Text Message Scam

I have a cell phone. It has no camera and no touch screen and was free. I don't use it very much. I used to have a friend who would text message me a lot. Each message came in 2 or 3 parts, each time ringing my phone only to see he hadn't completed his sentence, necessitating yet another call. So I blocked text messages. All of them. How the hell can you type on that little number pad with 3 letters or more on each key? Ridiculous.

Anyway, I got a text message today. How? I don't know, and neither does Sprint (could be the problem right there!). I called Sprint to let them know a text message made it through even though I have set things up so they can't get through. Sprint told me they were getting quite a few calls today about this text message.

It is a text message scam. The text came from 9099. The message read:

customer issue, visa
service frozen. please call at
270 495 0189

I did call and the first thing out of the robot's mouth was "Please enter your Visa number," so I hung up.

If you get a text like I did, ignore it. Your bank will not text you. They will definitely not text you without identifying information in the text message if they text you at all.

During this holiday season, with poverty on the rise and war all around, there are many scum-suckers out there trying to steal what little money you have by scamming your credit card numbers. Be on the lookout and report fraud to your bank, your cell provider and your friends!

Monday Cartoon Fun: Million Dollar Edition + Links

The EPA has decided global warming is real.

Russ Feingold doesn't understand the Afghanistan surge (neither do I).

The Harlem Children's Zone gets results, but they cost millions and require proximity, paying students for grades and providing FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ITS STUDENTS.

Education Research Sucks (But We Knew That)

From Susan Ohanian:

Dr. Jerome Groopman holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest book is How Doctors Think. He makes this observation in an interview in the Dec. 17, 2009 New York Review of Books.

As you read this excerpt, think about how closely it relates to the current Race to the Top and LEARN (sic) initiatives coming from Washington, D. C.

Jerome Groopman: [T]here are important reasons for having a scientific statistical analysis of evidence. I'm a scientist. I'm a professor at Harvard. I've done the clinical trials in my own field that have led to such "evidence." But I'm also acutely aware of their limitations. Statistical analysis is not a substitute for thinking. [emphasis added] Unfortunately, to my mind, because I voted for President Obama and certainly support many of the current reform efforts, there is a very powerful group with an ideology emphasizing evidence-based medicine, what they call "best practices." That is a wonderful term, because how can you argue with best practices?

But if you look at some of the bills, like the House bill, HR3200, and you look at many of the incentives in the Baucus bill from the Senate Finance Committee, they clearly want doctors not to think and lead, but to simply follow. And the incentives are that you are paid more by adhering to specific guidelines, and according to some proposals, your malpractice liability will be tied to whether you follow guidelines or not.

Now many times, there are patients whose illness don't conform to the direction of guidelines. Many people do not realize that in general the committees that draw up clinical guidelines force a consensus and there are often experts who disagree with some aspects of the guidelines or contend that they are flawed. There are numerous examples of this that are familiar to the public. One was the treatment of nearly all women after menopause with estrogen to prevent heart disease and dementia. We now know that the case for such treatment is far from clear and some credible experts had doubts about it from the start. A recent analysis of more than a hundred evidence-based conclusions about clinical practice reported that after two years more than a quarter of the conclusions were contradicted by new data, and that nearly half of the "best practices" were overturned at five years. This shows that guidelines are not gospel from a scientific point of view. Also, patients have different goals with respect to how much treatment they want, what kinds of treatment, and frankly, how much they are willing to comply with prescribed treatment. And you are punished in this system if your patients don't comply.

And so what's happened in Massachusetts is that patients who are in most need of a caring and communicative doctor, patients who are confused about their treatment, patients who are resistant, patients who don't like to take pills, diabetics who are too poor to eat healthy food--all of these patients now may be shunned by physicians because of the risk that you're going to look bad on a report card. I just learned of an older woman who was very fragile and in the midst of heart attack whose cardiologist hesitated to perform a necessary procedure to open the coronary arteries because her outcome might well be poor, and this could be counted against him in assessing his performance. These are the unintended consequences of much of the movement for what is called "pay-for-performance."

Saturday Cartoon Fun: Woods Edition

Let Teachers Run A School? Yes!

Deal would let L.A. teachers create "pilot schools"

December 3, 2009

Local school officials and the teachers union have reached a tentative deal that would help groups of teachers bid for control of 30 campuses under a recently adopted school-reform plan.

The agreement, announced today, would allow the number of “pilot schools” in the Los Angeles Unified School District to increase from 10 to 30. Pilots are small schools where teachers, administrators and community members have broad latitude to establish the rules under which the school operates. Unlike charter schools, the pilots remain closely affiliated with the district, and employees retain their representation by district unions.

Death And Taxes: The Big Picture, Literally Updated

Click the pic to make it B I G.

Update: I think the link is fixed now.

Thursday Cartoon Fun: Game Theory Edition

Arne Duncan Talks Formative Assessments (Pop Quizzes)

I don't think I heard anything of substance in this discussion. Gwen seemed dubious about the Dunc, with good reason. The Dunc speaks poorly, sounds like a marketer, and has clearly never been in a classroom. I heard nothing specific come from his mouth; he has nothing really.

His love for "formative assessments" is intriguing. Formative assessments are basically pop quizzes. Teachers use formative assessment constantly: spelling tests, pop quizzes, writing assignments, all the things kids dread and have dreaded for a hundred years. It's not new. Nothing the Dunc says is new. It's packaging and it's Sputnik, all over again.

American Students in the Global Classroom from Innovation Economy on Vimeo.

h/t Ken Libby

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: Enjoy The Speech! Edition Updated

President Obama will give his Afghanistan speech in a few minutes. Here are a couple toons to get you ready.

Update: I remain opposed to the war in Afghanistan. He did not persuade me. Not by a long shot. It seems he is trying to exit by escalating. Oxymoron anyone? Just get out.

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: Oops Edition