After my last anagram about Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre, Alan Farrar from Shakespeare Experience posted a comment that The Tempest wasn’t Shakespeare’s last play. Fair enough.

From The Tempest:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Duteous Alan Farrar would see me deluded, for this masterpiece wasn’t his finale.

I am black or I’m white for your classroom decor;
Used for fixing the window, or blocking the door;
I lie flat in a chess game, but not Connect Four;
And in Strangelove, I’m big; in Glengarry, the score.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Craig. See comments for answer.

One of my favorite pieces of trivia is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day. What’s truly remarkable about this is that it happened on July 4, 1826, which was the 50th anniversary of the famous signing of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams’s last words are reported to be “Thomas Jefferson survives” – he did not know that his long-time friend and rival had died a few hours earlier. For us, then, knowing that Jefferson died first is an essential part of the story of these great founding fathers.

But what of the founding fathers of Western literature? Recently, we celebrated April 23 as Shakespeare’s birthday, but we also know it as his death day. Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616. We do not know the time of his death, or his last words.

Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, might likewise be considered one of the founding fathers of Western literature. Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616. We do not know the time of his death, or his last words.

And yet, it is possible to say, with some degree of certainty, which of the two authors perished first. And that, dear readers, is today’s Conundrum.

Who died first: Shakespeare or Cervantes? How do you know?

Feel free to speculate as to last words too, if that sort of thing amuses you.

UPDATE: Question answered by Neel Mehta. See comments for answer.

This morning, I read an editorial from the New York Times editorial staff in my pajamas. How they got in my pajamas, I don’t know:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was supposed to create clear, reliable data that told parents how local schools stacked up against schools elsewhere in the nation. It has not worked that way, thanks in part to timidity at the Department of Education, which initially allowed states to phony up even the most basic data on graduation rates. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings took a welcome step in the right direction by issuing new rules for how those rates are calculated.

By the 2012-13 school year, states will have to use the generally accepted way of computing their dropout rate. That means tracking students from the day they enter high school until the day they receive regular diplomas, counting as nongraduates those who leave without the diploma. This method was endorsed three years ago by the National Governors Association, which realized that accurate graduation rates were a vital indicator of how well the schools were doing.

Had the federal government led the way on this issue instead of waiting to see how the wind was blowing the country would already have built a sound data collection system.

Were they waiting to see how the wind was blowing? Or were they simply waiting until they were almost out of office?

Let’s be clear. The Bush administration did not simply “allow” states to falsify their dropout rates; they led the charge. George W. Bush ran in 2000 on the “Houston Miracle” in education, where Superintendent Rod Paige was able to raise test scores and lower dropout rates. Paige became the first Secretary of Education in the Bush White House.

Unfortunately, the “Houston Miracle” turned out to be a scam, which was eventually debunked by, among others, Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes:

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”

Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”

The political ramifications of this should be obvious. The school system is pressured by the politicians to fake the numbers, and the very same politicians get to run on an excellent record of educational reform.

So what happens when the fraud is finally elimated and the statistics start to reflect reality? We’re going to see a massive rise in high school dropout rates. This will not reflect actual high school students dropping out in larger numbers, but rather a change in the way such things are measured. And it’s all set to happen by 2012, when the next president, likely a Democrat, is running for re-election. And the story will be about that president’s dismal record on education, with a chilling statistic about rises in high-school dropout rates during that president’s term.

I agree that the formula needs to be fixed, and the Times is correct that the administration waited too long to do it. But I don’t think the Times editorial goes far enough in outlining the true consequences of the timing, appearing even to praise Spellings for taking this “welcome step in the right direction” which will cost her and her boss a total of nothing, and will likely help the Republican candidate in 2012.

Clay Shirky has a posting well worth reading about the changing nature of how we spend our time. You should really read the whole thing, but I think his point is well summed up by his reaction to a television producer when he was explaining to her how Wikipedia works:

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The producer still just thought it all a fad, but Shirky would soon have an experience that’s hard to dismiss.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

The thing is that this change in our culture is more than just about our attitudes towards media or technology. Students are going to be coming to school expecting a more self-directed, interactive form of learning than we’ve been giving them. They won’t wait to be given permission to publish their writing or participate in their democracy. We need to make sure that school is a place where they can learn to acquire information more efficiently and express themselves more effectively, not a place where they are stifled in their attempts to do so.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

From The Tempest:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Pure fans feel let down.

Will’s famous theatre adieu reduces histories and drama.

UPDATE: A clarification anagram.

I’m one side of a ship; or its windows in line;
I’m the place where it docks, or its city assign;
I’m a slot for your flash drive; Iberian wine;
And when caught in a storm, any one of me’s fine.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Annalisa. See comments for answer.

Today is Shakespeare’s 444th birthday.

This means that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would be the world’s oldest human. In fact, he would be the oldest human who ever lived.

The number 444 makes me think of the Iran Hostage Crisis. The hostages were held for 444 days.

444 is a Harshad number. It is also a palindrome.

The year 444 AD was precisely 1564 years ago. What year was Shakespeare born? 1564. Believe it or not!

Company retreats and team-building exercises often get a bad rap. I actually have quite a bit of experience doing team-building exercises at retreats, and the most important thing is to create a space where people feel safe. I never do pure “trust” exercises, such as having people fall backwards or the like. I generally start with having participants do activities where they learn new things about one another, and we work our way into role-playing activities that allow us to workshop some of the more common situations that we encounter in our jobs.

It certainly never would have occurred to me to use waterboarding:

PROVO, Utah – No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

Hudgens is filing a lawsuit, which has brought to light some of the other motivational practices of his supervisor.

Hudgens alleged that if the 10-person sales team went a day without a sale, members had to work the next day standing up; Christopherson took away their chairs. The team leader also threatened to draw a mustache in permanent marker on the face of sales people for ‘negativity,'” Hudgens said. Christopherson kept on his desk a piece of wood, ‘the 2-by-4 of motivation,’ he said.

Make no mistake – this is not about motivation. It’s about power, and the abuse of it.

“We don’t know what he was thinking, but we know that he wasn’t thinking waterboarding, or torture,” Brunt said. Christopherson, suspended for two weeks while the company investigated the incident, is back on the job. The company declined to allow interviews with him or other employees.

I’m glad the guy is filing a lawsuit, but this goes way beyond workplace harrassment. There really needs to be a criminal investigation, and the people involved should be held accountable. This goes not only for the wolf who poured the water on Hudgens, but also for the sheep who were holding him down.