That City Pages piece was just going around on my FB. Somehow I missed it back in '11. (Probably because CP sucks nowadays and I only read it once a month or so.)
Didn't you or someone else link this years ago?
The thing that always confuses me about the rubric is it says an "excellent" score is excellent on all the metrics, "good" is good on all the metrics, etc. What if they're excellent on organization, adequate on focus, good on word choice, and excellent on grammar and usage? The rubric doesn't explain at all how they should be graded.
"Porcello" must be some kind of bacon-infused liqueur, right?
2: I suppose that means the score is the worst subscore.
Man, what a depressing article. I didn't realize that such a high proportion of graders, supervisors, and others involved in the testing industry were temps.
If people didn't read ProPublica's investigative piece on perma-temps when it was linked here before, here it is again.
I doubt it has much to do with the temps doing the grading since they say that drift occurs over time. Grading is subjective and dull. Standardizing "good writing" is nearly impossible. Kids defy rubrics. The whole system is absolutely awful, but I do think it's easier in math than in writing to do skills assessments that are fair and objective. (Not that I think that's a worthwhile undertaking, either.)
Off topic, but relevant to the hunt for a decent ISP. As well as Sonic.net, XMission has turned down all the surveillance letters it got but one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/09/xmission-isp-customers-privacy-nsa
Dead thread
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****Spoilers*****
So, I'm marathoning Clannad + After Story this weekend and I get 3/4 through and sit up and say: Goddamn, zombie Satyajit Ray needs to fucking sue!
But you know, Clannad was just better. I kinda hated the Apu, and though both are male fantasies, at least the women in Clannad aren't totally passive sacrifices and the redemption and happiness of the male lead in Clannad is somewhat earned.
Among the amazements in Clannad, what struck me beyond the constant adventurous cinematography (so many shots of feet, or conversing torsos without heads or feet)... was the massive number of pivot, establishing, or "pillow shots", a term of Burch, and B & T talking about a shot without diagetic content. Shots without diagetic content are impossible.
An incredible number of frames that flash by quickly but contain important symbolic or emotional content. I was stopping constantly, and backing up, goin wait a minute....Absolutely subliminal.
So many shots of telephone poles and sidestreets and buildings that you would think people would get that in Clannad and After Story the fucking city (as more than a collection of people, but definitely that too) has a consciousness and agency and that this is the point of the entire story.
"I hate this town. It's full of memories I want to forget." is how we start.
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The town is full of memories?
But I forgot. Obviously Apu is justly famous for its sense of place and use of landscape, but in Apu the countryside is what you need to escape from and in Clannad the countryside is where you, very rarely for restorative purposes, escape to.
Clannad is totally urban and pro-urban and strongly hints that the Kami of a site survives the shopping center built on top of it.
"Lastly, all Kami have a different guardianship or duty to the people around them. Just as the people have an obligation to keep the Kami happy, the Kami have to perform the specific function of the object, place, or idea they inhabit."
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