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School Balance
Both Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkeley, California have made efforts to balance the public elementary schools by family income. They do this by dropping the idea of the neighborhood school and instead sending some children to schools across the city, in order to get the average family income roughly equal at every elementary school. They do…
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STT_GNU_IFUNC
I recently added support for STT_GNU_IFUNC to gold. As you can tell by the name, STT_GNU_IFUNC is a GNU specific ELF symbol type. It is defined in the range reserved for operating system specific types. A symbol with type STT_GNU_IFUNC is a function, but the symbol does not provide the address of the function as…
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Inception
I enjoyed watching Inception, and as far as I could tell it was a consistent if complex story for the world that it set up. But that world was a very weird one. If my subconscious mind wanted to get rid of some outside influence within the context of a shared dream, it certainly would…
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Deaths in middle childhood
By far the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 9 in the U.S. is automobile accidents, accounting for some 21% of all deaths (I’m looking at figures from 2002). After that comes cancer (18%) and congenital abnormality (7%). What surprises me is the fourth item on the list: drowning (5%). I’ve heard…
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Condensation Computing
It’s a frequent observation that computing has oscillated between centralized and distributed. We’ve gone from centralized computing facilities (which were effectively single-user, but only the administrators could use them) to time-sharing to personal computers to server farms. Data has moved from the card deck you kept in your office to the tape deck at the…