Joseph:

On 25 May 2018, the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in to force, this resulted in organisations (mainly US based newspapers) blocking people living in the European Union and European Economic Area from accessing their websites. This dataset lists websites that are or were blocked, along with links to archived versions of the websites and archived block messages. This dataset is incomplete.

Miles Kimball:

The administration of President Donald Trump just made it easier for for-profit colleges to get away with making fake promises about things like graduation rates and job placements. That’s regrettable. But let’s not let prestigious institutions off the hook. They aren’t exactly rigorous when they tout the benefits of higher education, either.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed new rules to make it harder for students to get loan forgiveness from schools that lured them with false advertising. Notably, the government wants to make aggrieved students show that the schools actually intended to defraud them, a high burden of proof.

The problem is that the prestige schools have undermined the case for making it easy to go after the bad ones, which just pretend to provide an education without really delivering. Though most colleges and universities mean well, they are also responsible for false advertising and don’t always deliver the education they promised. If all institutions of higher education were held to higher standards, it would be easier legally to penalize the worst.

Ransom:

An increasing number of countries are passing laws that facilitate the mass surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, governments and citizens are increasingly paying attention to the countries that their Internet traffic traverses. In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect directly, and encouraging local interconnection to keep local traffic local. We find that although many of these efforts are extensive, they are often futile, due to the inherent lack of hosting and route diversity for many popular sites. By measuring the country-level paths to popular domains, we characterize transnational routing detours. We find that traffic is traversing known surveillance states, even when the traffic originates and ends in a country that does not conduct mass surveillance. Then, we investigate how clients can use overlay network relays and the open DNS resolver infrastructure to prevent their traffic from traversing certain jurisdictions. We find that 84% of paths originating in Brazil traverse the United States, but when relays are used for country avoidance, only 37% of Brazilian paths traverse the United States. Using the open DNS resolver infrastructure allows Kenyan clients to avoid the United States on 17% more paths. Unfortunately, we find that some of the more prominent surveillance states (e.g., the U.S.) are also some of the least avoidable countries.

Mark Bergen:

Google staff awoke on Wednesday to surprising news: Their company is working on a search app tailored, and censored, for China. The project, kept secret from all but select teams and leaders, sparked a furious internal debate.

Yet the move couldn’t have been entirely surprising for Googlers.

Sundar Pichai, 46, chief executive officer since 2015, has made no secret of his desire to take the search giant back to mainland China. The executive is more pragmatic about the world’s largest internet market than Google’s founders, who pulled search from the mainland in 2010 over censorship concerns.

Under Pichai, Google has invested in Chinese companies, met with its leaders and made it a priority to spread Google’s artificial intelligence technology across the country. But bringing search back would be Pichai’s boldest move yet and will put his personal stamp firmly on the company.

Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google to “organize the world’s information and make it universally available.” They viewed China as a threat to the company’s stance as a defender of the open web. Pichai, in contrast, sees China as a hotbed of engineering talent and an appealing market.

Nick Dunn, Dr Paul Cureton and Serena Pollastri:

This paper is concerned with how future cities have been visualised, what these projections sought to communicate and why.

The paper is organised into eight sections. Each of the first seven sections is highly illustrated by relevant visualisations to capture the main ways in which the thematic content is evident within future cities. We present a brief summary at the end of each section to understand the key issues.

First, we describe the relevance and power of imagined cities and urban visions throughout popular culture, a multi-disciplinary discourse, along with an explanation of the methods used.

Second, we examine the role of different media and its influence upon the way in which ideas are communicated and also translated, including, but not limited to: diagrams, drawings, films, graphic novels, literature, paintings, and photomontages.

Third, we interrogate the ‘groundedness’ of visualisations of future cities and whether they relate to a specific context or a more general set of conditions.

Fourth, we identify the role of technological speculation in future city scenarios including: infrastructure, mobility, sustainability, built form, density and scale.

Fifth, we examine the variations in socio-spatial relationships that occur across different visualisations of cities, identifying the lived experience and inhabitation of the projected environments.

Sixth, we consider the relationship of data, ubiquitous computing and digital technologies in contemporary visualisations of cities.

Seventh, we establish the overarching themes that appear derived from visualisations of British cities and their legacy.
In conclusion, we establish a synthesis of the prevalent patterns within and across legacies, and the diversity of visualisations, to draw together our findings in relation to overarching narratives and themes for how urban life has been envisaged and projected for the period under scrutiny.

Jakes Hagert:

Wendy Kopp was riding a train to New York one winter morning 17 years ago when a chatty older man sat next to her. She tried to cut the conversation short and get back to work on her laptop. He persisted. She finally told him all about the charity she founded, Teach for America, which sends teachers to work in low-income areas.

Giving away money became Mr. Lenfest’s mission after he sold the cable-TV company Lenfest Communications in 2000. He and his wife, Marguerite, preferred to give most of their wealth away in their lifetimes rather than creating a perpetual foundation whose trustees might stray from their vision. So far, their gifts total more than $1.2 billion.

Mr. Lenfest, who died Aug. 5 at age 88, relied on his instincts about people in making gifts. His wife was more deliberative. She kept a note on the refrigerator reminding him to remember two words when people asked for money: “no” and “why.”

In 2014, Mr. Lenfest acquired the ailing publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com for about $88 million. Two years later he donated that company to a nonprofit, now known as the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, charged with preserving quality journalism in Philadelphia and testing ideas that might sustain fact-based news reporting elsewhere.

“I can’t think of any cause that we support that’s more important than the support of the newspapers,” Mr. Lenfest said in 2014. He avoided interfering in editorial policy, other than by objecting when reporters described him as a billionaire. He explained to one editor that his purchase of newspapers had instantly deflated his net worth.

Ross Douthat:

The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been a basic stability, at best a soft declension.
But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.” Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns.

Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip.

Jennifer Walter:

On the fourth day of EnQuest, Chris Beimborn stopped 20 campers outside a classroom in University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Engineering and Mathematical Sciences building for an announcement.

“We’ve got bad news,” she said. “The 3D printer failed overnight.”

The campers were supposed to make casting patterns in a foundry on Wednesday, but they couldn’t do it without the 3D-printed pieces — and it would take 15 hours to make new ones.

Like engineering projects in the real world, things don’t always go as planned.

“This is sort of what happens all the time when you’re working on a project that has a lot of facets,” Beimborn said.

What’s important is the ability to be flexible.

Beimborn coordinates EnQuest, a six-day engineering camp exclusively for high school girls. Campers work on real-world projects and network with college students and professionals from an array of engineering-related disciplines.

The camp seeks to inspire more women to pursue STEM and engineering disciplines. Beimborn gives opportunities for the girls to design and build projects themselves and gives them some autonomy to choose what they want to do in a day.

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg:

Local watchdogs and litigators say a City of Madison initiative and its multiple committees should provide the public with greater transparency.

In a unanimous 2017 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that committees created by local governmental bodies in Wisconsin are themselves governmental bodies subject to the state’s open meetings law.

Wisconsin open meetings law states: “All meetings of all state and local governmental bodies shall be publicly held in places reasonably accessible to members of the public and shall be open to all citizens at all times unless otherwise expressly provided by law.”

Public bodies are required to give notice of the time, date, location and general agenda of all meetings at least 24 hours in advance. Even when, “for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical…in no case may the notice be provided less than 2 hours in advance of [a] meeting.”

Ryan Mac:

When Facebook purchased TBH last October it got more than just a viral polling app that amassed 2.5 million daily users, mostly teens, a few months after launch. The social network also acquired a carefully honed growth strategy targeted toward high school kids.

An internal document from Facebook, obtained by BuzzFeed News, shows TBH’s leadership explaining a well-tested method the startup used to attract teens at individual high schools to download its app. The note provides a window into Facebook’s growth-at-any-costs mentality and the company’s efforts to keep a key demographic engaged as its popularity among teens declines and it simultaneously runs out of people in the connected world to bring to its platform.

“Our team obsessed with finding ways to get individual high schools to adopt a product simultaneously.”
In the confidential memo, TBH’s founders told their new colleagues of “a psychological trick” that they employed to acquire teenage users en masse — a combination of scraping Instagram for high schoolers’ accounts, playing to youthful curiosity, and taking advantage of class dismissal hours.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the note or on questions about whether the company employed the growth tactics learned from TBH.

Elena Cue:

As you well said, trust is one of the foundations of society. What do you believe to be the reason we have reached such a general widespread lack of trust today?

The empirical evidence for the lack of trust is much worse than people think. When we actually look at the polls, we find variations in different countries, but the polling evidence in the UK, for example, shows trust in certain people, such as politicians and journalists, was very low 25 years ago and remains low to this day.

Molly Beck:

Gov. Scott Walker said he wants Wisconsin high school students to graduate at a rate higher than any other state in the nation by the end of his third term should he be re-elected this fall.

Walker, who in an interview late Monday called himself “an education governor,” set the goal to coincide with the release of a new television advertisement promoting his most-recent state budget, which gave schools millions more in new funding.

The ad also features a Racine public school teacher touting Walker’s signature legislation known as Act 10, which all but eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers, as a way for school boards to spend more money in classrooms.

“I’m an education governor and I want to be an even better education governor going forward,” Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We need every one of these young people to graduate and to be ready for the next step.”

Scott Walker notes and links.

Stretch targets.

Victor Davis Hansen:

That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people.” Or rather, in the manner of a cowardly age of social media, he tweeted that slur when safely at a distance.

What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse? And if Caputo had substituted any other racial minority for his slurs, would he still have his job according to the cannons of progressive censure and Internet lynching? Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of after an open borders or Black Lives Matter rally and still have his job?

Sarah Jeong’s Struggle
Last week, the New York Times named tech writer Sarah Jeong to its editorial board with apparent knowledge of her long history of racist tweets, as well as verbal attacks on police and males in general. Perhaps such gutter venom was proof of militant orthodoxy to be appreciated rather than medieval racism to be shunned. Her mostly empty résumé seems compensated by her identity and her politics—as the Times more or less confessed in its sad defense of her racist outbursts.

Jessie Opoien:

There was once a time when Tony Evers didn’t like cheese. But there was also a time when he didn’t see himself running for governor, and now multiple polls show him leading the field of Democrats vying for a chance to challenge Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Evers, 66, won his third statewide victory as Superintendent of Public Instruction in April 2017. Before he was elected to head the state Department of Public Instruction, Evers served for eight years as deputy superintendent of schools. He grew up in Plymouth, and worked as a science teacher, high school principal and district superintendent in Baraboo, Tomah, Oakfield and Verona.

Two Marquette University Law School polls over the course of the summer have shown Evers leading the eight-person Democratic primary field, and an NBC News/Marist Poll released last month showed him leading Walker in a hypothetical match-up.

Tony Evers notes and links.

Matthew DeFour:

Soglin offered some of the sharpest zingers aimed at Walker. Asked how he would “undo the damage Walker has done to public education,” Soglin said, “We understand the purpose of education is not a career and a technical job, the purpose of an education is to teach young people how to think, which scares the hell out of Scott Walker.”

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2013:

MADISON MAYOR PAUL “WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW CHARTER SCHOOLS” SOGLIN ASKED SARAH MANSKI TO RUN FOR THE SCHOOL BOARD; “REFERRED” HER TO MTI EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JOHN MATTHEWS

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

2018 update; “And I am going to call it Madison Prep.”

Paul Soglin notes and links.

Ruan Gallagher:

GOOGLE’S FORMER HEAD of free expression issues in Asia has slammed the internet’s giant’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China, calling it a “stupid move” that would violate widely–held human rights principles.

As The Intercept first reported last week, Google has been quietly developing a search platform for China that would remove content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political opponents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. It would “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, according to internal Google documents.

Lokman Tsui, Google’s head of free expression for Asia and the Pacific between 2011 and 2014, read the leaked censorship plans and said he was disturbed by the details. “This is just a really bad idea, a stupid, stupid move,” he told The Intercept in an interview. “I feel compelled to speak out and say that this is not right.”

Tyler Pager:

Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed during his first mayoral campaign in 2013 to overhaul the admissions process for New York City’s specialized schools. After years of inaction, Mr. de Blasio announced in June his plans to scrap the SHSAT.

In the debate over the test for New York City’s elite high schools, one question had seemed to be unanswered: Whether there was evidence that the exam was a good predictor of how well students would do at the schools.

But on Friday, the city’s Education Department released for the first time a study it had commissioned in 2013 that showed a strong positive relationship between doing well on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test and high school academic performance.

Erik Lorenzsonn:

LaShya Washington, an 11-year-old Mendota Elementary School student, sat with a laptop in a classroom in the School of Human Ecology building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Tuesday afternoon, typing instructions to a robot.

“You can make it turn, move, say things,” said Washington, setting the Finch robot on the ground near her chair. She hit the space bar on her laptop, and the robot — a shoe-sized gizmo on wheels that looks like a lilywhite blobfish — “spoke” using text-to-voice technology. “I love STEM and Maydm,” it said, in a tinny voice.

Maydm is a nonprofit dedicated to exposing youth, particularly girls and children of color, to science, technology, engineering and mathematics — also known as the STEM fields. It was the organizing force behind RoboSmarts, a new summer course in artificial intelligence and robotics that was responsible for honing Washington’s skillset with the Finch.

Li Yuan:

Wei Dilong, 18, who lives in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou, likes basketball, hip-hop music and Hollywood superhero movies. He plans to study chemistry in Canada when he goes to college in 2020.

Mr. Wei is typical of Chinese teenagers in another way, too: He has never heard of Google or Twitter. He once heard of Facebook, though. It is “maybe like Baidu?” he asked one recent afternoon, referring to China’s dominant search engine.

A generation of Chinese is coming of age with an internet that is distinctively different from the rest of the web. Over the past decade, China has blocked Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as thousands of other foreign websites, including The New York Times and Chinese Wikipedia. A plethora of Chinese websites emerged to serve the same functions — though they came with a heavy dose of censorship.

Now the implications of growing up with this different internet system are starting to play out. Many young people in China have little idea what Google, Twitter or Facebook are, creating a gulf with the rest of the world. And, accustomed to the homegrown apps and online services, many appear uninterested in knowing what has been censored online, allowing Beijing to build an altern

Phil Williams:

A secret recording, obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, reveals a plan to sabotage efforts to protect Nashville school children from toxic lead in their drinking water.

That plan, developed by the man in charge of Metro school buildings, was never meant for parents to hear.

“It’s stunning,” said parent Chelle Baldwin. “It’s stunning, the callousness of it.”

For the past nine months, NewsChannel 5 Investigates exposed data kept secret by the district showing high lead levels in some Metro schools.

In response, a number of schools installed special fountains that were supposed to filter out the lead.

But the recording, from inside a meeting of Metro Schools maintenance employees, reveals a plan to dismantle those efforts.

Ted Galen Carpenter:

Recent debate about U.S. policy with respect to Lebanon, Central America, and South Africa suggests that the United States may be entering a new phase in the recurring conflict between Congress and the executive branch over the control of foreign affairs. This conflict does not merely involve constitutional or partisan political matters—as important as those might be—but reflects competing conceptions about substantive policy issues.

The current White House occupant is seeking to weaken or eliminate congressional restraints imposed on the executive during the 1970s, in order to regain the flexibility he believes is necessary to pursue America’s cold war objectives. His congressional opponents are attempting to preserve those constraints not simply to enhance the power and prestige of the legislative branch, but because they fear that an unfettered president may pursue policies that would contravene fundamental American values or again plunge the United States into ill-advised military interventions. As before in our history, the conflict will likely determine the substance of American foreign policy, as well as which branch shall chart its course.

Merrit Kennedy:

The scandal has been reported in multiple Japanese news sources, including state broadcaster NHK. All cite unnamed sources from the university, and NPR has not independently verified the allegations.

Tokyo Medical University spokesman Fumio Azuma told Reuters that the university is conducting an internal investigation.

A university official told NHK that “it was concerned that a large increase in the number of women posed a serious problem for the future of the university hospital, because female doctors tend to quit after marrying or starting families.”

The points deduction was apparently aimed at keeping the number of female students at about 30 percent of the class or less, the media reports state. And it followed a regular pattern. The Asahi Shimbun, citing university officials, said, “A specific coefficient was used to automatically reduce the exam scores of all female applicants.”

Richard J. Murnane, Sean F. Reardon, Preeya P. Mbekeani and Anne Lamb:

To explore these questions, we examine enrollment and family-income data from the past 50 years at Catholic, other religious, and nonsectarian private elementary schools (that is, schools serving grades K–8). Our analysis finds that private schools, like public schools, are increasingly segregated by income. In particular, the share of middle-income students attending private schools has declined by almost half, while the private-school enrollment rate of wealthy children has remained steady. Much of the decline among middle-income students is due to falling enrollment at Catholic schools, which have closed in droves in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, private-school enrollment among affluent students has shifted from religious to nonsectarian schools.

Sara Fischer:

Google — and its products like YouTube and Waze — combined to account for 34.2% of all time on digital media in June, according to Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

The details: Pivotal found that as Google increases its foothold into America’s daily routines, Facebook is seeing declines in time spent at a faster rate than before.

Core Facebook use (including Messenger) fell 10% in aggregated time spent for all content measured.
Even including Instagram and WhatsApp, Pivotal says it still observed a 6% decline.

David Bernstein and Noah Isackson:

few months before last February’s citywide elections, Hal Baskin’s phone started ringing. And ringing. Most of the callers were candidates for Chicago City Council, seeking the kind of help Baskin was uniquely qualified to provide.

Baskin isn’t a slick campaign strategist. He’s a former gang leader and, for several decades, a community activist who now operates a neighborhood center that aims to keep kids off the streets. Baskin has deep contacts inside the South Side’s complex network of politicians, community organizations, and street gangs. as he recalls, the inquiring candidates wanted to know: “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”

Baskin—who was himself a candidate in the 16th Ward aldermanic race, which he would lose—was happy to oblige. In all, he says, he helped broker meetings between roughly 30 politicians (ten sitting aldermen and 20 candidates for City Council) and at least six gang representatives. That claim is backed up by two other community activists, Harold Davis Jr. and Kublai K. M. Toure, who worked with Baskin to arrange the meetings, and a third participant, also a community activist, who requested anonymity. The gang representatives were former chiefs who had walked away from day-to-day thug life, but they were still respected on the streets and wielded enough influence to mobilize active gang members.

Paul Frazee:

Even the most casual technology-user can recognize the inescapable role that the Internet plays in modern life. Its services drive our lives, yet as users, we’re completely disconnected from their governance.

The disconnect is a motivating force for the decentralization movement, which includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Freenet, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Dat, Blockstack, and the Beaker Browser among others. Their motivations vary from the assertion of personal liberties to economic empowerment, but they all aim to somehow distribute political authority within a technical system.

Authority defines a network’s behavior and the powers of its participants. To change the distribution of authority, we should study how authority works. We should ask: When is authority within a computer network appropriate? How should it be assigned? Once assigned, how can it be constrained?

Anton Gorlin:

This article summarizes all my knowledge, experience and 6 months of work. I believe, anyone, newbie or pro, could find some new useful info inside of it. There are already hundreds of articles, dozens of guides. And some of them are really good. However, there was still a need for the comprehensive composition guide nicely presented and easy to follow. I did my best to keep it simple, concise and easy to understand with lots of goodies to download for future reference. Also, I keep it as short as possible with zero fluff for such a massive amount of material. Less talk, more practical info with examples, charts and graphs.

Elizabeth Ross:

This study examines all 50 states’ and the District of Columbia’s requirements regarding the science of reading for elementary and special education teacher candidates.

Chan Stroman:

“Report finds only 11 states have adequate safeguards in place for both elementary and special education teachers.” Make that “10 states”; with Wisconsin PI 34, the loophole (created by a succession of emergency rules) waiving the Foundations of Reading Test is now permanent.

Much more on Tony Evers and Scott Walker, along with Act 10 and the DPI efgort to undermine elementary teacher english content knowledge requirements.

Foundations of Reading

MTEL

A capital conversation.

Matthew De Four:

It wasn’t until the end of Wednesday night’s Democratic gubernatorial forum at the Madison Public Library that someone took a swing at the candidate who has led in all of the polls.

Former party chairman Matt Flynn in his closing statement called State Superintendent Tony Evers “Republican lite” and criticized him for describing Gov. Scott Walker’s most recent budget as “pro-kid.” Evers, given a chance to respond, called Flynn’s attack “an outrageous comment” to which Flynn replied that Walker would “eat you for lunch.”

Much more on Tony Evers and Scott Walker, along with Act 10 and the DPI efgort to undermine elementary teacher english content knowledge requirements.

Foundations of Reading

MTEL

A capital conversation.

Elizabeth Gibney:

In the midst of growing public concern over artificial intelligence (AI), privacy and the use of data, Brent Hecht has a controversial proposal: the computer-science community should change its peer-review process to ensure that researchers disclose any possible negative societal consequences of their work in papers, or risk rejection.

Hecht, a computer scientist, chairs the Future of Computing Academy (FCA), a group of young leaders in the field that pitched the policy in March. Without such measures, he says, computer scientists will blindly develop products without considering their impacts, and the field risks joining oil and tobacco as industries whose researchers history judges unfavourably.

The FCA is part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York City, the world’s largest computing society. It, too, is making changes to encourage researchers to consider societal impacts: on 17 July, it published an updated version of its ethics code, last redrafted in 1992. The guidelines call on researchers to be alert to how their work can influence society, take steps to protect privacy and continually reassess technologies whose impact will change over time, such as those based in machine learning.

BBC:

She shows me tourist information leaflets on Somerset’s churches and guided heritage walks. She assures me that a few people do still ask for them but admits that today’s tourist generally has different priorities.

“Your 1939 guide barely mentions children. It was about what adults wanted,” she says.

“Now it’s all about the family holiday. And today’s children, with all the TV and advertising they’re exposed to, do want a bit more than sitting on the beach staring at seagulls. They’re looking for activity like the waterpark or adventure park and the fun rides.”

Winbolt referred to Weston as a “most astonishing mushroom” that suddenly grows in the holiday season. And it still is.

Dan Wang:

I consider Definite Optimism as Human Capital to be my most creative piece. Unfortunately, it’s oblique and meandering. So I thought to write a followup to lay out its premises more directly and to offer a restatement of its ideas.

The goal of both pieces is to broaden the terms in which we discuss “technology.” Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.

Erica Klarreich:

At the playground on the leafy campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, one afternoon in May, the mathematician Akshay Venkatesh alternated between pushing his 4-year-old daughter on the swing and musing on the genius myth in mathematics. The genius stereotype does the discipline no favors, he told Quanta. “I think it doesn’t capture all the different kinds of ways people contribute to mathematics.”

Venkatesh’s other daughter, 7, wandered somewhere with her friends on the serene grounds of the institute’s visitor housing complex, which lends itself to the kind of free-range childhood that has become rare these days. Venkatesh had been visiting IAS for the past year, on leave from Stanford University; as of mid-August he will join the institute’s permanent faculty, whose previous members include Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and quite a few winners of the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics.

Ilya Feoktistov:

It was late on a cold and snowy New England evening in February 2017, and Newton North history teacher Isongesit Ibokette was venting at his keyboard about the new guidelines for avoiding bias in teaching. They had been sent out by Newton North’s principal that morning, prompted by the general ill will among teachers for the new occupant of the White House.

The guidelines asked teachers to remain objective while teaching about historical and current events; and to treat all students, regardless of political opinion, with respect. Teachers were told: “For current controversial issues (health care, immigration, environmental policies, gun laws), teach students that there are different perspectives and present the reasoning of those who hold those different perspectives.”

Ibokette was having none of it. He typed this reply: “I am concerned that the call for ‘objectivity’ may just inadvertently become the most effective destructive weapon against social justice,” and sent it to the members of Newton North’s history department.

Ibokette was responding to an email from another Newton North history teacher, David Bedar. Bedar was same teacher who hosted the anti-Semites at Newton North, and has played a significant role in the years-long controversy over anti-Jewish bias in the public schools of the heavily Jewish suburb.

Earlier that February day, Bedar sent an email to fellow Newton North history faculty, accusing President Trump and his supporters of “nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.,” and objecting to the following “don’ts” that the Newton North principal had asked teachers to avoid:

Newton School District (12,674 students, with a recent annual budget of 227,560,263, or $17,954 per student, somewhat less than Madison).

Interestingly, Newton’s 2019 budget presentation slides (PDF) concisely summarize their spending, in one screen. Oh, that we had a simple presentation of Madison’s annual spending, and ongoing increases….

Ann Babe:

Years ago in Yonsa, a small North Korean town near the Chinese border, residents gathered to watch a man die. Executioners tied him by his neck, chest, and waist to a log in the town square, then shot 90 bullets into him. When it was over, all that remained were two legs.

The man, an executive at a trading company, had been ratted out for illegally cutting down and selling trees to China. When the police came to his property, they found his ceiling papered with money and a getaway boat filled with wads of cash. Or so the story goes among locals.

*Names have been changed.

But it was what became of this man’s daughter that haunted a 12-year-old Kim So Won*. The daughter was tall and beautiful and made small but daring fashion statements. “I remember she wore earrings and tight jeans,” says So Won, “and she wore a tight red jacket” — none of which was officially allowed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Rumors circulated that the girl could jump incredible distances, that she could fly across a room. “She was a star.”

Then one day, in 2007, not long after her father was publicly executed, the daughter vanished. No one ever saw or heard from her again. But So Won would always remember the earrings, the skinny jeans, the red jacket.

The Chronicle:

While you may gain prestige, grant money, and talented researchers, be prepared for high costs and steep competition – and make sure your goals align with your values.

TaxProf:

Saint Louis University has a lot going for it: a billion-dollar endowment, more than a dozen academic programs ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report, and a place among just seven Roman Catholic colleges listed in the Carnegie Classification’s second-highest tier of research institutions. (That tier, called Research 2, designates “Doctoral Universities: Higher Research Activity.”)

But the university’s leaders have even loftier goals: They want to double the amount of grants, private contracts, and donations awarded for faculty research — to $100 million — in just five years. They also hope to join the exclusive group of universities classified by Carnegie as R-1, or Research 1, which would put them in the company of institutions like Georgetown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The criteria for reaching that classification include several measures of research spending, staff levels, and the number of doctorates an institution awards. …

[T]he path to the pinnacle of academic research is narrow and crowded. In 2015, the last year Carnegie updated its classifications, just 115 institutions held R-1 status, seven more than in 2010. About 150 universities spend more than $100-million a year on research. Among those striving to raise their research profiles are the Universities of Memphis, Montana, and Nevada at Reno. All three share St. Louis’s R-2 classification.

To reach the top often requires significant costs to build laboratory space, recruit star faculty researchers, and pay graduate-student stipends. And the competition for both faculty members and coveted federal research grants is growing, while federal spending for those awards is stagnant. Meanwhile, critics wonder whether going for more research money and a higher Carnegie classification really has more to do with elevating institutional image, and comes at the expense of academic quality — particularly for undergraduates.

“It’s a huge investment on the part of the institution,” says George D. Kuh, founding director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. Based at Indiana University at Bloomington, the institute studies ways to improve undergraduate education. “There are so many other universities around that have already captured the prestige.”

Barbara Oakley:

For parents who want to encourage their daughters in STEM subjects, it’s crucial to remember this: Math is the sine qua non.

You and your daughter can have fun throwing eggs off a building and making papier-mâché volcanoes, but the only way to create a full set of options for her in STEM is to ensure she has a solid foundation in math. Math is the language of science, engineering and technology. And like any language, it is best acquired through lengthy, in-depth practice.

But for girls, this can be trickier than it looks. This is because many girls can have a special advantage over boys — an advantage that can steer them away from this all-important building block.

A large body of research has revealed that boys and girls have, on average, similar abilities in math. But girls have a consistent advantage in reading and writing and are often relatively better at these than they are at math, even though their math skills are as good as the boys’. The consequence? A typical little boy can think he’s better at math than language arts. But a typical little girl can think she’s better at language arts than math. As a result, when she sits down to do math, she might be more likely to say, “I’m not that good at this!” She actually is just as good (on average) as a boy at the math — it’s just that she’s even better at language arts.

David Bernstein:

No, this isn’t another post about that horrible Nancy MacLean book, but it is related. As an early, vociferous critic of the book, I wound up in email, blog, and Twitter debates with some of her defenders among fellow historians, especially those who purport to specialize in intellectual history. And what I learned from this was troubling. While I’m sure there are many excellent historians around, I found that the historians I interacted with not only tended to reason backwards from their political priors, but that their standards of how one makes an appropriate inference from existing evidence are such that they would be laughed out of any decent philosophy or law school academic workshop.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.

Christina Hoff Summers:

Title IX, the 1972 legislation banning sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal financial support, was a reasonable equality-of-opportunity law in its original form. So what explains the scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports carried out in its name? Why has it been used to deny students and professors due process and free speech in sexual harassment cases? When a Massachusetts district court judge reviewed Brandeis University’s Title IX–inspired harassment proceedings, he declared them “closer to Salem 1692, than Boston 2015.”

How did we get here?

I have been reading and writing about weird applications of Title IX for years. Until now, I didn’t fully understand the source of the weirdness. In his new book, The Transformation of Title IX, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick provides the answer: the transformation happened slowly and incrementally and involved a strange symbiosis between government officials, federal judges, and activists. Melnick’s calm, lucid analysis shows how a law once intended to increase educational and athletic opportunities for girls and women came to diminish those opportunities for men and women alike.

Responsibility for administering Title IX falls to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). This small agency has the power to issue rules and regulations and to deny federal funding to schools that fail to meet them. But Congress has placed clear constraints on OCR rule making. New rules must be approved by the president after a “notice-and-comment” proceeding that allows affected parties—colleges and universities, civil liberties organizations, policymakers, activist groups, students, parents—to ask questions, raise objections, and request clarifications and revisions to proposed rules before they become binding policy.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

Titled “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” the draft policy paper—penned by Sen. Mark Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axios—the paper starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when “the Soviets tried to spread ‘fake news’ denigrating Martin Luther King” (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW IT’S DIFFERENT, because technology.

“Today’s tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques,” Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us, will be even worse.

Here’s how Warner is suggesting we deal:

Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social media platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin of all user accounts or posts.

Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social media and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only allow “authentic” accounts (“inauthentic accounts not only pose threats to our democratic process…but undermine the integrity of digital markets”), with “failure to appropriately address inauthentic account activity” punishable as “a violation of both SEC disclosure rules and/or Section 5 of the [Federal Trade Commission] Act.”

Bot labeling: Warner’s paper suggests forcing companies to somehow label bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is remotely feasible)

Politifact:

“Tony misspoke,” his campaign spokeswoman Maggie Gau told us. “We acknowledge it’s not correct. As much as we try to prevent them, no one is perfect and mistakes happen on the trail.”

UW System’s funding streams

The UW System is composed of 13 campuses, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that offer four-year and advanced degrees, and 13 campuses that offer two-year degrees. Currently, its operating budget is about $6 billion per year, with about $1 billion — 17 percent — coming from state funding.

To see whether that percentage has changed during Walker’s tenure as governor, we turned to a state agency, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. (Federal funding and tuition are the two other largest sources of funding, and there are others, as well.)

Here is how much of the UW System operating budgets has come from state funding since the year before Walker took office as governor:

Mr. Evers currently serves as the Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction, an organization fighting attempts to improve elementary teacher English content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading).

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

MTEL

A capitol conversation

The Economist:

“AT THE end of the day I would be anxious,” says Anil Awasthi, a 44-year-old garment worker in Delhi, “thinking what mistakes of mine would be pointed out.” He was worried about what was going to happen as his sight deteriorated, until—courtesy of VisionSpring, an American social enterprise—he got reading glasses. “I’m confident now that my work will meet my boss’s expectations,” he says. “I go home satisfied.”

For the rich, the worst consequence of long sightedness is having to wear the world’s most ageing accessory. For the poor, things are more serious. “It’s the 42-year-old seamstress or tailor,” says Jordan Kassalow, VisionSpring’s founder. “If they can’t see, they can’t do their jobs, and if they can’t do their jobs they end up breaking rocks by the side of the road.”

The first randomised control trial to measure the impact on productivity of reading glasses was carried out recently in a tea estate in Assam, in north-eastern India, paid for by Clearly, a charity. Nathan Congdon, a professor of ophthalmology at Queen’s University, Belfast, and his colleagues gave spectacles to half of a group of 751 tea-pickers aged over 40. The other half got none. Over 11 weeks, the productivity of those whose sight had been corrected rose by 39%. It rose for the others, too, showing the importance in such trials of having a control group. But that rise was only 18%. The rise in productivity for those with glasses was the largest caused by a medical intervention that has ever been shown in such a trial (others have been of mosquito nets and micronutrients). Since tea-picking is piecework, productivity translates directly into money.

Jack Nicas:

For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.

The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.

“It’s degrading to the reputation of our area,” said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90 percent disliked the name.

Kevin Hartnett:

This spring, not long after Caucher Birkar learned that he would be receiving the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, he shared a memory from his undergraduate years. Even by that time he had come a long way. Born and raised in a rural subsistence farming village in the Kurdish region of western Iran, Birkar had made his way to the University of Tehran, one of the pre-eminent universities in the country. There, at the math club, he recalled studying the pictures of Fields medalists lining the walls. “I looked at them and said to myself, ‘Will I ever meet one of these people?’ At that time in Iran, I couldn’t even know that I’d be able to go to the West.”

There was a lot about his future that Birkar couldn’t have predicted at that time: his flight from Iran, his request for political asylum, the push to rekindle a nearly abandoned field of mathematics. And today, at a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, the honor of being selected as one of four winners of the Fields Medal, a prize conferred every four years by the International Mathematical Union on the most accomplished mathematicians in the world under the age of 40 at the beginning of the year in which the prize is awarded. “To go from the point that I didn’t imagine meeting these people to the point where someday I hold a medal myself — I just couldn’t imagine that this would come true,” said Birkar, who turned 40 in July.

Julian Assange:

We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak U.S. government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then, as the evening came on, it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work.

It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D.C., including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel.

While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.

I put it aside until February 2012, when WikiLeaks—along with over thirty of our international media partners—began publishing the Global Intelligence Files: the internal email spool from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. One of our stronger investigative partners—the Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar— scoured the emails for intelligence on Jared Cohen.

The people at Stratfor, who liked to think of themselves as a sort of corporate CIA, were acutely conscious of other ventures that they perceived as making inroads into their sector. Google had turned up on their radar. In a series of colorful emails they discussed a pattern of activity conducted by Cohen under the Google Ideas aegis, suggesting what the “do” in “think/do tank” actually means.

Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.”

According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky.

Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to “engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,” as part of a Google Ideas’ project on “repressive societies.” In internal emails Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton (himself a former State Department security official), wrote:

Many school districts, including Madison, use Google services.

Scott Drenkard:

The way the researchers compare policies is quite interesting. Their report uses the newly-constructed Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) firm age dataset, which allows researchers to isolate effects on new versus established firms. It also has local granularity that enables a comparison of economic outcomes in states against adjoining border counties in other states.

In essence, this allows you to hold demographic and industrial characteristics constant (because you are examining areas right next to each other), while examining impacts of changes in policy in one place against another.

Alia Wong:

In 1995, the University of Vermont sociologist and historian James W. Loewen published a book that sought to debunk the myriad myths children were often taught about the United States’ past. Framed largely as a critique of the history education delivered in America’s classrooms but also serving as a history text itself, Lies My Teacher Told Me was the result of Loewen’s analysis of a dozen major high-school textbooks. It found that those materials frequently taught students about topics including the first Thanksgiving, the Civil and Vietnam Wars, and the Americas before Columbus arrived in incomplete, distorted, or otherwise flawed ways. Take, for example, the false yet relatively widespread conviction that the Reconstruction era was a chaotic period whose tumult was attributable to poor, uncivilized governance of recently freed slaves. Textbooks’ framing of the history in this way, according to Loewen, promoted racist attitudes among white people. White supremacists in the South, for example, repeatedly cited this interpretation of Reconstruction to justify the prevention of black people from voting.

Loewen didn’t veer from his conclusions with the second-edition release of Lies My Teacher Told Me in 2007, for which he analyzed six new history textbooks. The books’ treatment of what were then new developments, such as 9/11 and the Iraq War, reinforced his belief that history education in the U.S. is fundamentally broken.

Keri Rodrigues:

Here’s the executive summary:

White children are not smarter than black and brown children. Parachuting white families into majority “minority” schools will not automatically improve academic performance.

Black and Latino children ARE more than capable of achievement. Just because a school is majority “minority” does not make it a failing school.

Student diversity is positive and is linked to better student achievement for all students.
The segregation in Boston Public Schools has more to do with class and poverty than race, although systemic racism and income inequality perpetuating the cycle of poverty hits communities of color a hell of a lot harder than white families — especially in Boston. If you want to understand why a school might be poor performing, take a look at the income levels of the students’ families before you even think about the racial diversity of the students. Family income will tell you a whole lot more about the educational challenges of the kids than their race.
All of these things are true.

This is also true: People who can afford to buy $3 million condos in Boston are not going to send their children to underperforming schools in the opposite part of the city. They just AREN’T. Ever. No matter how progressive they claim to be. And if you think there is any amount of political pressure you can put on Marty Walsh to make him attempt to force it to happen — you’re nuts.

Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

We spend far more than most, yet have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Five Filters:

Wikipedia’s arbitration committee (ArbCom) has finally voted to ban editor Philip Cross from the topic of ‘post-1978 British politics’. He had spent years making agenda-driven edits on the site. Having spent some time documenting his hostile edits and his conduct toward his Wikipedia subjects on Twitter, it’s good to see Wikipedia finally taking action:

Martin Hořeňovský :

Before I started doing research for Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) group at FEE CTU, I saw SAT solvers as academically interesting but didn’t think that they have many practical uses outside of other academic applications. After spending ~1.5 years working with them, I have to say that modern SAT solvers are fast, neat and criminally underused by the industry.

Introduction

Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) is the problem of deciding whether a formula in boolean logic is satisfiable. A formula is satisfiable when at least one interpretation (an assignment of true and false values to logical variables) leads to the formula evaluating to true. If no such interpretation exists, the formula is unsatisfiable.

What makes SAT interesting is that a variant of it was the first problem to be proven NP-complete, which roughly means that a lot of other problems can be translated into SAT in reasonable[1] time, and the solution to this translated problem can be converted back into a solution for the original problem.

As an example, the often-talked-about dependency management problem, is also NP-Complete and thus translates into SAT[2][3], and SAT could be translated into dependency manager. The problem our group worked on, generating key and lock cuttings based on user-provided lock-chart and manufacturer-specified geometry, is also NP-complete.

Nora Khan and Fred Turner:

Nora Khan: You’ve written at length on the New Communalists, their rejection of politics, their attempts to build a pure new world on the edge of society. This ethic was translated into tools, infrastructure, and material for the technological world we are in today.

But, as you’ve argued so well, that rejection of politics, embedded in tools, has given us a series of disasters. To me, it seems the most insidious effect is when this claim suggests more advanced technologies are apolitical, amoral, or neutral. It seems particularly absurd when you start talking about machine vision, predictive policing and their algorithmic phrenology, databases sorting people by their employability, or psychographic maps.

I often hear tech activists and critics decry technology companies’ claims that their tools and platforms are neutral. I also do the same. But where does this idea of technology as neutral, come from? Is it similar to how business leaders claim the market is amoral?

Fred Turner: Well, I’ll speculate, and I hope it’ll be useful speculation. There are a couple of sources. One is chronologically proximate, and one is probably a little bit more distant. The proximate one remains professional engineering culture and its educational system. Engineering education is a system in which explicitly political questions are generally relegated to other fields entirely: political science, sociology, history, English, and on down the line.

Gerald F. Seib:

The decline of civility in political debate was alarming. Harsh rhetoric was getting in the way of resolving bitter disputes.

Worse yet, the nasty tenor of political discourse was so turning off young people that they were walking away from it, saying they didn’t want to get involved in such a nasty process.

Sounds like Washington today, right? Actually, it was Duluth, Minn., more than a decade ago as tensions rose over local budget strains. Then, as now on the national political stage, nastiness was becoming the norm, preventing well-intentioned people from coming together to solve problems.

The difference is that the leaders of Duluth decided to do something about it. Civic leaders launched something called Speak Your Peace: The Civility Project. They drew up a list of nine guidelines for civilized debate so simple they could and did fit on a wallet card.

Then, a funny thing happened. People took the idea to heart. All six major units of regional government—city and county boards and school districts—adopted the guidelines. As debate improved, so did the process of addressing problems. Today, Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson, credits the civility project for helping the city work through an emotional, two-year debate over a new ordinance requiring employers to offer paid sick leave, which was adopted in May.

Is it naive to think that the experience of a city of 86,000 can be useful on a national scale? Perhaps. And maybe Minnesotans are just nicer than the rest of us.

Alvin Chang:

This means that a huge number of disadvantaged students — who had to overcome more obstacles than the average student to make it to the doorstep of college — never even go in the door.

”They’ve already made it through so much. They’ve come so far; they’re so close,” said Holly Morrow, who works at uAspire, which helps disadvantaged kids get to college. (uAspire provided data to Page and Castleman for this research.)

So why is this happening?

One high school counselor compared it to the story of Hansel and Gretel. She told researchers that during the school year, the counselors set out bread crumbs for students to follow. But once high school ends, “all of a sudden, the bread crumbs are gone and they have no idea where to go.” And that leads them to drift off the college-bound path.

Related:

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine – NOT! (2006)

Thomas Redman:

We’ve all experienced some version of this problem: Ask “how many customers do we have?” and the marketing team provides one answer, sales a second, and accounting a third. Each department trusts its own system, but when the task at hand requires that data be shared across silos, the company’s various systems simply do not talk to one and other.

The problem arises because different systems employ different definitions of key terms. Thus, the term “customer” can mean a potential buyer to the marketing department, the person who signed the purchase order to sales, and the legal entity that it bills to accounting. Then people misunderstand the data and make mistakes. These issues grow more important as companies try to pull more and more disparate data together — to develop predictive models using machine learning, for example.

Specialized vocabularies develop in the business world every day to support new or specialized disciplines, departments, problems, and innovative opportunities. The term “customer” means different things to different departments because, at some point, each required the term to mean something specific to them. Language constantly grows and divides, becoming increasingly subtle and nuanced. But over time, systems don’t agree, which can cause tension and conflict in organizations.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Universities grew not just increasingly left-wing but far more intolerant than they were during the radicalism of the Sixties — but again in an infantile way. Speakers were shouted down to prove social-justice fides. “Studies” courses squeezed out philosophy and Latin. History became a melodramatic game of finding sinners and saints, rather than shared tragedy. Standards fell to accommodate poorly prepared incoming students, on the logic that old norms were arbitrary and discriminatory constructs anyway.

The curriculum now was recalibrated as therapeutic; it no longer aimed to challenge students by demanding wide reading, composition skills, and mastery of the inductive method. The net result was the worst of all possible worlds: An entire generation of students left college with record debt, mostly ignorant of the skills necessary to read, write, and argue effectively, lacking a general body of shared knowledge — and angry. They were often arrogant in their determination to actualize the ideologies of their professors in the real world. A generation ignorant, arrogant, and poor is a prescription for social volatility.

Frustration and failure were inevitable, more so when marriage and home-owning in a stagnant economy were now encumbered by $1 trillion in student loans. New conventional wisdom recalibrated the nuclear family and suburban life as the font of collective unhappiness. The result was the rise of the stereotypical single 28-year-old — furious at an unfair world that did not appreciate his unique sociology or environmental-studies major, stuck in his parents’ basement or garage, working enough at low-paying jobs to pay for entertainments, if his room, board, and car were subsidized by his aging and retired parents.

Doyin Oyeniyi:

In the aftermath of a tragedy like a school shooting, one of the first things people try to figure out is what can be done to prevent another such tragedy. That routine happened again following two prominent school shootings this year. The shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14 left seventeen people dead. On May 18, ten people were killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas. At the end of May, Governor Greg Abbott published a “School and Firearm Safety Action Plan” and lawmakers, including the Select Committee on Violence in Schools and School Security, began hearings to address school violence. Meanwhile, many Texas schools responded to the issue of school violence by simply arresting more of their students, according to a report by Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit for social and economic justice.

The report, titled “Collateral Consequences, The Increase in Texas Student Arrests Following the Parkland and Santa Fe Tragedies,” documents a sharp increase in the number of referrals to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department for students charged with either “terroristic threat” or “exhibition of a firearm.” From 2017 to 2018, referrals for terroristic threats increased by 156 percent, the report concluded. And there was a 600 percent increase of referrals for exhibition of firearms (a majority of which, 66 percent, did not actually include possession of a firearm). It may seem that these schools are being proactive in following up on potential safety threats, but Deborah Fowler, the executive director of Texas Appleseed, says that schools are falling back on a zero-tolerance approach to addressing school violence, an approach that doesn’t accurately assess threat levels and that research has proven ineffective in keeping schools safe. Examples of arrests made in the report exemplify the disproportionate response of zero-tolerance policies, such as a 17-year-old student who was taken to jail for pulling a school fire alarm and a 12-year-old student with a disability who was arrested for pointing a finger gun at imaginary creatures in an empty hallway. In another incident, a 15-year-old was arrested for making a terroristic threat after a teacher asked him to remove his backpack and he joked, “It’s not like it’s going to blow up.”

Joan Quigley:

New Jersey workers recently celebrated the signing of a bill requiring most employers to offer sick days for every job. Legislators celebrated themselves for having enacted it.

It not only was the right thing to do, it made a lot of sense. Who needs a chef sneezing in the soup or a salesclerk coughing as he wraps your package? Who wants to sit next to the accountant sweating, sniffling and exhaling germs into your cubicle while she fights the flu? And you sure don’t need a child care worker with an itchy rash bathing your infant.

b2o:

In a passage from his 2014 book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free author and copyright reformer Cory Doctorow sounds a familiar note against strict copyright. “Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention [laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits subverting controls on the intended use of digital objects] isn’t copyright protection, it’s middleman protection” (50).

This is the specter haunting the digital cultural economy, according to many of the most influential voices arguing to reform or disrupt it: the specter of the middleman, the monopolist, the distortionist of markets. Rather than an insurgency, this specter emanates from economic incumbency: these middlemen are the culture industries themselves. With the dual revolutions of personal computer and internet connection, record labels, book publishers, and movie studios could maintain their control and their profits only by asserting and strengthening intellectual property protections and squelching the new technologies that subverted them. Thus, these “monopolies” of cultural production threatened to prevent individual creators from using technology to reach their audiences independently.

Deepa Seetharaman:

That hasn’t assuaged concerns about Facebook’s privacy practices. Bank executives are worried about the breadth of information being sought, even if it means not being available on certain platforms that their customers use. It is unclear whether bank customers would need to opt-in to the proposed Facebook services or what other privacy protections might be offered.
 
 JPMorgan isn’t “sharing our customers’ off-platform transaction data with these platforms, and have had to say no to some things as a result,” said spokeswoman Trish Wexler.
 
 Banks view mobile commerce as one of their biggest opportunities, but are still running behind technology firms like PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc. Customers have moved slowly too; many Americans still prefer using their cards, along with cash and checks.
 
 In an effort to compete with PayPal’s Venmo, a group of large banks last year connected their smartphone apps to money-transfer network Zelle. Results are mixed so far: While usage has risen, many banks still aren’t on the platform.
 
 In recent years, Facebook has tried to transform Messenger into a hub for customer service and commerce, in keeping with a broader trend among mobile messaging services.
 
 A partnership with American Express Co. allows Facebook users to contact the card company’s representatives. Last year, Facebook struck a deal with PayPal that allows users to send money through Messenger. Mastercard Inc. cardholders can place online orders with certain merchants through Messenger using the card company’s Masterpass digital wallet. (A Mastercard spokesman said Facebook doesn’t see card information.)

John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel:

Apple has removed the entire library for five of Infowars’ six podcasts from its iTunes and Podcast apps, BuzzFeed News has learned. Among the podcasts, which were removed from Apples’ iTunes directory, are the show “War Room” as well as the popular Alex Jones Show podcast, which is hosted daily by the prominent conspiracy theorist.

Following the move, Spotify and Facebook have also acted to remove content made by Jones.

Apple’s decision to remove all episodes of Jones’ popular show — rather than just specific offending episodes — is one of the largest enforcement actions intended to curb conspiratorial news content by a technology company to date. Apple did not host Jones’s shows, but it offered an index that allowed anyone with an iPhone to find and subscribe to them. Though Apple is far from Jones and Infowars’ only distribution platform, the decision to pull Jones’ content will considerably limit the outlet’s audio reach — as of 2018, Apple’s Podcasts platform amassed 50 billion all-time downloads and streams.

John Hilliard and Emily Williams
:

The increase in segregation of the Boston Public School system — decades after court-ordered busing strove to help diversify the city’s schools — will worsen divisions among families along racial and economic lines, parents and education advocates said Sunday.

The concerns came a day after the Globe reported that more of the city’s schools are segregated now than they were two decades ago — in many cases, leaving students of color increasingly isolated in low-performing schools.

Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Makena Kelly:

Many French students will have their social media scrolling forcibly ended during school hours this upcoming year, after French lawmakers voted to ban smartphone use in schools.

On Monday, lawmakers decided that students under the age of 15 must leave their cellphones at home, or at least have them turned off during the school day. French high schools will be allowed to decide whether they implement the ban in their classrooms.

The measure prohibits the use of tablets, computers, and other internet-connected devices as well. There are exceptions in place for students with disabilities and for the educational use of devices in the classroom and in extra-curricular activities. This was a campaign promise of French president Emmanuel Macron, and after the measure was passed he tweeted, “Commitment held.”

Clare Wirth and Tomi Ogundimu :

Decades of research substantiate the devastating effects of social isolation. Loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and increases the risk of death by 26-45%, which is on par with risk factors such as high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of exercise.

Learn more: How to integrate psychosocial risk factors into ongoing care

Isolation is not only unnerving, it is also widespread. Cigna’s recent survey of 20K+ people revealed 46% of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone. Although striking, this finding is not surprising to those following former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who has argued for years that the scale and impact of this issue make it an epidemic.

How leading organizations are addressing the loneliness epidemic

Toni Airaksinen:

The University of California-Los Angeles has hired 18 students at $13 per hour to combat “social injustices” and “privilege and oppression” following a semester-long recruitment campaign.

Hosted by the UCLA Intergroup Relations Program, the Diversity Peer Leaders project is a year-long internship during which students facilitate workshops on social justice issues in exchange for leadership training and compensation from UCLA.

Carol Kaufmann:

The girls in my daughter’s class began to divide themselves into groups. Reports of comments that someone was “fat” or not “cool enough” directed at girls I’d known since they were 5 became prime topics of discussions at home. I heard cruel insults about my child, because her loyal friends told her about them.

I figured my daughter would eventually stumble into mean-girl territory, and that subversive manipulation, social rejection and alliance-building would leave her occasionally on the curb. But not until middle school, at the earliest. Right?

Wrong.

“The mean-girl thing is happening much sooner than everyone realizes,” our elementary school counselor told me when I called to talk it through. “I see it all the time.”

William Davies:

Keeping going, in this instance, didn’t quite deliver what Peterson, Harris and Murray are best known for. All three men owe their reputations to their professed willingness to criticise ‘political correctness’ in one guise or another, and a refusal to tiptoe around sensitive subjects. Harris, whose background is in neuroscience, became part of the ‘new atheist’ movement in the mid-2000s, courting controversy with a series of attacks on Islam, Catholicism and Judaism. Murray is equally provocative on the topic of Islam, most recently in his book The Strange Death of Europe, which whips up every fear imaginable regarding the threat posed by immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. A Darwinian thread runs through the work of both, which issues in the idea that we must be brave enough to face up to the existence of biologically innate inequalities.

Peterson’s name was barely known this time last year, yet it was his involvement in the O2 event that made its scale possible. His recent book, Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, blends a defence of patriarchal tradition with self-help and psychoanalytic mysticism, drawing on Carl Jung and religious fables to produce such peculiar tips as ‘Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street,’ alongside more menacing advice on how to physically discipline your child. His public profile is so high thanks to a series of online videos in which he attacks the arguments of trans rights activists and feminists. His eagerness to call out ‘postmodernists’, a catch-all for anyone who questions the superiority of dominant Western political and scientific institutions, is perfectly geared towards those in the younger generation who feel alienated from identity politics.

If Peterson, Murray and Harris have one thing in common, it is a brand (always carefully tended) of intellectual and political fearlessness. The logo for the O2 event, titled ‘Winning the War of Ideas’, consisted of a grenade made out of a human brain, surrounded by black and yellow hazard stripes suggesting mortal danger. But on the night the risks were few and far between. At one point Murray, trying to inject some edginess into the proceedings, asked why they were ‘having to hide in a sports stadium to address serious issues’. Harris dutifully tossed out a couple of mildly derogatory remarks about Islam, but you sensed that his heart wasn’t really in it. Peterson was avuncular to a fault.

The Guardian:

Jacob Mikanowski (How the English language is taking over the planet, 27 July) writes with unconscious irony: “Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago…”

I can’t wait to read more of what he says about English syntax affecting German and changing the grammar of Scandinavian languages, but he seems to ignore the English language’s penchant for borrowing from other languages. Behemoth (actually plural) is from Hebrew and archipelago is Greek.

The point is made graphically by a famous description attributed to James Nicoll: “We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary”.

Native English speakers are fortunate that theirs has become the universal language, and it is even more fortunate that there is one. Polish and all the other colourful and beautiful languages that seem to be in its shade are still available for private conversation among native speakers.

Art Markman:

Public speaking is so stressful for so many people that it is routinely used as a stress manipulation in psychological studies. Tell undergrads they have 10 minutes to prepare a speech that will be evaluated by experts, and their levels of the stress hormone cortisol shoot through the roof.

Yet success in many roles requires speaking in public. In addition to presenting in my classes, I typically give a talk per week in front of groups. People ask me if speaking gets me nervous. It does not. And I give a lot of credit to my fascination with stand-up comedy. While I’m not a comedian myself, I’ve been a fan of comedians and their process for a long time, and I think there are three lessons that anyone can learn from them about public speaking.

Jon Watts:

In the first part of a week-long series revealing the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on cities around the world, Jon Watts journeys from the steppes of Central Asia to the Black Sea and into Europe, as Beijing’s grand plan radically remakes the lives of people in its path

The Silk Road setting feels timeless: an expanse of desert scrub below the Tianshan Mountains, where weather-beaten farmers herd flocks of sheep much as their ancestors might have done in Marco Polo’s day.

Rising up surreally in their midst, however, are the new landmarks of a modern development: the gleaming yellow gantries of the world’s biggest dry port and the shopping mall towers of a duty-free zone the size of a city.

Welcome to Khorgos, China’s new land gateway to the mineral-rich resources of Central Asia and the consumer-rich markets of Europe. Further from the sea than almost anywhere on Earth, it is both the middle of nowhere and the centre of Beijing’s plans for a new world order.

China is opening new commercial routes across Eurasia. The construction of a new network of Silk Roads – as well as railways, pipelines, ports and ferry routes – is part of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Matthew Ladner:

In a previous post I basically made the case that a majority of American states failed to show much academic progress between 2003 and 2017 and that the nation’s fiscal problems are closing. While state constitutions guarantee K-12 funding, making it about as close to a permanent institution as you get in American life, the looming crunch in state budgets between K-12 and Medicaid/Pension shortfalls does not look to be pretty. For instance, consider these projections from the Texas Comptroller’s Office:

Annysa Johnson:

A brief summary of the proposal, provided by Evers’ office, said the budget would, among other things:

Ensure that no district receives less in aid than they previously received.

Allow districts to count 4-year-old kindergarten students as full time for state funding purposes. They are currently funded at 0.5 and 0.6 full-time equivalent.

Index revenue limits for the lowest-spending school districts to inflation so they would rise over time to the state average. Revenue limits cap the amount of money schools can collect in state and local taxes. The change is meant to help districts that were locked in at low-revenue limits when the caps were created in 1993-’94.

Mr. Evers is currently Superintendent of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, an organization that has fought the implementation of just one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement “Foundations of Reading“.

Related:

MTEL

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

A capitol conversation.

Abby Comerford:

Walker is a first-generation college student from the south side of Chicago. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio before becoming a K-12 English teacher in Florida. Even though Walker is no longer in the classroom, her ongoing passion for education is prevalent in her work.

Walker is joining the rigorous Studio 20 program at NYU to learn multimedia content creation and emerging media strategies. Eventually, she wants to become her own boss through creating her own publication or through freelance writing.

Keeping children and their families at the center of her journalism is very important to Walker. She enjoys hearing from members of the community who often don’t have a voice, so she’s willing to spend time in neighborhoods and uncover the truth.

NYU awarded Walker with a full-tuition scholarship; however, they did not provide financial assistance for any other expenses such as food, rent and course materials. A Go Fund Me page has been set up to help support her. Any donations are very appreciated.

We will be sad to see Walker go but we are very excited to see where her journey takes her.

Amber’s work, notes and links.

The Economist:

NEWS OUTLETS call him “China’s Edward Snowden”. His fans worldwide call him “Brother Fu”—a tag now seen on T-shirts and in internet memes. Both labels are said to mortify Fu Xuedong, the shy Canadian-educated software engineer whose allegations about Chinese cyber-spying have been the summer surprise of 2024. Mr Fu has thrown this, the final year of Donald Trump’s second term, into turmoil with his allegation that China’s intelligence services, working with the country’s technology firms, have turned millions of cars in America, Europe and Asia into remote spying devices, letting Beijing track vehicles in real time, identify passengers with facial-recognition and even eavesdrop on them.

China denies the claims, which if confirmed would amount to the largest espionage operation in history. Yet the fury of its response sits uneasily with its talk of Mr Fu as a “fantasist” and “a historic liar”. A cyber-security specialist at an innovation laboratory in Shenzhen, he has now been on the run from Chinese agents for five weeks—the past four of which he has spent holed up in the American consulate in Istanbul, as diplomats and politicians wrangle over his fate. So far Mr Fu’s saga is one with no winners, but many losers—including some of the world’s largest firms and governments that have buckled at the first hint of Chinese anger.

Anthony Daniels:

There was a time when despots were content to be despots rather than philosopher-kings. The military dictator General Mariano Melgarejo, for example, is supposed to have once explained his title to the office: I’m going to rule in Bolivia as long as I like, and if anyone tries to stop me I’ll have him hanged from the nearest tree. As he was reputed personally to have shot his predecessor, General Belzu, immediately afterwards asking the crowd that had just acclaimed Belzu as a hero whom they were shouting for now, his threat was taken seriously. He was not a man to be trifled with.

Latin American literature would have been much the poorer without despots (at least three Nobel laureates have been inspired by them), but this is not the kind of dictator literature that Daniel Kalder examines in The Infernal Library. Instead, books by rather than about despots are his subject, and by its end one is full of admiration for a man who, over a period of many years and with dogged perseverance, has plowed through whole shelvesful of what must be among the dullest prose ever written. I am no enthusiast for the concept of the banality of evil, but if it has application anywhere, it is here, in books by dictators, especially totalitarian dictators. It is a sobering thought that men who consigned millions to their deaths usually expressed themselves in print with mind-numbing woodenness, waging war on imagination and triumphing in the struggle. Whether they were below average in natural literary ability is a question that cannot be answered without a scientific trial controlled for upbringing, intelligence, level of education, and so forth, but it is clear that they had little regard for the welfare of the reader and it is even possible in some cases that they desired nothing more than to drive him mad with boredom while also compelling him to read and memorize what they had written (or had had written at their behest, for not all dictators actually wrote what appeared under their names). Here, indeed, was something to satisfy the most refined sadist: to torture people with banality piled on cliché piled on falsehood.

Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon:

In 2017, the University of Virginia reported an operating budget of almost $3.2 billion, assets of $11.2 billion, and liabilities of more than $7.8 billion. The university includes UVA Global LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary based in Shanghai; an athletics enterprise with 25 programs and $24 million in revenues and expenses; a police force with 67 officers; an investment company that manages resources from 25 tax-exempt foundations, each with its own board; ownership of numerous art, historical, and scholarly collections, including more than five million printed volumes; capital assets in the form of academic buildings, dorms, and a Unesco-recognized World Heritage Site; a top-ranked medical center with several affiliated health companies, more than 12,000 employees, and its own budget of almost $1.5 billion; a concert-and-events venue for everything from monster-truck rallies to the Rolling Stones; a recycling business; a mental-healthcare provider; and a transportation system with a fleet of buses and cars. Incidentally, UVa also educates around 16,000 undergraduates and 6,500 graduate and professional students each year.

In 1963 the University of California’s president, Clark Kerr, famously predicted this state of affairs when he described the postwar American university as a “multiversity” — an institution serving varied, even conflicting, interests and oriented to a range of purposes.

Today, Kerr’s multiversity seems quaint. Universities both public and private contend with an ever-expanding range of demands and expectations: that they satisfy the health-care needs of local populations, that they redress manifold social inequalities, that they serve as engines of economic activity and growth — even as the most elite among them have historically exacerbated some of these very same problems.

Vincent Chen:

It’s not entirely clear what level of mathematics is necessary to get started in machine learning, especially for those who didn’t study math or statistics in school.

In this piece, my goal is to suggest the mathematical background necessary to build products or conduct academic research in machine learning. These suggestions are derived from conversations with machine learning engineers, researchers, and educators, as well as my own experiences in both machine learning research and industry roles.

To frame the math prerequisites, I first propose different mindsets and strategies for approaching your math education outside of traditional classroom settings. Then, I outline the specific backgrounds necessary for different kinds of machine learning work, as these subjects range from high school-level statistics and calculus to the latest developments in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). By the end of the post, my hope is that you’ll have a sense of the math education you’ll need to be effective in your machine learning work, whatever that may be!

Gene Bunin:

For many, the situation in Xinjiang is an elephant masquerading as a mouse, whose presence is tacitly acknowledged but whose identity is frequently obscured. When talking about it becomes inevitable – for example, when someone unwittingly asks about a person who’s been sent to Xinjiang, to camp, or to jail – it is standard to use euphemisms.

The most common by far is the word yoq, which here may be translated as “gone” or “not around”. The phrase adem yoq (“everybody’s gone”) is probably the one I’ve heard the most this past year, and has been used to describe the absence of staff, clients, and people in general. To refer to people who have been forced to return to their hometowns (for hometown arrest, camp, or worse), it is typical to say that they “went back home” – more specifically, people in inner China might say that they “went back to Xinjiang”, while people in northern Xinjiang might say that they “went back to Kashgar”.

Gideon Rachman:

The west’s metropolitan elites have not yet turned against democracy. But some may harbour doubts. In Britain, many ardent Remainers are eager to overturn Britain’s vote to leave the EU. In the US, as the political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa point out, “the trend toward openness to nondemocratic alternatives is especially strong among citizens who are both young and rich . . . In 1995 only 6 per cent of rich young Americans believed that it would be a ‘good’ thing for the army to take over; today, this view is held by 35 per cent of rich young Americans.”

If some big-city voters are ambivalent about democracy, small-town voters are increasingly drawn to the nationalism expressed
by the likes of presidents Trump and Erdogan. Resurgent nationalism can raise international tension, but the widening urban-rural divide suggests that the most explosive political pressures may now lie within countries — rather than between them.

(Urban) Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most.

Matt Taibbi:

Facebook was “helped” in its efforts to wipe out these dangerous memes by the Atlantic Council, on whose board you’ll find confidence-inspiring names like Henry Kissinger, former CIA chief Michael Hayden, former acting CIA head Michael Morell and former Bush-era Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. (The latter is the guy who used to bring you the insane color-coded terror threat level system.)

These people now have their hands on what is essentially a direct lever over nationwide news distribution. It’s hard to understate the potential mischief that lurks behind this union of Internet platforms and would-be government censors.

As noted in Rolling Stone earlier this year, 70 percent of Americans get their news from just two sources, Facebook and Google. As that number rises, the power of just a few people to decide what information does and does not reach the public will amplify significantly.

In a way, this is the other shoe dropping after last week’s much-publicized brouhaha over Infowars lunatic Alex Jones. Jones had four videos removed from YouTube and had his Facebook page banned for 30 days, though he seemed to find a way around that more or less instantly.

These moves were celebrated across social media, because who doesn’t hate Alex Jones?

Alan Borsuk:

Have there been any developments in Milwaukee in the last decade or two that have turned out to be positive for kids?

When that question arose in a conversation with a friend, I decided it was time to focus on things in our midst that provide a firm case for answering yes.

There are good things happening in the city, including in some of its most strained neighborhoods. And there are more than you (and, often times, I) might think, given how easy it is to get immersed in worrisome stuff.

I don’t know what I’m starting here, but I expect it will be at least a couple of columns because I want to put a few worthy efforts in the spotlight.

I’ll start with the first specific answer that came to my mind: The Urban Ecology Center.

Aris Folley:

Brendan Mulvaney’s makeshift stand was located just outside the Saratoga County Fair in upstate New York, where a group of vendors reportedly made complaints to a state health official doing a routine inspection of the fair about the young competition, according to the New York Post.

The inspector then made a visit to the lemonade stand, where he reportedly ordered the family to shut down the operation.

“We didn’t think that we needed [a permit], we didn’t know that we needed one,” the young boy’s mother, Jodi Mulvaney, told the Post. “It didn’t even cross our minds.”

Local authorities told the outlet it was unusual for the state’s health department to be regulating lemonade stands.

The agency issued a public apology to the 7-year-old “for any inconvenience.”

Anemona Hartocollis, Amy Harmon and Mitch Smith:

He had perfect scores — on his SAT, on three SAT subject tests and on nine Advanced Placement exams — and was ranked first in his high school class of 592. An admissions officer who reviewed his application to Harvard called him “the proverbial picket fence,” the embodiment of the American dream, saying, “Someone we’ll fight over w/ Princeton, I’d guess.”

But in the end, the student was wait-listed and did not get in.

Generations of high school students have applied to Harvard thinking that if they checked all the right boxes, they would be admitted.

But behind the curtain, Harvard’s much-feared admissions officers have a whole other set of boxes that few ambitious high school students and their parents know about — or could check even if they did. The officers speak a secret language — of “dockets,” “the lop list,” “tips,” “DE,” the “Z-list” and the “dean’s interest list” — and maintain a culling system in which factors like where applicants are from, whether their parents went to Harvard, how much money they have and how they fit the school’s goals for diversity may be just as important as scoring a perfect 1600 on the SAT.

Bernard Zand:

These days, the city of Kashgar in westernmost China feels a bit like Baghdad after the war. The sound of wailing sirens fills the air, armed trucks patrol the streets and fighter jets roar above the city. The few hotels that still host a smattering of tourists are surrounded by high concrete walls. Police in protective vests and helmets direct the traffic with sweeping, bossy gestures, sometimes yelling at those who don’t comply.

But now and then, a ghostly calm descends on the city. Just after noon, when it’s time for Friday prayers, the square in front of the huge Id Kah Mosque lies empty. There’s no muezzin piercing the air, just a gentle buzz on the rare occasion that someone passes through the metal detector at the entrance to the mosque. Dozens of surveillance cameras overlook the square. Security forces, some in uniform and others in plain-clothes, do the rounds of the Old Town with such stealth it’s as if they were trying to read people’s minds.

Journalists are not immune to their attentions. No sooner have we arrived than two police officers insist on sitting down with us for a “talk.” The next day in our hotel, one of them emerges from a room on our floor. When we take a walk through the city in the morning, we’re followed by several plain-clothes officers. Eventually, we’re being tailed by some eight people and three cars, including a black Honda with a covered license plate — apparently the secret police. Occasionally, our minders seem to be leaving us alone, but already awaiting us at the next intersection are the surveillance cameras that reach into every last corner of Kashgar’s inner city. The minute we strike up conversation with anyone, officials appear and start interrogating them.

Before too long, they’ll detain us too. More on that later. But while the authorities in Xinjiang keep close tabs on foreign reporters, their vigilance is nothing compared to their persecution of the Uighur population.

Education Consumers foundation:

Tennessee’s Value Added Assessment System has been in place since 1995. It enables users to estimate the success of teachers, schools, and districts in lifting student achievement and it does so in a way that permits statistically fair comparisons.

Since 2007, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission has published a report card that uses the TVAAS data to estimate success of Tennessee’s teacher preparation programs in graduating “highly effective” new teachers. Highly effective new teachers are ones who are able bring about as much student learning per year as top-performing veteran teachers. Highly ineffective teachers are ones who bring about the same learning gains per year as the State’s least effective veteran teachers. The teacher classification is based on the first 3 years of teaching.

Related: Foundations of Reading.

MTEL

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Joel Kotkin:

In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.

Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.

The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment, to work for low wages.

Anya Kamenetz:

No parent, teacher or caregiver has the time or patience to respond perfectly to all of the many, many opportunities like these that come along. But one book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, is designed to get us thinking about the magnitude of these moments.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is a distinguished developmental psychologist with decades of experience. So is her co-author, Roberta Golinkoff at the University of Delaware. This book features a new framework, based on the science of learning and development, to help parents think about cultivating the skills people really need to succeed

Tyler Cowen:

So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off.

Here’s the cleanest tale of hypothetical decline I could come up with, keeping away from the more partisan or hysterical scenarios, or those involving a catastrophic deus ex machina.

Imagine that the United States gets through the presidency of Donald Trump without a crippling constitutional crisis. Still, the shrill public debate — which will continue well past Trump’s time in office — will continue to prove unequal to the task of addressing the nation’s most pressing problems.

In recent years, the underlying rate of productivity growth often has been about 1 percent, and rates of economic growth are not even half of what they used to be. Meanwhile, America will have to increase taxes or reduce spending by about $2,200 per taxpayer per year to keep the national debt-to-GDP ratio from rising ever higher, and that figure predates the Trump tax cuts. To fund that shortfall, the U.S. will cut back on infrastructure maintenance. At least one-third of this country will end up looking like — forgive the colloquial phrase — “a dump.” The racial wealth gap will not be narrowed.

Ryan Gallagher:

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

The planned move represents a dramatic shift in Google’s policy on China and will mark the first time in almost a decade that the internet giant has operated its search engine in the country.

Google’s search service cannot currently be accessed by most internet users in China because it is blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The app Google is building for China will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping’s Communist Party regime deems unfavorable.

Aral Balkan:

The core injustice that Mariana’s piece ignores is that the business model of surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook is based on the violation of a fundamental human right. When she says “let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us” it sounds like we voluntarily got together to create a dataset for the common good by revealing the most intimate details of our lives through having our behaviour tracked and aggregated. In truth, we did no such thing.

We were farmed.

We might have resigned ourselves to being farmed by the likes of Google and Facebook because we have no other choice but that’s not a healthy definition of consent by any standard. If 99.99999% of all investment goes into funding surveillance-based technology (and it does), then people have neither a true choice nor can they be expected to give any meaningful consent to being tracked and profiled. Surveillance capitalism is the norm today. It is mainstream technology. It’s what we funded and what we built.

David Zweig Zoe Ge:

The number of Chinese students returning from abroad has grown by leaps and bounds. In 2017, 608,000 students went abroad and 480,900 returned. China is proud of a return rate of 79 per cent; in 1987, the return rate was about 5 per cent, and in 2007 only 30.6 per cent.

Why this turnaround? Many students today are not committed to staying abroad. The largest group of students going out and coming back have been candidates for an MA degree – in 2015, 80.5 per cent of returnees were MA students – whose chances of succeeding abroad are not that great. Their major goal is to enhance their resumes for their job search back in China rather than seek a new life abroad.

But research shows that to really benefit from their time abroad, these young people need to select the right field or major, which affords them important opportunities back in a changing China, and they really need some work experience abroad.

Drawing on a recent questionnaire by the Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG) that was posted on the website of Zhaopin, a job placement firm in China, and the 1,700 responses they shared with us, we looked at seven aspects of students’ decision to return: the time it took to find a job, how satisfied they were with their job and their lives after returning, whether the cost of studying abroad was greater than the benefits, how many years it would take to recoup the investment in their education, their actual income, and whether it was below their expectations.

Alexandria Neason:

There are few newspapers left in his community; the Fulton Patriot closed in 2010, and The (Oswego County) Valley News, is printed just twice weekly. And yet Tryniski’s living room is drowning in newsprint, home to millions of pages of newspapers from all over New York, and the country, and Canada, stretching back to the 19th century. Every day, he sits in front of his surveillance-style monitors, shoulders hunched forward, face burrowed into the blue glow of the screen, scanning newspapers from microfilm into his massive online repository, Fultonhistory.com. Ten computers stacked on a black cart behind him hum and click, and just outside the sliding doors that open into the apartment, perched on a corner of the deck like a watchtower, is a small gazebo he built himself. Inside are his servers and three more computer monitors, which he uses to monitor Web traffic. A scanner detailing the movements of the local police buzzes in the background, and a light mist blows from the lid of a diffuser, filling the room with the scent of cinnamon. On a brisk day this past fall, Tryniski was working on issues of the now-defunct Canajoharie Courier from between 1912 and 1914 (the last issue went to press in Upstate New York in 1943).

Milo Yiannopoulos :

Standing at 5’5” and weighing barely 130 lbs — “Just say size eight,” she tells me during fact-checking — Professor Rachel Fulton Brown doesn’t look like the dangerous woman her critics describe. But she has become used to reading outlandish descriptions of herself since June 2015, when she published a blog post titled “Three Cheers For White Men,” effectively dropping a barrel of gunpowder into a burgeoning internecine war within Medieval Studies. Three years and hundreds of blog posts later, the tenured University of Chicago history professor is being casually referred to as a “fascist” at medievalist conferences, accused of inciting physical violence and rape against her peers, and avoided like a strumpet with bubonic plague. She has even been called out for bad language by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Donna.

Fulton Brown’s blog post wasn’t, as her critics claim, a veiled defense of white nationalism, or anything like it. She was responding playfully to the “dead white male” trope in academia, gently pointing out that the wicked caucasian dudes of social justice folklore were responsible for, among other things, the development of chivalry, consensual marriage and, to some extent, the success of feminism itself. But her post went down like a cup of cold sick anyway. Dozens, later hundreds, of Fulton Brown’s colleagues declared war on her, incensed by her refusal to back down and apologize — and by the fact that she had blogged approvingly, a number of times, about a rising star in conservative media who was causing eruptions on campuses with his scathing commentary about the finger-wagging campus Left.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Despite the written and oral testimony of many concerned stakeholders around the state, the legislature’s Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules made no changes to the PI-34 teacher licensing rule that was submitted by the Department of Public Instruction. As a result, graduates of any teacher preparation program (along with other categories of potential teachers) who fail to pass the Foundations of Reading Test may nevertheless become teachers of record in grades K-5 and special education, or may serve as a reading teacher or reading specialist. This move guts the protection for beginning and struggling readers that was provided by section 118.19(14)(a).

Text of PI-34

School district administrators may now hire whomever they want to teach beginning and struggling readers, and educator preparation programs will feel even less pressure to teach the foundations of reading to future teachers.

What does this mean for parents who are concerned about the quality of their child’s reading education? You will need to check with your school or district to find out if your child’s teacher has a tier I license that does not require passing the Foundations of Reading Test. If this is the case, and you feel it jeopardizes your child’s education, we urge you to contact your district administration and school board to express your concern.

Undoubtedly, this will be one area of discussion for the legislative study committee on the identification and management of dyslexia, which will have its second meeting on August 29th, with DPI-provided testimony. The public is invited to provide written testimony prior to August 29th, and this may be a topic on which you wish to comment. You may send your comments to committee chair Rep. Bob Kulp (Rep.Kulp@legis.wisconsin.gov), committee vice-chair Sen. Patty Schachtner (Sen.Schachtner@legis.wisconsin.gov), and your own assembly person and senator (see https://legis.wisconsin.gov to locate your representatives). Decoding Dyslexia-Wisconsin is tracking the number and impact of the statements, so please bcc them (decodingdyslexiawi@gmail.com) on your communications.

Foundations of Reading

MTEL

Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers (currently running for Governor…..)

A capitol conversation (2011)

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Madison spends more than most, yet we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

What will be different, this time?

“Plenty of resources“.

Joseph Walker:

The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other developed nation. It will soon spend close to 20% of its GDP on health—significantly more than the percentage spent by major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.

What is driving costs so high? As this series of charts shows, Americans aren’t buying more health care overall than other countries. But what they are buying is increasingly expensive. Among the reasons is the troubling fact that few people in health care, from consumers to doctors to hospitals to insurers, know the true cost of what they are buying and selling.

Providers, manufacturers and middlemen operate in an opaque market that can mask their role and their cut of the revenue. Mergers give some players more heft to enlarge their piece of the pie.

Zach Dorfman:

In the fall of 1989, during the Cold War’s wan and washed-out final months, the Berlin Wall was crumbling—and so was San Francisco. The powerful Loma Prieta earthquake, the most destructive to hit the region in more than 80 years, felled entire apartment buildings. Freeway overpasses shuddered and collapsed, swallowing cars like a sandpit. Sixty-three people were killed and thousands injured. And local Soviet spies, just like many other denizens of the Bay Area, applied for their share of the nearly $3.5 billion in relief funds allocated by President George H.W. Bush.

FBI counterintelligence saw an opening, recalled Rick Smith, who worked on the Bureau’s San Francisco-based Soviet squad from 1972 to 1992. When they discovered that a known Soviet spy, operating under diplomatic cover, had filed a claim, Smith and several other bureau officials posed as federal employees disbursing relief funds to meet with the spy. The goal was to compromise him with repeated payments, then to turn him. “We can offer your full claim,” Smith told the man. “Come meet us again.” He agreed.

But the second time, the suspected intel officer wasn’t alone. FBI surveillance teams reported that he was being accompanied by a Russian diplomat known to the FBI as the head of Soviet counterintelligence in San Francisco. The operation, Smith knew, was over—the presence of the Soviet spy boss meant that the FBI’s target had reported the meeting to his superiors—but they had to go through with the meeting anyway. The two Soviet intelligence operatives walked into the office room. The undercover FBI agents, who knew the whole affair had turned farcical, greeted the Soviet counterintelligence chief.

“What,” he replied, “You didn’t expect me to come?”

June Casagrande:

To hear some sticklers talk, you’d think that somewhere, in a classified location, there’s a top-secret grammar law library that houses the voluminous Grammar Penal Code: an official list of all the things you’d be “wrong” to do.

It’s wrong to split an infinitive, some say. It’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s wrong to begin a sentence with and. It’s wrong to use take to mean bring. Hang around these people long enough, and you see the list of no-nos is endless.

Their source, conveniently, is never revealed. They know what’s wrong and they’re not telling you how they know—as if they have a copy of the Grammar Penal Code and you don’t, so you’re forever at their mercy. With every word you speak or write, you’re in danger of getting busted for breaking a rule you never knew existed.

Here’s where these nitpickers get their information: someone—a teacher, a parent, a know-it-all friend—told them there’s a rule against saying a certain thing, and they believed it. It’s as if they, too, were fooled into believing there exists some list of grammar crimes that only their teacher, parent, or friend was privy to.

Jacob Mikanowski:

As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It’s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that “we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse”.

As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

lukeprog:

For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff’s Notes. How inefficient!

I’ve since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. That’s what they are designed to be, after all. Less Wrong has often recommended the “read textbooks!” method. Make progress by accumulation, not random walks.

But textbooks vary widely in quality. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful.

German Rectors’ Conference:

“The excessive demands put forward by Elsevier have left us with no choice but to suspend negotiations between the publisher and the DEAL project set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany.” That was the verdict of the lead negotiator and spokesperson for the DEAL Project Steering Committee, Prof Dr Horst Hippler, the President of the German Rectors’ Conference, speaking in Bonn, where the last discussion took place this week.

“As far as we’re concerned, the aim of the ongoing negotiations with the three biggest academic publishers is to develop a future-oriented model for the publishing and reading of scientific literature. What we want is to bring an end to the pricing trend for academic journals that has the potential to prove disastrous for libraries as it stands. We are also working to promote open access, with a view to essentially making the results of publicly funded research freely accessible. The publishers should play a crucial role in achieving this. We have our sights set on a sustainable publish and read model, which means fair payment for publication and unrestricted availability for readers afterwards. Elsevier, however, is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable,” said Hippler.

For many months now the negotiations addressing the implementation of a nationwide publish and read licence in Germany have attracted a lot of attention all around the world[1]. Since October 2017, a number of renowned researchers have resigned their editorship of Elsevier journals[2] as a way of showing their solidarity with the DEAL discussions. In addition, some 200 scientific institutions chose not to extend their licensing agreements with Elsevier at the end of 2016/2017[3]. The publisher wanted to enter into discussions to carry on with the agreements with these institutions to try and secure at least some of their lost income.