The Economist:

CramvilleAmeerpet, India’s unofficial IT training hub

The Hyderabad neighbourhood’s IT courses cost less than $400 for six months
From the print edition | Business
Mar 30th 2017
| HYDERABAD

UNIVERSITY campuses can take a while to get going in the mornings, as students recover from extra-curricular antics. Contrast that with Ameerpet, a squeezed neighbourhood of Hyderabad that has become India’s unofficial cramming-college capital. By 7.30am the place is already buzzing as 500-odd training institutes cater to over 100,000 students looking to improve their IT skills. If there are ivory towers here, they are obscured by a forest of fluorescent billboards promising skills ranging from debugging Oracle servers to expertise in Java coding to handling Microsoft’s cloud.

Expertise in the IT industry erodes fast as software programs are upgraded or become obsolete. Indian outsourcing giants such as Infosys and Wipro spend heavily to keep employees’ skills up to date. But staff looking to change their career paths—to say nothing of those who didn’t crack the interview in the first place—need rapid systems upgrades of their own. Training courses authorised by software providers exist but cost up to 375,000 rupees ($5,765). Fees at Ameerpet’s informal institutes are typically below 25,000 rupees for classes lasting three to six months.

Kelsey Gee:

Even William Shakespeare could have benefited from an M.B.A.—or so the nation’s oldest business school would like young poets to think.

University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is set to launch a new program today for undergraduates studying liberal arts, science and nursing at the Ivy League institution and looking to gain early admission to its prestigious graduate business school.

Investment banker Ken Moelis and his wife, Julie Taffet Moelis, gave a $10 million gift to their alma mater to create the program, which is open to Penn seniors aiming to work for up to four years after graduation before returning to campus to study management.

Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has made a cause of public and private school choice, and liberals who oppose evaluating teachers based on student achievement are now hyping a few studies that have found vouchers hurt student performance. A closer look still supports the case for giving parents choice.

More than 400,000 students in 30 states and Washington, D.C., participate in private-school choice programs whose designs and funding sources vary. Over the last two decades dozens of studies have sought to measure these programs’ impact on student growth. Those with the most rigorous methodologies have produced positive findings.

A meta-analysis last year by the Friedman Foundation found that 14 of 18 empirical studies analyzing programs in which students were chosen at random by lottery found positive academic outcomes. Two demonstrated no visible effect, while two recent studies of Louisiana’s voucher program found negative effects. The Louisiana studies are disconcerting since voucher proponents have hailed the program, and the negative effects were large. Math scores declined in one study by 0.4 standard deviations after one year in private schools, representing a 50% increase in likelihood of failing the state test.

Sebastian Anthony:

A couple of years ago, when I was investigating the UK’s safest ISP, a high-ranking employee at Virgin Media told me there was no NSA or GCHQ Internet traffic interception equipment hiding within Virgin’s network. He also said that, in his opinion, not much traffic interception actually occurs in the UK. I asked him why. “Because they don’t need to. They’ll get your data when it lands in the US.”
While it’s not true that all Internet traffic flows through the US, the addition of a few listening posts at key Internet exchanges in Europe (London, Paris) and some in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo) ensure that the NSA and its Five Eyes partners can analyse and ingest the majority of international Internet traffic.

To visualise the extent of the NSA’s surveillance network, IXmaps is hosting a tool that shows you the location of suspected Internet traffic interception points. You can input your own traceroute data, or if you’re in a rush you can just bring up traceroute data from people living in the same city or using the same ISP. Then click the “layers” button and turn on NSA, AT&T/Fairview, and Verizon/Stormbrew.

Most of the suspected surveillance sites come from Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents in 2013, including the image you see below. The blue dots, which appear to all be at submarine cable landing sites, are the most important: Internet traffic can take many different routes across a country, but there are only a handful of submarine trunk links that most international traffic traverses.

BBC:

For years, it has been rumoured that somebody has been going out late at night, correcting bad punctuation on Bristol shop fronts.

The self-proclaimed “grammar vigilante” goes out undercover in the dead of night correcting street signs and shop fronts where the apostrophes are in the wrong place.

Jon Kay meets grammar’s answer to Banksy and reveals the extent of his one man mission to improve standards.

Bari Weiss:

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

Trupti Rami:

Growing up, the narrative in my household was you’re going to do something in the sciences. Most likely, you’re going to be a doctor. That’s kind of how I had structured my life. I never really thought about other career options. I definitely never thought about teaching.

I was studying physics at the University of Chicago, planning on applying to medical school. Towards the end of my senior year, I realized that I was no longer interested in pursuing math. I just hated everything I was doing. I had been a part of an organization called Peer Health Exchange where we went to schools in Chicago and taught health lessons. I decided that teaching might be something that I was interested in. Now I’m a ninth-grade math teacher at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy on the South Side of Chicago. This is my fourth year.

Betsy Hammond:

In 2011, Oregon lawmakers agreed on an ambitious goal: By 2025, the state should get all its young people to graduate from high school and 80 percent to earn a two- or four-year college degree.

Now, largely at the urging of the state’s teachers union, a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers want the state to drop those goals, largely as an admission the state’s schools and colleges won’t come close to accomplishing them.

“It is not realistic,” Rep. Paul Evans, D-Salem, a community college instructor and the primary sponsor of the bill to end the numeric goals, said Wednesday as he unveiled his plan. Unless the state were to spend $1 billion more a year on education, a drive to get all young people to complete high schools and 80 percent to earn a college credential is just “a fantasy we tell ourselves,” he said.

Other lawmakers, community colleges, the state’s higher education commission and Oregon businesses are pushing back, however. They say it’s essential that the state set measurable education goals and doing so has had a big impact on students.

Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson, Uri Simonsohn

In 2010 or thereabouts, we stopped believing that many published findings were true. We discussed recently published articles in our weekly journal clubs (we were all at different universities then), and those discussions frequently devolved into statements of disbelief. We didn’t think the findings were fraudulent, but it was just impossible to believe that, with only 14 participants per cell, researchers had found that people will pay more for a chocolate bar when it is presented at a 45 degree angle, but only if they are below the median on the self-monitoring scale.1 When results in the scientific literature disagree with our intuition, we should be able to trust the literature enough to question our beliefs rather than to question the findings. We were questioning the findings. Something was broken.
After much discussion, our best guess was that so many published findings were false because researchers were conducting many analyses on the same dataset and just reporting those that were statistically significant, a behavior that we later labeled “p-hacking” (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014).

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

In 1945, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave an influential lecture about two kinds of knowledge. A child knows that a bicycle has two wheels, that its tires are filled with air, and that you ride the contraption by pushing its pedals forward in circles. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—the factual, propositional kind—“knowing that.” But to learn to ride a bicycle involves another realm of learning. A child learns how to ride by falling off, by balancing herself on two wheels, by going over potholes. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—implicit, experiential, skill-based—“knowing how.”

The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.” One afternoon, I watched my seven-year-old daughter negotiate a small hill on her bike. The first time she tried, she stalled at the steepest part of the slope and fell off. The next time, I saw her lean forward, imperceptibly at first, and then more visibly, and adjust her weight back on the seat as the slope decreased. But I hadn’t taught her rules to ride a bike up that hill. When her daughter learns to negotiate the same hill, I imagine, she won’t teach her the rules, either. We pass on a few precepts about the universe but leave the brain to figure out the rest.

Some time after Lignelli-Dipple’s session with the radiology trainees, I spoke to Steffen Haider, the young man who had picked up the early stroke on the CT scan. How had he found that culprit lesion? Was it “knowing that” or “knowing how”? He began by telling me about learned rules. He knew that strokes are often one-sided; that they result in the subtle “graying” of tissue; that the tissue often swells slightly, causing a loss of anatomical borders. “There are spots in the brain where the blood supply is particularly vulnerable,” he said. To identify the lesion, he’d have to search for these signs on one side which were not present on the other.

Nikhil Sonnad:

O’Neil: All of the time when you’re on the internet. All of the time. I have a couple examples that I like to tell because they affect everyone, and everyone is kind of offended by them in a very direct way.

One of them is, you call up customer service, and from your phone number they infer your value as a customer. If you’re a low-value customer you will wait on hold forever. If you’re a high-value customer you get to a customer representative immediately. And if you’re low-value, you’re likely to be told by the rep, “Oh you’re low-value, you’re not going to get what you want.” That happens. I didn’t even know the rep knows your score, but turns out that in that system they actually do. And they can say, “I’m not going to give you what you want.”

Flagg Taylor:

The protest and subsequent riot at Middlebury College during Charles Murray’s recent visit has prompted a great deal of commentary, facing left and right, about ever-increasing intolerance on college campuses. Much of this commentary is reassuring insofar as people from different sides of the political spectrum seem to agree that many colleges and universities are now reaching the point where they are betraying a core element of their mission: to foster atmospheres of rigorous and reasoned debate and discussion. Further, it is finally dawning on many interested observers that the lack of political and ideological diversity on too many campuses (both among faculty and students) might have something to do with this intolerance. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy precisely to increase awareness of this problem and to advocate for viewpoint diversity.

John Minehan

Professor Vlahos concludes that elites (which he defines more broadly than “the One Percent”) are acting to their own advantage, as elites have done in other times moving towards the point when things fell apart (for example, at the end of Classical times in 6th through the 8th Centuries or after the Black Death in the 14th Century or after the World Wars in the 20th Century).

He further thinks that over what could be a long period of time our current elites have set the stage, by monopolizing resources, for a catastrophic event (perhaps climate change) to change how the cards are dealt.

Professor Vlahos came to that conclusion while teaching graduate courses on how global systems subside. He states that he initially focused on climate change, but came to see such events (like the, probably climate related, Plague of Justinian in the 6th Century) as being a trigger for a course of events that were already in trail.

There have been thinkers who have considered these matters before.

In 1930, the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, published a book called The Revolt of the Masses, which dealt with the “mass-ification” of society, which included “señorito satisfecho” (“Little Mr. Satisfied” or the bureaucrat).

In 1995, the late historian, Christopher Lasch, wrote a book called The Revolt of the Elites, which presciently predicted the perception on the part of many Americans that elites “‘dangerously isolated’ from the rest of the country” mind set and lacked a sense of “noblesse oblige.”

I am vastly less qualified than the people I have cited, but let me offer my own opinion.

English 10, connected math and discovery math.

Austin Weinstein:

The bachelor’s degree — long a ticket to middle-class comfort — is losing its luster in the U.S. job market.

Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers.

What you study matters for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates’s paychecks have fallen. A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier.

T Rees Shapiro:

The University of Virginia’s fundraising team for years has sought to help children of wealthy alumni and prominent donors who apply for admission, flagging their cases internally for special handling, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The records from the U-Va. advancement office, which oversees fundraising for the prestigious public flagship, reveal nearly a decade of efforts to monitor admission bids and in some cases assist those in jeopardy of rejection.

U-Va. denies that the advancement office held any sway over admissions decisions. But the documents show the office kept meticulous notes on the status of certain VIP applicants and steps taken on their behalf.

Within U-Va., the records were known as an annual “watch list.” They provide a case study of what is regarded as an open secret in higher education: that schools do pay attention when an applicant’s family has given them money — or might in the future.

Alan Borsuk:

And Holtz said, “There is no scientific correlation between higher spending and higher academic achievement… Adequate funding is important, but money is not the thing that is going to save our failing schools.”

Evers said, “Frankly, our public schools have been deteriorating in their state support, everybody knows that.” Referring to differences in facilities and success between schools in places such as Milwaukee and in more affluent communities, he said, “Resources are at the core of this.”

In short, Evers sees himself as an advocate for more money for schools. Holtz doesn’t.

The state budget. When Walker says he is going to fight for more money for schools, who does he expect to fight with? It seems certain Democrats will back his proposal, as compared to any involving lower amounts. But some Republican legislators are sending signals they are likely to favor smaller increases, given other pressures on the state budget (which is mostly to say, roads).

Alex Good:

The CBC’s Canada Reads radio program was launched in 2001 with the intention of creating a national book club, a way to “get Canada reading.” And over the years it has enjoyed some success, becoming probably the most prominent platform for the discussion of Canadian books in the country.

In 2014, however, something interesting happened when the program announced a theme: pick the one book that could change the nation. For starters, not one of the five panelists was what might be considered, however loosely, a literary figure. And that’s fine. People like celebrities, so inviting a sports star, a television star, a film star, a former politician, and a rapper made a kind of sense. These are, theoretically, the kind of people who can be counted on to provide articulate and entertaining debate.

Phil Shapiro:

As cloud computing has become an integral part of the lives of students at public schools, it has increased the importance of a place generations of students have turned to for much more analog learning needs—the library.

Both public and school libraries have always been a source of information for students. And while the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way students do research, cloud-based tools have actually evolved the library’s role rather than diminished it. Public computers at libraries have become an extension of the classroom, and they’re an important resource for children who don’t have unfettered access to broadband Internet at home. The cloud has only made those public computers more effective.

The Hub:

By using the categories of evidence—strong, moderate, and promising—outlined in the law, Evidence for ESSA makes it easier for school leaders to determine which programs are in compliance. Programs without evidence of effectiveness are not ranked on the website, and the CRRE plans to incorporate new educational studies and new programs into the website as they become available.

“We plan to have a very fast response, so that users can be confident that what they’re looking at is the very latest,” Slavin said.

The website also offers a wide array of filters that allow users to sort through programs that target the needs of different types of students, such as struggling students; rural, suburban, or urban students; English learners; special education students; and low-income students. It also filters for program features, such as whether or not they incorporate technology or opportunities for teacher professional development.

Development of Evidence for ESSA began almost 10 months ago, and key national organizations have provided feedback. Organizations including the National Education Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National PTA, the National Association of State Board of Education, and America Forward were among those stakeholders helping to create the nonpartisan website.

“Our view is this: At the end of the day, you’ve got a school, you’ve got teachers, and you’ve got kids,” Slavin said. “You’ve got to use programs and practices that are as effective as they can possibly be.”

Kat Merck:

The Cuban-American Chicago native graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just three years with a 5.0-grade point average, the highest possible, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard with full academic freedom — meaning she can pursue her own study on her own terms without staff interference.

Pasterski first attracted the attention of the scientific and academic community after single-handedly building her own single-engine airplane in 2008, at age 14, and documenting the process on YouTube.

MIT professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman saw the video and were astonished. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty recalls. “Her potential is off the charts.”

WisPolitics:

Holtz also slammed Evers for the state’s achievement gaps, saying it’s “not acceptable to be the worst” in the country. He said one of the main reasons why it exists is because schools aren’t safe

“We’re turning our back on generations of minority kids and saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t fix the problem,’” he said.

He also asked Evers why he let the achievement gap widen during his eight years as state superintendent.

Evers said the achievement gap is tied to poverty, which he’s not responsible for, but refuted Holtz’s claims that he’s done nothing on the issue. The state has “spent a lot of time, effort and money” to help address the issue and noted there’s lots of collaborations with other state agencies happening to provide mental health treatment, services for parents and developing job centers.

Gayle World:

Thirteen-year-old Alyssa Anderson isn’t quite sure where she’ll be at noon on Friday, since Madison students have no school that day.

But wherever she is, she’ll probably be Googling.

Alyssa, a seventh-grader at Wright Middle School, is Wisconsin’s finalist in this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition, a nationwide design contest run by the search-engine giant since 2008.

The national winner, to be announced online around noon Friday along with four runners-up, will receive a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology award for their school, a trip to Google headquarters in California and other prizes.

“It’s been amazing. Everyone has been encouraging me and telling me they’re rooting for me,” Alyssa said of the process of entering and advancing in the contest. “We’re just keeping our fingers crossed.”

Joe Mullin:

Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The “good” news for Georgia residents is that they’ll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis.

Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn’t cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia’s official laws, known as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state’s legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers.

Christopher Groskopf & Dan Kopf

As the Rust Belt stagnated, coastal metropolises thrived. As Appalachia sputtered, shale country boomed. As Southern manufacturing centers shut their doors, neighboring research hubs opened theirs.

These are just a few the trends that have played out in regional economies across the United States over the past 25 years. This period includes the booms of the late 1990s and mid 2000s, a couple of mild recessions, one huge one, and the slow but steady growth of today. Nationally, workers’ average annual earnings rose by about 24% from 1990 to 2015, or from $42,800 to $52,300 in inflation-adjusted dollars. That works out to a 1.3% real annual raise every year—don’t spend it all at once!

Jasky Singh:

All because the outcomes seem to have been forgotten, and sadly we the technology providers are partly to blame.

So, this Principal continued to go on and on about comparing the benefits of one classroom technology over another in making her decision. She went back and forth asking me about every feature, functionality, and delving other all minute aspects for nearly an hour. And this continued over a number of days.

Every time I raised a suggestion and moved the conversation to the topic where I felt her energy should go, it came across as if I was trying to sway her opinion and was selling her on something that was in my interest.
She was obviously skeptical, this method of decision making had been drilled into her and any possible diversions lifted her guard up. Hence, I realised I wasn’t doing a good enough job.

Juan Perez

A group seeking to open a taxpayer-financed charter school in the South Loop is getting support from a conservative Michigan college that aims to build on President Donald Trump’s school choice agenda.

Hillsdale College, which refuses federal funds in order to maintain its independence from government oversight, has helped open 17 schools in states including Texas, Florida and Indiana through its Barney Charter School Initiative.

K-12 governance diversity….

Patrick Deneen:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.