Cuomo's School Receivership Program Is "Stack Ranking" For Schools, Designed To Break Up The System

Fred LeBrun in the Times-Union dissects Cuomo's vaunted school receivership program:

In the Capital Region, only Albany's William S. Hackett Middle School is on the persistent list, but if a handful of schools in Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Amsterdam, including Albany High School, don't show appropriate progress, they will join Hackett next year.

What happens now for schools like Hackett is as complicated as directions to Atlantis, and about as reliable.

Albany school Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard becomes the acting school receiver, with broad powers, for the next year. A required community engagement team composed of the principal, staff, teachers, parents and even students from Hackett will forward recommendations for improvements to the superintendent, who will use them to help create her intervention plan to turn the school around. The plan is due at State Ed for approval by the end of this month. Over the next year, the community team will look over her shoulder as the intervention plan unfolds.

In the meantime, the school receiver can do pretty much what she wants (with approval from State Ed): change the curriculum, replace teachers and administrators, increase salaries, reallocate the budget, expand the school day or year, turn Hackett into a community school, even convert to a charter school. Although there's enormous rigmarole attached to much of it, including going charter. Remember, the receiver in this case remains the superintendent for the rest of the district, so she is answerable for any wild and crazy ideas to the voters through the school board.

Anyway, to help start the process, Vanden Wyngaard can apply for a grant from a $75 million pot set up by the state, although she'll have plenty of competition from other "persistently struggling" school receivers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, New York City and elsewhere. She has a year to do her turnaround. Or the hammer falls and we are off to Neverland.

Then the state would appoint an independent receiver who is answerable only to State Ed. At which time the process of community involvement, an intervention plan, and the rest are repeated, only now change is apt to be far more radical, with wholesale staff firings. An independent receiver can be a person from an approved list that doesn't yet exist, or an institution or charter school. Although charter schools upstate have been mostly a bust, as Albany well knows. Middle school charters in Albany could not save themselves, let alone others.

So. If you're getting the idea that this receivership idea seems like a plan designed to fail and thus prepare the way for school privatizers to make a bundle, move over.

For one thing, the state has yet to give school receivers a clear idea of what would constitute appropriate progress to avoid an independent receiver. Presumably, we'll know by the end of the month when intervention plans have to be approved. What is expected and how reasonable it is will answer a great deal.

Because just a year to show any marked improvement on any front for a school like Hackett, no matter how thoughtfully considered, broadly accepted by the community, or earnestly pursued, is absurd. Real change needs time for all stakeholders to become invested. Teachers at Hackett today are still complaining that attendance and discipline as major problems, just as it was when I substituted there, oh, a half century ago. These are, after all, manifestations of the poverty and despair underlying most of Hackett's problems; they don't go away. They are the community's problems, not just Hackett's.

The school can be taken over in a year if it doesn't "improve," but the state still hasn't explained what that "improvement" will look like.

Yeah, that's a plan designed to "fail" schools and hand them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

LeBrun's writing about a school in Albany, but Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina have a lot riding on this too, since the city has 62 schools in the receivership program, with six deemed "persistently struggling" and having only one year to improve (the seventh is already closing.)

As with Hackett, these schools don't know yet what will constitute "improvement," which is a problem since the deadline for that "improvement" is fast approaching.

The cynic in me wonders if a side benefit to declaring all these schools "failing" and handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators isn't another opportunity for Governor Cuomo to declare his "friend" bill de Blasio a loser too.

Governor Cuomo promised the Daily News and a Forbes forum he would "break" the public school "monopoly" before his re-election in 2014 and it certainly looks like the receivership program is part of that plan.

After the state gets through privatizing these 144 schools, the next slate of so-called "struggling" schools will be added to the receivership list - this will be an ongoing program:

The program was one of several education reforms hammered out during budget negotiations this spring. Under the deal, schools are placed into two categories, “struggling schools,” those in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state for three years, based on measures like test scores and graduation rates, and “persistently struggling schools,” which have been in that bracket since 2006.

What we have here is "stacking ranking" for schools, with the state playing rank and yank every year, adding schools to the privatization, er, receivership list, setting them up to "fail" and then handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

Just as with stack ranking for employees, the program will disempower, demoralize and ultimately destroy the system (this is also the same rationale behind Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system, btw - ranking teachers every year and declaring 7% "ineffective" no matter what.)

Just ask Microsoft, which used stack ranking as its evaluation system for employees, how well that worked for them as Apple was kicking them to the wayside in competition.

But of course if you're Andrew Cuomo, you want to destroy the system - that's exactly what he promised to do in 2014 and that's the plan he's been carrying out since.

NYCDOE Offers Professional Development From Microsoft

I got this in an email:

Become a Microsoft Innovative Educator and Facilitator

• Open to:  All teachers interested in integrating technology tools and sharing them with 75 or more educators annually
• Opportunity at a Glance: The Microsoft Innovative Educator PD program will help you integrate technology tools to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom.  This free workshop will certify you as a Microsoft Innovative Educator who can deliver training to your colleagues about the range of free Microsoft tools available to teachers and students.
• Event Date: Tuesday, January 13 and Wednesday, January 14 (Lunch will be provided)
• Registration: Click to register for the training workshop.
• Location:  Manhattan
• For more information: Visit the Microsoft Innovative Educator website.

I'm almost tempted to sign up to be a "Microsoft Innovative Educator," except I'm loathe to lose class time that close to the Regents exam and I'd probably have to get heavily sedated in order to get through the whole thing without a major Al Pacino moment.

Why the hell is the NYCDOE advertising this garbage?

Seriously.

Is Microsoft getting money for this?

Or is this some "philanthropy" from them?

In the end, it doesn't matter if the DOE is getting this for free or paying Microsoft for it.

The real problem is, they're offering this garbage that's taking teachers out of classrooms in order to learn what Microsoft says is "innovative technology" and calling it "professional development."

Just another indication of how pushing "professional development" for teachers is really often just a way of making it look like they're improving teaching and learning while they're doing nothing of the sort.

Microsoft Innovative Educator and Facilitator PD.

Hey, will Clippy be there?

Now that was innovative!

Microsoft CEO Says Women Should Be Satisfied With A Pat On The Head, Shouldn't Ask For Raises

Classic quote from the new Microsoft CEO that crystallizes how so many business guys think about workers, salary increases and women:

If you are a man speaking at a conference celebrating women in computing, it is probably O.K. to flatter the largely female audience members by telling them they possess “superpowers.”

It is probably unwise, though, to imply that they should not ask for a pay raise.

Just ask Satya Nadella.

Mr. Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, suggested on Thursday that women who don’t ask for more money from their employers would be rewarded in the long run when their good work is recognized. The remarks, at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, drew swift and negative responses on Twitter, many of them compiled in a critical article about Mr. Nadella’s comments on ReadWrite, a technology blog.

...

Mr. Nadella’s comment came about an hour and a half into his conversation with Maria M. Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College and a Microsoft board member. During the discussion, she prompted Mr. Nadella for advice for women who are uncomfortable seeking promotions and career advancement.

Mr. Nadella said his own thinking on the matter was influenced by Mike Maples, a former Microsoft executive, who had a memorable saying about how human resources systems were inefficient in the short term and efficient in the long term. “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” Mr. Nadella said, according to a webcast of the event.

But then he continued: “That, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back because somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to. And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up.”

So many problems with Nadella's comments.

First off, no, women shouldn't be satisfied with "praise" over a "raise" - that's asking to be exploited by the company.

Second, nobody should trust that the "human resources system" will "give you the right raises as you go along" - not women, not men.

That's also asking to be exploited by the system.

Third, doesn't it seem like everybody who runs Microsoft is an ass?

Bill Gates, Steve Balmer and now this misogynistic jerk.

Fourth, can I remind everybody how well the "human resources system" at Microsoft handled layoffs this year?

They laid people off by algorithm.

Microsoft Lays Off 18,000 Employees Based Not On Performance Or Worth To The Company, But By Algorithm

The people going after teacher tenure and seniority protections always claim that they want these gone so that when layoffs come, teachers can be retained based upon performance and value, not time with the district.

But according to one former employee, Microsoft - the company founded by one of the major opponents to teacher protections, Bill Gates - just let 18,000 people go randomly:

At the end of last week, Microsoft laid off 18,000 employees — some were laid off in a terribly insensitive memo written by Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop.

One of those fired employees was Jerry Berg, who worked at the company for 15 years as a software developer. Berg or “Barnacules” is also the creator of a popular YouTube channel, “Nergasm.” On Sunday, he took to YouTube to explain the devastating layoff and what losing Microsoft’s very comprehensive insurance plan means to his autistic son.

 ...

Berg stated, that the layoffs did not appear to be based on performance or worth to the company, and he jokingly speculates that an algorithm may have had a role.
“Somehow, some algorithm put me on a list, and that was the end of it,” Berg explained. “I’d like to think that I was probably laid off by a computer. A computer put me on a list for whatever reason and sent me packing.”

Berg says that some who were laid off were "people I know have personally saved the Windows project countless times" - nonetheless, out they went, with a severance package and key card access revoked as of Sunday.

Berg says his severance package was generous and will give him a few months to transition to new work but

That's very little consolation when you think about how many years you put into that company.  And it's one thing if you're a bad performer. If you're a bad performer and you're not doing much for the company, that's one thing. But I had a unique set of skills that I had honed over the years. I know a lot of the systems, a lot of the infrastructure, I've made myself a place, I've made myself a permanent fixture at Microsoft and somehow some algorithm just put me on a list and that was the end of it. Nobody went and looked at my track record, nobody went and looked at my performance, nobody went and figured out, 'Wait a second, this guy could be an asset elsewhere in the company, we should move him!" It was just easier for them to cut everybody that was on the list.

Think about all of this the next time you hear Gates or any of the other prominent corporate reformers talk about how important it is that districts be given the ability to lay off based upon "performance."

You can see Berg's full You Tube video below:

Why Doesn't Bill Gates Try To Fix Microsoft And Leave Public Education Alone?

Didn't get a chance to blog this back in September when it first occurred - another Microsoft screw-up:

Computerworld - Microsoft yesterday acknowledged yet another problem with its Sept. 10 updates, confirming that one of those fixes broke Office 2010 Starter Edition by changing the file associations of already-created documents.

"After installing this update, some users have reported they are unable to open files by double-clicking them, that the file type icons have changed, and that they must go to the application to open files," Microsoft's Office team said in a company blog post Wednesday.

Some customers, said Microsoft, were even told that they needed to buy a copy of the full-scale Office, which starts at $140 for Office Home & Student 2013.

Naturally, that caused some customers to wig out, as their suite -- Office 2010 Starter Edition -- had come free with their PCs.

Starter Edition, which Microsoft did not revive for Office 2013, was the company's 2009 replacement for Microsoft Works, an entry-level application suite that had been offered to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) for bundling with new PCs. Starter included Word 2010 and Excel 2010.

As Microsoft's free OEM offer, Starter was to give new PC buyers a taste of the productivity suite in the hope that they would later pony up for one of the paid editions.

The free edition also included advertisements, the first of Microsoft's market-leading desktop suite to do that, and limited the functionality of Word and Excel. However, they were not time-sensitive versions that stopped working at some point, as earlier Office trial editions had done.

Within hours of the Sept. 10 updates -- part of a larger-than-average Patch Tuesday slate -- users began reporting problems on Microsoft's support forums.

"I have Microsoft Office 2010 Starter. Suddenly, all my files are in .docx format, and I cannot open them," wrote "Kloi" on one thread last Wednesday. "I get a message saying I need to purchase Office. Why has this suddenly happened? How can I change it back?"

Others chimed in to say that they too could not open documents by double-clicking because those files icons had gone blank or turned a strange orange hue.

Among those who saw messages to buy a copy of Office, the more conspiracy-leaning quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was a Microsoft move to force them to upgrade to the full version of the suite.

"Microsoft gets me to put all my files on Word Starter and then holds them hostage forcing me to pay," said "kjeld65" on the same thread. "I was deceived, tricked, and now held hostage by Microsoft. I WILL NOT PAY MICROSOFT HOSTAGE MONEY, AND I WOULD ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO DO LIKEWISE."

In reality, the gaffe was simply that, said Microsoft, not a plot to separate customers from their cash.
"The operating system has lost the association between a file type and the application that it is supposed to open it," said the Office team. "This does not change the file, this only affects the relationship between the operating system and the applications associated with the documents."

The company showed users how to reestablish file associations, but warned that in some cases customers may need to repair Office 2010 Starter Edition using the "Uninstall or change a program" Control Panel tool.

Yesterday's admission by Microsoft was the latest in a string of update snafus the company's dealt with this month. Last week, an Office 2013 stability and performance update blanked the folder pane in Outlook 2013, and other updates repeatedly demanded they be installed even though they had already been deployed by users.

Those followed buggy fixes shipped in August and April that blocked access to server-based email mailboxes and crippled Windows 7 PCs.

The trend in declining quality has set patch professionals on edge, and has caused many to call for Microsoft to get its act together.

Microsoft has been publicly apologetic at times, but has not said specifically what it will do to prevent flawed updates in the future. "I apologize again for the difficulty this has created," wrote Gray Knowlton, a principal group program manager for Office, on the Patchmangement.org mailing list, or listserv. "We are aware and are doing all we can to get this set right now and for future releases."

Susan Bradley, a moderator on the listserv who also writes a weekly column on patching for the "Windows Secrets" newsletter, and who last week emailed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asking him to appoint a top executive to investigate the problems, had a suggestion for Knowlton and his firm.

"Enough is enough. Let's reboot this process and see what really is broken here," Bradley said on the listserv Tuesday. "Obviously there are testing issues (Exchange team admitted to not dogfooding that 2013 update), and just as importantly what appears to me to be a lot of communication issues."

Awful company that makes awful products and has survived this long only because of the ruthless business tactics that made them into a monopoly.

Not much different than Bill Gates' education reforms, now that I think about it.

On The Commons: Bll Gates Is Responsible For The Teacher Evaluation Mess

Nice post that puts all the pieces together - the VAM, the bell curve that ensures a certain number of "ineffectives" every year, how the new teacher evaluation systems are based on Microsoft's stack ranking system, how destructive stack ranking has been to Microsoft, how Microsoft just got rid of stack ranking because it is so destructive but how school districts all across the country are stuck with stack ranking for teacher evaluations:

Just as public school systems have widely adopted the Microsoft model in order to win the Race to the Top, it turns out that Microsoft now realizes that this model has pushed Microsoft itself into a Race to the Bottom.

 In a widely circulated 2012 article in Vanity award-winning reporter Fair Kurt Eichenwald concluded that stacked ranking “effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

This month Microsoft abandoned the hated system.

 On November 12 all Microsoft employees received a memo from Lisa Brummel, Executive Vice President for Human Resources announcing the company will be adopting “a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact.”

 Ms. Brummel listed four key elements in the company’s new policy.
 •More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration.
•More emphasis on employee growth and development.
•No more use of a Bell curve for evaluating employees.
•No more ratings of employees.

Sue Altman at EduShyster vividly sums up the frustration of a nation of educators at this new development. “So let me get this straight. The big business method of evaluation that now rules our schools is no longer the big business method of evaluation? And collaboration and teamwork, which have been abandoned by our schools in favor of the big business method of evaluation, is in?”

Big business can turn on a dime when the CEO orders it to do so. But changing policies embraced and internalized by dozens of states and thousands of public school districts will take far, far longer. Which means the legacy of Bill Gates will continue to handicap millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers even as the company Gates founded along with many other businesses, have thrown his pernicious performance model in the dustbin of history.

Once again, no accountability for the billionaire malanthropists who shove through their "innovations" and "solutions" to the ginned up "crisis" in public education in order to wreck the entire public school system and promote their free marketeer dream of so-called school choice, charterization and online schooling.

Bill Gates Faces Shareholder Revolt At Microsoft

Apparently teachers aren't the only people who think Gates wields more power than one man should:these

Three of the top 20 investors in Microsoft are lobbying the board to press for Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the software company he co-founded 38 years ago, according to people familiar with matter.

The outgoing Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has been under pressure for years to improve the company's performance and share price, but this appears to be the first time that major shareholders are taking aim at Gates, who remains one of the most respected and influential figures in technology.

There is no indication that Microsoft's board would heed the wishes of the three investors, who collectively hold more than 5% of the company's stock, the sources say. They requested the identity of the investors be kept anonymous because the discussions are private.

Gates owns about 4.5% of the $277bn company and is its largest individual shareholder.

The three investors are concerned that Gates's presence on the board effectively blocks the adoption of new strategies and would limit the power of a new chief executive to make substantial changes. In particular, they point to Gates's role on the special committee searching for Ballmer's successor.

They are also worried that Gates – who spends most of his time on his philanthropic foundation – wields power out of proportion to his declining shareholding.

Gates, who owned 49% of Microsoft before it went public in 1986, sells about 80m Microsoft shares a year under a pre-set plan, which if continued would leave him with no financial stake in the company by 2018.

Bill Gates - not only harming public education these days but also, at least according to three investors mounting an uphill rebellion against him, harming his old company, Microsoft, too.

Bill Gates Is Wrong - We Do Know Whether His Reforms Will Work

Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post:

“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

That’s what Bill Gates said on Sept. 21 (see video below) about the billions of dollars his foundation has plowed into education reform during a nearly hour-long interview he gave at Harvard University. He repeated the “we don’t know if it will work” refrain about his reform efforts a few days later during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Hmmm. Teachers around the country are saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable “research.” And now Gates says he won’t know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs now because of reforms he is funding.

In the past he sounded pretty sure of what he was doing. In this 2011 oped in The Washington Post, he wrote:

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students.

Actually, that’s not an approach any educator I know would think is a good idea, but Gates had decided that class size doesn’t really matter. Earlier, he had put some $2 billion into forming small schools out of large high schools, on the theory that small schools would better serve students. When the initiative didn’t work out as he hoped, he moved on by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on teacher evaluation systems that in part linked teacher assessments to student standardized test scores, an approach that many assessment experts have warned against.

Now he says that the success of his experiments on public education won’t be known for a decade, but we already know that evaluating teachers by student test scores is a bad idea.

These same rank and yank evaluation systems Gates helped bring to public education systems have not worked when Microsoft used them.

As this Slate article reported, that evaluation system very well may have been the biggest thing to do Microsoft in as a company.

And yet this arrogant Gates is insistent that he is going to take the same evaluation system that split Microsoft apart, with different departements operating as private fiefdoms at war with each other and employees in the same department sticking knives in each other's backs so they won't end up at the bottom of the stack ranking, and brought it to public education.

And now he admits, "Yeah, we need about 10 years to see if it works or not..."

Bill Gates - No Tech Genius, Just A Ruthless Operator

Barry Ritholtz looks at why Microsoft is in such trouble and decides that it's because their monopoly status no longer holds.

He then looks at how they got their monopoly status in the first place:

Gates’s true genius was not as a tech visionary. It was his business acumen in leveraging a monopoly position in operating systems to become the dominant U.S. tech company. IBM gave the world its first PC in 1980. The mainframe giant looked down on the idea of a personal computer for home or even business use. It thought the PC insignificant — it could never replace the big iron it made. In 1981, it happily outsourced the operating system to Gates’s squad of geeks, who themselves outsourced the OS code writing. By 1982, MS-DOS was released.

Embedded within that original IBM deal was the seed of Microsoft’s vast fortunes. Microsoft’s true genius was in its license agreements of MS-DOS (and, eventually, Windows) with PC manufacturers. They offered a variety of licenses, but the version that charged the least per copy included a clever kicker: Microsoft had to be paid for every machine sold — regardless of whether MS-DOS was the operating system. This brilliant, if evil, agreement with computer makers effectively blocked all OS competition. Microsoft became the standard adopted by corporate America.

Microsoft had its deal with the devil: Its lightning in a bottle was not some awesome technology or brilliant breakthrough – it was a clause in a contract that led to an enormously profitable monopoly. It then pre-installed Office in new PCs, creating a second monopoly and billions more in profits. By then, Office had become the dominant productivity software suite. Eventually, Microsoft’s server and tools division — which includes Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Database — also became a de facto standard.

Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” was a not-so-subtle swipe at how Microsoft had achieved its dominance.

Worked for a while - a long while, in terms of tech companies - but not so much anymore:

Most monopolies, aside from baseball, eventually get broken. Microsoft was no exception. Once the Justice Department and the European Commission found the company in violation of antitrust laws, it was forced to compete fairly. It is no coincidence that as the company lost its vice grip on the desktop, its dominance faded. Revealed as a dinosaur, it was unable to compete with the smaller, more-nimble mammals.

And therein lay its current problems. In a fair and level playing field, the once-feared software giant has been revealed as a middling software writer and a mediocre competitor.

Ballmer oversaw a decade of missed opportunities, and he very well may have hastened Microsoft’s decline. But it might have been inevitable. The truth is that for all its claims of innovation, Microsoft never generated much in the way of profits by innovating. This then is a tale of the long, slow death of an enormous cash cow. 

The next time you hear somebody say or read somebody write that Gates is a genius and an innovator, remember Ritholtz's Washington Post column and this quote:

In a fair and level playing field, the once-feared software giant has been revealed as a middling software writer and a mediocre competitor.

Gates and Microsoft thrived through ruthlessness - that's all.

Nothing innovative about either Gates the man or Microsoft the company.

One might say the same about his education reforms and philanthropy.

Daily News: De Blasio And Thompson Would Try To Give Parents The Right To Opt Out Of InBloom

Great news:

At least two of the three leading Democratic mayoral candidates are set to nix plans for handing sensitive student data, including test scores and discipline records, to private companies.

The move against the $100 million inBloom project — if former Controller Bill Thompson or Public Advocate Bill de Blasio win in November — could spell the end of the already faltering data-sharing plan and set off a showdown with the state.

“Like any parent, I know that private student data should never be bought and sold without explicit parental consent,” said de Blasio in a statement. “As mayor, I will protect students’ privacy and stop this needless invasion of privacy.”

Thompson spokesman John Collins, said, if elected, “Bill Thompson will make sure parents consent before personal information about their children is shared with a private company.”

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the third leading Democrat for mayor, has staked out a slightly more conciliatory position, expressing “concern.”

InBloom, funded primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was originally conceived of as a joint project for multiple states. Of the nine states that originally expressed interest, five have now backed away.

The idea is to format student data — including attendance, test scores, learning disabilities and disciplinary records — in a way that can be used by educational tech companies to improve classroom instruction and aid students in danger of failing.

The companies would not be allowed to sell students’ data, but concerned parents fear the information could be compromised or stolen.

“Parents demand that their children’s personal information be pulled out of inBloom and that we should have the right to decide which companies have access to the information,” said Shino Tanikawa, a public school parent with NYC Kids PAC, which has championed the privacy issue.

It’s not clear whether New York state officials will allow future mayors to have a say.

The inBloom system is expected to be ready this fall, and state officials don’t plan to allow parents or districts to opt out. They say the information is required by law, most data have been submitted for years, and inBloom is a required part of the federal Race to the Top grants.

“In order to fulfill the Race to the Top commitments, we will be providing a statewide data set ,” said Associate Commissioner Ken Wagner, who noted the project aims to boost security standards for districts around the state.

“We do have state-of-the-art protections built into this project.”

Notice the rhetorical horse hockey from the state - "state of the art protections" are built into the project.

 

What the hell does that mean?

 

The fact is, all of this data is going to be collected, tracked and handed over to private companies to use for commercial purposes by a "non-profit" run by a man whose former for-profit computer company helps the federal government spy on U.S. citizens.

If the state won't let parents or districts opt out, then parents and districts will sue them.

Having a mayor in City Hall who will fight to give parents the right to opt out of this system will go a long way toward killing it.

The more people who opt out, the more the beast gets starved of its data.

More than half of the state that were in it this thing are out already.

It's Time For Bill Gates To Get Out Of His Public Education Work And Go Save Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced his retirement on Friday, though it seems he was pushed from the company for his many failures:

The company portrayed the departure as voluntary, but it comes amid rising complaints among investors and a month after a disappointing earnings report sent the company’s share price down by 11 percent.

Among the problems was a $900 million write-off related to poor sales of the Surface tablet computer, praised by reviewers but largely ignored by consumers. Microsoft has struggled as well with the rollout of the Windows Phone and its latest PC operating system, Windows 8.

...

 The product misfires, analysts say, fell into a familiar pattern, with Microsoft moving into markets after other companies already had established loyalty among customers. Its Zune music player lost out to Apple’s iPod. The Windows line of phones has made little dent in a market dominated by the iPhone and several Android devices. Microsoft’s Bing search engine lags far behind Google

Not exactly a track record of accomplishments to be proud of, is it?

No wonder Wall Street cheered Ballmer's retirement announcement by bidding up the stock 7 percent.

Just how did Microsoft get to be in such trouble?

Let's start and end with how the company is set up because therein lies many of their problems.

Microsoft is famous for having its divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other:

Organizationally, Microsoft has suffered from years of operating as a collection of silo-like divisions — some would say warring fiefdoms. The company has come under fire for failing both to develop fresh, creative products and to successfully follow others into exciting new markets.

Because divisions within the company would try and undercut other divisions in the company to protect their own turf, Microsoft was unable to capitalize on any of these exciting new markets.

For example, Microsoft had actually developed a tablet before Apple brought the iPad to market, but fighting within the company put that tablet work on hold until well after the iPad grabbed a huge part of the market share.  By the time Microsoft released its Surface tablet this year, there was little market left to grab and the move was a failure.

In addition to divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other, employees within divisions are also at war with each other under the infamous Microsoft rank-and-yank employee evaluation system:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

Will Oremus at Slate notes how other companies have also used rank-and-yank systems to poisonous effect but eventually shelved those systems while Microsoft has stuck with it:

Microsoft wasn’t the first company to adopt this sort of ranking system. It was actually popularized by Jack Welch at GE, where it was known as “rank and yank.” Welch defended the practice to the Wall Street Journal in a January 2012 article, saying, “This is not some mean system—this is the kindest form of management. [Low performers] are given a chance to improve, and if they don't in a year or so, you move them out. "

As the Journal and others have noted, what seemed to work for Welch—for a time, anyway—has produced some ugly results elsewhere. Even GE phased the system out following Welch’s departure. But in an interview with the Seattle Times just last month, Ballmer indicate that he was sticking with it. From the Seattle Times:

Q: A lot of people have slammed Microsoft’s stack ranking review system as contributing to a noncollaborative atmosphere. Is the kind of cultural change you want to effect possible with that stacked ranking system still in place?

A: We’re doing our performance reviews now. We’re finishing up our year (and there are) no changes to—no—I’ll say minor changes to our system. I think everybody wants to work in a high-performance culture where we reward people who are doing fantastic work, and we help people who are having a hard time find something else to do. Now, whether our existing performance-management system needs to change to meet the goal of fostering collaboration is something that Lisa Brummel [head of human resources] would take up.

This rank-and-yank system, btw, has been brought to public education via teacher evaluation systems promoted by old Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, so it seems that not only is Microsoft going to stick with a poisonous ranking system that has driven the company onto the rocks, the founder of the company is looking to take that system elsewhere and destroy even more with it.

Speaking of Mr. Gates, some are calling for Bill to return to his old company and right the sinking ship:

Jack Gold, a tech analyst at Gold Associates, is among many who believe Microsoft needs the type of jolt that can best be provided by someone outside of the company.

"They need a proven innovator with a track record of turning around big, sometimes unwieldy companies," says Gold, who suggests poaching someone from Google. If that doesn't work out, perhaps Microsoft can reach back into its recent past, he says.

"Maybe it's time," Gold says, "for Bill Gates to come back on a temporary basis."

I concur - it's time for Bill Gates to get out of public education "malanthropy" work, get out of bringing GMO's to the world, get out of cloud whitening to save the environment from global warming and galvanic skin bracelets to measure teacher effectiveness and get back to showing the world what a ruthless genius he is at navigating the technology industry waters.

Even better, since he's been promoting rank-and-yank teacher effectiveness evaluation systems all over the country, he can show us how it's done by continuing to use this poisonous ranking system at Microsoft while trying to right his sinking ship.

If Big Bill can fix Microsoft while continuing to rank employees on a bell curve and having the bottom 10% fired every year, then surely pubic school systems can do the same.

So go back to the old company, Bill, and show us all how it's done.

It's time.

First Slave Labor, Now This

From the Post:

The billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ has reportedly hooked up with the divorcing, former mayor of Washington DC.

Laurene Powell Jobs, 49, and Adrian Fenty, 42, got their romance rolling in January when the former DC mayor announced his separation from wife Michelle, the Washington Post reported today.

The new power couple met in 2011 at an education conference.

Then in 2012, Fenty joined the board of College Track, a non-profit founded
  by Powell Jobs and dedicated to getting students from underserved high schools into college.

“Adrian Fenty is one of our country’s great advocates for education reform,” she said when Fenty joined the board. “His sense of urgency and record of accomplishment is unparalleled.”

Ugh.

Gates and Jobs' widow, both in the education reform game, both with more money than God to push their respective agendas.

And now Jobs' widow dating the man who brought Michelle Rhee to D.C.

I'm giving up computers and going back to the abacus and stylus.  

As far as I know, those technologies aren't owned by ed deformers, right?

Microsoft, Public Education And "The Wire"

Good Slate piece comparing Microsoft to The Wire to explian why Bill Gates' company is failing:

And it had a lot to do with bad management. There’s too much personnel turnover in the drug trade for managerial rot to really set in—for the Microsoft analogy on The Wire, you’d look not just to Avon Barksdale’s intransigence but to his nemeses in the Baltimore police department, with its toxic strains of authoritarianism, politics-playing, bean-counting, and pure sloth. Consider Windows Vista, the much-maligned follow-up to the genuinely decent Windows XP. It took five years to produce something that was far worse than its predecessor. Three years into it, in mid-2004, they threw out all the code and started over. There was a big reorg then, too, just like now. Reorgs are the product of endless turf wars between executives and keep managers occupied with PowerPoint charts. Reorgs keep peons nervous about where the axe will fall, as does the brutal zero-sum stack rank review system that dictates that every good performance review in a group must be balanced by a bad one—and thus that you can only excel if your peers fall behind.

 What reorgs don’t result in is a stronger product. They result in slow, clunky, buggy, yet long-in-the-making junk like Microsoft Surface, or Vista, or Kin. Why did it take two years to realize that Vista wouldn’t work? And how did Kin, Microsoft’s iPhone competitor, even get released? It landed in May 2010, it was universally loathed, and then it vanished. A contributor to the infamous Minimsft blog—ground zero for disgruntled employees—put it this way: “We all knew that Kin was a lackluster device, lacked the features the market wanted and was buggy with performance problems ... But when our best ideas were knocked down over and over and it began to dawn on us that we were not going to have any real affect [sic] on the product, we gave up.” Or, as the Baltimore police department’s deputy commissioner Rawls once said to a frustrated underling, “What part of ‘Bend over’ didn’t you understand?”

And of course the genius who developed this system at Microsoft now has brought the same one to public education systems around the country - the brutal zero-sum stack rank system that dictates every good performance review must be balanced by a bad one so a teacher can only excel if her/his peers fall behind, the awful policies that they're going to promote and go with no matter how buggy, ill-conceived or faulty they are.

It's worked so well for Microsoft, you can bet it's going to work well for public schools too.

Guardian: Microsoft Works Closely With U.S. Government To Aid Spying

From The Guardian:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

Microsoft and it's subsidiaries like Skype advertise how customer privacy is their priority, but The Guardian exposes that slogan as empty. 

Microsoft is actually developing products like Outlook with NSA spying needs in mind:

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."

Similarly, Skype's privacy policy states: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.

The latest documents come from the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division, described by Snowden as the "crown jewel" of the agency. It is responsible for all programs aimed at US communications systems through corporate partnerships such as Prism.

The files show that the NSA became concerned about the interception of encrypted chats on Microsoft's Outlook.com portal from the moment the company began testing the service in July last year.

Within five months, the documents explain, Microsoft and the FBI had come up with a solution that allowed the NSA to circumvent encryption on Outlook.com chats

A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: "MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the issue. "These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012."

Two months later, in February this year, Microsoft officially launched the Outlook.com portal.

Another newsletter entry stated that NSA already had pre-encryption access to Outlook email. "For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption."

Microsoft's co-operation was not limited to Outlook.com. An entry dated 8 April 2013 describes how the company worked "for many months" with the FBI – which acts as the liaison between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley on Prism – to allow Prism access without separate authorization to its cloud storage service SkyDrive.

The document describes how this access "means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this – a process step that many analysts may not have known about".

The NSA explained that "this new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response". It continued: "This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established."

A separate entry identified another area for collaboration. "The FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) team is working with Microsoft to understand an additional feature in Outlook.com which allows users to create email aliases, which may affect our tasking processes."

Tell me again, Bill Gates, how student data will be kept safe and secure in your In Bloom data base.

I sure will believe you, just the way I believe that privacy is your company, Microsoft's, "priority."

Microsoft And The Gates Foundation: Your Privacy Is NOT Their Priority

From The Guardian story about the Internet companies that are offering up email content, live chat transcripts, download logs, and other Internet activity to the U.S. government comes this gem:

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Yeah, all these companies are evil, but let's face it: there's a special place in hell for Buffalo Bill Gates and the Microsoft barbarians.

You can't make this stuff up:

Microsoft is first to offer up the data and information to the government, then pulls out the old "Don't worry, we've got your privacy covered" ad campaign.

Just another reason why children's personal information and data ought not to be given over to the Gates Foundation for any reason.

Neither Gates entity - Microsoft nor the Gates Foundation - can be trusted with anything so personal.

Microsoft Blue

From the NY Times:

REDMOND, Wash. — Windows Blue, the code name for an update to the Microsoft’s flagship operating system, sums up the current melancholy in the PC business pretty well, though Microsoft didn’t intend it that way.

PC shipments are slumping and the declines in the industry have gotten worse, not better, since a major overhaul of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 8, came out last fall. If it were possible for PCs to sing, there’s little doubt they would be singing the blues.

Microsoft’s basic vision for Windows 8 has not changed — an operating system flexible enough to run on traditional PCs, tablets and everything in between — but the company is for the first time confirming that it is making changes to the software to address some of the problems people have when using it. In a recent interview at Microsoft’s headquarters, Tami Reller, the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of the Windows division, revealed that Windows Blue will be released this calendar year and will include modifications that make the software easier to learn, especially for people running it on computers without touch screens.

“The learning curve is real and needs to be addressed,” Ms. Reller said.

Like computers, like education policy - badly thought out, arrogantly implemented, and blame is always put on something or somebody outside of the Gates operation (in this case, the PC market.)

Microsoft And News Corp. Both Under Investigation For Bribery Of Overseas Officials

First News Corp. and the Wall Street Journal was investigated for allegedly bribing Chinese officials.

Now Microsoft is under similar investigation:

SEATTLE — Federal authorities are examining Microsoft’s involvement with companies and individuals that are accused of paying bribes to overseas government officials in exchange for business, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.

 The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into bribery accusations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is a confidential legal matter. 

Microsoft’s practices in those countries are being looked at for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law passed in 1977 that prohibits American companies from making payments to government officials and others overseas to further their business interests.

...

Microsoft joins a list of about 100 other companies under investigation at present related to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to Mike Koehler, a professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Law and the author of a blog, FCPA Professor, about the anticorruption law. Because companies have such a strong incentive to settle cases of this sort, they rarely end up going to trial. 

Fines in these corruption cases can run into the tens of millions of dollars. In 2008, Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, signed an $800 million settlement with the Justice Department and the S.E.C. to end an investigation into accusations related to the law.

So glad that NY State is going to hand over confidential data and information about children to these companies.

I'm sure they'll only do upstanding things with that data and info.

Didn't Bill Gates Say He Wanted To Give Away Half Of His Money?

I seem to recall that Bill Gates, malanthropist extraordinaire, wanted to give away half his wealth for "good causes"before he died.

That's what Gates' Giving Pledge is all about.

So how is Bill Gates doing in his initiative?

Not so well - he's getting richer by the year:

Despite giving away a staggering $28million dollars in 2012, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates increased his wealth by $7billion this year.

And with a new net worth around $62.7billion, the 57-year-old Seattle native was named the richest tech billionaire by Bloomberg’s annual Billionaire’s Index.

...

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index, which was published yesterday, Mr Gates earned some of his $7billion this year from a spike in Microsoft stocks, which went up 2 percent this year.

In addition, Business Insider reports that the philanthropist, who has given a sizable endowment to the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, has capitalized a company called Cascade Investments.

In a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was revealed that Mr Gates owns shares in companies like Coca-Cola and tractor company John Deere & Co.

So much for the Giving Pledge.

Gates may play philanthropist at TEDx and his wife may play that role when Nick Kristof is helping her disseminate propaganda via the NY Times.

But Gates is above all a ruthless oligarch looking to wield power and maintain his privilege even as he makes believe he's got other motivations for his actions.

It's not a mistake that he is the second wealthiest man in the world and he's increasing his fortune astronomically even as many of the rest of us are having to work longer and harder for less and less.

The Gates Foundation, like the Broad Foundation and the Walton group and Bloomberg Philanthropy, promote "giving" that seems to benefit their bottom lines as well as their tax bills.

When it comes to these wealthy corporate criminals, you have to watch what they're doing, not listen to what they're saying (or what their publicists are saying.)

When you watch Gates closely, what you see is a man increasing his wealth by promoting harmful initiatives all over the globe that help increase that wealth (like GMO in Africa that uses Monsanto products or technology in classrooms and teacher training that promotes Microsoft products over Linux and Apple), yet playing a "good guy" in corporate media reports.

Wouldn't it be nice if the media exposed this?

I think it would, but Gates bought off some of the media too (see here and here.)

Windows 8 - A Christmas Gift For Someone You Hate

Microsoft has bet its future on the Windows 8 system, but that bet doesn't seem to be paying off:

BELLEVUE, Wash. — It used to be that a new version of the Windows operating system was enough to get people excited about buying a new computer, giving sales a nice pop. 

Not this time. Windows 8, the latest edition of Microsoft’s software, failed to pack shoppers into a Microsoft store in a mall here last week, at a time when parking lots in the area were overflowing. The trickle of shopping bags leaving the store with merchandise was nothing like the steady stream at a bustling Apple store upstairs. 

Weak PC sales this holiday season suggest that the struggles of Microsoft and other companies that depend heavily on the computer business will not abate soon. Plenty of consumers already own PCs and seem content to make do with what they have, especially in a shaky economy in which less expensive mobile devices are bidding for a share of their wallets. 

While there are also many tablets running Microsoft’s new, touch-friendly Windows, they have so far failed to emerge from the shadow of competing products from Apple and Amazon and other devices that are being snapped up by holiday shoppers. 

Emmanuel Fromont, president of the Americas division of Acer, the world’s No. 4 PC maker, said sales of the company’s Windows 8 PCs had been lower than expected. He said one factor was the system’s unfamiliar design, which appeared to be making consumers cautious.

“There was not a huge spark in the market,” Mr. Fromont said. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

The clearest evidence of Windows 8’s disappointing introduction comes from the research firm NPD, which estimates that sales of Windows machines have actually dropped from a year ago. 

According to NPD, stores in the United States sold 13 percent fewer Windows devices from late October, when Windows 8 made its debut, through the first week in December, than in the same period last year. 

Those figures do not include sales in Microsoft’s own stores, which were the only place to buy a Surface tablet during that period, but because the stores are scarce, analysts believe it is unlikely they made a big difference. 

“I think everybody would have hoped for a better start,” said Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD. “The thing is, this market is not the same market that Windows 7 or Vista or even XP launched into.” 

There you have it - people hate Windows 8, people aren't buying the new Microsoft Surface tablet, Microsoft stores are bereft of shoppers, and Windows-based PC sales are down from last year to this year, partly because people don't like Windows 8.

And I mean people really don't like Windows 8.  There have been some really harsh reviews of the system, including one by the Nielson Norman Group that panned every part of the Windows 8 system in a usability study.

So while Bill Gates spends all his time trying to privatize the public education system, make all of Africa and Asia eat genetically modified food, and solve global warming by whitening the clouds in the sky, the company he helped found has become a bigger object of ridicule than during the darkest days of Vista:

Microsoft (MSFT) is no stranger to criticism these days, and the company’s new Windows 8 platform is once again the target of a scathing review from a high-profile user. Well-known Internet entrepreneur and MIT professor Philip Greenspun handed Windows 8 one of its most damning reviews yet earlier this week, calling the new operating system a “Christmas gift for someone you hate.” Greenspun panned almost every aspect of Microsoft’s new software, noting that Microsoft had four years to study Android and more than five to examine iOS, but still couldn’t build a usable tablet experience.



“The only device that I can remember being as confused by is the BlackBerry PlayBook,” Greenspun wrote on his blog after using Windows 8 on a Dell (DELL) XPS One All-in-One desktop PC. The acclaimed computer scientist noted that Microsoft omitted all of the best features from the most popular touch-focused platforms and instead created a user interface he describes as a “dog’s breakfast.”

“Suppose that you are an expert user of Windows NT/XP/Vista/7, an expert user of an iPad, and an expert user of an Android phone… you will have no idea how to use Windows 8,” Greenspun wrote.

He continued, “Some functions, such as ‘start an application’ or ‘restart the computer’ are available only from the tablet interface. Conversely, when one is comfortably ensconced in a touch/tablet application, an additional click will fire up a Web browser, thereby causing the tablet to disappear in favor of the desktop. Many of the ‘apps’ that show up on the ‘all apps’ menu at the bottom of the screen (accessible only if you swipe down from the top of the screen) dump you right into the desktop on the first click.”

Bill Gates seems to know as much about computers, tablets and operating systems these days as he does about what works in a school classroom - he thinks Windows 8 is fabulous:

Bill Gates is giving some initial feedback about Windows 8, and it's no shocker that he thinks the operating system is pretty nifty.
 
The Microsoft co-founder and chairman, speaking in a video interview with Microsoft's Steve Clayton, echoes CEO Steve Ballmer in calling Windows 8 an "absolutely critical product" that combines "the best" of tablets and traditional PCs.

  Gates noted that people will be "amazed at the energy" Microsoft is putting behind its new products, and he said Windows 8 "is key to where personal computing is going."

"This is the big time for us," Gates said.

He added that he has been using his Surface tablet nonstop, calling it "unbelievably great."

Gate also hinted that the PC/tablet version of Windows and the phone version will eventually merge over time.

"We're certainly sharing between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8," Gates said. "Over time, we do more and more of that. It's evolving literally to be a single platform."

Microsoft can merge the Windows 8 phone and computer systems into one single platform all they want - people can then hate one big operating systems instead of two little ones.

And I love how Gates thinks Windows 8 takes all of what is great from every other system while Greenspun the MIT professor and the Nielson Norman Group says it is just the opposite - Microsoft took the worst parts of every system and put them into Windows 8.

It's amazing to me that the people give credence to anything Bill Gates says about poverty, education or the environment when it is becoming increasingly clear that he can't even get computer and phone operating systems right - and that's a business he supposedly knows about.

What's worse, he seems to really think the system is fabo, showing just how clueless he truly is.

Microsoft Windows 8 is a nightmare system designed by people who think they're geniuses but who actually are clueless incompetents.

Pretty much like the people at the Gates Foundation who are involved in education policy, food policy, disease eradication and poverty alleviation.

Bloomberg, NYPD, and Microsoft Go Into The Crime-Fighting Business Together

Sounds like a story from The Onion - but it's not:

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has unveiled a new crime-fighting system developed with Microsoft – and revealed that the city will take a cut of the profits if it is sold to other administrations.

The innovation, which bears a passing resemblance to the futuristic hologram data screens used by Tom Cruise in the science fiction film Minority Report, will allow police to quickly collate and visualise vast amounts of data from cameras, licence plate readers, 911 calls, police databases and other sources.

It will then display the information in real time, both visually and chronologically, allowing investigators to centralise information about crimes as they happen or are reported. "It is a one-stop shop for law enforcement," Bloomberg said at a City Hall press conference unveiling the new technology.

But, though it has many screens, maps, and flashing visuals that make it look like science fiction, the new technology has a distinctly un-Hollywood name: the Domain Awareness System. Developed by Microsoft engineers working with New York police officers, DAS will allow a host of activities to be carried out, such as spotting a suspicious vehicle and being able to track its recent movements or use cameras to track back and see who left a suspicious package.

It features live video feeds, huge databases of recent crime patterns and can take input direct from the field in real time via things like 911 calls or police radios. "All the information is presented visually and geographically and in chronological context," said police commissioner Ray Kelly.

If other cities purchase this system, Microsoft will share 30% of the profit with NYC.

Given how shoddy Microsoft products generally are, I doubt this thing will work as Bloomberg and Microsoft are advertising it, so we'll just have to see if any other municipality signs on to it.

Even so, I am a little disturbed that Microsoft and the NYPD are partnering on a crime tracking system.

Maybe the Gates Foundation can add a test score/teacher evaluation and really bring the school-to-prison complex together into one huge database?

Oops - maybe I shouldn't give Uncle Bill any ideas - he's been known to steal them before and make them into a core component of his Microsoft business model.

Although as I noted above, if this thing is as bad as Microsoft ME, Vista, Zune or Windows 8, I suspect it will spend more time freezing up and causing frustration than actually helping police track "criminals."