Pat Tribble retiring

Retiring teachers

From a personal point of view, it is not news that Mitch Daniels is planning to cut the education budget in Indiana. Given his history, it would be surprising if he weren't.

The retiring teachers are Barbara Chaplin, 27 years as Connersville High School guidance counselor; Fred Halberstadt, 22 years MiMD at Fayette Central; Susan Jinks, 32 years MiMD at CHS; Janet Miller, 28 years physical education; Frank Paddock, 34 years at Frazee Elementary School; Peggy Paddock, 34 years at Everton Elementary School; Helen Sanders, 23 years math at CHS; Susan Scott, 26 years art at CHS; Wilma Studt, 42 years Everton; Sally Taylor, 31 years MiMD at Eastview Elementary School; Patricia Tribble, 40 years speech/language/hearing at Eastview; and Dorothy Horton, 32 years as a special education assistant at Eastview

Pat Tribble taught me probably everything I still remember about chess. (She probably also taught me how to pronounce words such as "water" so that I would sound as if I was a native of Indiana, not Philadelphia.) Most notably, she chastized me when I bollixed a game I dominated--a lesson never forgotten, if not always abided.

Happy retirement, Pat.

CBS, UNIVAC, and Credibility Issues of 1952

CBS, UNIVAC, and Credibility Issues of 1952

From William Gibson's blog comes the Christie's "Origins of Cyberspace" auction, featuring among other interesting material this Lot.

Pull quote:

On election night programmers fed early return data from eight key states into UNIVAC 1 to be compared with voting patterns from past elections. On the basis of this comparison, the computer predicted a landslide victory for Eisenhower: 438 electoral votes versus 93 for Adlai Stevenson. This contradicted the polls, which had called for a close race, and nervous officials from both CBS and Remington Rand insisted that the parameters of the computer's calculations be adjusted to better match the pollster's predictions. After some tinkering, the UNIVAC was made to produce odds of 8 to 7 for an Eisenhower victory, and CBS used this revised prediction in its election broadcasts. However, when the final returns were in, UNIVAC's initial forecast of a landslide turned out to be correct: Eisenhower ended up with 442 electoral votes, while Stevenson had only 89. The computer had predicted the election's outcome with over 98 percent accuracy, and on the air that night CBS confessed to its mistake in not trusting the UNIVAC's original numbers.

Note for the record that this didn't destroy CBS's credibility.