points with high specificity scores. Overall though, the assays showed that the higher the specificity score, the lower the off-target effects.
Similarly, efficiency scoring is not very accurate: guides with low scores can be efficient and vice versa. As a general rule, however, the higher the score, the less likely that a guide is very inefficient. The following histograms illustrate, for each type of score, how the share of inefficient guides drops with increasing efficiency scores:
When reading this plot, keep in mind that both scores were evaluated on their own training data. Especially for the Moreno-Mateos score, the results are too optimistic, due to overfitting. When evaluated on independent datasets, the correlation of the prediction with other assays was around 25% lower, see Haeussler et al. 2016. At the time of writing, there is no independent dataset available yet to determine the Moreno-Mateos accuracy for each score percentile range.
The entire mouse (mm39) genome was scanned for the -NGG motif. Flanking 20mer guide sequences were aligned to the genome with BWA and scored with MIT Specificity scores using the command-line version of crispor.org. Non-unique guide sequences were skipped. Flanking sequences were extracted from the genome and input for Crispor efficiency scoring, available from the Crispor downloads page, which includes the Doench 2016, Moreno-Mateos 2015 and Bae 2014 algorithms, among others.
Note that the Doench 2016 scores were updated by the Broad institute in 2017 ("Azimuth" update). As a result, earlier versions of the track show the old Doench 2016 scores and this version of the track shows new Doench 2016 scores. Old and new scores are almost identical, they are correlated to 0.99 and for more than 80% of the guides the difference is below 0.02. However, for very few guides, the difference can be bigger. In case of doubt, we recommend the new scores. Crispor.org can display both scores and many more with the "Show all scores" link.
Positional data can be explored interactively with the Table Browser or the Data Integrator. For small programmatic positional queries, the track can be accessed using our REST API. For genome-wide data or automated analysis, CRISPR genome annotations can be downloaded from our download server as a bigBedFile.
The files for this track are called crispr.bb, which lists positions and scores, and crisprDetails.tab, which has information about off-target matches. Individual regions or whole genome annotations can be obtained using our tool bigBedToBed, which can be compiled from the source code or downloaded as a pre-compiled binary for your system. Instructions for downloading source code and binaries can be found here. The tool can also be used to obtain only features within a given range, e.g.
bigBedToBed http://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/gbdb/mm39/crisprAllTargets/crispr.bb -chrom=chr21 -start=0 -end=1000000 stdout
Track created by Maximilian Haeussler, with helpful input from Jean-Paul Concordet (MNHN Paris) and Alberto Stolfi (NYU).
Haeussler M, Schönig K, Eckert H, Eschstruth A, Mianné J, Renaud JB, Schneider-Maunoury S, Shkumatava A, Teboul L, Kent J et al. Evaluation of off-target and on-target scoring algorithms and integration into the guide RNA selection tool CRISPOR. Genome Biol. 2016 Jul 5;17(1):148. PMID: 27380939; PMC: PMC4934014
Bae S, Kweon J, Kim HS, Kim JS. Microhomology-based choice of Cas9 nuclease target sites. Nat Methods. 2014 Jul;11(7):705-6. PMID: 24972169
Doench JG, Fusi N, Sullender M, Hegde M, Vaimberg EW, Donovan KF, Smith I, Tothova Z, Wilen C, Orchard R et al. Optimized sgRNA design to maximize activity and minimize off-target effects of CRISPR-Cas9. Nat Biotechnol. 2016 Feb;34(2):184-91. PMID: 26780180; PMC: PMC4744125
Hsu PD, Scott DA, Weinstein JA, Ran FA, Konermann S, Agarwala V, Li Y, Fine EJ, Wu X, Shalem O et al. DNA targeting specificity of RNA-guided Cas9 nucleases. Nat Biotechnol. 2013 Sep;31(9):827-32. PMID: 23873081; PMC: PMC3969858
Moreno-Mateos MA, Vejnar CE, Beaudoin JD, Fernandez JP, Mis EK, Khokha MK, Giraldez AJ. CRISPRscan: designing highly efficient sgRNAs for CRISPR-Cas9 targeting in vivo. Nat Methods. 2015 Oct;12(10):982-8. PMID: 26322839; PMC: PMC4589495

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I have posted a framework of info in the data thread. This is from an extensive study we did in the early 90's. The data is representative of our findings.
Currently on the table:
Spin is the only major factor accounting for paintball inaccuracy. Promoted by Pbjosh
Closed bolt operation has an effect on overall accuracy. Promoted by Glen Palmer.
The paintball flight is subject to "knuckleball effect".
Spin may or may not be possible because of the liquid in the paintball.
Barrels have something to do with accuracy.
Seams have something to do with accuracy.
Balls distort with the impact of the air blast.
Balls distort when leaving the barrel.
Ok lets have a pointed discussion on the subject. For those of you just reading this, this thread is a continuation of the "closed bolt" thread found here.
original thread


text:
Q: What do Lady Macbeth, the removal of a molar and a one-legged landlady have in common?
A: They're all part of a blistering review penned by critic Camilla Long in her March 4, 2012, Sunday Times takedown of Rachel Cusk's book Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. Her singular feat of verbal devastation was recently recognized as the Hatchet Job of the Year by the literary digest The Omnivore, which described her piece as "angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of 2012.
(MORE: TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012)
It's not hard to see why Long deserves the award. She begins her review by calling it "quite simply, bizarre"—and it only gets weirder (and meaner) from there. Here's just one choice selection from her scathing take on the story of a marriage's end (available in full at the Omnivore's site):
The book is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments. There are hectic passages on Greek tragedy and the Christian concept of family, as well as fragments of ghost stories, references to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, and heavy Freudian symbolism, including a long description of the removal of a molar, "a large tooth," she writes portentously, "of great…personal significance". The final chapter is an out-of-body experience — her situation seen through the eyes of her pill-popping Eastern European au pair. Oddly, I read the whole thing in a Bulgarian accent.
Along with the honor and glory of the award, Long will receive a year's worth of potted shrimp, an English culinary staple.
John Walsh, one of this year's judges, explained to the Independent why bad reviews are worth rewarding: "Expressions of delight and approbation are welcome to authors, publishers and people looking for birthday-gift ideas. Bad reviews, however, reverberate down the years," he said. The best hatchet jobs are more than a list of problems with a book—and in this particular case, the winner prevailed due to its surprising effect on the reader. "It made you want to go and read the book," said Walsh, "for all its faults."


text:
Using a wish list is a great way to remember products you have seen on our site. You can also share your list with friends and family.
New Customer? Join Us Here
ThePharmacy © Your Health is Our Life
ThePharmacy is owned by our principal pharmacist, Christine Kelly (B Pharm MPS).
Our Pharmacists are available from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 1pm on Saturday.
AEST GMT+10 (Sydney Australia)
Phone: 02 9569 4056 or +61 2 9569 4056


text:
Pressing All Purpose Flat Plate
Model: Pressing All Purpose Flat Plate
Material: Glass
Color: plain white or with decal
Process: press process
Our Opal Glassware is milk-color,odourless,breakage-proof,heat-resistant, microwave-safe,easy-wahsing etc. They can be used in microwave oven and dish-washer. What`s more, it is stronger than ceramics and it can bear radical temperature variation and is healthy to people.
Nowadays the opal glassware is considered as the newest substitutes for traditional ceramics. They are very popular as houseware, hotel supply and gifts. Welcome domestic and foreign customers to cooperate with us. We can offer you good quality with competitive price and upmost service.


text:
Another off-day brings another puzzle for the SoSG masses. This time, in honor of Ned Colletti, it's all about matches. You see, Ned is like one of those chaperones at a high-school cotillion dance, making sure everyone has a partner. Ned hates seeing someone left out! As such, last offseason, Ned made sure Andruw Jones was matched with a $36M salary for the next two years. And the season before that, he made sure Juan Pierre was matched with a cushy $45M deal. But now, Ned needs your help finding matches, especially since one of them is someone that even Ned doesn't want (if that is indeed possible).
Each of the five images on page 1 has an appropriate match on page 2. Find the matches, and then find the one pair of images that Ned doesn't want. Then, tell us which pair of images is the one pair that Ned doesn't want, and why not (after all, it IS Ned Colletti here).
Rules: Once again, please feel free to post comments in the thread, but if you think you have the solution, please don't give away the answer to everyone in the comments section. Instead, do the following:
- email us your solution explanation, and
- Post a comment simply saying you have emailed your solution attempt. Due to firewall issues, I may not be able to reply to your original email promptly, so please do be patient and check back on the comment thread for the latest news; I will confirm correct answers there.
HINT #1 (9.37a PT): Admittedly, this puzzle worked better prior to the trade deadline, when it was concocted. I got too lazy to revise the unwanted pair.
HINT #2 (10.35a PT): Strangely, one of the guys in this puzzle that Ned did end up wanting after all, was supposedly on the block in the final hour before the trade deadline. Luckily, we kept him (though sadly, we're not playing him).
HINT #3 (11:21a PT): Ned Colletti has been known to be a tinted cello.
HINT #4 (12.14p PT): On page 1, reading clockwise from the upper left, the images correspond with (8), (6), (5), (9), and (4). On page 2, reading clockwise from the top center, the images correspond with (4), (3), (6), (7), and (5). If you're stuck on one image, email me (and signal the email, please, in the comment thread).
HINT #5 (2:04p PT): In response to the emails, I suppose I should clarify that hint #4 refers to standard notation for word lengths. (Check comment #5 in that post for a link to that puzzle's solution.)
HINT #6 (4.54p PT) Yes, this is a wordplay puzzle. And just as a starting point, REINDEER does indeed match with HAT. Four pairs to go....
NOTE: I'll try to check email one last time this evening. Solution goes up at midnight!


text:
He ate to his heart's content or so he says:).To this day,I can't fathom how someone can speak so lovingly about Kanji.
Another event which comes to mind while speaking about Kanji is a festival in our temple in Kayamkulam.After the ten day yearly festival,there is an event called Pejje Nishe[porridge,again;)].Early morning,people flock to the temple to have pej.Sitting pretty on the sand,plaintain leaves are distributed.Making an indent on the sand,leaves are placed properly and then pej is served,topped with chavli human,some upkari and then pickle.Though I am not a big fan of pej/kanji,this is one event I miss attending.Its just too good,tasty beyond words.
So here's presenting,a very simple fare.
Podiyari Kanji
Podiyari – 1 cup[I used Nirapara Podiyari]
Water – 3-4 cups
Salt to taste
Wash the podiyari well under running water.
Cook with enough water till well cooked.
Retain the water and serve Kanji.
Cherupayar Mezhukkupuratti
Cherupayar/Chavli/Cow peas – ½ cup
Small onions/shallots – 5-6,sliced
Grated coconut – 2 tbsp
Green chilly – 1
Oil – 1 tbsp
Mustard seeds – ¼ tsp
Curry leaves – 1 sprig
Cook the cow peas till soft and tender.[drain the excess water]
Grind the coconut and green chilly into a coarse paste.
In a kadai,add oil,splutter mustard seeds and add curry leaves.
Add the sliced onions and sauté till they turn light brown in color.
Add the ground coconut paste and stir well.
Now add the cooked cow peas and add salt to taste.
Stir till the water[if any] is absorbed and the dish turns dry.
Chuttaracha Chammanthi
Grated coconut – 4-5 tbsp
Red chillies – 1-2
Curry leaves – 1 sprig
Tamarind – 1 small piece
Salt to taste
Dry roast all the ingredients together in a kadai till the coconut starts turning light golden brown.[Chuttu-roast]
Remove and keep aside till cool.
Grind to a smooth paste using as little water as possible.[Aracha-ground]
Serve with kanji.
On another note,thanks to all of you who have passed me Awards.I'll accept it and do the tag soon.Thanks once again:)


text:
Monday, June 28, 2010
When Mom is Sick
So I came home, lay down, and immediately fell asleep. I didn't wake up until 5:00. Well, except for all the times, the kids came in my room. Like when Brooklyn came in and stole the gum from my purse. And the time she came in and pilfered an AMC gift card from my purse. She told me she was going to ride her tricycle to the store and use the movie theater gift card to buy a cell phone so she could call her friend, Emma. Austin told her, "Emma doesn't have a cell phone." Brooklyn said it was okay because Emma could use her home phone. Austin pointed out that Brooklyn, also, could use the home phone. This was the point, she started wailing like someone had branded her with a hot poker.
Then there were the times that Clay and Jackson ran through my room chasing each other with the intention to do bodily harm. I did what any responsible parent would do. I closed my eyes and rolled over in bed.
There was the time Savannah came in my room and said, "That is SO gross! You're soaking wet! Your pillow is wet! Gross!" Like I didn't know I was sitting in a pool of sweat as my fever finally went down.
There was the time, I mumbled to Austin to please change the laundry so I could have clean, dry sheets tonight. Austin's fifteen.
"So, I just put the sheets in the washing machine?"
"That's it?"
"Well you have to put detergent in with them."
"Is this detergent?" he asked, holding up a bottle.
"Ummm yes."
"What should I set it to?"
"Oh, I think I've got it. Oh wait. It won't turn on. How do you turn it on?"
Yep, his future wife is going to love me.
Oh and let's not forget the time I heard the little kids in the bathroom. The water was running and they were talking about fishing. I was scared. I dragged myself from bed and kinda leaned against the wall so I wouldn't fall over from the dizziness, and made my way to the bathroom. By the time I got there, they'd already left the bathroom and were playing outside. They were fishing, all right. In the fire pit. Filled with water. Their poles were the roasting sticks for the fire pit. Their fish were latex gloves filled with water. Once again, I closed my eyes and made my way back to bed.
And most recently, Jackson decided to make a cherry pie. It looks like there was an explosion at a grain mill in my kitchen.
And on that note, I'm lying back down, closing my eyes, and hoping my fever stays under 104 tonight.
30 comments:
- Lisa said...
I pray that you feel better in the morning.
- June 29, 2010 at 1:33 AM
- Robin said...
No rest for mama, come hell or fever.
I hope you get some real sleep and start feeling better soon.
Everything else will sort itself out eventually. - June 29, 2010 at 1:38 AM
- HRH Mommy said...
I really hope you feel better soon. If needed, just close your eyes, turn over and hope that things (and humans) in the house will at some point return to a point of sanity. I hope for your sake that will be soon.
- June 29, 2010 at 2:45 AM
- Tokyo Biker Mommy said...
Oh but i love cherry pie! :)
Feel better soon, this too shall pass. :P - June 29, 2010 at 4:45 AM
- Julia in Sweden said...
Get well soon, sweetie! Who knows, there might be something to cheer you up in the mail this week? At least I hope so.
Lots of hugs! - June 29, 2010 at 5:41 AM
- WeaselMomma said...
I sure do hope that magic fairies come and clean up your house overnight so that you don't have to deal with it when you feel better.
- June 29, 2010 at 6:25 AM
- Jen@Scrapingirl said...
It's not fair that us moms don't get sick days. I hope you feel better soon.
- June 29, 2010 at 7:11 AM
Dawn, Dawn, Dawn! Don't you know mothers don't get sick? Pay the older kids to WATCH the younger kids and try to get some rest! Mom's are the most important element of the entire family....Sharon
- June 29, 2010 at 8:19 AM
- Unknown said...
I hope you get to feeling better. I can relate to the laundry thing, though. I didn't know how to do laundry until I was in college and getting made fun of by a girl I was trying to hook up with. Needless to say, we never got serious. I did, however, learn how to do laundry and I have a beautiful wife as well. So it always works out... detergent or not.
- June 29, 2010 at 8:57 AM
- Robin said...
All that and you STILL find time to be funny! Hope you're feeling better Dawn!
- June 29, 2010 at 10:13 AM
- Unknown said...
Oh Dawn...my heart aches for you and I am praying your 'bug' can't come thru here and attach to me !
Get well soon !
Soft hug, Donna from Indiana - June 29, 2010 at 10:21 AM
Feel better soon!!!!!
- June 29, 2010 at 11:13 AM
Hope you feel better soon. What you have sounds MISERABLE and I hope it goes away SOON!!!
Mel.UT - June 29, 2010 at 11:30 AM
- And I'll Raise You 5 said...
Sounds hauntingly familiar. Hope you feel better soon. And I just wanted to add, (I've read you for awhile, but disappeared for a long time and am recently back), I love Jackson. Seems like a great kid. (They all do, but I always especially enjoy your Jackson references.) Did he successfully make a cherry pie?
- June 29, 2010 at 2:42 PM
- Purple Quilter Queen said...
Oh Dawn! That's one of the big things that sucks about being a single parent - nobody to take care of you when you are sick or the rest of the household. Take care! Hopefully the older ones will see how much you need their help right now and step it up a bit. Feel better soon. Jenn
- June 29, 2010 at 2:48 PM
I also follow the "If you ignore it long enough, it'll go away" theory.
I had a really sore throat recently and my glands started feeling swollen so I started wondering about strep. I drug myself to the doctor to get checked out (negative results) and was also told "Drink plenty of water and get lots of rest." I paid $100 for someone to tell me to continue doing what I was doing.
To make matters worse, I picked up pink eye while I was at the doctor, so I spent the next week or so battling that too! Tack on another $100 or so for another doctor visit and prescription of pink eye medicine. Because believe me, pink eye is one of the things you don't want to wait out. It's nasty!
Hope you're feeling better soon, Dawn! - June 29, 2010 at 3:32 PM
Oh Dawn, I do hope you feel better soon. Don't try to get up and deal with things too soon, stay in bed all you can.
Much love to ya. - June 29, 2010 at 5:09 PM
- Magda said...
Oh Dawn, hugs to you!!! Hope you feel better soon.
(Side note: fishing in the fire pit... rubber gloves as fish!!!?? Man, your kids have an AWESOME imagination!!!!! Love it) - June 29, 2010 at 6:43 PM
- Jill said...
I feel the same way about dr's. I just recently went to have my ankle x-rayed and they informed me it would take 2-3 days to read the results and get back to me. huh? Now how does that make sense, so it's wrapped in an ace bandage and I'm praying it's not broken. LOL
I hope you feel better soon. I have 2 children and the words keep your foot elevated mean nothing here!!! Have a great night - June 29, 2010 at 8:25 PM
- mommeeof10 said...
Poor Dawn! I can relate, though I have a hubby that can muddle through when I get sick. Plus, my older 6 kids can do laundry, though not to my specifications. Does it really matter if everyones underwear turned pink, green or blue?
- June 29, 2010 at 10:00 PM
- Katrina said...
I have the same approach to the Dr, can't afford the $60 to go anyway and she's useless at the best of times. Hope you feeling better quickly
- June 30, 2010 at 10:12 AM
- Jen said...
Holy cow, woman! You better stay in bed until you can wake up and not fall over. (hugs) Get well soon, sweetie. I really do hope you feel better soon. Treat the older kiddos to something awesome when you're well for helping you out... (if they ARE helping you out.. ;))
Rest easy, Dawn. :) - June 30, 2010 at 10:49 AM
- Bookworm said...
Fishing for latex gloves filled with water. Well, at least they're creative! :)
- June 30, 2010 at 2:35 PM
O, sweetie, I feel so badly for you. Is there anything worse than being sicker than all get out and no one will get out long enough to let you get well? So none of your kids are prone to go into medicine. You'd think out of 6 you'd at least have one. And i'm with you on ignoring it and it'll go away - or at least get bad enough to require an ambulance, in which case you don't have to wait in line once you get there. The glib thingie i'm doing is my attempt at being that "merry heart that does good like medicine" from Proverbs 17:22 because i'm presuming you'll be feeling better by the time you approve this for posting. If you're overly diligent, i won't expect to see it at all since you'll be too busy trying to get the sacchrine out from between your teeth. ;) Get well soon!
- June 30, 2010 at 3:07 PM
- TornadoTwos said...
You gotta admit, the water filled latex gloves as fish was pretty ingenious of them. I hope you feel better soon, it's the worst when us mom's get sick- 10x more work to catch up on when we're better.
- June 30, 2010 at 3:22 PM
- Kris said...
Possible SSO: Dawn, I have seen in a couple of your Facebook pictures that you have a tattoo on your ankle. So do I. Would you mind telling us what it is and/or posting a picture??? :)
- June 30, 2010 at 3:33 PM
Sorry I'm laughing at this, but you explain it so well and I do recognize myself. :D
Feel better soon! - June 30, 2010 at 3:48 PM
- Marly said...
so sorry you're so sick! I hate it when I'm sick. I also just ignore it because if I go in, I pay them a co pay for them to tell me I'm sick and to go home and sleep. Ummm, that's what I was doing before I came to them!
I hope you're feeling more human. - July 1, 2010 at 12:07 AM
- HRH Mommy said...
Hope you're feeling better by now [fingers crossed]
- July 1, 2010 at 3:24 AM
Kudos to the doc for not giving you a prescription just to appease you. As you know, sometimes it's just a virus and you have to wait it out.
- July 6, 2010 at 1:41 PM


text:
That thing called A Chris Brown that crawled out of the bottom of a septic tank in 1989 has deleted his Twitter after a particularly nasty showdown with a comedian named Jenny Johnson, which began like this.
Actual retorts from Breezy, citizen of the world, charm school graduate, during the online fracas:
"take them teeth out when u Sucking my dick HOE."
"I should fart while ur giving me top."
"mom says hello… She told me not to shart in ur mouth, wanted me to shit right on the retina."
And, perhaps the worst response: "Just ask Rihanna if she mad??????"
Johnson concluded the feud with, "Okay. I'm done. All I got from that exchange with Chris Brown is that he wants to shit and fart on me … I have zero respect for a person who seems unapologetic for the terrible crime he committed and shows no signs of changing." UH-dorable. Just to be clear, neither party's winning any awards here. Twitter is where the Siths and Slytherins of the world go to take pointless, abrasive dumps on each other. But, hey, at least his account is gone now. I actually think this is how the Age of Enlightenment started. [MTV News]
Oh cool, Breezy's fans are still harassing her. [Twitter]
Sofia Vergara and Nick Loeb visited UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles to discuss harvesting her eggs for a surrogate pregnancy, which sounds great, but let's not forget that Nick Loeb is allegedly a major fucking dickhead. "Nick wants to have a baby with Sofia, but he doesn't want her to lose her gorgeous shape. He also doesn't want to sideline her from earning money." But no, yeah, have a kid, you guys, that will totally fix things. [National Enquirer]
The Spirit of Christmas is hella jubilant, for Taylor Swift is meeting Harry Styles' parents after One Direction's special holiday concert in New York on December 3rd. A source says, "He's been very hush-hush about Taylor, but this is the perfect chance to introduce her to them." It has now become clear that Harry Styles is Taylor Swift's Chuck Bass. Shine on, you crazy diamonds. [Hollywood Life]
The day before he and Selena Gomez broke up last week, Justin Bieber told Oprah that he wants to be married by the time he's twenty-five, and also he gets depressed sometimes. "Not like super, super, super depressed, but I get days where I'm just down and gloomy, just because I'm human. Some days you just feel what you've gone through. You just have pain in your heart because maybe you haven't dealt with [it]." [Gossip Cop]
Morgan Freeman, God, and Morgan Freeman-as-God all support gay marriage.
- If you wanted to know what Jessica Simpson is eating, you are in luck (and also: get a hobby)? [TMZ]
- Camille Grammar went to court to get an emergency restraining order on Kelsey Grammar. [TMZ]
- Sly Stallone has started painting in an effort to work through his grief about the death of his son Sage. [TV3.ie]
- The Naomi Watts-starring Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde starts shooting in 2013. [Indiewire]
- Tom Cruise shut down Trafalgar Square for a movie, generally annoyed London. [E!]
- Bey and Gwyneth exchanged Christmas recipes (but the typo of "Goop" as "Gloop" in this article is way more important. [The Sun]
- Lindsay Lohan says that many other actors in her position would have "like, committed suicide." [NDTV]
- Oh, and Charlie Sheen may have paid LiLo's taxes for her, no big deal. [NYDN]
- Jane Fonda maybe called off her third wedding. [National Enquirer]
- Tori Spelling had the nerve to leave her house without any stuff on her face. [Radar Online]
- No! One of my favorites, Allison Janney, lost her house to foreclosure. [Radar Online]
- Gross, Olivier Martinez's Miami restaurant was slapped with 13 health violations. [Female First]
- One of Rebel Wilson's first auditions in the States was for Glee and she didn't get it. Joke's on them. [News.com.au]
- Ashmi went out in Rome with doofy hats on. [People]
- "When I eventually looked in the mirror I just thought I looked like my gay brother." —Anne Hathaway on her (awesome) Les Miserables haircut. [Us Weekly]
- My favorite thing about Miley Cyrus's birthday pig from PETA is that it's rather incongruously named "Nora." [Us Weekly]
- Grandmas are into Ryan Gosling. No surprise there. [Page Six]
- Bill Clinton "looked radiant and fit in a tailored blazer" and drank some wine. [Page Six]
- Apparently Eminem and Will Smith were especially good friends to T.I. during his stint in the clink. [Page Six]
- Bjork had vocal cord surgery but she's OK now. [Miami Herald]
- Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones is selling her house. Want to buy it? [Radar Online]


text:
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
F is For Phenomenal
Of course, when Jackson came along, he insisted we take the training wheels off when he was 3. He hopped on and took off down the street, never so much as wobbling across the sidewalk. Lexi learned how to ride by trying and falling a few times. She was cautious, but stuck with it and learned.
Clay, at the age of 3, asked us to take the training wheels off. We told him we didn't think he was old enough, so he took it upon himself to climb up on the workbench, find the right size wrench, and he took the training wheels off himself. Then he went for a ride around the neighborhood, never falling at all. I suspect Brooklyn will just demand everyone push her around in the stroller and won't bother to learn how to ride at all.
Anyway, everything has always come easily to Austin. He's never had to try or work very hard. When faced with a challenge, instead of working hard and figuring it out, he gives up. Things don't come so easily to Savannah, but she's determined and works hard and ends up doing really well.
Progress reports for Austin and Savannah were mailed out this week. I looked at Savannah's report. She's getting all As and 1 B+. Yay! You go girl! Great job, Savannah! I looked at Austin's report. He's getting 2 Fs.
"Austin, tell me this F stands for fantastic," I asked, hoping against hope for a positive explanation.
"OK, it stands for Fantastic," he lied to appease me.
"First-rate? Fabulous?" I tried.
Blank stare from Austin
"Fine? Fair?" I spit out, grasping at thin air.
"Mom," Austin said, his voice laced with concern at my maniacal babbling.
"Phenomenal?" Tell me it stands for phenomenal!" I demanded of him.
"Ummm, phenomenal starts with a P," Austin said, looking at me like I should be the one getting the failing grade.
"Yeah, you know how to spell phenomenal, but you're failing 2 classes, Mister! Why, why, why are you getting TWO F's?" I demanded.
Austin shrugged his shoulders.
"You don't know? You seriously don't know why you're failing two classes? Are you doing your homework?" I asked.
"No," he admitted. He continued, "Homework is stupid and boring."
I stood there with my mouth hanging open for a full minute. "Excuse me," I said, then marched over to the phone where I punched in the numbers I knew by heart.
"Hello? Yeah, I'm just calling to say I'm sorry. What for? Well, let's just say your curse has come to pass, Mom and I have indeed given birth to a child WHO IS JUST LIKE I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL."
I'm not sure, but I believe I heard laughter as I hung up the phone.
(If I had a dime for every time I heard the phrases, "If only you would work up to your potential", "If only you would apply yourself", and "You have an attitude problem!", I would be a millionaire today.)
"Well, Austin, I'm not going to punish you. In fact, I'm going to help you out. I'll take away TV and video games so you have more time to study since you don't seem to have enough right now. Isn't that nice of me?"
Needless to say, Austin didn't appreciate my help.
Since I'm not having a heart attack, I have no excuse to get out of walking in my church's Crop Walk this month. (OK, I actually want to walk.) Anyway, I have a button at the top right side of my blog if anyone would like to donate to the cause. Just click the button and it'll take you to my page. Thank you!
27 comments:
- mommyrox said...
Is he in the right classes yet? I am wondering if he is bored?
- October 6, 2009 at 7:59 PM
- Erin T. said...
I was also going to ask if he'd been placed into the correct classes yet.
I also want to add my personal favorite phrase from my high school days "Erin needs to pay attention to the task at hand". Apparently, I was easily distracted!
Keep on truckin, Mom! He'll get it. Eventually! - October 6, 2009 at 8:19 PM
- Dawn said...
Yes, he's in the right classes now. They're all honors classes, so I really don't think it's boredom. He's being challenged for the first time and instead of rising to the challenge, he's saying it's stupid and giving up.
- October 6, 2009 at 8:20 PM
- Brandy said...
That's funny... we are helping our son out the same way.
- October 6, 2009 at 8:42 PM
Tell Austin that a college professor said "Get off your arse and learn how to study!" This is the best time to learn because if you don't learn how to study when you get to college in 4 years you will get a lot more than 2 F's and then you will be kicked out of school. I expect my students to put in 2 hours studying outside of class for every hour they spend in class.
Also, he should develop the self-discipline to do his homework without you or dad riding him to do it. When he does get to college, assuming he pulls his grades up enough to get in, there won't be anyone there to remind him to do it, make him do it, or take the TV/computer/videogame away so he is forced to do it. I'm not saying you shouldn't nag him now but he does need to eventually develop the ability to manage his time. - October 6, 2009 at 8:51 PM
- Laura said...
In fourth grade, our son was doing his homework but not turning it in! One thing that worked for our him later was requiring him to show us his homework every night, even if he said he'd finished it at school.
Before kids, I used to wonder why my friends with children said they hated school because of the homework... their kids' homework and having to help with/check over it. Now I know.... - October 6, 2009 at 9:11 PM
- Jen@Scrapingirl said...
Homework is boring, I must say. But TWO F's...WOW!! Well, no TV should help him improve. And he was bored in the other classes.
- October 6, 2009 at 10:35 PM
- TheQueen@TerrorsInTiaras said...
For a minute there I thought you were describing my oldest, and me. I just want to wring her neck sometimes, but she is always saved because she inherited it from me. Sigh. This year she's getting straight A's, though. Not sure what happened.
- October 6, 2009 at 10:53 PM
- Mum-me said...
He sounds like my son. But if I take away his TV and video game privileges he just reads books or rides his bike !!
- October 6, 2009 at 11:09 PM
- Beckie said...
Oh have I been in your shoes. Well minus 4 kids. My oldest is a freaking genius. Loves science and yet managed to fail 9th grade science. His reason, the teacher wasn't doing his job right. Not he couldn't do his work, but he didn't like the teacher so he failed in order to teach the teacher a lesson. Twisted logic, I know! So as a 10th grader this year, he's in a 9th grade class again this year. He didn't believe us when we told him he would have to repeat any grade he failed because Mom and Dad refused to pay for summer school. And we also threatened to do the same thing you did, no games, TV, or computer except for homework. He really likes his games so this year he's decided to actually do his work.
- October 7, 2009 at 6:30 AM
- Keeley said...
Hahaha. You're a great Mom.
Funnily enough, our son is also grounded. And banned from electronic entertainment, including his ipod. And, furthermore, if he had a phone we'd take that away too.
What is it with these freshmen? - October 7, 2009 at 8:02 AM
Oh I soooo know that feeling, I have one of those gifted children who if she doesnt get something the first time then it is wrong!!!! lol
- October 7, 2009 at 8:49 AM
- Christy said...
I went through the same thing with my son. He is the smartest person I know and one day he just decided to stop, just like that. Jr. High was horrible in this house but now he is in high school and all of a sudden he has just decided to do his work and his grades are so much better. So through all the hard time to come just remember to press on and it will improve.
- October 7, 2009 at 9:27 AM
- MamaLemma said...
Yep, those were the comments I received on my report cards, too (from elementary school on). I still find that if a task does not interest me, I cannot get the strength to focus on it and do it (though a little self-medication in the form of caffeine helps). I feel for him, I really do. My daughter sounds more like Savannah, but my son, I fear, is just like me.
Not to sound too negative, but I doubt the punishment (while necessary) will turn the corner for him. I have always needed a way to make a task interesting and fun. Is there anything you can do (in your spare time, ha!) to help him see his assignments in a new way? Can he attack essays as a news reporter script? Anything that would make it fun? Good luck! - October 7, 2009 at 9:49 AM
- Angela said...
Dawn, I just really appreciate your blog....I can relate to your life so well as a wife and mother!
Have a great day and good luck with the Phenominal F's....ha!
Angela - October 7, 2009 at 12:31 PM
Smart kids often have a hard time learning to WORK. Watch out for the AP classes. (Freshman don't usually get to take many.) Honors classes and advanced classes are fine......but in my opinion....unless it is their ONE favorite subject....AP classes aren't worth the STRESS!
- October 7, 2009 at 1:30 PM
- Pams Party said...
Going through similar things here with my 7th grader. Either she wont do the work because its stupid and boring, or she does the work and doesnt turn it in. Its a power struggle with her and the more she tries to take control the more out of control things get.. Its not that we are putting pressure on her to get straight As, at this point we would just be happy if she passed..
- October 7, 2009 at 1:35 PM
- JillyBeanTM said...
I just wanted to let you know what worked with me when I was in school and decided "Homework is stupid". I failed 7th grade, all Ds and Fs. I went to summer school which was extremely stupid and simple. Basically you only had to attend to pass. 8th grade I started failing again, figuring I'd just do two weeks of easy summer school again and be fine. My mother told me there was "no way in hell" she'd let me go back to summer school and if I didn't get my grades up I'd be repeating 8th grade. Let me tell you, with about 1 month to spare I brought all my grades up to at least Cs and started off 9th grade with all As and Bs.
- October 7, 2009 at 1:45 PM
Hey Dawn
I enjoy your blog:) I don't know if you have it there or not, but here in Texas we have a website that we can go to that tells us EXACTLY how our kids are doing. It shows grades for all papers thay have turned in, and if they are missing any papers from the teachers. I find this tool PRICELESS. I can just log on and know where i need to set my nag-o-meter when the kids get home. I guess we have had it for a few years but i just discovered it this year. i find i have trouble keeping up with my three kids so i can't imagine keeping up with six. I hope you have this there and it helps you out. - October 7, 2009 at 1:46 PM
I feel your pain, sister! My son is smart, but doesn't want to exert himself if it doesn't come easily to him. This year, however, he has started to put a little more time into homework. (Don't you love how they say "I already did it in class"?) Maybe all the talk about getting into college from his teachers is starting to sink in. Plus he's taking a few classes that actually interest him (Astronomy and AP History).
Don't get me wrong, he's still content with a C, while we know he can do better. We've been going through this for a few years now (he's a junior). I do think that part of it is THEY have to decide they want to do better. It's hard to instill in them that desire to work at it. But I am for taking away the "distractions". That has worked, but I know you get tired of nagging. Hang in there girl! We know what you're going through. - October 7, 2009 at 4:31 PM
LMAO...he is way too clever. Maybe he needs for challenging classes. Things will get better :)
- October 8, 2009 at 10:08 AM
- Shellie said...
When I was in high school my mom always said she hoped I would have a teenage daughter just like me someday. I got her, ten times as me-like as I was. So, often I found myself laughing at the curse come true. It would drive her crazy whenever I'd burst out in laughter whatever she was doing just like me! BTW, I used to always say I hoped I had a daughter like me because at least I'd understand her. The funny thing is, I usually do. But, meanwhile, I've somehow turned into my mom and now she's the one making more sense.
- October 8, 2009 at 4:26 PM
Does Austin mind you posting his grades online? I know I wouldn't let my mom do that.
- October 9, 2009 at 12:15 AM
I agree with the person who left the anonymous comment about taking classes that are too difficult and that sometimes, they're not worth the work. When I was in high school (about two years ago), I did take some kind of honors and then later AP classes. But I dropped the AP class because it was difficult (college-level) and it was my least favorite subject- history. Now, looking back, I'm glad I did. It would have been so NOT worth the stress. Plus, most of what you take in high school you soon forget. You have to relearn anyways. I think high school should be fun and not too difficult. As a senior in high school, I had two very easy and fun classes (cooking and life management) and I had a blast!!! Some of the tips even transferred over to my adult life. And I am glad to say that I took one history class in a university as part of the GE requirements and it was like third-grade level easy. No kidding. The difficult classes that I have now are the subjects that I am interested in, so it is more useful and fun for me to learn that way. My parents never pushed me to take any difficult classes and I did great nonetheless. I would suggest talking with him and asking him how he feels about this. And if he really hates the classes, the effort is not worth the reward. Maybe you'll find this perspective helpful. :-)
- October 9, 2009 at 3:41 PM
I'm sorry, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I meant, how did you get Austin to let you post that?
- October 10, 2009 at 11:10 PM
- M Woods said...
What strategies have you tried to get your less persistent children to keep trying the things they aren't good at? My son gives up on things quite easily, and my husband & I aren't sure what the best approach is to try to encourage / force / teach him to not give up so easily...Advice or suggestions? Thanks in advance!
- October 11, 2009 at 10:32 PM
I have read a book called 'Mindset' by Dr. Carol S Dweck which deals with similar issues that you state about Austin. I am sure he is a bright kid who gets everything easy and thus does not want to try hard for anything that does not come easy. Its all about effort and talent. I can go on here but feel Dr. Dweck has done a helluva job explaining it. I would recommend you read that book. It will give you great insight. - October 14, 2009 at 6:09 AM


text:
Chance News 83
March 1, 2012 to March 31, 2012
"A poll is not laser surgery; it's an estimate."
ABC Blogs, December 3, 2007
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
"The most famous result of Student's experimental method is Student's t-table. But the real end of Student's inquiry was taste, quality control, and minimally efficient sample sizes for experimental Guinness – not to achieve statistical significance at the .05 level or, worse yet, boast about an artificially randomized experiment."
(Ziliak is the co-author of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives. You can find a thoughtful review of this book by David Aldous on amazon.com)
Submitted by Bill Peterson
"[W. S. Gossett] wrote to R. A. Fisher of the t tables, "You are probably the only man who will ever use them (Box 1978)."
"[W]e see the data analyst's insistence on 'letting the data speak to us' by plots and displays as an instinctive understanding of the need to encourage and to stimulate the pattern recognition and model generating capability of the right brain. Also, it expresses his concern that we not allow our pushy deductive left brain to take over too quickly and perhaps forcibly produce unwarranted conclusions based on an inadequate model."
Technometrics, February 1984
Tom Moore recommended this article in an ISOSTAT posting. (It is available in JSTOR.)
We are familiar with George Box's famous statement: "All models are wrong but some are useful." Here is another variant, cited in Wikipedia:
- "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
(Note. For an interesting recent discussion revisiting this theme, see All models are right, most are useless on Andrew Gelman's blog, 4 March 2012).
"There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up."
Submitted by Paul Alper
"Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures."
"The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions."
Submitted by Paul Alper
"Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. …. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. …. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."
Journal of Cell Science, 2008
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
"In the first four months [at the new Resorts World Casino New York City], roughly 25,000 gamblers showed up every day, shoving a collective $2.3 billion through the slots and losing $140 million in the process. …. Resorts World offers more than 4,000 slot machines, but thanks to state law, there are no traditional card tables."
The Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2012
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
"Drivers 85 and older still have a higher rate of deadly crashes than any other age group except teenagers."
(The article also describes two women who have learned to "compensate" for their macular degeneration in various ways - not necessarily welcome news!)
The Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2012
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
See the "Observation" at the top of the chart.
"The Meaning of most", downloaded from Junk Charts, March 1, 2012
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
"Here is the rub: Apple is so big, it's running up against the law of large numbers. Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger."
The New York Times, February 24, 2012
Bill Peterson found Andrew Gelman's comments[1] about this article.
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Kaiser Fung on Minnesota's ramp meters
A number references to Kaiser Fung's book, Numbers Rule Your World, appear in Chance News 82. From a Minnesotan's point of view, however, the most important topic he discusses is not hurricanes, not drug testing, and not bias in standardized testing. Rather, the most critical issue is ramp metering as a means of improving traffic flow, relieving congestion and reducing travel time on Minnesota highways. "Industry experts regard Minnesota's system of 430 ramp meters as a national model."
Unfortunately, "perception trumped reality." An influential state senator, Dick Day, now a lobbyist for gambling interests, "led a charge to abolish the nationally recognized program, portraying it as part of the problem, not the solution."
Leave it to Senator Day to speak the minds of "average Joes"--the people he meets at coffee shops, county fairs, summer parades, and the stock car races he loves. He saw ramp metering as a symbol of Big Government strangling our liberty.
In the Twin Cities, drivers perceived their trip times to have lengthened [due to the ramp meters] even though in reality they have probably decreased. Thus, when in September 2000, the state legislature passed a mandate requiring MnDOT [Minnesota Department of Transportation] to conduct a "meters shutoff" experiment [of six weeks], the engineers [who devised the metering program] were stunned and disillusioned.
To make a long story short, when the ramp meters came back on, it turns out that:
[T]he engineering vision triumphed. Freeway conditions indeed worsened after the ramp meters went off. The key findings, based on actual measurements were as follows:
- Peak freeway volume dropped by 9 percent.
- Travel times rose by 22 percent, and the reliability deteriorated.
- Travel speeds declined by 7 percent.
- The number of crashes during merges jumped by 26 percent.
"The consultants further estimated that the benefits of ramp metering outweighed costs by five to one." Nevertheless, the-above objective measures had to continue to battle subjective ones:
Despite the reality that commuters shortened their journeys if they waited their turns at the ramps, the drivers did not perceive the trade-off to be beneficial; they insisted that they would rather be moving slowly on the freeway than coming to a standstill at the ramp.
Accordingly, the engineers decided to modify the optimum solution to take into account driver psychology. "When they turned the lights back on, they limited waiting time on the ramps to four minutes, retired some unnecessary meters, and also shortened the operating hours." Said differently, the constrained optimization model the engineers first considered left out some pivotal constraints.
1. Do a search for "behavioral economics" to see the prevalence of irrational perceptions and subjective calculations in the economic sphere.
2. Fung discusses an allied, albeit inverse, problem of waiting-time misconception. This instance concerns Disney World and its popular so-called FastPass as a means of avoiding queues. According to Fung
Clearly, FastPass users love the product--but how much waiting time can they save? Amazingly, the answer is none; they spend the same amount of time waiting for popular rides with or without FastPass!..So Disney confirms yet again that perception trumps reality. The FastPass concept is an absolute stroke of genius; it utterly changes perceived waiting times and has made many, many park-goers very, very giddy.
3. An oft-repeated and perhaps apocryphal operations research/statistics/decision theory anecdote has to do with elevators in a very large office building. Employees complained about excessive waiting times because the elevators all too frequently seemed to be in lockstep. Any physical solution such as creating a new elevator shaft or installing a complicated timing algorithm would be very expensive. The famous and utterly inexpensive psychological solution whereby perception trumped reality was to put in mirrors so that the waiting time would seem less because the employees would enjoy admiring themselves in the mirrors. Note that older and more benighted operations research/statistics/decision theory textbooks would have used the word "women" instead of "employees" in the previous sentence.
4. A very modern and frustrating example of perception again trumping reality can often be observed in supermarkets which have installed self-checkout lanes without placing a limit on the number of items per shopper. In order to avoid a line at the regular checkout, some shoppers with an extremely large number of items will often choose the self-checkout and take much longer to finish than if had they queued at the regular checkout. Explain why said shoppers psychologically might prefer to persist in that behavior despite evidence to the contrary. Why don't supermarkets simply limit the number of items per customer at self-checkout lanes?
Submitted by Paul Alper
Don't forget Chebyshev
Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, Random House, 2007
When I taught at Stanford Law School, professors were required to award grades that had a 3.2 mean. …. The problem was that many of the students and many of the professors had no way to express the degree of variability in professors' grading habits. …. As a nation, we lack a vocabulary of dispersion. We don't know how to express what we intuitively know about the variability of a distribution of numbers. The 2SD [2 standard-deviation] rule could help give us this vocabulary. A professor who said that her standard deviation was .2 could have conveyed a lot of information with a single number. The problem is that very few people in the U.S. today understand what this means. But you should know and be able to explain to others that only about 2.5 percent of the professor's grades are above 3.6. [pp. 221-222]
1. Suppose that a professor's awarded grades had mean 3.2 and SD 0.2.
- (a) Under what condition could we say that "only about 2.5 percent of the professor's grades are above 3.6"?
- (b) Without that condition, what could we say, if anything, about the percent of awarded grades outside of a 2SD range about the mean? About the percent of awarded grades above 3.6?
2. Suppose that a professor's raw grades had mean 3.2 and SD 0.2. Do you think that this would be a realistic scenario in most undergraduate college classes? In most graduate-school classes? Why or why not?
3. How could a professor construct a distribution of awarded grades with mean 3.2 and SD 0.2, based on raw grades, so that one could say that only about 2.5 percent of the awarded grades are above 3.6? What effect, if any, could that scaling have had on the worst – or on the best – raw grades?
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Critique of women-in-science statistics
"Rumors of Our Rarity are Greatly Exaggerated: Bad Statistics About Women in Science"
by Cathy Kessel, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, July 2011
Based on her apparently extensive and detailed study of reports about female-to-male ratios with respect to STEM abilities/careers, Kessel discusses three major problems with the statistics cited in them, as well as with the repetition of these questionable figures in subsequent academic and non-academic reports.
Whatever their origins, statistics which are mislabeled, misinterpreted, fictitious, or otherwise defective remain in circulation because they are accepted by editors, readers, and referees.
"The Solitary Statistic." A 13-to-1 boy-girl ratio in SAT-Math scores has been widely cited since it appeared in a 1983 Science article. That ratio was based on the scores of 280 seventh- and eighth-graders who scored 700 or above on the test over the period 1980-83. These students were part of a total of 64,000 students applying for a Johns Hopkins science program for exceptionally talented STEM-potential students. Kessel faults the widespread references to this outdated data, among other issues, and she cites more recent statistics at Hopkins and other such programs, including a ratio as low as 3 to 1 in 2005.
"The Fabricated Statistic." A "finding" that "Women talk almost three times as much as men" was published in The Female Brain in 2006. This was supposed to explain why women prefer careers which allow them to "connect and communicate" as opposed careers in science and engineering. Kessel outlines some issues that might make this explanation questionable.
"The Garbled Statistic." An example from "The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics," published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2007, was a report that women were "8.3% of tenure-track faculty at 'elite' mathematics departments." A 2002 survey produced similar math data; that survey was based on the "top 50 departments." These and other reports generally reported only the aggregate figure and not any of the raw data by rank. Kessel gives other examples in which raw data summary tables (which she had requested and received) would have been helpful to interpreting results.
Although noticing mistakes may require numerical sophistication or knowledge of particular fields, accurate reporting of names, dates, and sources of statistics does not take much skill. At the very least, authors and research assistants can copy categories and sources as well as numbers. Editors can (and should) ask for sources.
1. Is there anything random about the group of students applying to a university's program for talented students - or about the top SAT-M scorers in that group? Why are these important questions?
2. Kessel quotes a statement that has been reported a number of times: "Women use 20,000 words per day, while men use 7,000." How do you think the researchers got these counts?
3. Why might it be important to consider academic rank as a variable in analyzing the progress, or lack thereof, of women in obtaining university positions?
4. Why might it be important to know more about the sponsorship of these studies – researcher affiliations, funding, etc.?
Submitted by Margaret Cibes, based on a reference in March 2012 College Mathematics Journal
Ethics study of social classes
"Study: High Social Class Predicts Unethical Behavior"
The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2012
Here is an abstract of the study[2] referred to in the article:
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals' unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
See also "Supporting Information", published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, February 27, 2012.
1. If you were going to write an article about this study, and you had access to the entire report, what would be the first, most basic, information you would want to provide to your readers about the "class" categories referred to in the abstract?
2. The article indicates that the sample sizes for the first three experiments were "250," "150 drivers," and "105 students." Besides the relatively small sample sizes, what other issues can you identify as a potential problems in making any inference about ethics from these experimental results?
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Judea Pearl wins Turing Prize
Danny Kaplan posted a link to this story on the Isolated Statisicians e-mail list:
A Turing Award for helping make computers smarter.
by Steve Lohr, Bits blog, New York Times, 15 March 2012
Judea Pearl of UCLA has been awarded the 2012 Turing Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery. As described in the NYT article, Pearl's work on probabilistic reasoning and Bayesian networks has influenced applications in areas from search engines to fraud detection to speech recognition.
Danny's message provided links to Pearl's web page for references to his work on causality, and to this talk, "The Art and Science of Cause and Effect," which is the epilogue to his famous book, Causality.
Danny's own Statistical Modeling textbook includes a chapter which discusses some of these ideas at a level appropriate for an introductory statistics audience.
A bizarre anatomical correlation
Politicians Swinging Stethoscopes, Gail Collins, The New York Times, March 16, 2012.
When a topic carries strong emotions, often people forget to check their facts carefully. And abortion is possibly the most emotional topic in politics today. It's not too surprising that opponents of abortion have tried to promote a link between abortion and breast cancer.
New Hampshire, for instance, seems to have developed a thing for linking sex and malignant disease. This week, the State House passed a bill that required that women who want to terminate a pregnancy be informed that abortions were linked to "an increased risk of breast cancer." As Terie Norelli, the minority leader, put it, the Legislature is attempting to make it a felony for a doctor "to not give a patient inaccurate information."
This was actually an issue about 25 years ago, when C. Everett Koop was Surgeon General. The American Cancer Society (ACS) has written that scientific research studies have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between abortion and breast cancer, and cites a comprehensive review in 2003 by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). But numerous pro-life sites still claim the opposite, with headlines like Hundreds of Studies Confirm Abortion-Breast Cancer Link.
It is interesting to speculate why pro-life sites would promote the abortion/breast cancer link so strongly in spite of dismissive commentary from respected organizations like ACS and NCI. If you believe that abortion is murder (as many people do), then it is not too far a leap to believe that something this evil would necessarily carry bad health consequences at the same time. It may also be a belief that mainstream organizations like ACS and NCI are dominated by pro-abortion extremists.
It is still curious, because if abortion is immoral, it should not matter whether it has bad side effects, such as an increased risk of breast cancer, or good side effects, such as a decrease in the crime rate. It may be that opponents of abortion feel free to use any weapon at their disposal to dissuade women from choosing abortion. It is worth noting that opponents of abortion are not the first and will not be the last group that has seized on a dubious statistical finding to support their political perspective.
The abortion/breast cancer link at least has biological plausibility. The number of pregnancies that you have and the number of live births are indeed associated with various types of cancer, so it is not too far fetched to believe that abortion might be related to these cancers as well. But another cancer link in an area almost as contentious lacks even this biological plausibility.
And there's more. One of the sponsors, Representative Jeanine Notter, recently asked a colleague whether he would be interested, "as a man," to know that there was a study "that links the pill to prostate cancer."
Clearly, Ms. Notter understands that only women consume birth control pills and that only men have a prostate. What she is claiming is
that nations with high use of birth control pills among women also tended to have high rates of prostate cancer among men.
Gail Collins mocks this correlation.
You could also possibly discover that nations with the lowest per capita number of ferrets have a higher rate of prostate cancer.
Birth control pills are possibly associated with ovarian and cervical cancer, and these are two organs that women do have. They may also be associated with a decrease in the risk of endometrial cancer. If you don't believe that NCI is overrun by extremists, you might find this fact sheet to offer a helpful review of these risks. Disentangling these cancer risks from other confounders (such as the age at first sexual intercourse) is very difficult.
Submitted by Steve Simon
1. What is the name for the type of study that notes that "nations with high use of birth control pills among women also tended to have high rates of prostate cancer among men"?
2. Randomized studies of the link between abortion and breast cancer are clearly impossible. What types of observational studies might be used to examine this link? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those types of studies.
Playing the casino
"The Man Who Broke Atlantic City"
by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic, April 2012
This is the story of an extremely talented blackjack player who is now banned from many casinos – not because of card-counting (supposedly) but because he was able to negotiate terms of play that lowered the house advantage.
Fifteen million dollars in winnings from three different casinos? .... How did he do it? .... The wagering of card counters assumes a clearly recognizable pattern over time, and Johnson was being watched very carefully. The verdict: card counting was not Don Johnson's game. .... As good as he is at playing cards, he turns out to be even better at playing the casinos. ....
Sophisticated gamblers won't play by the standard rules. They negotiate. Because the casino values high rollers more than the average customer, it is willing to lessen its edge for them ... primarily by offering ... discounts .... When a casino offers a discount of, say, 10 percent, that means if the player loses $100,000 at the blackjack table, he has to pay only $90,000. ….
So how did all these casinos end up giving Johnson ... a "huge edge"? "I just think somebody missed the math when they did the numbers on it," he told an interviewer.
Johnson did not miss the math. For example, at the [Tropicana], he was willing to play with a 20 percent discount after his losses hit $500,000, but only if the casino structured the rules of the game to shave away some of the house advantage. Johnson could calculate exactly how much of an advantage he would gain with each small adjustment in the rules of play. He won't say what all the adjustments were …, but they included playing with a hand-shuffled six-deck shoe; the right to split and double down on up to four hands at once; and a "soft 17"…. [H] whittled the house edge down to one-fourth of 1 percent …. In effect, he was playing a 50-50 game against the house, and with the discount, he was risking only 80 cents of every dollar he played. He had to pony up $1 million of his own money to start, but …: "You'd never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and … owe them only $400,000." ….
The Trop has embraced Johnson, inviting him back to host a tournament—but its management isn't about to offer him the same terms again.
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Sobering reminder: just because it is intuitively obvious doesn't mean it's true
by Harold DeMonaco, HealthNewsReview.org, 23 March 2012
According to DeMonaco, all of us are born with PFO, patent foramen ovale (an opening between the right and left atria or upper chambers in the heart). "It allows blood to bypass the lungs in the fetus since oxygen is supplied by the mother's blood circulation. The PFO closes in most right after birth."
When the PFO doesn't close properly, "There is good evidence that a significant number" of strokes result.
In theory, blood clots can travel from the right side of the heart and into the left ventricle and then be carried to the brain causing the stroke. Based on a number of reported case studies and small open label trials, a number of academic medical centers began to provide a new catheter based treatment. The treatment consists of placement of a closure device into the heart through the veins and serves to seal the opening. The procedure looks much like a cardiac catheterization. There are at least three medical devices used during this procedure; the Amplatzer PFO occluder, the Gore Helix Septal Occluder and the Starflex Septal Repair Implant.
In what HealthNewsReview.org refers to as a "Sobering reminder: just because it is intuitively obvious doesn't mean it's true,"
The industry sponsored study reported this week [in the March 15, 2012 NEJM] looked at two approaches to managing people who have had a previous cryptogenic stroke: 462 had medical care consisting of warfarin, aspirin or both for two years. 447 had placement of a Starflex Implant along with clopidogrel for 6 months and aspirin for two years. All subjects were randomized to the treatment arms. At the end of two years, 2.9% of the PFO closure group suffered another stroke compared to 3.1% of the people treated with drugs alone. Basically no difference in stroke outcome.
Overall, adverse events were equal in both groups with those having the device implanted suffering more events directly related to its placement.
1. The catheter-based treatments had been deemed successful via so-called "open label" trials. Google open label trials to see why that type of clinical trial doesn't carry the clout of some other types of clinical trials. This NEJM "study took 9 years to complete. A major reason for delay in completion was the inability of many centers to enroll patients. Since the closure devices are commercially available, they are routinely used off label. Patients had little reason to enroll in a clinical trial."
2. Note the pun in The March 15 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, whose editorial comment which accompanied the article: "Patent Foramen Ovale Closure — Closing the Door Except for Trials."
3. One of the manufacturers of the catheter, Starflex, was also involved in another PFO catheter procedure for alleviating migraines, the so-called MIST trial. According to Ben Goldacre
147 patients with migraine took part, 74 had the NMT STARFlex device implanted, 73 had a fake operation with no device implanted, and 3 people in each group stopped having migraines. The NMT STARFlex device made no difference at all. This is not a statement of opinion, and there are no complex stats involved.
Goldacre's article about the ensuing dustup and the 29 comments which follow make for very interesting reading, albeit discouraging if you want to have any faith in medical science.
Submitted by Paul Alper
Choosing the perfect March Madness bracket
"Trying for a Perfect Bracket? Insurers Will Take Those Odds"
by Erik Holm, The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2012
Before the 2012 NCAA men's basketball tournament, Fox Sports network ran an online contest, that offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could correctly pick all 63 March Madness games correctly. Fox also bought an insurance policy for the contest.
After just 16 games on the first day of March Madness ... fewer than 1% of the contestants still had perfect brackets .... By the time the field had been whittled to the Sweet 16 ... no one was left.
There are a number of companies offering to insure "all sorts of online competitions, wacky stunts, hole-in-one contests and even coupon giveaways." While these companies do not generally disclose the cost of insurance, a representative of one company stated that his company charges about 2% of the prize value for a "perfect-bracket" competition and up to 15% for other competitions. In any case, these rates are said to be "still more than the odds might indicate."
The website Book of Odds determined that picking the higher seed to win every matchup—generally the better bet for individual games—would result in odds of picking a perfect bracket of one in 35.4 billion. .... Other estimates have come up with better—but still minuscule—chances of success. Still, interviews with several experts who have arranged such contests yielded no one with a recollection of any contestant ever winning.
One contest-organizing company's representative stated that none of the millions of entries they had received had come closer than 59 games out of 63 games.
A blogger commented, "I am surprised that Fox Sports does not self-insure since the premium appears to be overpriced by a factor of 700."
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
New York City's teaching rankings
Here are three recent articles concerning New York City's controversial teacher rankings:
City teacher data reports are released
by Fernanda Santos and Sharon Otterman, New York Times, Schoolbook blog, 24 February 2012
After much legal wrangling, New York City has released its rankings of some 18,000 public school teachers in grades 4 through 8. The ranks are based on their students' performance on New York state's math and English exams over the five-year period ending with the 2009-10 school year. In response to concerns that the results might lead to criticism of individual teachers, officials sought to qualify the findings. We read
But citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher's math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam — as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.
The rankings are value-added assessments. This means that students' actual performance on the exam is compared to how well they would statistically be expected to perform based on their previous year's scores and various demographic variabless. As described in the article
If the students surpass the expectations, their teacher is ranked at the top of the scale — "above average" or "high" under different models used in New York City. If they fall short, the teacher receives a rating of "below average" or "low." ...In New York City, a curve dictated that each year 50 percent of teachers were ranked "average," 20 percent each "above average" and "below average," and 5 percent each "high" and "low."
The next article raises serious questions about the methodology, and questions whether the public will be able to appreciate its limitations.
Applying a precise label to a rough number
by Michael Winerip, New York Times, Schoolbook blog, 28 February 2012
Winerip sarcastically says how "delighted" he is that the scores have been released. He juxtaposes the cautions issued by school official, who said "We would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone" with reaction in the press:
Within 24 hours The Daily News had published a front-page headline that read, "NYC'S Best and Worst Teachers." And inside, on Page 4: "24 teachers stink, but 105 called great."
This article also provides a more detailed description of the value-added calculations:
Using a complex mathematical formula, the department's statisticians have calculated how much elementary and middle-school teachers' students outpaced — or fell short of — expectations on annual standardized tests. They adjusted these calculations for 32 variables, including "whether a child was new to the city in pretest or post-test year" and "whether the child was retained in grade before pretest year." This enabled them to assign each teacher a score of 1 to 100, representing how much value the teachers added to their students' education.
See the post from last year, Chance News 71: Formulas for rating teachers, for more discussion of the value-added model.
In the present article, Winerip makes the following comment about the comically wide confidence intervals cited for the rankings.
Think of it this way: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is seeking re-election and gives his pollsters $1 million to figure out how he's doing. The pollsters come back and say, "Mr. Mayor, somewhere between 13.5 percent and 66.5 percent of the electorate prefer you."
In the next article, Winerip examines how the ratings went wrong at one particular school, P.S. 146 in Brooklyn.
Hard-working teachers, sabotaged when student test scores slip
by Michael Winerip, New York Times, 4 March 2012
According to the article, P.S. 146 has a reputation as a high-achieving school. In 2009, 96 percent of their fifth graders were proficient in English and 89 percent were proficient in math. Nevertheless, when the rankings were published, the school fared quite poorly. Several exceptionally qualified teachers received terrible scores. For example, Cora Sangree, whose resume includes training teachers at Columbia University's Teachers College, received an 11 in English and a 1 in math.
Winerip attributes such anomalies to the perverse nature of the value-added model. He explains
Though 89 percent of P.S. 146 fifth graders were rated proficient in math in 2009, the year before, as fourth graders, 97 percent were rated as proficient. This resulted in the worst thing that can happen to a teacher in America today: negative value was added.
The difference between 89 percent and 97 percent proficiency at P.S. 146 is the result of three children scoring a 2 out of 4 instead of a 3 out of 4.
1. The value-added computations would seem to assume that the student groups are stable from year to year. What problems might there be here?
2. Look at the percentages given for each rating category ("low," "below average," "average" etc.). The article says these were dictated by a "curve". Do you suppose the value-added data were symmetric, or that this was a normal curve? What are the implications of such a scheme?
Submitted by Bill Peterson


text:
It all started one day in July when I commented on one of her recipes (see link). She had made a beautiful cake with those biscuits and I wrote that it was a pity we didn't find them here, because I really wanted to test her recipe. She then proposed to send me some as she thought that I deserved a taste of that regional speciality. So, some days later, the postman left her parcel in my letter box. It was with big pleasure that I discovered it waiting for me in it's compartment. Her present made me really very happy as it meant that I was going to be able to test all those gorgeous recipes for sweet treats made with those cute little pink ladyfingers!
For my first use of the "Biscuits De Reims", I decided upon making the cake I saw on her blog: an "Almond Cake". Let me tell you that I was not deceived at all by it as it is delicious, soft, smooth, delicate and light like sponge cake. Somehow, it reminds me of "Carrot Cake" texture- and taste-wise (that's maybe because of the ground almond and lemon zest)... Those pink biscuits add an interesting nutty flavor as well as an uncomparable fluffy texture to this cake. A real delicacy!
If you had not made this kind gift, I would never have known that gorgeous speciality!
~ Almond Cake From Reims ~
Recipe by Fossier and slightly adapted by Rosa @ Rosa's Yummy Yums
20g Ground almonds
70g Unsalted butter, melted
165g Castor sugar
3 Eggs (~53g), separated
12 Biscuits Roses De Reims
The zest of 1 lemon
1 1/2 Tsps Vanilla extract
1. Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F) and grease a 20cm (7.8 inches) round cake pan.
2. Put the "Biscuits Roses De Reims" in the bowl of your mixer and grind until powder-like.
3. In a big bowl, beat together the egg yolks with the sugar until fluffy and light colored.
4. Add the lemon zest, vanilla extract, the biscuit powder, the ground almonds and the butter.
5. Mix well for about 5 minutes until smooth.
6. Beat the egg whites until fluffy and stiff.
7. Incorporate them delicately to the biscuit mixture in order to get a homogenous batter.
8. Pour this batter into the cake pan.
9. Bake for about 20-25 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
10. Cool on a wire rack.
If you don't have any "Biscuits De Reims", then use ladyfingers and add a few drops of red food coloring to the batter.
The ground biscuits should resemble fine semolina flour. It should not look like coarse meal.
I guess that you could replace the castor sugar by light brown sugar and the lemon zest by orange zest.
Serving suggestions:
Eat at any time of the day and serve with "Crème Anglaise" (see infos) or red fruits (salad or coulis).