text:
Her lawyer, Teddy Gordon, says... it "is a pure quota," adding, "We've color coded children."...There's much more at the link, and plenty of discussion elsewhere on the web about today's tremendously important cases. (The second case is about the Seattle schools.) Please read the whole article. Your comments here will be better if you speak to the specific details to the case and understand the context, even if it is your inclination to answer the question with a bright, ideological rule. Keep in mind that Judge Alex Kozinski, a judge who is highly respected by conservatives, approved of the Seattle program, writing that it "is not meant to oppress minorities, nor does it have that effect. . . . There is no attempt to give members of particular races political power based on skin color. There is no competition between the races, and no race is given a preference over another."
To supporters of the Louisville plan, diversity is more important in early grades than it is in college. Opponents counter that there are other race-neutral ways of achieving diversity -- such as assignment by socio-economic status. In school surveys, however, Louisville parents have rejected that approach as too intrusive, since it would require that families supply the school board with personal information.
What the parents want is important, the school board says. It points to the fact that white students were fleeing the Louisville public schools by the thousands until the board adopted a plan in the mid-1980s that combined race-conscious student assignment with choice. Suddenly, school attendance stabilized....
PTA board member Mary Myers says the race-conscious assignment plan has also equalized school resources. "My children do not have to sit next to a white child to learn," she says, "but they need the resources of that school," and under this system, "they all get the same resources."...
The Bush administration and its former solicitor general, Ted Olson, point out though, that before 1954, racially segregated schools were highly popular too. "To deny people opportunities on the basis of race because you've been re-elected by a high popular vote just won't cut it under the Constitution," Olson says.
The Constitution, he adds, requires that the government be colorblind. It cannot discriminate to offset societal discrimination. Frank Mellen, the school board's lawyer, says that's simplistic since the Louisville plan is an evolution of what the federal courts ordered until just six years ago.
"It would be odd," he says, "if what was legally required one day by a desegregation decree becomes forbidden another day when the court dissolves the decree."
December 4, 2006
"'The office of student services has disapproved your transfer request' because it would 'have an adverse effect on desegregation compliance.'"
44 comments:
- Simon said...
This morning's Washington Journal features the head of the LDF, who argued not ten minutes ago that the most important precedent in today's decision is Brown v. Board. Moreover, at SCOTUSblog on Friday, Lyle Dennison wondered aloud if this case could be Brown III. Frankly, I find it astonishing to learn that fifty years on, Brown v. Board has been transformed into a case that should be read to support racial discrimination.
- Ann Althouse said...
As the linked article said, the desegregation orders coming out of Brown required race to be taken into account. In that sense, it is inaccurate to view what these cities are doing as the opposite of Brown.
- Unknown said...
I love the part in the story I read about the case on Sunday where "Pat Todd...said the average bus commute in the district is 45 minutes." As if that is an acceptable amount of time for a child to spend on a bus.
I live in Memphis, which is still under court-ordered bussing. If I had kids, they would not be able to go to the school four blocks from my house. Instead, they would be bussed across town. Why not just improve the neighborhood schools instead of bussing kids to a bad education?
Oh. Right. To serve the higher god of diversity.
(Incidentally, Memphis has horrible public schools. When bussing was started, almost all parents who could afford to do so, black or white, put their children in private school. So now they pay taxes for public schools and $4,000 to $12,000 a year for private school tuition. The public school valedictorians get 21s on their ACTs; private school kids get 34s.)
- tjl said...
The NPR article tells us that Seattle's plan is no longer in force, while Meredith's transfer request was eventually granted. Maybe the SC will surprise everybody by holding that both of these cases are actually about standing.
Both cities' plans allow many different alternatives -- e.g., specialized programs v. traditional ones, in addition to the neighborhood school. It's not a simple matter of either you get in or you don't. The plans can easily be distinguished from what Michigan was doing in Grutter.
- Ann Althouse said...
Class-factotum: You're complaining about court-ordered busing, but these cases are about a plan the cities adopted for themselves, pursuant to the local democratic process. The issue is whether the courts should intervene and deprive the majority of what it has decided it likes. That's a very different context. Please address that.
- Ann Althouse said...
I think it's easily predictable that the cities will win, the only question is whether they will win by more than 5-4. The basis for deferring to the cities is very strong, and the call of judicial restraint is distinct.
- Unknown said...
Sorry, Ann. I started with the Crystal Meredith story (the Pat Todd quotation) and segued into my own drama!
- Ann Althouse said...
Class-factotum: It's okay to relate the story to your own situation, but you are making a serious mistake if you reason by analogy when your situation is completely different. I am not asking you to explain your inclination to switch to talking about your own life, I am asking you to sharpen your thinking about legal issues. I'm being the lawprof here today.
- Zeb Quinn said...
For all their self-serving ballyhooing about how "successful" the Louisville plan is, even to the point that a one-time critic is now an entrenched board member manning the ramparts in its defense, nobody talks about results. By "results" I mean real results. After 31 years in Louisville, 1975 to present, a supremely ample baseline, show us the test scores that show black kids scoring the same as, or God forbid, even exceeding white kids, even if only here or there. Go ahead and adjust them for economic factors, comparing lower income to lower income, middle class to middle class. That's okay, and that's the fair way. But where are those results? After 31 years, where are they??? And show us the college entrance rates for white kids and black kids. Where are they?
If they had them in their favor or even they were merely trending in their direction they'd be screaming them from the rooftops to justify this program.
The absence is telling.
- jaed said...
a plan the cities adopted for themselves
Mrph. Can they be said to have been completely free of the shadow of court-ordered race-based busing and school assignment, though, even if they were not under court order? In the Louisville case, the city seems to have initially adopted the plan under court order, even if it's not court-mandated now. I can't figure out whether the possibility of a lawsuit figured in Seattle's decision, but it does seem possible.
Oddly, using race as a tiebreaker when schools are oversubscribed doesn't bother me as much as using it as a primary selection mechanism; I'm not sure why that's so, because I think the constitutional rule ought to be the same. Perhaps because when it's only used as a tiebreaker, no student is refused admission to the school of his or her preference (or parent's preference) solely because of race.
- Daryl Herbert said...
From reading the article, it sounds like Louisville has a decent setup that goes beyond racial balancing and tries to cater to children's needs.
Is it racist to fear that white children sent to majority-minority schools would be subject to racial abuse? Wasn't that the fear people had back in the 1970s? Regardless of whether their fears were rooted in racism, how often did that sort of violence take place?
I'll bet that's an issue left-wing social science researchers have never dared to touch with a ten-foot pole (though I'm sure they dismiss it offhand with a sneer)
As long as the school administrators do their jobs and prevent that sort of racial bullying (or serious bullying of any other kind), the program sounds fine.
- Dust Bunny Queen said...
The goal seems to be (as I understand it)to counter self segregated schools that have been created by demographics. i.e. people living in neighborhoods of people who look like themselves or share the same culture. By re-shuffling the school deck they hope to create schools with the approved percentage of "races" despite the demographic trends that the residents have set up themselves.
Is the next logical step to force approved mixes of people in their choice of residence? Forcing populations in neighborhoods to be the right mix. "I'm sorry Mr. & Mrs Chan, we already have our approved quota of Chinese residents in this subdivision/apartment building/condo development. You will have to buy a home elsewhere."
I think these cases present an important fork in the road for post-Brown constitutional law. Brown was one of the earliest cases to rely on social science in support of a decision as to the meaning of constitutional text. Of course, now it is commonplace to be drowned in social science research any time a key social issue is to be determined in the courts. This case is no exception, with numerous amicus submissions debating the supposed scientific proof of the benefits of racially diverse classrooms, etc.
What these cases will test is which is the stronger Brown legacy: taking the Equal Protection Clause seriously (i.e. enforcing its literal terms), or allowing constitutional law to follow prevailing fads in the social sciences. Assuming the accuracy of Ann's prediction of at least a 5-4 win for the cities, it appears we'll have to brace for the sad eventuality of the core holding of Brown being eclipsed by the preference for bending constitutional principles to fit prevailing social science orthodoxy.
I'll admit I don't get Kozinski's concurrence. Why the does purity of the government actor's motives matter? How could such a consideration possibly work as a constitutional standard?
And finally, as to framing the issue as "whether the courts should intervene and deprive the majority of what it has decided it likes," that ought to be the first consideration taken off the table in any Equal Protection case. Equal Protection jurisprudence (at least as applied to racial classifications) is not supposed to include a default preference for what the majority likes.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
I think it is a clear win for the cities as well. But I am surprised Ann agrees, because no one I know seems to think SCOTUS would have taken the case if not to strike down the plans. But the most important point is this one: if schools can use race to determine admissions to K-12 schooling, then they can certainly tell your 5-year old boy not to wear dresses to school.
- MadisonMan said...
Zeb Quinn, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- Simon said...
Brown II characterized the holding of Brown I as "racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional." Brown II, 349 U.S. 294, 298 (1955). Moreover, that cases was about providing a remedy for explicitly government-maintained de jure segregation; extreme measures there may have been justified. They are not here. These cases are not about government-mandated segregation, as Justice Scalia noted at oral argument, they are about whether the government may take race into account in distributing children among schools in pursuit of the laudable goal of racial diversity. Those means - not the goal, but the means - put the instant cases on a collision course with the proposition that "racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional." That statement is eviscerated if the school boards prevail today, and for that reason, I would maintain that in the most meaningful sense, what these cities are doing is the opposite of Brown. The Fourteenth Amendment - with very few exceptions - mandates a colorblind government, even when that stricture (as many of the Bill of Rights' strictures) is downright inconvenient.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
The Fourteenth Amendment - with very few exceptions - mandates a colorblind government, even when that stricture (as many of the Bill of Rights' strictures) is downright inconvenient.
I just re-read the Fourteenth Amendment, and I don't see the word "colorblind" in it. What happened to the text? Is that a textualist or a purposivist reading, Simon?
- Simon said...
Article I never uses the word "veto" either - does that mean the President doesn't have one?
- SarahWeddington said...
Ann writes that Judge Kozinski is highly respected by conservatives. I don't know what conservatives she's talking about.
He's highly respected by libertarians, but I don't think too many conservatives hold him in high regard. Certainly not in the first tier. I can think of at least a handful of Judges more highly respected than Kozinski:
Luttig, K. Williams, Alito, Randolph, Sentelle, Brown, Pryor, Jones, Higgenbotham, Wilkins, Easterbrook, etc...
I think Kozinski may be intellectually respected on the lines of a Dick Posner, but no one thinks he's a real conservative on the lines of a Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, Bork etc...
This case should be pretty easy and based on the oral arguments, I predict the petitioners win both cases 5-4. Kennedy gave pretty strong signals that he has problems with both cities' programs.
- Simon said...
Sarah said...
"This case should be pretty easy and based on the oral arguments, I predict the petitioners win both cases 5-4. Kennedy gave pretty strong signals that he has problems with both cities' programs."
I agree, and I really would like to know where Ann thinks this fifth vote is coming from. Surely not from Justice Kennedy, who went out of his way in his Grutter dissent to make explicit what might be inferred from his joining the Chief Justice's opinion in Gratz: that Justice Kennedy views racial classification as a permissible criterion only where it can survive under strict scrutiny. And in his Croson concurrence, Kennedy stated that "The moral imperative of racial neutrality" -- that is, in other language, colorblindness, Mort -- "is the driving force of the Equal Protection Clause." In one of his occaisional flashes of clarity, Justice Kennedy continued (as if in answer to Ann's earlier point about Brown II): "[t]he rule against race-conscious remedies is already less than an absolute one, for that relief may be the only adequate remedy after a judicial determination that a State or its instrumentality has violated the Equal Protection Clause" (emphasis added), but in cases where the Court is presented "with an ordinance and a legislative record open to the fair charge that it is not a remedy but is itself a preference which will cause the same corrosive animosities that the Constitution forbids in the whole sphere of government," that measure will not pass strict scrutiny.
A man who expects consistency from Justice Kennedy is a man who invites disappointment into his life, but in this case, I have a hard time believing that this program survives strict scrutiny, and so I have a hard time believing that Kennedy will rat. Thus, I would tend to agree with Sarah that this case is going to be 5-4, but not for the schools. As dismal as my opinion of Justice Kennedy is, and as much as I expect him to rat in Carhart, I have a pretty good level of confidence that the good guys are going to win this one.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
After listening to both oral arguments, I must say I am suprised at how easy a time Mellen had.
Clearly, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens line up on one side. Thomas and Alito are on the other.
I am unsure where Roberts, Kennedy, and Scalia are going, but any of them could provide the fifth vote. I think Ann is playing the odds: it is unlikely that all three will break for the other side. Kennedy, Alito, and Roberts seemed to indicate they were "gettable" votes (or Kennedy indicated that in one of his questions, though I doubt Alito is "gettable").
- Simon said...
I explained above why I think Kennedy comes out for the petitioners in this case, and to that, I'd add that if you think Scalia's vote is in play, you need to read his concurrences in Richmond v. Croson and Adarand Constructors v. Pena, and his dissent in Grutter. But I'm intrigued as to what your pitch for the Chief Justice's vote would be?
- Mark R. said...
I am surprised that none of the arguments presented in the case, or discussed here raise the issue of harm to the child from being bussed to a far away school instead of a preferential claim to a spot in a closer, local school.
To have a child spend an extra hour or more of a day on the bus is a) raises their risk of a traffic accident purely from miles driven, and b) deprives them of that hour to study, play, relax, be with their family, etc.
It's just seems wrong to force a child to go to a far away school when there's a local school in the neighborhood. It may be occasionally justified if the local school is oversubscribed, but even then the child should be allowed to try to go to the next nearest school, rather than be bussed an hour to a school selected for racial balance reasons.
Is it constitutional for a city ordinance to impose the higher risk of traffic accidents and extra time burden on school children? The school day is long enough, and the traffic statistics are bad enough that I would certainly not allow my children to be treated as some pawns in a coercive scheme like the one described in the two cases.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
I'd add that you need not to talk to me like I haven't attended law school. If I were you, I would check out Roberts' oral argument in Rice v. Cayetano. And, for a textualist, Simon, you seem to have some problem today understanding what I meant by exactly what I said: I am unsure where Roberts is going.
I would also suggest you listen to the oral arguments. 1. Scalia was not totally on-board with the petitioners' arguments, in the least. 2. There is no guarantee -- none at all -- that the Justices, especially if Kennedy is writing the opinion in favor of the petitioners, will simply graft Adarand and Croson, two easily distinguishable cases, on to the K-12 context. Adarand and Croson don't even involve schools or the making of educational policy. If kennedy is willing to disregard Grutter because it involves the First Amendment, it's enough to disregard Adarand and Croson for their irrelevance to discretionary policy-making in the educational context. If the petitioners win, I sincerely doubt the court will simply parrot Clement's arguments, which most of the bench seemed to cold toward.
Your analysis is bad, in my opinion, because you can't just look to past opinions of Justices to predict their future voting-behavior. Any prospectus will tell you that's question-begging ("Past performance does not determine future results"). And, aside from its fallaciousness, if it worked, then you would have foreseen Scalia's concurrence in Raich and his support of Sixth Amendment rights in Gonzalez-Lopez. Did you?
- Cedarford said...
Ann - Class-factotum: You're complaining about court-ordered busing, but these cases are about a plan the cities adopted for themselves, pursuant to the local democratic process. The issue is whether the courts should intervene and deprive the majority of what it has decided it likes. That's a very different context. Please address that.
Yes and no, Ann. If you are in law professor mode....
Yes, the racial quotas are promulgated by elected school boards.
No, they would not be doing so unless they feared the money and power of the ACLU-types or others coming in and suing the city if they failed to be properly multi-culti. So playing it safe means boards are saying some students must accept severe impositions (3 hour commuting times, lack of school socialization with nearby peers) and NOT go to a good local school based on their race - but HAVE to be bused across town to meet racial targets.
The same sort of decision-making process under lawyer pressure that leads school boards to democratically decide to be safe and sanitize Christ out of school Christmas activities. Or ban JROTC and other controversies that could embroil volunteers in unwanted litigation.
Now there are certainly school board members that are elected espousing belief in PC and that they honestly want 100% secular school programs, that JROTC is evil and homophobic, and that lack of this or that color in "acceptable proportions" is unthinkable. But the "democratic"
process occurs under shadow of law and lawyers and fear that being a Board member could entail subpeonas at one's doorstep if they decide "wrongly".
Hopefully the Court will look at it not as "elected members doing noble work of advancing society and avoiding trouble" that are the most affected parties, but the children.
Are there children that are subjected to harm based on purely on their being individual victims of racial discrimination?
Yes. Students in Louisville and Seattle are harmed from up to 3 hours of busing precluding their using that time for meaningful study in a conducive environment, participation in after-school activities including sports, or if older, after-school jobs. Harm from missing out in socialization in their immediate neighborhood. Potential harm from inability of remote parents to monitor their progress, guage effectiveness of the school, or quickly be there for their children in an emergency.
And just so you know, I was a former "victim of being white" from a voluntary busing plan made by a school board and lawyers that feared lawsuits by ACLU, NAACP. Half my housing development got to attend the local HS one mile away (the side with 2 school board member's kids). All blacks got the local school, automaticaly. I got bused to a school 11 miles away on the opposite side of the city. With racial fights at the connecting bus stop. With inability to do after school activities unless parents chauffered. With 2 working parents, I did activities despite that, even though it involved walking or hitchhiking the last 5-6 miles home not served by city or school buses in the evening. Winters walking or hitching in freezing weather and darkness were tough.
At school, little "diversity" benefits existed. Racial tensions were high. Whites hung with whites, blacks with blacks. Few blacks were in the honors classes, mainstreaming classes were mainly an education in how to learn despite the constant class disruptions or how to move ahead and learn more while the teachers focused on the laggers.
In our housing development, frienships changed based on school assignment, and the lawyers moved the "who goes where" map a few streets over based on those whites who could do so - fleeing to private schools. Which finally caused an uprising to block seniors and juniors from being uprooted. My parents chose to save for their 3 kids college, instead.
- Simon said...
"I'd add that you need not to talk to me like I haven't attended law school."
Why would I assume that you had? This is not a blawg, so there is no particular reason to assume that most posters here are legal professionals of any stripe. Nor is there anything in your profile to suggest that you have, and there's no way to infer from your comments (those that I've read, at least) that you have or haven't. Thusfar, all I know about you is that you're a valuable commenter here, you have evident familiarity with legal materials, and you seem to share my high opinion of our hostess, none of which is a prima facie case to infer your educational background.
As to Rice, I'm not familiar with that case, but I'd note that from the date alone, it's apparent to even the casual observer that Roberts' involvement in that case was as an advocate. Unless you believe that Roberts is an astonishingly incapable lawyer -- hardly the consensus view, I think -- I don't see how you can possibly infer his views on the case from what he argued for his client in that case, unless you also believe that the taxi driver who conveyed Roberts to the Court that morning just happened to fancy a leisurely drive from 555 Thirteenth Street NW to 1 First Street NE, rather than efficiently executing the desire of his paying client.
On the question of predicting voting patters, I concede that in Kennedy's case, that's difficult to do, because Kennedy has the principles of a bowl of jello. Which is to say, he's a pragmatist: he either doesn't have, or has never showed the faintest hint that he might have, an overarching theory of what law is and how you interpret it. He lacks the formalist's interest in rules, which is one of the principal reasons why I find him so objectionable as a jurist. None-the-less, I think he has articulated a view in the past of the issues in this case that seem to make his voting for the good guys quite likely.
Scalia, of course, is a different story. Perhaps it's just because I've spent an unhealthy amount of time contemplating his opinions and methods, or more likely it's because he more than most jurists has in spades the very virtues that Kennedy lacks, but for the most part, I feel like I can read the briefs and tell you which way Scalia's going to come out, for most cases. Did I see Gonzales-Lopez coming? Yes, absolutely. I think Scalia's Sixth Amendment jurisprudence points directly at that result. Did I see Raich coming? Honestly, no - but in hindsight, I suggest that I should have seen it coming. Scalia declined to join Justice Thomas' concurrence in Lopez, and Scalia and I have always had a stronger view of stare decisis than does Justice Thomas. I was and remain surprised by the tone of his concurrence, though - I would have expected him to much more strongly emphasize that his vote had different doctrinal underpinnings. In any event, I would suggest that Justice Scalia's principal contribution to law has been to spearhead a revival of formalism and rules, and those animating beliefs make his vote in this case fairly easy to predict. I would be very disappointed - indeed, I would be absolutely astonished - if he voted with the school boards in these cases.
- Anon Y. Mous said...
14th amendment: "... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. ..."
Ann Althouse: "The issue is whether the courts should intervene and deprive the majority of what it has decided it likes."
I'm going to have to go with the constitution here.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
As to Rice, I'm not familiar with that case, but I'd note that from the date alone, it's apparent to even the casual observer that Roberts' involvement in that case was as an advocate. Unless you believe that Roberts is an astonishingly incapable lawyer -- hardly the consensus view, I think -- I don't see how you can possibly infer his views on the case
He didn't have to take the case if he disagreed with the argument. He certainly presented the argument to the court. Rice involved use of racial classifications in distributing trustee benefits in Hawaii. The position Roberts advocated in favor of there is about as far from the position you are trying to impute to him now as can be. I have a hard believing Roberts has strong, principled beliefs that would lead you to confidently predict him necessarily striking down the programs here, given that he was willing to go blow for blow with Ted Olson in advance of the exact opposite position only a few years ago, in exchange for cash. Listen to the oral arguments. And note what Kennedey's ruling was there, too.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
Did I see Raich coming? Honestly, no - but in hindsight,
Hindsight is not forecasting. You are engaging in what is called a post hoc rationalization. I would note that I saw both Raich and Gonzalez-Lopez coming and I disagree with you here.
- Atticus said...
Mark R. said...
"I am surprised that none of the arguments presented in the case, or discussed here raise the issue of harm to the child from being bussed to a far away school instead of a preferential claim to a spot in a closer, local school."
Some parents from the bad areas of town prefer to put their children on a bus and send them across town. The bus ride is safer than the child walking two blocks to the neighborhood school. The mother of my daughter's friend told me that is the reason she wants her little girl bussed out of the neighborhood.
As much as individual teachers, administrators, and parents hate it, government regulations require them to track students according to race. There is no possibility of ignoring race.
One more tidbit. In my city, parents don't need to provide any kind of information for the school district to know who is low income--because they already provide that information when they apply for free or reduced lunches. If you don't apply for free or reduced school lunches, then you must be wealthy.
Somebody stop me... And if your school is tagged as "wealthy," then the PTA is expected to ante up for playground equipment and air conditioning while the poor schools get it from the district. I don't know how to solve that one, but I do know that discussions about "equity" never talk about that.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
and there's no way to infer from your comments (those that I've read, at least) that you have or haven't.
you have evident familiarity with legal materials
Oh, look. A clue.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
- Mortimer Brezny said...
In any event, I would suggest that Justice Scalia's principal contribution to law has been to spearhead a revival of formalism and rules, and those animating beliefs make his vote in this case fairly easy to predict. I would be very disappointed - indeed, I would be absolutely astonished - if he voted with the school boards in these cases.
Because Scalia would never decide a case on the basis of deferring to state governments.
- Mark R. said...
Some parents from the bad areas of town prefer to put their children on a bus and send them across town. The bus ride is safer than the child walking two blocks to the neighborhood school. The mother of my daughter's friend told me that is the reason she wants her little girl bussed out of the neighborhood.
That might be, but are you suggesting that this is the reason to bus some other kids from far away to that unsafe neighborhood? Just because some neighborhoods in the city are unsafe, should all kids in the city be exposed to the risks? This is a crazy argument. The city should strive to make your daughter's friend's neightborhood safe enough to go to school, not make other kids subject to unsafe circumstances to compensate for its ineptness. Or they can move all schools from unsafe to safer neighborhoods, and bus kids from unsafe neighborhoods to where parents feel they would be safer. That should not entitle the city to coerce other kids to going to those unsafe neighborhoods.
When I was making an argument about possible harm to bussed children, I was just thinking about the time extra time they would spend on the road. But clearly the risks to being in an unsafe neighborhood, plus the inability to socialize outside of school with kids who live an hour away and can't come over to play or to study without someone driving them, all seem to support the notion that this co-erced program is truly harming at least some of the children subjected to it.
- Zeb Quinn said...
MadisonMan said
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Sure it is. In fact the silence is deafening. The utter failure of the public schools to bring black student performances up to the performance levels of other races, as manifested on standardized tests, despite 30 plus years of busing and quotas and all manner of other funded programs for the purported purpose of supposedly giving equal opportunities to all, is the elephant in the room nobody even looks at let alone brings up.
And for the Supremes to be playing patty-cake with local school districts in their efforts to achieve visual coloration harmonics --pleasing to the eye-- is sophistry at best and preposterous at worst. If the court really wanted to make a difference they'd be holding the school districts' feet to the fire over things that really matter, and be a little proactive when and where it makes a difference for once.
- Richard Dolan said...
After reading the transcript of the argument in the Seattle case, I don't see why anyone would think that Seattle is likely to win this case. The transcript of the argument in the Louisville case wasn't posted on the SCOTUS site when I checked a while ago.
As for Justice Kennedy, he makes a point of saying during the Seattle argument that, even where race conscious factors can be used for purposes of making pupil assignments, the Court has always insisted that they be a last resort. From his questioning, he seemed unconvinced that the Seattle plan used race conscious factors as a last resort.
Scalia and Roberts both seemed quite hostile to the Seattle plan. among other things, Scalia offered an elaborate analogy to Gov't funding of festivals in Little Italy's and Chinatowns, which he said were perfectly OK if intended to foster diversity and cultural preservation. But Scalia thought that such programs would cross a clear constitutional line if the Gov't accorded preferences for particular ethnicities in Gov't housing to achieve the same goals. As he made plain, his point was that diversity as a Gov't goal is fine, but the means to achieve it must comply with equal protection requirements. During Seattle's argument, Roberts asked whether Seattle really meant to defend the "separate but equal" justification of Plessy that Brown had rejected. Roberts is clearly no fan of racial line-drawing by Gov'ts, and nothing in his questioning today suggested that he had suddenly become one.
Alito (along with Stevens and Breyer) seemed most interested in the real world consequences of the Seattle plan. During his rebuttal argument, Petitioner's attorney went immediately to that subject, and offered the Court specific cites to the appendix to show, in substance, that Seattle's schools maintained a high level of racial/ethnic diversity even after the plan under consideration in this case was ended.
One other factual oddity about the Seattle case came out during the argument. For its racial classifications, Seattle basically uses a white/non-white scheme. Several justices asked about how Asians and Hispanics fit into this scheme; whether a school that was 60% Asian/Hispanic, 40% white and 0% black would be deemed by Seattle to be racially balanced; and the like. The point of that questioning seemed to be that Seattle's exercise in social engineering was pretty unsophisticated if diversity was the goal.
If I were Seattle's lawyer, I'd be worried about a 5-4 or 6-3 decision against me after that argument. Quite apart from which side ultimately prevails, it will be interesting to see whether any single opinion commands 5 votes.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
Roberts is clearly no fan of racial line-drawing by Gov'ts, and nothing in his questioning today suggested that he had suddenly become one.
Except he argued that racial line-drawing is mandated by the Hawaii constitution and the federal Constitution in Rice v. Cayetano.
And, you're ignoring the answers to those questions. The question isn't whether the Justices asked questions; it's whether they were combative and unrelenting and whether the answers were sufficient/satisfying.
I don't think the school districts gave bad answers to the Justices' questions, and I think the petitioners got really hostile questioning from conservative Justices, too. (Including Scalia.)
So I don't see the easy result that everyone else sees. I see four votes for the school district and possibly 5 votes against. But, if the opinion is written right, any of a certain 3 of those 5 could join the 4. You don't think Justices will flip to write the opinion? And you call yourself a court-watcher?
- Harkonnendog said...
"You're complaining about court-ordered busing, but these cases are about a plan the cities adopted for themselves, pursuant to the local democratic process. The issue is whether the courts should intervene and deprive the majority of what it has decided it likes."
1. The courts intervene, creating a law that thwarts the will of the majority.
2. The majority bend over and take it to avoid being sued.
3. The court cannot intervene because that might thwart the will of the majority. 'Cause they like it.
The schools' use of race is unconstitutional, since it is just racial balancing, which the Supreme court has repeatedly stated is unconstitutional.
Even if Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), permitting the use of race in admissions in higher education, does apply in the K-12 context -- contrary to Justice Kennedy's suggestion at oral argument -- the school districts' use of race should still be found unconstitutional, because the school districts are doing precisely what Grutter said race-conscious admissions policies could NOT do: racial balancing.
As the Supreme Court observed in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 330 (2003), "racial balancing" is "patently unconstitutional."
Moreover, any observer who is not willfully blind -- even an observer who sympathizes with affirmative action -- would have to concede that the school districts are engaged in racial balancing. Many commentators who support affirmative action have admitted as much. And many court reporters have noted that the school districts are engaged in racial balancing. See, e.g., Charles Lane, "Court to Rule on Race-Conscious Assignment of Students to Public Schools," Washington Post, June 5, 2006, at A3 (in the Seattle and Jefferson County cases, "each [school district] seeks to maintain racial balance"); Linda Greenhouse, "Supreme Court Roundup; Court to Weigh Race As a Factor in School Rolls," New York Times, June 6, 2006, at A1 ("One difference between the Michigan decison [Grutter v. Bollinger] and the new cases is that . . . the [Seattle and Jefferson County] school districts are trying to maintain racial balance").
Moreover, Grutter held that race-based policies must have time limits. The Jefferson County policy has no time limit, making its position much weaker than if it were merely using race for a transition period after it became unitary.
And the Seattle Schools, while temporarily suspending their use of race after being sued, clearly want to return to race-based decisionmaking, and to do so permanently, without any time limit.
In their public statements, quoted extensively in the Competitive Enterprise Institute amicus brief, they have denigrated being "colorblind" and called the "concept" of a "melting pot" "unsuccessful," expressing ideological hostility to the idea of non-racial government decisionmaking, even though Justice Kennedy has observed for the Court that the Equal Protection Clause's "central mandate is racial neutrality in governmental decisionmaking."
They are not interested in colorblind decisionmaking, ever.
They are very much averse to treating people as individuals, rather than as members of competing racial groups. Indeed, the Seattle Schools have claimed that "individualism" is a form of "cultural racism," and have said that planning ahead ("future time orientation") is for whites only, and that only whites can be racists. Thus, they are firmly wedded to racial stereotypes and race-based classifications.
The concept of a melting pot is a valuable one, as Judge Kozinski has observed.
And if the school system pursued it through ways (even race-conscious ways) that do not involve racial classifications or racial preferences -- such as considering demographics in deciding where to site a school, so that its attendance zone would include plenty of both white students and minority students -- that would just fine.
But the Seattle School District is using racial classifications, and giving racial preferences, not just keeping the goal of a melting pot in mind.
Indeed, it has rejected the very concept of a melting pot, emphasizing that the school district's "intention is not . . . to continue unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot."
Moreover, in practice, the Seattle Schools' use of race is so unthinking and rigidly mechanical that it actually aggravates racial imbalances in some schools, as the Center for Individual Rights amicus brief notes at pg. 7.
Thus, the Supreme Court should declare its use of race unconstitutional.
- Unknown said...
As a layperson I can't really talk about the legal issues, but I do agree that these cases will probably be important forks in the road, because today racial balance means something entirely different than it did 60 years ago.
George Will here in this article talks more of the Seattle plan than the Louisville. (Wonder why, ahem.) It sounds horrifying and unbelievable-- until I remember a friend of mine who yanked her kid out of public school when the Venice CA school said she would be assigned to either an English- or Spanish-speaking class randomly because to place kids any other way would be discriminatory.
With all the Educational Leadership Ph.D. programs proliferating, we may have lots more of these suits.
- Revenant said...
I just re-read the Fourteenth Amendment, and I don't see the word "colorblind" in it. What happened to the text?
The obvious implication of the governments of the USA being forbidden from "[denying] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" is that no government may discriminate on the basis of race. That is both the literal and the intended meaning of the amendment.
"Colorblindness" is simply a shorthand way of referring to that requirement.
- Atticus said...
Mark R said: "That might be, but are you suggesting that this is the reason to bus some other kids from far away to that unsafe neighborhood? Just because some neighborhoods in the city are unsafe, should all kids in the city be exposed to the risks? This is a crazy argument. The city should strive to make your daughter's friend's neightborhood safe enough to go to school, not make other kids subject to unsafe circumstances to compensate for its ineptness."
I am not suggesting that children be bussed to unsafe areas of town. Only an idiot--or a school board--would think that was a good idea.
Zeb Quinn said, "The utter failure of the public schools to bring black student performances up to the performance levels of other races, as manifested on standardized tests, despite 30 plus years of busing and quotas and all manner of other funded programs for the purported purpose of supposedly giving equal opportunities to all, is the elephant in the room nobody even looks at let alone brings up."
Absolutely. And such a noisy, messy elephant, too. The problem could be that districts are tracking "black student performance" instead of simply tracking student performance. Because records are kept based on skin color, and because districts are terrified of accusations of delivering poor education to black children, they refuse to talk about why some students fail. Instead of solving the problem where it is, they try to bring good students to the failing schools and hope that their habits and values spread. Sort of like trying to cure the flu by sitting next to healthy people.
Children do not fail at school because of the color of their skin.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
The obvious implication of the governments of the USA being forbidden from "[denying] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" is that no government may discriminate on the basis of race. That is both the literal and the intended meaning of the amendment.
The problem is: "What do you mean by discriminate?" Do you mean mere use of racial classifications? Well, then how do we take the census as is mandated by the Constitution, which specifically notes we've got to take into account those who are Native American and not living on reservations? How would we enforce the Thirteenth Amendment without taking stats on whether those badges and incidents have evaporated yet?
What does "equal protection" mean? Does it mean formal equality? Or does it mean substantive equality? Because "separate but equal" would seem to meet formal equality requirements.
"On the basis of" is also one of those vague prepositional terms like "in connection with" or "with regards to" or "relating to" -- it really could mean anything.
So it isn't clear what "colorblind" means at all: what kind of discrimination does it bar; what kind of equality does it provide; is the kind of equality it provides and the kind of discrimination is bars consistent with our Constitution?
That isn't so clear. If it were, this wouldn't be a close case. It can't be decided by a shorthand phrase, no matter how catchy.
I doubt this will be the lovefest conservatives are hoping for. And I'm not sure why conservatives want this decision, anyway. It would just energize Democrats and liberals for 2008.
- Mortimer Brezny said...
On the relevance of John Roberts' argument in Rice v. Cayetano:


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Mason joins Flyers for practice, uncertain for Game 1by Adam Kimelman
VOORHEES, N.J. -- Philadelphia Flyers goaltender Steve Mason joined the team for practice Tuesday as it prepares for its Stanley Cup Playoff series against the New York Rangers, but the Flyers remain unsure if their top goaltender will be available for the start of the postseason.
Mason sustained an upper-body injury with 2:33 left in the second period Saturday against the Pittsburgh Penguins when teammate Andrew MacDonald was pushed into him by Penguins forward Jayson Megna. Mason played the remainder of the period but Ray Emery came on in relief to start the third.
"I feel better each day and we'll see how I feel [Wednesday]," Mason said via the Flyers public relations department. He opted not to speak to the media after practice.
Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren said no decision on Mason's status for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference First Round against the Rangers on Thursday at Madison Square Garden (7 p.m. ET, CNBC, TSN) would be made until Wednesday.
"I thought it was good to see him out there," Holmgren said. "I thought he looked OK. ... We've just got to take it a day at a time. We'll know more [Wednesday]."
Coach Craig Berube said he thought Mason had made positive strides.
"I thought he looked decent," he said. "Came out for a little bit and practiced. Got some work in. Thought he looked pretty good."
Mason was on the ice for approximately 40 minutes Tuesday but the majority of that time was with goaltending coach Jeff Reese and teammates Zac Rinaldo and Michael Raffl prior to the start of practice. Once the full team came on the ice, Mason left after about 15 minutes.
Berube said that was the plan put in place prior to practice and when Mason left he felt fine.
"We didn't want him out there very long," Berube said. "Just wanted to get him out there, get some shots, let him get a feel and see how he felt. ...
"We will increase [ice time] probably [Wednesday] But again, it's how he feels."
Mason's teammates said Tuesday he looked like the same goaltender who won 33 games during the regular season.
"I know I didn't score a goal on him," Matt Read said. "He looked like he was back to himself, looks healthy. He's a hard-working guy. He's going to be out there trying to get better, try to get ready for Game 1."

subset: commoncrawl


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Located just east of Bali, Lombok in many ways lives up to or exceeds the promotional term, "an unspoiled Bali". With beautiful beaches, enchanting waterfalls, the large, looming volcano of Mount Rinjani combined with relatively few tourists, Lombok is indeed the paradisaical tropical island that many people still mistakenly imagine Bali to be now.
Lombok and Bali are separated by the Lombok Strait. It is also part of the bio-geographical boundary between the fauna of Indo-Malaysia and the distinctly different fauna of Australasia. The boundary is known as the Wallacean Line, after Alfred Russell Wallace who first remarked upon the striking difference between animals of Indo-Malaysia and those of Australasia and how abrupt the boundary was between the two biomes.
Calling Lombok paradise does not mean it is all things for all people. With a few exceptions, the natural landscape and the traditional way of life have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Virtually allsmall to medium size businesses are run by local families. Many of these businesses sell a wide variety of merchandise, where villagers can find food, hardware, and toys all in a single small store. While it is possible to find five-star hotels run by global corporations this is the exception not the rule. The ubiquitous global fast food franchises are restricted to two outlets in the precincts of Mataram Mall inthe main City of Lombok and are well sign-posted.


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Topics: Indigenous Environmental Health, Agriculture, Built Environment, Biological Agents, Cannabis, Chemical Agents, Children's Environmental Health, Climate Change, Infectious Diseases, Contaminants and Hazards, Drinking Water, Emergency Preparedness, Surveillance, Equity, Food, Forest Fires, Health Impact Assessment, Indoor Air, Nuisance Control, Outdoor Air, Personal Service Establishments, Pest Control, Physical Agents, Practices and Procedures, Public Facilities, Radiation, Recreational Water, Risk Analysis, Tobacco Reduction, Waste, Water, Zoonoses General, Canada
Full Scan The attached PDF version of the Research Scan has over 100 references and is broken into over 30 categories. Editor's Picks After searching through the dozens of articles referenced in the scan, our librarian picks the ones she feels may be especially interesting to our stakeholders. Her "Editor Picks" for January 2018 include: Adverse effects after medical, commercial, or self-...View Full Article


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Gandalf in the Library of Minas Tirith
Copyright ©1990 Patrick Wynne
Used with permission
E.L.F. Home > Vinyar Tengwar
Vinyar Tengwar
Announcing Vinyar Tengwar 50
This 28-page issue features a presentation and analysis of the "Túrin Wrapper", comprising a set of three untranslated Sindarin texts from the (probably early) 1950s pertaining to the "Túrins Saga".
Please note that henceforth issues of Vinyar Tengwar will be sold on a per-issue basis only, and will be ordered directly from the the online, print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com.
The Collected Vinyar Tengwar, Vol. 5
The Collected Vinyar Tengwar, Vol. 5, collecting issues 41-50 in both perfect and coil-bound editions, is now available in the VT Web Shop
Vinyar Tengwar format, subscription, and back-issue changes
Due to the vastly increased demands of time required for subscription and back-issue-order fulfillment as readership has grown dramatically, and to the reality of irregular publication dictated by its changed focus on publishing new primary material, and in order to remove format constraints on the size and scope of its contents, Vinyar Tengwar will undergo a format change and a switch to per-issue ordering after the publication of issue 50. Starting with issue 51, VT will be sold on a per-issue basis only, and will be ordered directly from the the online, print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com. Back-issue collections spanning issues 1 thru 50 of Vinyar Tengwar are also available as a series of softcover volumes through Lulu.com (in both perfect- and coil-bound formats), as The Collected Vinyar Tengwar.
Vinyar Tengwar Index
Diego Segui has very kindly provided his index of Vinyar Tengwar for publication here, in both English and (the original) Spanish versions. Diego writes: "This index lists in alphabetical order all words, roots, affixes, etc. belonging to languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien which appear attested, discussed or mentioned in the journal Vinyar Tengwar (VT). Its purpose is to provide the researcher with quick access to a reference, or to allow focusing on a particular form by checking it against other locations where information can be found."
Errata Page for E.L.F. Publications
This page lists all known, corroborated errata to the two print publications of the E.L.F., Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, at https://www.elvish.org/errata/. I encourage everyone who spots a potential erratum to either of these publications to report it at email@example.com. If the erratum is confirmed, it will be added to the page and reported to the Lambengolmor list.
Vinyar Tengwar sample issue available for download
With the very kind permission of the Tolkien Estate, I am pleased to be able to provide for download a PDF version of VT issue 43, containing the presentation and analysis of Tolkien's Quenya translations of the Paternoster (Átaremma), the Ave Maria (Aia María), and the Gloria Patri (Alcar i Ataren).
E.L.F. and Vinyar Tengwar Swag
Help support the E.L.F. and the production and publication of Vinyar Tengwar by purchasing from a nifty selection of E.L.F.- and VT-related swag, courtesty of CafePress.com.
Vinyar Tengwar (ISSN 1054-7606) is a not-for-profit refereed journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, devoted to the scholarly study of the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien. VT is indexed by the Modern Language Association.
The editor of Vinyar Tengwar can be reached at:
Carl F. Hostetter
2509 Ambling Circle
Crofton, MD 21114
E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
Collected volumes of all back-issues, and a listing of their contents, are available in the Vinyar Tengwar Web Shop
All submissions must in some manner deal with Tolkien's invented languages, and must be made by e-mail in plain text, RTF, or Microsoft Word formats. The editor reserves the right to edit any material (except artwork) for purposes of clarity, brevity, and relevance. All submissions are subject to review.
Note: The pages of VT are now, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, primarily devoted to the publication and analysis of new primary materials from Tolkien's linguistic papers, and these will of course continue to take precedence over other submissions. Materials may alternatively be submitted to the Lambengolmor mailing list or to the E.L.F.'s online journal, Tengwestië.
Copyright of all material submitted is retained by the author or artist, although VT reserves the right to reprint the material at any time. Acknowledgement that original material subsequently reprinted elsewhere first appeared in VT would be a welcome courtesy.


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Volunteers are a vital part of the Child Life team. Volunteers work in activity areas to provide one-to-one play with the patient in a group setting. When a patient is not able to leave their rooms, volunteers can go to the patient's room to provide age-appropriate activities and opportunities for play on an individual basis.
Visit the Volunteer Engagement page.


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Someone says something unkind about you or about your product; someone steals your music or on line idea. Before we felt helpless and unable to do anything to protect ourselves, now there is a new way for protection and correction. It's the Web Sheriff, who rides into town and sorts things out.
"People are brave when they think they're anonymous," said Jon Giacobbi, dubbed the Web Sheriff, "but the fact is no one really is. Somewhere along the line, there is a connection. With a combination of IP address and regular gum shoe investigation , it's almost always possible to find who is bugging you on line. It works worldwide, just like the internet does. The weakness can be found anywhere from Iceland and the North Pole to South America or Russia.
Most people, once they are found out and are told what they are doing is not nice, unethical and asked politely to stop, they will. "We try to appeal to people's better nature. Make it positive and treat them with respect. If they still refused, then we take legal action. A lot has to do with traffic reeducation. Treating people with respect is a much more positive outreach than resorting to legal action."
A former music attorney, Giacobbi originally represented the Village People. This was in the early days of the internet when it was easier to rip people off. People would dress Indian style and do fake band tours and fake albums. He realized that something had to be done about this. After all, if he didn't stop the infringements, all the work that his client had done to promote themselves would have gone to these other people. And so, he investigated.
Once he had taken care of the music problem, he began tackling other web related issues as cyber bullying. By confronting people, he is able to clean up reputations and stop harassments, on line fraud and the like. "It's critical to know what is going on with your name and check the on line sources every few months. " He told of one female star whose name and likeness had been taken to make a false website and promote porno. On Twitter and Facebook, too, there are a lot of bogus tweets that can damage a person's repututation.
There are a lot of ways to remain safe on the internet but many people ignore them. He spoke of a recent murder case in London where the man had a website devoted to strangling women! The victim, who had an online romance with the man and set to go on a blind date, never thought to check him out. It took a huge amount of pressure to get the server to take the site down, but eventually, they did. He warns parents to be careful of what details their children put on line. "It can come back to haunt you."
Basically, his firm deals with protecting music or other intellectual property rights as trademarks and brands, but he also works with the feds, as well. " We send out secure encrypted streams and upload the album to a secret website. "We send out releases ourselves and keep things as tight as possible. It's always best to come to us before leakage can occur or damage can be done.
He thought the name Web Sheriff was a bit cheesy, but once he had sorted things out for the band, it stuck.
To find out more about the web sheriff and ways to protect yourself or your product, go to www.websheriff.com.


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With the WGC-HSBC Champions event combining the talents of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson for a possible dream match and Michelle Wie needing a bodyguard to keep fans at bay during the LPGA Malaysia, Asian golf fans are coming out in droves to witness star power in professional golf.
The Asian golf market is relatively unknown here in the USA but has plenty of events during the season sanctioned by the Asian Tour, OneAsia and the Japan Golf Tour. It appears as if all of the Tours operate independently of each other instead of combining strength to create one professional commission with larger purses and better known talent. The LPGA has already established the Japan and Korean Tours but the Ladies Asian Golf Tour remains a separate entity.
In July, Tim Finchem made rumblings that there may be more PGA Tour events springing up in China, Japan and Korea. Currently there are two such events; the inaugural Asia Pacific Classic in Malaysia (co-sanctioned by both the PGA Tour and Asian Tour) and the HSBC-WGC event in Shanghai.
In other words, if you can't bring the Asian Tour to the USA, bring the action of the PGA Tour to Asia.
Although the number of Asian golfers is "increasing in the majors" as Tim Clark has mentioned, Ernie Els doubts that golfers will make the long trip to the region. This, in my opinion, may keep Asian golf segmented from the rest of the world.
"It's a very long way from the U.S. to Asia so any more golf tournaments over here," said Els. It's going to be tough for players to travel. They have a full schedule anyway in the U.S. but it will be interesting to see what the commissioner [Tim Finchem] thinks about it."
Luke Donald has agreed with Els adding that more events on the PGA Tour roster may make the field "a little bit diluted." On the flip-side, Donald sees golf as global adding, that "people want to see the U.S. players playing in Malaysia, China or Japan"
"New events like this tend to increase fan support for the game and create awareness that there are great places around the world to play golf in."
Even though every win still counts and the event money is good, the Asian Swing might deter golfers because of the distance to travel. On the flip side, the Asia-Pacific Classic has a very solid group making the trip: the top twenty-five players on the FedEx Cup standings along with the top ten golfers from the Asian Tour and five sponsor exemptions for a select group of forty will play in this week's event.
Adding the star power of Michelle Wie and Natalie Gulbis to the region for last week's LPGA event in Malaysia will also help gain momentum for an Asian Swing. With all of the professional Tours working together to bring golf into the region by coinciding their events, this Asian Swing can be a success for the PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, Asian Tours and most importantly, the fans and the growth of golf.
Also read about golf supremacy in Russia?
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Politicians and Election, Vote in Freedom, Actively Participate in Democracy, Vote for Change, Online referendum
Raymond Wong Yuk-man
> China > Politicians > Raymond Wong Yuk-man
Raymond Wong Yuk-man is ready for your opinion, support and vote. Vote online NOW!
黄毓民 - for
香港的政治家,作家,时事评论员和电台主持人。 | Hong Kong politician, author, current affairs commentator and radio host.
黄毓民 - against
按一下,如果你不支持。说是什么原因。 Click, if you do not support Raymond Wong. Say why.
raymond wong resigned as chairman of LSD, raymond wong yuk man, 黃毓民 and more...
Related polls > Wen Jiabao, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, Jiang Zemin, Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, Li Keqiang, Hu Jia, Deng Xiaoping, Wu Bangguo, Bo Xilai , Zhou Yongkang, Kuan Hsin-chi, Jia Qinglin, Donald Tsang, Emily Lau, Albert Ho Chun-yan, Miriam Lau, Li Changchun, Zhu Rongji, ( Raymond Wong Yuk-man) and more...


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Do you have to pay top dollar to get a great degree in Foreign Languages & Linguistics? Not if you are armed with this list. These rankings identify schools that offer a quality education in this major for a price that won't break the bank.
This ranking may not include every college that offers Foreign Languages & Linguistics. To see a full list of all the colleges offering this program check out our listing of Annual Graduates. To see a list of all the colleges that offer online degree options in Foreign Languages & Linguistics, check out our listing of Annual Foreign Languages & Linguistics Graduates From Programs Offered Online.
Provo, Utah
Pella, Iowa
Tallahassee, Florida
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- MagazineCloud storage for archiving
- MagazineDAS lives
- MagazineRecovery slows for storage shops
- MagazineShortages -- real or not -- have hiked disk prices
- MagazineCloud storage not so spooky anymore
- MagazineWere those crazy Mayans thinking about storage?
- MagazineDealing with big data: The storage implications
- MagazineFlash tech powers cloud storage and gives enterprises a boost
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Cloud storage for archiving
Cloud archiving services can offer accessibility and data preservation at a fraction of the cost of building an on-site archive infrastructure.
- Phil Goodwin, Contributor
Cloud archiving services can offer accessibility and data preservation at a fraction of the cost of building an on-site archive infrastructure.
It wouldn't seem necessary to start a discussion about archiving by defining the term, but it is. In the early days of computing, archiving was understood to be the process of moving data on tape to a remote facility for long-term storage. Now, however, archiving has taken on numerous meanings based on context. Archiving can be the "auto-archive" simplicity of Microsoft Outlook, moving older data to cheaper storage as well as more traditional long-term off-line storage. In the context of cloud computing, we'll define it to mean relegating data to a third-party location for the purposes of lowering costs, improving data protection or both while still maintaining a reasonable degree of data access.
How long is long?
Regardless of context, implicit in the notion of archive is time -- typically a long time. But "long" is a relative concept. For most financial data it means seven years, 20 years for pharmaceutical research, and more than 50 years for some medical records and nuclear records. In general, retaining data on spinning (or even spin-down) disk for 10 years or more is cost-prohibitive even in the cloud. So, for the purposes of this discussion, we'll define "long" as between one year and seven years. For data retention exceeding seven years, disk systems will be the media of choice in only specialized applications. Some examples of those specialized apps include geospatial data (i.e., oil and gas exploration images), medical images and aircraft maintenance logs where the frequency of access is low but the probability of retrieval at some point is high; therefore, the time and difficulty of recovering 15-year-old tapes is likely to be unacceptable.
Price vs. performance
Cloud-based archive opens the possibility of a "just right" balance between cost and accessibility. Tape has been, and remains, far and away the lowest cost method of storing data for years. A typical LTO tape holding approximately 1 TB of data costs roughly $35 with monthly off-site storage in the range of 25 cents per month. There's no way for even the cheapest cloud disk to compete with this price. On the downside, the normal retrieval time for a tape from archive is next-day delivery plus the time needed to mount and restore it. This means users will wait about a business day before being able to access the information requested.
Cloud storage, on the other hand, starts at approximately 10 cents/GB per month and up (depending on volumes). This adds up when contemplating hundreds of TBs, but it's still often less than the cost to procure, deploy and manage arrays in a central data center. Whereas tape retrieval is measured in business days, data hosted on cloud storage can be accessed in seconds. For some apps, this may be the ideal tradeoff between price and performance.
Cloud advantages, disadvantages
Before going all-in on cloud archiving, however, IT needs to weigh the virtues of cloud with in-house archiving. Technologically, cloud providers can't offer anything that can't be implemented in-house. So a company may, for example, choose to implement a tiered storage infrastructure with tier 3 high-capacity SATA disk to achieve a lower average cost per GB stored. Generally, organizations will lean toward an in-house solution if they can't risk the loss of connectivity to a remote location, have regulatory requirements that require strict data security oversight or have data retrieval requirements where remote latency would be unacceptable. This is a fairly restrictive list, but there are still many applications that are candidates for cloud archiving.
IT organizations can quantify the logistical effort to migrate to cloud, but shouldn't overlook a predictable but unforeseen challenge: a mind shift from a technology-centric perspective to a service-level management perspective. IT staff used to making technology choices and deployments often want to delve into the cloud vendor's architecture and "suggest" product or technology-specific implementations. Rarely are such requests warranted, as the vendor maintains full responsibility for managing the cloud infrastructure. IT departments really shouldn't be concerned with the underlying technology, provided contractual service levels are met. With experience, staff attention will gradually shift from low-level details to higher-level governance.
Service is the critical factor
Service-level management, then, is critical to the initial decision for cloud archiving as well as ongoing operations. When shopping for a cloud archival vendor, consider the following service-level issues:
Uptime. For most applications, three nines or four nines of availability are sufficient to meet business requirements. If you need five nines, you probably have data access requirements that aren't conducive to an archive tier. Data hosted in an archive tier is, by definition, non-critical. The uptime requirement largely determines how much infrastructure the vendor must provision, so it has a big impact on the hosting cost. Don't guess; determine the actual hours when data will be accessed, access patterns and cost of downtime. These calculations can be compared to the cost of various uptime guarantees, and easily justified or rejected based on the comparison. Vendors often offer hosting-fee rebates or other performance penalties for missing service-level agreements (SLAs). However, the caveats are contained in the fine print, so read them.
Accessibility. Accessibility and uptime aren't necessarily the same. The storage may be humming, but the subcomponents render an application unavailable. If you need redundancy or multiple redundancy of data links, for example, you'll have to pay for them but the alternative may be unacceptable application outages. Make sure service levels encompass end-to-end data availability.
Performance. Quantify how many IOPS your applications require and ensure this number is part of the SLA. IOPS can be measured either as an average or during peak activity. If you demand IOPS guarantees at peak, then you'll have to pay for the vendor to provision them. Some vendors may offer metered billing, but many organizations don't like the potential uncertainty of such billing should demand suddenly spike. Most organizations will absorb a certain amount of constrained operation (especially for an archive tier) in return for cost certainty. In this case, the SLA is for guaranteed IOPS, not absolute performance experienced by the end user. If application demands exceed contracted IOPS capacity, it's rightly the IT organization's problem; additional IOPS can always be purchased.
Data recoverability. As they do for in-house applications, IT organizations need to specify recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements for cloud-based archives. This is related to uptime, but also covers contingencies such as data corruption or a component failure that doesn't affect overall uptime but impacts individual applications. The vendor should have default values for RPO and RTO, which may be sufficient for an archive tier. Again, don't guess. Know what kind of data loss and application unavailability the business units can financially tolerate. In many cases, it's much more than is intuitive.
Disaster recovery (DR). If the cloud archive is used as off-site replicated storage to satisfy data redundancy requirements, it may not be necessary to consider a DR strategy for this tier. But buyer beware: Most hosted storage doesn't include any DR contingency. If the hosted data is "live" data provisioned as hybrid cloud storage, then a DR plan may be necessary. Hosting providers may regularly back up the data, but they generally don't rotate the data off-site, and if they do, they do so infrequently (e.g., monthly). Although a disaster at a SAS-70 compliant data center is unlikely, it's not impossible. DR capability from a hosting company is often a significant additional expense and can change the economics of hosting in a hurry. Make sure data isn't left in a vulnerable state.
Backup and recovery. Even if the hosting vendor backs up the data regularly and rotates it off-site frequently, IT organizations may not be out of the woods. Hosting companies usually have a limited number of backup software options and tape technologies. This means their backup format (hardware, software or both) may be incompatible with your IT systems. If an IT organization is forced to do a recovery from the vendor's tapes, there could be a substantial delay in acquiring the necessary infrastructure. Ensure there's a way out in a worst-case scenario.
Compliance. Archived data that requires special compliance treatment may still be a candidate for cloud hosting. You'll need to ensure the data is retained on immutable media, if required. You'll probably also need assurance that strict access guidelines are followed and auditable; SAS-70 providers should have such processes in place.
Cost certainty and granularity. One of the key benefits to cloud storage hosting for archiving rather than using in-house infrastructure is that you pay only for the storage consumed. The metering should go up or down with use, though it may have a floor minimum.
Turn tapes into cloud archives
It's clear that cloud archiving may be attractive to companies with aging data stored on relatively expensive in-house arrays. More questionable is whether or not converting from tape-based archives to cloud archives makes sense. Larger organizations may have tens of thousands of tapes in off-site archives. The process of retrieving all those tapes and reading them onto a cloud archive infrastructure is daunting. It also assumes the provider has the necessary hardware to read all the tapes, some of which may be in obsolete formats. Moreover, there's no way a cloud provider could host such a data volume at anything close to the cost of tapes sitting in a glorified warehouse. Disk compression and data deduplication can help significantly, but the difference in cost is still likely to amount to a substantial premium.
Even though the hurdles for converting tape to cloud archiving are high, it may still be a consideration. Tapes more than seven years old are likely to be very expensive -- and possibly problematic -- to restore. Best practices dictate that organizations retrieve and rewrite tapes every five years to ensure the data is readable and the format is current. It's a task to be reckoned with. For example, with a 10,000 tape archive and a five-year refresh cycle, a company would have to refresh 2,000 tapes each year. That comes to approximately eight tapes per workday, which is doable, but requires a year-around effort for what's fundamentally a nonproduction exercise. Here again, the crux of the matter lies in the probability of retrieval. Some organizations choose to allow tapes to become obsolete in the vault with the knowledge that a recovery would be painful, but the probability of needing to restore the data is low enough to be worth the risk. On the other hand, if you know a recovery is all but inevitable, you may opt to incur the time and expense of moving from tape to cloud now, thus saving significant time and effort later, perhaps under urgent conditions.
That's not to suggest that tape is losing its role in archiving. It's still the lowest cost choice for most situations. In addition, LTO's Linear Tape File System (LTFS) is enabling tape to take on a new role as "tier 4" storage, so it can act as another tier in the cloud (or data center) that's provisioned along with tiers 0, 1, 2 and 3. In a cloud archive environment, this would effectively enable a hybrid cloud that offers relatively fast access (e.g., minutes) but at the price point of tape for rarely accessed data. The tapes will also have built-in compression, and the options of encryption and WORM. Using automated tiering software, data can be moved automatically to the archive tier.
The inevitable "what if"
So far, we've painted a fairly positive picture of cloud archiving services. Usually the effort yields the desired result, but not always. Organizations should consider what would happen if they transferred tens of TBs of data to a provider and then failed to realize the desired or contracted results. Sure, penalties might kick in, but small monetary penalties wouldn't fully compensate for the true cost, aggravation or damage to the IT organization's reputation for delivery. Contingencies begin with a contract that may be terminated without penalty for failure to meet specific performance levels. It should also include a plan for alternative hosting capabilities, either back in-house or with another provider. Cloud archiving is fairly low on the list of risky endeavors, but smart organizations will be prepared for anything.
BIO: Phil Goodwin is a storage consultant and freelance writer.


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A History Lesson For Those Advocating Network Neutrality Laws
from the unintended-consequences dept
Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes that Barack Obama's election as the next president of the United States has bolstered the hopes of those hoping to impose network neutrality regulations on the Internet. While Obama's key advisors have been cagey about precisely what the new administration's stance on the issue will be, it's a safe bet that we'll be hearing a lot about the issue in the coming months. This seems like a good time for a long-overdue conclusion to my ongoing series on network neutrality regulation.
One of the things that has been missing from the network neutrality debate has been a sense of how it fits into the broader history of government regulations of network industries. It's easy to imagine that the Internet is so new and different that historical comparisons just aren't relevant. But as we've seen with copyright and patent debates, we can learn a lot from historical experiences that may not seem immediately relevant.
I think this is equally true in the network neutrality debate. While the specifics of network neutrality are unlike anything that has come before, the general principles involved—non-discrimination, competition, monopoly power, and so forth—have actually been with us for more than a century. Indeed, today's network neutrality debate bears a striking resemblance to the debate that led to the very first American regulatory agency: the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was created to regulate the railroad industry.
The railroad industry was the high-tech industry of its day, and it had many of the same kinds of transformative effects on the 19th Century American economy that the Internet is having today. As with today's Internet, some parts of the railroad market were highly competitive, while other markets were served by only one or two firms. And people had concerns about the behavior of the largest railroad firms that echoed those that people have about large Internet providers today: that they restrict competition, discriminate among customers.
In 1887, Congress passed legislation (you can read an abridged version here) that is strikingly similar to the proposed network neutrality legislation that we're debating today. The Interstate Commerce Act declared it illegal to charge different prices to different customers for "the transportation of a like kind of traffic under substantially similar circumstances and conditions." It also said that railroads may not "make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, company, firm, corporation, or locality, or any particular description of traffic." Compare that to the leading network neutrality proposal during the last Congress, which would have required network providers to deliver content on a "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" basis without imposing "a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available."
Unfortunately, the story of the Interstate Commerce Commission does not have a happy ending. Grover Cleveland appointed a railroad ally named Thomas M Cooley as the first chairman of the ICC. The ICC was widely regarded as toothless for its first couple of decades, largely rubber-stamping railroad industry decisions. Things got even worse after the turn of the century, when the ICC began actively discouraging competition in the railroad industry. The ICC had the power to decide when new firms were allowed to enter the railroad industry, and by the 1920s, the FCC was actively working to discourage competition and push up railroad rates. In the 1930s, the ICC gained authority over the infant trucking industry, and used its authority to slow the growth of the trucking industry to protect the railroads from competition. By 1970, things had gotten so bad that a Ralph Nader report described the ICC as "predominantly a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market."
What went wrong? The story is too long and complicated to fully describe in a blog post, but I think there are two key lessons. First, the authors of the ICA dramatically underestimated the complexity of the railroad industry and the difficulty of government oversight. One of the reasons the ICC was relatively toothless in its early years is that it was completely overwhelmed with paperwork, as dozens of railroads sent it information about thousands of routes. The railroad industry was simply too complex and dynamic for a few Washington bureaucrats to even understand, to say nothing of regulating them effectively.
Second, the ICC's failure is a classic example of what economists call "regulatory capture": the ability of special interests to gain control of the regulatory process and use it to their advantage. Because the railroads cared more about railroad regulation than anyone else, they were adept at getting their allies appointed to key positions at the commission. Over time, the ICC not only ceased to be an effective watchdog of consumer interests, but actually began actively defending the interests of the railroads at consumers' expense. For about six decades—from about 1920 to 1980—the ICC pursued policies that reduced competition and raised prices in the railroad industry. And when trucking emerged as a potentially disruptive innovation, the ICC helped to limit its growth and slow the corresponding decline of the railroad industry.
The story of the ICC is not an isolated case. Similar stories can be told of the Civil Aeronautics board, which limited competition in the airline industry until the 1970s. And, of course, there's the example of that the FCC actively promoted AT&T's monopoly in the telecommunications market until it was broken up in 1984.
We can certainly hope that Congress has learned from the experiences of the 20th century and will avoid the most egregious mistakes it made in the 20th century. But it's worth remembering that many of the conditions that led to the ICC's problems are still with us. Today's FCC, like the ICC of the 20th Century, has a revolving door between the commission and the firms they regulate. And the Internet, like the railroad industry of the 19th century, is extraordinarily dynamic and complex. As a result, there's a real danger that if Congress gives the FCC the power to regulate the Internet, it will make things worse, either because it cannot keep up with the Internet's rapid evolution, or because industry incumbents will succeed in getting their own allies in key positions within the commission. Either way, the results could be very different from what network neutrality proponents are hoping for.
Filed Under: history, net neutrality, regulations, regulatory capture, trains, unintended consequences