Should we legislate home schooled children?

I was notified of an article posted in the Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly from the University of Maryland. An article “The Harms of Homeschooling“, authored by Robin L. West, begins with specious arguments and then digresses into the ridiculous, and finally argues against his/her own points.

First, let me give a caveat: Ms. West is concerned about the devout, fundamentalist Protestant home schoolers, not the “rest of us.” But given her target, she is doing more of a disservice to all home schoolers in her arguments.

For those who don’t want to bother reading this … read more

Traveling is an inherently stressful endeavor. During the holidays, more so. We just took a lovely trip to beautiful Denver, Colorado from our home airport of Philadelphia, PA. Outbound flight was on United, return was on a “partner airline”, US Airways.

To our chagrin, two days before our return flight, my 3-year-old daughter came down with … read more

Now he's watching every domain name I look up?

Google recently added a Public DNS service. For a good definition of DNS, check our new wiki. In short: DNS is how your computer figures out where a web server is located when you type in any web address by your computer, meaning: … read more

Is that my cell phone he's holding?

As of August 25th, 2009, Google Alerts now tracks links from emails through the google.com domain.

Previously, they didn’t. … read more

Ah. The Google Books fiasco. I’ve seen it in the news, have been quietly monitoring the situation, but I just read … read more

Ignore the mouse ... and his two-letter domain name

Ever notice that when you sign into, oh, say, Gmail, you sign in at www.google.com? What’s up with that?

The reasons are technical, but it should be noted that when more and more traffic goes through the same domain name, you should wonder why.

Before I go off the nerd deep-end, if you don’t know what a URL is or the parts of a URL are, check out our new Wiki.

We are talking about the host portion (or domain name), of a web site. Specifically, … read more

Not that it’s news, but I did some quick analysis of FeedBurner, since I figured out they were acquired by Google, like, two years ago.

The links that Google sends visitors to go through … read more

Google snapped up reCAPTCHA recently. I’m feeling worried. As well, I must have been in a news bubble there, but they also acquired FeedBurner, in, like, 2007. They just re-branded it recently, which is probably why I didn’t notice.

Now, I don’t put on the tinfoil hat very often, but Google keeps snapping up large wedges of the internet traffic pie. I’m getting more and more confident that Google wants to monitor all of your internet activities, all the time. Their goal, to provide the best targetted advertising, means they need to understand their users better. And … read more

A quick post regarding Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters. Our conversion tracking software recently added support for Yahoo! Analytics tracking parameters, which, according to … read more

I had to write after reading this article in the New York Times. In short, Google “sees” 92 percent of online traffic for the top 100 internet sites. Other big boys, Atlas (60%), Omniture, and Quantcast (54% – I assume combined) don’t even get … read more