Special Education Today Newsletter 3(24)
Did you read the entries for 4 December 2023?
Hello, colleagues, friends, Romans, and anyone else who might want to avoid admitting a connection with me. Here you have the current issue of the newsletter for Special Education Today. Regular readers will, as regularly is the case, find the regular content here. New readers may find content that is new to them. Anyway, Regulars and Others, I’m providing table of contents for the past week, an updated status report for the site and the newsletter, and a bit of commentary at the end. Sound regular…or, at least, familiar?
Opener
Driving home from Chincoteague, Pat pulled into this little shop’s parking lot for The Great Machipongo Clam Shack (6468 Lankford Highway, Nassawadox, VA 23413). I want to mention it here because (a) the people were quite nice, (b) oysters were for sale (by the pint, not in the shell, but that’s fine), (c) the signs in the window at the left were a hint about what we’d find inside, (d) there was lots of room for outside seating (though we didn’t avail ourselves of it), and (e) it was convenient. We were the first customers of the day and we only bought retail products, but I suspect the two people at the shop would have fired up the kitchen to feed us. They were really nice…did I already mention that? We snagged a couple of pints of oysters and a couple of other small tourist items and learned about the place. Not only does it have fish (fin and shell) on the menu, but there are also vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free items; there were lots of peace-themed books, bumperstickers, and such; I saw a half dozen books about local lore and such, too; we learned that Jimmy Joe, or somebody, plays live music from the little bandstand between the doors on some nights; and the clerks were really nice. As usual, I don’t get any rewards for mentioning the shop.
Here’s a ToC
I published seven posts over the past week. At least two of them had typos (thanks, Joel M.)…at least, that’s how many I had to revise and issue an editor’s note indicating that they had been corrected. Here’s the list of them.
Special Education Today Newsletter 3(23): What’s been in the news for 4 December 2023?
E. Oster calls "bologna" on chiropractic for developmental disabilities: Am I happy that someone with her reach blew this whistle?
Olds: A mother's observations about LD: What can educators learn from listening to parents?
Zelma.ai with E. Oster: What do you want to know about students' performance in US states?
Ronnie Detrich, 1946-2023: Remembering a behavior analyst who provided superb clinical coaching
Special Education Day 2023: What did it look like in your neck of the woods?
ASAT Webinar 12 December 2023: What have these folks learned from promoting science in the treatment of autism?
I encourage readers to share the content. Of course, I embed “share” buttons in posts and hope you will use them. But, you can simply clip a URL and pass it along, too.
Flashes of the high beams
This week appreciation goes to the subscribers who click lots of links. These readers—Susan d. Dan H., [anon], Jane B., Mike N., John U., Nicole U., Jeannie K.-H., Rhonda B., Clay K., and Susan O.—have followed the URLs I embed in posts dozens of times each. Whenever a reader visits a site linked in a post on SET, that visit leaves a textual notice on the receiving server’s logs indicating that the source for the visit was the referring post on SET. Now, it takes a savvy and curious person to comb through server logs and identify referrers, but it can be done. In fact, however, a certain Internet company (it’s name starts with a “G” and its pronunciation is similar to how one would pronounce the name for a very large number called a “googol”) tracks lots of those referral data.1
I don’t have access to the http logs for the server where SET is hosted, so I can’t show you what those logs look like. Therefore I can’t do a lot of tracking of in-coming traffic for the site. Substack’s software provides some data (e.g., type of referrer, such as email, social media company, Substack itself, g[ooops[, Facebook) as well as selected others (e.g., some of the blogs that refer to SET).
Commentary
I’d planned to show the solution for the measurement puzzle that I posted 18 November 2023. No one has offered a solution yet, so I won’t give away the answer. However, I will provide a big hint: It’s easier to solve if you think about geometry rather than arithmetic.
I’ve been reading other sources of late. I wanted to share some of them with readers. I know some folks have been frequenting these (and other) blogs, and I hope that as you find other related sources you’ll alert me to them. Now, I ‘spose I should ask that you restrict your sharing to sources that are relevant to special education, disabilities, education…yes, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is wonderful, but it probably shouldn’t go on the SET reading list (and yes, I did just sneak it in there).
Here’s a baker’s dozen sources to peruse:
50ishWithaFullNest (Patti Ponder)
OK, now here’re the usual admonitions: (a) Wear your seatbelts: I learned to use them when I had a ‘56 Thunderbird because they came standard in that car! (b) COVID and other respiratory diseases that are running rampant (per Your Local Epidemiologist): Get boosted, keep safe social distance, wash your hands, use masks, and protect your family and friends. (c) Support people who are new to your community. And (of course) please, teach your children well.
JohnL
SET Editor
Charlottesville
SET should not be confused with a product with the same name that is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization.
Not only does the identity of the referring Web page get transported, but also other data: The IP address for the computer (yours!) requesting the page, the date and time of the request, the browser (including the version) making the request, the computer’s operating system (and which version), the date and time of the request, and lots more. By the way, in lots of the literature about referrer data, you’ll see referrer misspelled as “referer.” If you’re interested in learning more, go get into the documentation for the Apache server software or the Microsoft server software. Those are the two softwares used on very, very many servers all around the world.