October 31, 2012

The Cincinnati Enquirer slits its own throat

The newspaper industry is dying.

You know it. I know it. The newspaper folks know it. Heck, The Onion knows it.

And in these trying economic times, the Cincinnati Enquirer is doing everything in its power to remain solvent and profitable.

They've consolidated the Cincinnati Post and Enquirer together (a few years back).

They have shrunk the size of the print edition at least twice that I know of.

They've outsourced the writing of most of their neighborhood content to local people looking to promote their own events, setting up a largely web2.0 article generator.

Now they're putting their online content behind a pay wall, allowing folks only twenty (or maybe it was thirty) free articles before locking the rest of their articles down for subscribers only.

Before hitting this pay wall, though, readers are treated to full-page, click-through ads for Furniture Fair (I tried to do a screen cap, but the ad disappeared as I hit the print screen button)...animated advertisements with rain and skidding cars...pop-up banner ads...


pop-up window ads for LowerMyBills.com...


...banner ads across the top and right-side of the screen...


...a slide-back countdown for the number of free articles the reader has left...sponsored links at the bottom of the page...another floating banner ad at the bottom of the page...


and a website that hasn't been redesigned in at least five years.

For all of this joy, sorry, for all of this hassle in trying to actually read their content, they are offering a digital-only option for $10 a month. Or readers can go digital AND print for $13 a month, meaning that the print option is worth a grand total of $3 a month...ten cents a day.


I can't promise that the post-subscription website still has all those ridiculous ads (I haven't paid), but I'm guessing it still does. The neighborhood content looks to still be free, as does the list of news stories within each category (news, local, sports, business, etc), but everything else directs you to a screen that looks like this...


Clicking on the close X sent me back to the main news page.

I get that the NYTimes has been partially successful with the transition to a paywall (temporarily suspended in the wake of Sandy), allowing ten free articles per month before a reader has to pay for more access. The Cincinnati Enquirer is not, however, the New York Times. They aren't remotely the New York Times. They are a local paper with a website designed to annoy rather than to inform.

They are, however, the only game in town. Nobody else in town covers the Cincinnati news market, though I'm thinking there might be a market for one soon because I'm just about done with the Enquirer and their grasping at monetary straws instead of improving the consumer experience.

October 30, 2012

Vonne Gut Reaction: Deadeye Dick

It's been too long. We've got four books - after today's review - left and a couple of months to finish this quest. So, let's get it on...

Today we take a look at Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut's second novel set in Midland, Ohio, home of Dwayne Hoover and the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts which we last saw welcoming Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions. This book doesn't focus on Dwayne Hoover or the Arts Center, though both do play minor parts. We'll get to them in a few lines...

My thoughts as I read the book...(all pages refer to the 1982 edition, the printing with the iconic V-style cover)

  • p1 - "They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old....Blah blah blah." For a man who has made a living out of telling stories, Vonnegut seems to show a large amount of disdain for the written word. His view seems to be that people live, people die, and not much of anything that happens really matters. Ah, humanism...
  • p12 - "My mother's peephole opened in Midland City in 1912." - Again we get Vonnegut's view of life as a very limited glimpse of the world. In Slaughterhouse 5, he described Earthlings' view of the world as being chained to a railcar able only to look at the world through a long pipe constantly travelling through the world. Vonnegut seems to prefer the Tralfamadorian view in which all time - past, present, future - are viewed as a whole. Here, though, we get humans and our peepholes on the world opening and closing as we are born and die.
  • p20 - "Father once said to me when he was an old man, after he had spent two years in prison, after he and Mother had lost all their money and art treasures in a lawsuit..." - Vonnegut again tells us the end - or at least what is coming - in the story long before he needs to, a common practice of his. 
  • p21 - "Little did I suspect back then that I myself, Rudy Waltz, would become a notorious murderer known as "Deadeye Dick." - Again, not even foreshadowing as much as total revelation of where we are headed.
  • p33 - "Midland City has now been depopulated by a neutron bomb explosion." - The future is again revealed with no fanfare whatsoever. In the opening preface, Vonnegut explains that the neutron bomb explosion represents his hometown of Indianapolis where the city still stands but where the people he knew are long gone.
  • p42 - Celia Hildreth is greeted by Rudy's father as though she were Helen of Troy. Vonnegut's women have often been placed on pedestals, unable to be real people, trapped as idealized lovers or beauties. Celia is such a woman, though we do eventually get to see her revulsion at this behavior, her confusion and hatred at her own gorgeous face because no one ever sees beyond this to the person that she really is. She eventually destroys this gorgeous face through the abuse of amphetamines and eventual swallowing of Drano.
  • p50 - "She was married to Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer" - Dwayne is back from Breakfast of Champions, and he appears throughout the book to be the same person with an unhappy wife - the aforementioned Celia - and a disowned, homosexual son who plays at the local piano bar. Celia eventually dies, and we are spared reliving Dwayne's devolution into insanity that is covered in Breakfast of Champions
  • p80 - "...a few months before the dedication of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts" - The arts center plays heavily in Breakfast of Champions, and here we get a fair bit of background into its creation - the reasons for Fred T Barry's championing of the center, Rudy Waltz's mother's opposition to the center, Midland City's indifference to the center, the center's eventual fall because of lack of maintenance.
  • p81 - "No that I have known Haiti..." - Vonnegut's protagonists often find themselves ending their stories on tropical paradises - Galapagos, Cat's Cradle, Slapstick, Deadeye Dick. I wonder if Vonnegut at some point in his life visited a beautiful island locale and loved it that much, wishing to go back someday.
  • p93 - "There stood my mother, Emma, who was herself a child. Outside of school, she had never had any responsibilities, any work to do. Her servants had raised her as children. She was purely ornamental." - Again, a woman on a pedestal. At one point in the story, Vonnegut says that much of our lives is spent as epilogue, the declining action after our greatest moment. Rudy's mother's story was epilogue from the moment that she got married, so much of her life being largely pointless. In other words, she's a fairly typical Vonnegut female.
  • p133-4 - Rudy has a daydream about being a neuter and leading a parade of neuters. - Many of Vonnegut's characters - Dwayne Hoover, Billy Pilgrim, others - have these waking dreams that distract them from their humdrum lives.
  • p168 - "One of the ten greatest paintings in the world, as far as he was concerned, was 'Crucifixion in Rome,' by John Rettig...It now hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum." - So much of Vonnegut's world is of a Midwest that I know, and often I wonder which of the things in it are real.  Apparently this one is real and is, indeed, housed in Cincinnati, Sadly, though, I can't find an image of it online.
  • p185 - In Rudy's play, Katmandu, Rudy tinkers "with the idea of having the voice of God coming from the back of the theater...The actress playing Celia could ask why God had ever put her on earth. And then the voice from the back of the theater could rumble, 'To reproduce. Nothing else really interests Me. All the rest is Frippery.' " -  Yup, that's pretty much Vonnegut to a tee. We're here for a while. We're born. We die. We should try to make each other happy - or at least not hurt each other, but it's all just frippery.
  • p221 - "He sold his company to the RAMJAC Corporation..." - We've seen the RAMJAC Corporation before, in Jailbird. Turns out that the copyright on this edition of Deadeye Dick is 1982 by the Ramjac Corporation
Deadeye Dick is a fine book, a fun read, a decent enough tale, but it is one of Vonnegut's lesser works. There isn't any theme here outside of that maybe random actions shape our lives - a bullet fired at random, a neutron bomb set off by accident, a freak snowstorm, a poorly chosen art tutor. We are products of these actions, none of which are meant for any reason, none of which are intentional choices. We simply are.

In this telling of that same tale by Vonnegut, though, there simply isn't much humor to be had. Life happens, and nobody chuckles here.

That's Vonnegut for ya.

Next up, my second reading of Gallapagos.

Other reviews of Deadeye Dick...

October 29, 2012

Hi, She's Liz

I don't know much about Liz other than what's on her about page. Apparently she's a storyboard artist on The Simpsons. I do know, though, that her cartoon blog is a blast to read.



October 27, 2012

2982 - I think...


  • Experimental hazards - see the Flash's origin for proof
  • Troy Barnes insult GIF challenge - Let's go with #7 as our favorite, okay?
  • Fairfield welcomes newest park Saturday - May have to go check this out. Sounds really interesting.
  • Top 12 Most Unusual Weather Photographs - I'm including #1 here, but the rest are outstanding, too...Here's the explanation of this one, "This is an image no one would be happy to replicate. Two seconds after Mary McQuilken snapped this shot of her brothers posing on top of Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park, California a powerful lightning bolt struck them. A hiker just outside the frame was killed and Sean (on the left) eventually also died from complications associated with his injuries. Michael McQuilken (on the right) survived. The family was hiking in the Sierra Nevada during August 1975 when the incident occurred. Photo by Mary McQuilken."

October 26, 2012

Things I sawheardwatched

Quick hits here...


The Descendants - Cooney's flick about a family in Hawaii falling apart...great acting from Clooney as a man whose wife is injured and falls into a coma...he then finds out that his wife was cheating (finds out from his elder daughter)...at the same time Clooney is in charge of a decision of what the family (the eponymous Descendants) is going to do with a gorgeous piece of unspoiled property on the island...

In the board strokes, it's a very predictable plot: father has lost touch with his two daughters, has to get closer with his girls, has to figure out what to do when he finds out his wife was cheating. In the narrower strokes, the acting is outstanding, and Clooney in particular really shines. So does the elder daughter, Shailene Woodley. Ending is a bit predictable, but the experience of getting there is well worth the watch. Descendants easily earned its Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

Somewhere - I'd only seen one of Sofia Copola's films: Lost in Translation. Loved it...slow grower but well worth the watch. This - my second one - is also a slow grower, but this one never really gets anywhere at all. Actor is divorced and sees his daughter infrequently while doing actory stuff - going out on junkets, getting a monster mask mold made, getting awards in foreign lands. The actor realizes he's living a hollow, meaningless life and needs to become a better father to his daughter.

The whole thing goes nowhere...and it goes there slowly.

In watching the DVD extras, I got something out of this being Copola's film commentary on the lives of actors and Hollywood people, and maybe they liked/loved/appreciated/tolerated the film. I did none of that.

Rocket Science - There are a few actors who I will see in just about anything. Anna Kendrick's one of them. She's a cutey, and she can act the heck out of most roles.

Here she's a hugely successful high school debater looking to recruit a stutterer to become the master debater that she thinks he can be. But then things take a different turn when Kendrick's character ditches for a private school, leaving the debate team to flounder onward with the team of misfits that she recruited.

Good to see the stutterer start to come into his own, but the climax that we're looking for never develops, and the one that we get as a replacement isn't terrifically satisfying. The path to get there is worthwhile and enjoyable enough, though, that it's worth taking. It's a surprisingly honest portrait of high school hierarchy.

Sleepwalk With Me - I'd requested this one from The Neon in Dayton, the Esquire, and the Mariemont Strand. The Neon got things first, but before I had to take the arduous drive north, the Mariemont folks messaged me that they had acquiesced to the demands of the public (public here being defined as slightly liberal public who listens to This American Life on NPR) and brought Sleepwalk to the Strand.

The Girl and I hit Terry's for a burger - I'm thinking I need to try the chili next time. Then onward to the Strand to pay up on the begging that I'd done in trying to get Sleepwalk to town.

Mike Birbiglia's stand-up career has heavily mined his real life, particularly the part of his real life in which he sleepwalks - to the extent that he even jumps out a second-story window in hopes of escaping the rocket aimed at him in his dreams. Birbiglia told the story on This American Life, the producers of which helped turn the story into a stunningly honest movie starring Mike Birbiglia as an only slightly-fictionalized version of himself named Matt Pandapiglia, who tells the story of Pandapiglia's commitment issues, developing stand-up career, and dissolving relationship (and engagement).

Birbiglia doesn't pull any punches - even going so far as to say before one particularly unflattering part, 'Before this next part, I want you to remember that you're on my side.' In the process he tells a great story.

Worth hunting down.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay - Dumb...stupid...entertainment...

Fun stuff all the way through...not as awesome as the third one, but pretty close.

Well worth a few dozen chuckles.

Some Nights by fun. - Great album all the way through. I'd heard the first single - "We Are Young" - a bunch of times but really decided to take a second look at the band after seeing them perform and absolutely killing it on Colbert's StePhest Colbchella.

Turns out it's a great album from front to back, one of the better ones that I've heard in a past couple of years. Killer from front to back.







Looper - Just a heads up if you have any interest in seeing this one: the entirety of the trailer comes and goes in the first twenty minutes or so. The movie you get is not that one that you're expecting. Instead, you get a movie that's far better than that.

Instead of a fairly straight forward action film with man chasing his older version, we're granted with an outstanding time travel film that reveals itself in a perfect, meticulous pace, turning out to be a far deeper and richer even than the trailer - which impressed me, by the way - presents. I won't give you more than that because the revelations left me literally slack jawed.

It's a pretty stunning and outstanding film. Go see it.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. - I went with the full twelve-issue Ultimate Collection, not that I knew there was a difference, but apparently there is...

This one's an absolute blast. Hilarious, full of action, great characters that make for a thoroughly entertaining team of super heroes that have gone AWOL from HATE (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort) as they have found out that HATE isn't as purely good guys as they claim to be. In the process the hero team follows back through a series of biological weapons of mass destruction hidden across America: Fin Fang Foom, broccoli people, homicide crabs, each more ridiculous than the last. And in the process we see just how stupid, silly, and foolish the leadership of HATE really is.

Great read...one to pick up for a fun lark

Uncanny X-Men/Steve Rodgers: Super Soldier: Escape from the Negative Zone - ...needs a shorter title, sheesh...

This seems to be a trio of annuals collected in a single story. Three issues for a collection? Seems a little money-grubbing, even for Marvel. Plus, having the three issues from three separate art teams makes for a jarring pair of transitions between the various issues.

Luckily the story's a fun read with the X-Men's science team accidentally ripping open a portal to the Negative Zone, sucking through Hope, Cyclops, Dr Nemesis, and Namor, who are soon followed by Steve Rodgers on a rescue mission.

This one's worth reading mostly for the interplay between Hope and Cyclops. Nice interplay between the overprotective father figure and the ready-for-the-world youngster, future of mutantkind.

X-Men: Origins - This is land that has been tread a hundred times before - origins of Marvel Girl, Colossus  Beast, Sabertooth, Wolverine, and Gambit. Luckily it's retread fairly well, particularly the tales of Sabertooth and Marvel Girl. Nothing here that you need to see, but the Sabertooth story is easily the best, tying him in playfully with Logan/Wolverine in a summary of their relationship pre- and post-Weapon X.

You could avoid this entire collection and not have missed a thing other than some well re-told tales.

New Avengers: The Reunion - See, Hawkeye was dead and isn't any more. Same with Mockingbird, Hawkeye's wife. She was abducted by aliens, replaced, and her duplicate killed - only nobody knew it wasn't her. He, on the other hand, straight up died and was resurrected by Scarlet Witch.

Comics, everybody!

This volume explores the rebuilding of their relationship and revelations that the real Mockingbird was going to divorce Hawkeye before she was abducted. Her duplicate never went through with the plan, though. Neither can now trust the other, and these issues ply that land somewhat successfully. Sure, SHIELD continues to be whatever each author wants it to be - strong, weak, full of traitors, the highest agency, the second-highest agency, whatever. Dumb...

Not a bad read but nothing special.

Delirium's Party: a little Endless storybook - This is apparently the second Little Endless storybook from Jill Thompson, and it tells a tale of the seven Endless siblings (from the Sandman world) as Delerium tries to cheer up Despair by throwing a party.

The art is cute - Chibi-style versions of the Endless planning and attending the party in the vain hopes of getting a smile from the archetype of Despair. The writing is cute, too, with Delerium being particularly front and center with her cute pup, Barnabas. The tale, however, seems a little too adult in the end for the enjoyment of children, as the resolution finds the siblings doing what they can to cheer up their sister but ultimately failing. Despair then (spoilers behind the black) smirks only when every other sibling, Delerium in particularl, is finally miserable as their attempt at cheering her up has failed miserably, leaving everyone else as miserable as is she. It's a cute resolution but one that might be a little dark for most young readers.

Wolverine/Captain America - Dumb...dumb...dumb...

I'm fine with suspending my science knowledge in almost every case, but the science here is phenomenally stupid-sounding as well as stupid...

To whit...The plot is put into motion when a computer chip mutates and gains sentience, so the X-Men have to protect it...and destroy it.

Wolverine is nearly killed when 'magnetized bullets...attached themselves to his adamantium skeleton...plus the magnetic pulses prevent the wounds from healing around them...(and if they don't do something) soon, Wolverine's heart is going to explode'.

Dumb...dumb...dumb...and the artwork stinks, too, especially every facial expression drawn in the book.

Avoid this one...

X-Men: First Class: The Wonder Years - fun read kept together by the thematic arc of Angel leaving the team to live in a cave behind the world's largest waterfalls. It's not believable, but it's at least fun to read. Each issue is drawn by a different art team which actually works here, letting the tone of the issues shift fairly drastically but never being weighed down by being anything more than a book about teenagers.

I particularly enjoyed the Continui-teens issue that lead off the collection. Worth a read for that issue alone.

Archer - Big apologies to GRob who's been telling me I have to see this one for a year or two. Mea culpa, G'Rob.

Archer's a blast, an animated, vulgar, sexist (hitting men and women evenly, though), thoroughly offensive skewering of the spy genre - particularly if James Bond worked at a spy agency with rampant drug use, drinking, sleeping around - on the job, in the office, in the elevator at the office, in the break room, on the rooftops around work, on screen, off screen, halfway on screen. The characters are alternately drunk, high, murderous, vulgar, incompetent, at each other's throats, and between each other's legs.

It's not one for the kiddies, but it's definitely one for the rest of us.

October 25, 2012

These are the breaks!

Don't let the picture fool you. This is rap - some of which is a little .


October 23, 2012

Goodbye, Blues Tuesday

With full apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, I offer up a belly full of blues...

October 22, 2012

October 20, 2012

We're doing everything different today...


October 19, 2012

October 18, 2012

Infinity Imagined

On Saturday I posted a link to an animated gif of the solar system's motion, the sun and planets creating a complex helix as they move through the galaxy. In checking things out, I wandered to the source blog, Infinity Imagined, where the blogger posts some interesting graphics, animated gifs, space photos, and stupid musings on the fact that the universe has patterns and stuff...

The musings are dumb, but some of the pictures are cool...


Photobucket


Photobucket


October 17, 2012

Electoral evidence

Clearly, Romney is going to win...and so is Obama...


I know the formatting's messed up, but it's worth posting in the original size. Man, Randall amazes me so very often.

A colorful blog

I'm not usually down with design blogs, but Plenty of Color is kinda pretty...










October 15, 2012

Have a nice trip!

A while back I mentioned Joe Kittinger who - until yesterday - held the record for the highest, fastest, longest skydive. Yesterday, however - in case you hadn't heard - Joe helped Felix Baumgartner break nearly all of those records (not the longest freefall, though - still Joe's).


The words that Joe spoke just before Felix stepped off from his capsule ('and our Guardian Angel will take care of you') were stunning, as were Felix's last words ('I wish you could see what I see...I'm coming home') before he set himself free to do something that no other human - other than Joe - can possibly understand.



It wasn't all sunshine and roses, though, as Felix hit a spin (0:25 above) and had his visor fog up, blocking his view of his instruments (0:42 above). Luckily it looks like everything worked out just fine, and Felix touched down, dropping to his knees.


You can get a feel for what the experience was like thanks to this recreation...



Video of the full ten-plus minute jump after, well, the jump...

October 13, 2012

Let me die in an emergency room with a treatable disease like all Americans


October 11, 2012

Hopper To It!

Bismuth crystallizes in gorgeous crystals that have a hopper (like a grain hopper, see?) shape, so they're often just called hopper crystals.

...and they're really pretty...


(source)


October 10, 2012

Going back

I've been turning back to some of the old timesuck games that I posted.

This past week I played Bloons Tower Defense 4 and Toss the Turtle. I was able to get further on Bloons - to round 120, but I'm thinking that's mostly a result of my new (as of this summer) computer being a bit faster than the old one.


...and on Toss the Turtle, I got just as far as I had before, earning all the badges before getting bored with constantly nuking the bloody, little reptile. I've gotten nowhere near the 7-million foot launch I previously achieved, but I'm done.



October 9, 2012

Indeterminate

"Indeterminate"

That's what the recently-released Ohio Auditor of State's INTERIM Report on Student Attendance Data and Accountability System announced Princeton High School's status to be.

A little background here...

Every student in Ohio is required to attend school. That's not terribly different from it is in most every state in the Union. Each state has a few loopholes that allow parents to pull their students from schools if they can show that they're being responsible for their child's education - filing educational plans with the local school board, stuff like that.

Because of this requirement, each school is required to demonstrate that they are definitively educating each student in their district. If a student is assigned to a school, they stay assigned to that school until there's proof that the student has been assigned to a new school. You can't, in other words, withdraw a student until their new school enrolls them - meaning until you get a request for records from that new school.

Seems pretty straight forward, sure, but there are two complicating factors, both of which are part of the state report card for schools: attendance and state testing. Every school is 'graded' on a series of factors, most of which are based on various state-wide tests (10th-grade science, 4th-grade math, 5th-grade reading, etc) with attendance and graduation rate thrown in for good measure. We have to test every student in our building, but we only have to count the scores of the students who are 'ours' for 120 consecutive days - from the end of September through the March testing dates. If a student scores poorly on the state test but hasn't been with us for 120 days, that score doesn't count for us. This, then, gives schools incentive to err on the side of over-removing low-scoring students who have less than constant attendance to keep our state testing percentages as high as possible - while also giving us an incentive to (sometimes) under-remove students because we need attendance percentages of at least 93%.

Let's say, for example, that a student takes the test and leaves Princeton to transfer to another school. If we receive the request for records on what would be the student's 122nd day with Princeton but the student left on day 115, the official state policy of removing the student on day 122 may hurt us doubly as the student was not in school for days 116-122 and maybe the student's test score wouldn't have helped Princeton's numbers.

'Indeterminate'

Apparently things like this have been going on all over the state - definitely in Lockland which was officially announced as having fudged their attendance/testing numbers this past year and whose cheating has set off a fire storm of investigation by the Auditor's office. The Auditor's office developed a list of one hundred schools whose statistics - students tested, students whose results were cleared - suggested that they needed a second look. Alphabetically, Princeton High School was #73 on that list (linked above) which meant that Princeton was visited by staff from the Auditor's office for a week or so who asked questions regarding our attendance recording.

This wasn't ever officially discussed with the staff or anything. We just...you know...heard about it here and there and got to read the following announcement on the district website...
STATE AUDITORS REPORT NO EVIDENCE OF ATTENDANCE TAMPERING 
The Princeton City School District was notified on September 4 that the office of Ohio State Auditor Dave Yost wished to review our procedures and supporting documentation for student attendance for fiscal year 2011 for Princeton High School. Princeton, along with approximately 100 other schools in the state, was selected due to our high mobility rate that resulted in a large number of students not meeting the criteria for Full Academic Year (FAY). Only students that are continuously enrolled from the first week in October through the week of state testing are considered to meet FAY and have their test scores count on the district report card.  The complexity of urban school districts, as well as those districts adjacent to them, is not widely understood. These school districts often have high rates of poverty and homelessness that may result in families having to relocate frequently.  Additionally, Princeton serves as the fiscal agent for a juvenile court facility.  These attendance files and records are property of the facility, and Princeton does not have access to these requested records. 
While the financial auditors assigned to this work had no experience with this type of paper audit and the types of documentation they would encounter in the process, they were open to learning about the complex system of paperwork surrounding the lives of many students and families in school districts while still managing student confidentiality. The state auditors were present in the school district for five days reviewing student records to verify enrollment and withdrawal of individual students.   No evidence of attendance tampering was identified. Princeton staff appreciates the suggestions from the auditors for improved efficiencies for the management of our paperwork and will begin to improve our systems immediately.
So it seems that Princeton is in the all-clear...at least according to Princeton's website announcement.

And then the big INTERIM report came out and broke the schools down into various categories: 'Schools With Evidence of Scrubbing' (36 of those), 'Schools With Errors' (28 of those), 'Clean Schools' (21 of those), and 'Schools Indeterminate as of the Date of This Report' (15 of those). That last category is the one where I'd like to spend a little time today because there are two schools that are sort of near and dear to me and mine in that category: Hamilton High School and Princeton High School.

Here's what the Auditor's INTERIM report has to say about that last category of schools...
The following table describes the schools where enrollment testing for the 2010‐11 school year is still indeterminate due to factors outside AOS control (e.g., schools are still gathering student information files and other information to support enrollment) as of the date of this report
It's not anything definitive there. There's no concrete proof of any maleficence (big word, huh?) or anything, but I'm not sure anything as definitive as 'no evidence of attendance tampering was identified' in the word 'indeterminate' either.

With all this hullabaloo, all this kerfuffle, all this turmoil and tumult, all this brouhaha, all this upheaval, of course, the report cards for the 2011-12 school have yet to be released - at least a month later than they've always been released in the past years.

(Source - WVXU)