Mike Wilson

You Are 92% NYC

Congratulations, you are truly a New Yorker. You’ve seen it all, and you’re more than a little cynical.

(ht: Cappy)

Some things need to be quoted in full:

Harlem School Aces Math Test In a society obsessed with school testing, one public school in New York City has achieved the perfect score.

One hundred percent — every single student — of the eighth grade at Harlem Village Academy passed the state’s math test.

What’s the key to the school’s success? It’s not a selection process: Students are admitted to the charter school by lottery, not any sort of screening. It’s not small class size: There can be 28 or more students in a class.

Deborah Kenny, founder of Harlem Village Academies, says that with all the dire warnings about failing schools, officials try to analyze exactly what successful schools like hers do and then require all other schools to do the same.

“It’s a completely incorrect way to transform education,” she says. Teaching shouldn’t be compliance-driven, she says. “Education is all about the person standing at the front of the room.”

Kenny says that the key to her school’s success is attracting, developing and retaining great teachers.

“How do you create an amazing environment for teachers?” she asks. “And when you start to give enough thought and put enough time into that, you begin to come up with the answers.”

Harlem Village’s teachers all work together to create common goals and guidelines for expected behavior from students. Kenny says it’s about consistency.

“If you insist on a behavior and every other one of your colleagues in the school is insisting on that same exact expectation, the kids all of the sudden realize, ‘Wow! The teachers are all on the same page.’”

While Kenny doesn’t think that what her school does can be forced by legislation on other schools, she does believe that her approach can succeed elsewhere.

“It is absolutely scalable. It is absolutely possible,” she says. “All teachers want a school environment like this. … All children really, really can transform themselves into children who behave well and learn at a high level.”

As they say on Fark:

THIS

Congratulations everyone.

(h/t SondraK)

So I had my first “loss to platform technical issue” today. It was a short position in WDC that I was going to take for a nice $0.20 cents (believe it or not that amounts to real money.)

Now one can say it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. But that doesn’t tend to apply for tools that fly apart.

So I’ve shut down trading for the day until I get confirmations that their selective lag issue (quotes are fine, charts are not) is cleared up. I’d made some really nice “yeah, I can do this for a living, that wasn’t that hard” trades under my belt.

All in all it was a damn good day, that aside. CIT and WDC were the only things I had positions in.

Posting about trading’s been light because it’s been uneventful. I usually have a couple solid positions to the good early in the trading day. Every once in a while I “try something a little different” as I’m technically “in school” for the next couple/few weeks. Sometimes that backfires with a lesson learned.

Sometimes my mind is elsewhere ;-) But that’s not a topic for here.

…mmm… elsewhere…

But I’m finding out that despite my initial conviction that it wasn’t so, my temperament is really that of the twitchy day trader. It’s the style of trading I’m so far best at and I’m fighting it less and less. Problem is (or… ‘may be’… hell if I know) that my reading had always been focused on swing trading, so I’m in this weird area where I’m training myself off the style of trading I’d learned by circumstances.

It’s good in a way because it forces me to learn to day trade with enough of a theoretical background that I’ve actually got a basis for doing it. If I’d started off by reading a bunch of books on day trading I’m positive I would be in a much worse spot.

Now I can go back and do that research.

“Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. You’re just going to have to make up your own mind one day about what’s right and wrong.”

I’ve lived in and around this city for 39 years and tonight I saw a Monday night movie in Bryant Park for the first time.

It was Hud, starring Paul Newman as a rather deplorable character. The quote above is from his father to his wide-eyed nephew.

The event is really quite something, but I won’t go so much in to the particular social setting. It’s just not something I do so much here any more.

Meh, too tired for this right now.

Mikey?

Yeah.

Mikey’s not that stupid and as such is markedly up on the day without having gone short.

Ha ha, I win ;-)

Well, I originally posted some of this over here. but…

If bernanke wasn’t such a damned pussy he’d have raised rates 25 basis points and undone some of his mistakes of last year to partially handle the inflation issue, showing full support for the dollar which would put downward pressure on crude.

But instead he’s hinting about leaning towards considering maybe perhaps someday thinking about raising the rate… possibly. What he did today was continue to try to be all things to all people instead of ending up as, as one commentator said in a stroke of brilliance today “being nothing to anybody.”

Where the hell is Greenspan when we need him. (Enjoying a well earned break I hope.)

*snicker*

Ric Romero reports:

Scientists find childbirth wonder drug that can ‘cure’ shyness

It can turn anything from job interviews to the most routine of family gatherings into a sweat-inducing ordeal.

But a ‘love drug’ produced naturally by the body during sex and childbirth could offer hope to the millions of people blighted by shyness, scientists have said.

Yeah, it’s called…

Attention Twitter peeples:

It’s a great idea, well implemented.

But if you have scaling issues that result in these retarded “over capacity” states that disable your service, it’s no good to me. I shouldn’t have to think about service availability.

Yes, I’d pay for one that had five 9 uptime. (not MUCH granted, but I’d pay.)