Steven Pinker:

Consider the U.S. just three decades ago. Our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000. Eleven percent of us fell below the poverty line (as measured by consumption). And we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.

Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today. The homicide rate is 5.3 (a blip up from 4.4 in 2014). Three percent of us fall below the consumption poverty line. And we emit four million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulates, despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.

Karen Harris, Austin Kimson, Andrew Schwedel:

Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Our analysis shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years (see Figure 1). The aim of this report by Bain’s Macro Trends Group is to detail how the impact of aging populations, the adoption of new automation technologies and rising inequality will likely combine to give rise to new business risks and opportunities. These gathering forces already pose challenges for businesses and investors. In the next decade, they will combine to create an economic climate of increasing extremes but may also trigger a decade-plus investment boom.

In the US, a new wave of investment in automation could stimulate as much as $8 trillion in incremental investments and abruptly lift interest rates. By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, hitting middle- to low-income workers the hardest. As investments peak and then decline—probably around the end of the 2020s to the start of the 2030s—anemic demand growth is likely to constrain economic expansion, and global interest rates may again test zero percent. Faced with market imbalances and growth-stifling levels of inequality, many societies may reset the government’s role in the marketplace.

Virginia Postrel:

From the cab of Rodney Terry’s state-of-the-art John Deere cotton stripper, harvesting cotton seems like the easiest job in the world. We chug along at four or five miles an hour, watching the giant machine’s bright yellow fingers gobble up eight rows of bolls at a time. White rows magically turn brown as we pass over them. Then comes the reveal, as every few minutes a plastic-wrapped cylinder eight feet across plops out the back, holding as much as 5,000 pounds of cotton ready for the gin.

“This thing is just constantly moving,” says Terry, who farms 6,000 acres in Ropesville, Texas, a half hour’s drive southwest of Lubbock. The stripper cost a whopping $700,000, but it’s amazingly efficient. Terry can harvest 100 to 120 acres a day, compared to 80 with the previous generation of equipment, which had to stop periodically to empty its basket of harvested cotton into a trailer. He can also keep working in windy weather that would blow away loose bolls waiting to be wrapped in the field.

Most important, he no longer needs to hire a half dozen harvest workers to supplement his three full-time employees. Finding reliable seasonal laborers for farms and gins is increasingly difficult in West Texas. Locals blame government benefits that offer a better deal than temporary work. (“Don’t get me started,” says Terry.) Bringing in the harvest with his new setup takes only two people at a time: one to steer the stripper and one to drive a tractor that lines up the modules for the gin to pick up. Full-timers handle everything, and the machine can run all night if needed.

Morgan R. Frank, Lijun Sun, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Iyad Rahwan:

The city has proved to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: how will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across US urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation and subsampling of occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal forces: urban agglomeration and automation’s impact on employment.

College Debt.

Scott Jaschik:

In 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported that a leading private college consultant was charging $9,999 each to 10 attendees for a weekend “boot camp” on college admissions. The idea that parents would pay that kind of money for a few days of advice stunned and appalled many.
These days, $9,999 may be pocket change in the world of elite college consulting. A lawsuit filed last week by Ivy Coach revealed that it charged a woman in Vietnam $1.5 million to help her daughter apply to 22 elite colleges, as well as seven top boarding schools she sought to attend in high school, before applying to college. The fee was worth it, the lawsuit says. In December, an (unnamed) Ivy League institution granted the daughter early admission.

But, the lawsuit charges, the Vietnamese mother has paid only half of the $1.5 million. The family, the lawsuit says, is part of the “international aristocracy who have enlisted Ivy Coach’s premium services.”

The lawsuit says that Ivy Coach provided “substantial guidance and effort” to help the daughter apply to Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams Colleges; Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, New York, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford and Tufts Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Universities of California (Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses); Chicago, Pennsylvania and Southern California. The legal papers reviewed by Inside Higher Ed reference 22 colleges, but only 21 are named.

A. G. Hopkins:

Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, is in a state of flux. Not Even Past, or perhaps Not Ever Past, because the continuously unfolding present prompts a re-examination of approaches to history that fail to respond to the needs of the moment, as inevitably they all do.

Beth Hawkins:

Does anybody remember the coup de gras leaders of the current St. Paul School Board delivered to former Superintendent Valeria Silva? Recruited, funded and swept to electoral victory by the teachers’ union, the first thing they did upon taking office two years ago was to settle the last contract talks by granting raises of 2 percent in each of the next two years, to the tune of $21 million. On top of the contract’s automatic “step and lane” increases, which cost an additional 2 percent to 4 percent a year.

This of course exacerbated the district’s shortfall, which the new board majority believed could be made by up by cutting fat at the administrative level. They didn’t like the budget Silva presented, sent her back to do it their way and when the river of superfluous money failed to appear volunteered to buy out her contract. They didn’t have cause to let her go, so the cost of this maneuver approached $1 million.

And so how bitter is the irony that in recent weeks these same relative board newcomers have found themselves pleading publicly that there is no money? And that their 2016 decision in fact compounded the size of the shortfall today?

Kevin Williamson:

am not much one for rubbernecking at car crashes. (I’m not setting you up for a Congress joke, here. That comes later.) Most of the time they are scary but ultimately insignificant episodes involving a little property damage and a great deal of inconvenience. Sometimes they are much worse, and I couldn’t help looking at the car blazing in the middle of the freeway in the middle of the day, looking more like it had been bombed or hit with a rocket than like it had been involved in an accident. Thick black smoke covered both sides of the highway, and as the flames poured out of the doors and windows, I thought to myself that it’s a lucky thing that in real life burning cars don’t explode like they do in the movies.

Jeanne Lindsay:

With a teacher shortage in the state, lawmakers want to help license more teachers by waiving some testing requirements some educators see as a barrier to getting into the classroom.

Shon Harris says he’s had trouble passing the math requirement for his elementary school teacher license. In part, because it includes material he won’t even teach his fourth grade students.

“It goes all the way up to high school geometry, despite the fact that most of the skills on the test won’t be taught in the elementary classroom,” Harris says.

Gary Fineout:

Following a sharply worded partisan debate, the Republican-controlled Florida House on Thursday passed a sweeping education bill that would add yet another private-school voucher program in the state while also making a vast array of changes on everything from school testing to how much money charter schools can receive.

It’s the second year in a row that House Speaker Richard Corcoran and GOP leaders have pushed to overhaul Florida’s schools, which have been constantly altered and reshaped during the nearly 20 years that Republicans have controlled state government. It’s not clear the entire measure will pass, although Senate Republicans say they support many key provisions.

The fierce debate echoed previous ones in which Republicans asserted they were creating more choices for parents, while Democrats said the sweeping scope of the bill was designed to divert money from traditional public schools to schools run or controlled privately.

Nicholas Thompson:

In any case, Facebook’s move into news set off yet another explosion of ways that people could connect. Now Facebook was the place where publications could connect with their readers—and also where Macedonian teenagers could connect with voters in America, and operatives in Saint Petersburg could connect with audiences of their own choosing in a way that no one at the company had ever seen before.

III
In February of 2016, just as the Trending Topics fiasco was building up steam, Roger ­McNamee became one of the first Facebook insiders to notice strange things happening on the platform. McNamee was an early investor in Facebook who had mentored Zuckerberg through two crucial decisions: to turn down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to acquire Facebook in 2006; and to hire a Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg in 2008 to help find a business model. McNamee was no longer in touch with Zuckerberg much, but he was still an investor, and that month he started seeing things related to the Bernie Sanders campaign that worried him. “I’m observing memes ostensibly coming out of a Facebook group associated with the Sanders campaign that couldn’t possibly have been from the Sanders campaign,” he recalls, “and yet they were organized and spreading in such a way that suggested somebody had a budget. And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘That’s really weird. I mean, that’s not good.’ ”

But McNamee didn’t say anything to anyone at Facebook—at least not yet. And the company itself was not picking up on any such worrying signals, save for one blip on its radar: In early 2016, its security team noticed an uptick in Russian actors attempting to steal the credentials of journalists and public figures. Facebook reported this to the FBI. But the company says it never heard back from the government, and that was that.

Citizen Stewart:

And finally, and perhaps most importantly at the moment, we can recruit, hire and retain a diverse corps of high-quality teachers and principals who live out the ideals of equity even without adequate resources. These leaders, both within schools and on the systems level, continue to work relentlessly and creatively to access alternative funding streams because students are sitting in front of us right now and it cannot wait.
No, Superman is not coming. She and he are already here toiling in our most high-needs schools for our most high-needs students. But even Superman needs help. It’s time to demand it.

Shannon Bond:

Nearly half of Americans favour regulating how websites such as Facebook and Google select what news stories they show to readers, according to a new report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation, in the latest sign of growing public concern over big tech.

The study comes just days after Facebook announced sweeping changes to its news feed to prioritise posts from friends and family over content from media outlets, businesses and brands, in response to warnings that the world’s largest social network may be harming its users and society.

The role that technology platforms have come to play in people’s lives has come under scrutiny, with concerns over Facebook’s inability to curb the spread of Russian propaganda and hoax stories during the 2016 election and worries that the way news is presented in online feeds creates filter bubbles that exacerbate political polarisation.

The Gallup-Knight survey suggests the public shares some of those concerns. It found 57 per cent of Americans say the methods that websites use to choose which stories to show to visitors — including their past viewing history — presents “a major problem” for democracy. But they are divided on what to do about it: 49 per cent favour regulation of how websites provide news, while 47 per cent said the sites should be free to use whatever methods they choose.

Tanvi Misra:

It’s this speech that Virginia Eubanks, an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, comes back to at the end of her new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. In it, Eubanks takes a hard look at some of the seemingly agnostic—and even well-meaning technologies—that promise to make the U.S. welfare apparatus well-oiled and efficient. Automated systems that gauge eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, databases that match homeless folks to resources, statistical tools that detect cases of child abuse are all considered game-changers for welfare institutions. But Eubanks demystifies these complex-sounding technologies, detailing the ways they can compromise the human rights and dignity of the very people they claim to help. King’s vision on this front, as with many others, is yet to be realized, she argues.

CityLab caught up with Eubanks to talk about some of the main themes in her book.

Kelsey McSorley:

“Understanding global perspectives and how they are formed is not just a prerequisite for becoming a global citizen; it is necessary for becoming an engaged citizen of any local community,” asserts the preamble of the document approving the new mandate, noting that course requirements play “a critical role in helping students develop an understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of the world.”

In order to fulfill the requirement, students must complete at least six credits from a list of approved courses that address at least two out of four categories: Global Self-Awareness, Global Knowledge, Global Viewpoint, and Global Engagement.

“Global self-awareness” courses, for instance, focus on embracing the “values of diverse others,” helping students to “develop appreciation for diverse voices and stories and the contributions of cultures and countries different from one’s own.”

The “global knowledge” goal, meanwhile, addresses “the deeply interconnected nature of the world,” with courses exploring concepts like how “the impact of globalized capitalism and neoliberalism on economic systems, inter and intra-societal stratification, civil and human rights, and sustainability” form the “historical roots” of inequities around the world.

The “global viewpoint” category aims to introduce students to different cultural and historical perspectives, while the “global engagement” element teaches students to “take effective critical action” on the basis of their new knowledge by “contributing to positive change in globally diverse, interconnected, and interdependent natural, social, and business environments.”

Peter Goff, Bradley Carl, and Minseok Yang:

This report presents findings on key features of the Wisconsin teacher labor market, including mobility, attrition, supply, and demand. We use data from multiple sources (including state staffing and credentialing files, application and vacancy information, and statewide survey data on perceptions of staffing challenges) to (a) establish a common vocabulary around categories of labor supply—specifically which positions are high supply, which are medium supply, and which are low supply; (b) provide a baseline against which subsequent reports can build and future policies can be assessed; (c) provide a common base of empirical evidence to focus and foster debate; and (d) identify aspects of the teacher labor market that are problematic.
Key findings

• High attrition rates among those in low-supply positions exacerbate staffing challenges.

• There are two external applicants (those not currently teaching in a Wisconsin public
school) for every one internal applicant; yet, in the low-supply category, this external-to- internal applicant ratio is closer to 1:1, suggesting that policies that increase the labor supply may be warranted for these positions.

• There is a marked increase in the use of emergency credentialing to bring teachers entering the labor market into classrooms, and there is an increase in the number of individuals who remain on emergency certificates in consecutive years.

• Use of emergency credentialing appears incongruous with policy intent, as district leaders report using this tactic to fill 30% of high-supply vacancies.

• The prime hiring times are early March through mid-May, which therefore is the optimal time for districts to find candidates across all three labor supply categories.

• Opinions as to whether a teacher shortage exists vary with the kind of position being filled.

According to district leaders, low-supply positions draw “too few” applicants (seldom more than 10 per vacancy), reinforcing perceptions of a labor shortage. In contrast, drawing fewer than 18 applicants for high-supply positions is considered too small of an applicant pool by district leaders; the perception of a teacher shortage arises with roughly half of the vacancies for these high-supply positions.

• Regardless of the depth of the vacancy pool, district administrators perceive a lack of quality in applicants; they consider 83% of applicants for low-supply positions, 64% of medium-supply applicants, and 50% of high-supply applicants to be of low quality.

Örjan Falk, Märta Wallinius, […], and Nóra Kerekes :

The nationwide multi-generation register was used with many other linked nationwide registers to select participants. All individuals born in 1958–1980 (2,393,765 individuals) were included. Persistent violent offenders (those with a lifetime history of three or more violent crime convictions) were compared with individuals having one or two such convictions, and to matched non-offenders. Independent variables were gender, age of first conviction for a violent crime, nonviolent crime convictions, and diagnoses for major mental disorders, personality disorders, and substance use disorders.

Matt Levine:

“Berkeley is the center of the resistance, and for the resistance to work, it must have a coin,” says a city council member, in a sentence that makes as little sense as every other sentence in this story. You can just sell the municipal bonds. Why sell “tokens” that are backed by municipal bonds? Fine, fine, you want to issue the bonds “on the blockchain”? I will allow it, you gotta keep track of the bonds somehow, that is some harmless buzzwordery. But throwing in the buzzword “token” is, I think, a bridge too far.

Elsewhere here is John Quiggin arguing that “the Bitcoin bubble should finally destroy our faith in the efficiency of markets.” In particular, he notes that Bitcoin is a terrible currency, and then dismisses the alternative argument that Bitcoin’s value comes from its usefulness as a store of value:

Katie Bo Williams:

In 2016, the court reviewed 1,752 applications and certifications. In total, about 98 percent of applications were granted, either as originally requested or with modifications.

Almost 80 percent of the warrants were granted as requested. About 19 percent, 339 applications were granted with edits — like including a reporting requirement or shortening the duration of the proposed surveillance.

Twenty-six applications were denied in part and nine were denied in full.

Critics say that the FISC is a “rubber-stamp” court because so few applications are denied. Its defenders argue that the final approval rate is misleading because the vetting and editing process is so rigorous.

Matthew Gonzales:

Three years ago, my wife and I moved downtown for the typical reasons: to enjoy the amenities of urban living; to be closer to interesting arts, dining, and nightlife opportunities; and to live among people who shared what we imagined were our socially progressive values.

We also had our eye on a downtown elementary school for our two young sons: Center for Inquiry 2, a highly regarded Indianapolis Public Schools magnet that offers the prestigious International Baccalaureate program. Several of our friends already sent their kids there, and they assured us it was a fantastic school.

Enrollment at CFI (and all IPS magnets) is lottery-based and governed by rules that give some families an edge over others. For example, hopefuls who live in a “priority zone” around a magnet school get an advantage, as do those who have a child already attending the school of their choice.

We first played the magnet lottery when we enrolled our oldest son in pre-kindergarten—a process that’s playing out in thousands of Marion County homes this month. Since CFI 2 doesn’t have a pre-K program, we made CFI 27—a duplicate of CFI 2 in the nearby Kennedy-King neighborhood—our first choice on the lottery application. But we didn’t get in. Instead, we got ou

Cathwrine Gewertz:

The headlines made a big splash, and yet they were strangely familiar: Another school system was reporting a higher graduation rate than it deserved.

The most recent scandal-in the District of Columbia-is just the latest example in a growing case file of school systems where investigators have uncovered bogus graduation-rate practices.

Those revelations have unleashed a wave of questions about the pressures and incentives built into U.S. high schools, and fueled nagging doubts that states’ rising high school graduation rates-and the country’s current all-time-high rate of 84 percent-aren’t what they seem.

Tyler Coward:

On Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah announced that he was introducing legislation to protect free speech on campus. The bill, called the “Free Right to Expression in Education Act,” would prohibit public institutions of higher education from quarantining free expression into small, misleadingly labeled “free speech zones” on their campuses. If enacted, the measure would free tens of thousands of public university students from these restrictive, unconstitutional zones.

Sam
Dangremond:

This past year the price of college tuition rose faster that inflation, according to the College Board, and the cost of attending college is now higher than ever. Scroll down to see which American colleges are the most expensive to attend.

Nick Anderson:

An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen.

Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United States, English in China — with a curriculum centered on mastery of core academic subjects, ­student-driven projects and off-campus learning opportunities in major world cities.

On Thursday, veteran education entrepreneur Chris Whittle plans to announce the debut of the D.C. campus in fall 2019 at a prominent site near a cluster of embassies — the striking aluminum and glass edifice at 4000 Connecticut Ave. NW once known as the Intelsat building.

David Brady, Ryan M. Finnigan and Sabine Hübgen:

No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception, have children out of wedlock and do not marry.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty” in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.”

Josh O’Kane:

Sara Hjellstrom had just had a tonsil operation when a friend, DJ-producer Mike Perry, handed her the roots of a song he hoped she could turn into a hit. Sitting on the couch in her Stockholm apartment, Hjellstrom built Perry’s four chords into a tropical house track, with help from her songwriting partner Nirob Islam. The beat, top-line melody and the words came near-instantly.

Hjellstrom wanted her own voice on the track, but had been told by her doctors not to sing. Being from Sweden, though, where music is treated like a job – a profession, really, such as an engineer or electrician – she wanted to get that job done. So, a half an hour after she began writing, she stepped into her walk-in closet and recorded the vocals – in a single take.

In June, 2016, that song, The Ocean, began a six-week summer run atop Sweden’s charts, reaching No. 11 on Billboard’s American dance chart, too. Hjellstrom, who’s taken on the alias SHY Martin, instantly went from music-school student to coveted co-writer and guest performer, jumping on tracks by the Chainsmokers, Kygo and Bebe Rexha.

ABA Journal:

Could reforming the federal student-loan program be a way to halt the skyrocketing cost of attending law school? At the 2018 ABA Midyear Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, the American Bar Foundation gathered a panel together to discuss the issue in The Perennial (and Stubborn) Challenge of Cost, Affordability and Access in Legal Education: Has it Finally Hit the Fan?

“If I have to put the blame for the title of this panel on any one place, I would put it on these student loan programs and the fact that they are basically unregulated, really, in terms of the amount,” said Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education.

“The students can borrow as much money through those programs as they want,” Currier said. “So if Harvard Law School or New England Law School said, ‘Tuition at our school next year is $200,000, and living expenses are $50,000,’ the federal government wouldn’t say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ They would say, ‘Where can we send that check for $250,000?’” …

Currier and Stephen Daniels, a senior research professor at the American Bar Foundation, both drew attention to a current bill that would impact the federal student-loan program and potentially cause havoc for law schools and law students. HR 4508, the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity through Education Reform Act was introduced in the House of Representatives in December.

Hans-Edzard Busemann, Nadine Schimroszik:

The verdict, from a Berlin regional court, comes as Big Tech faces increasing scrutiny in Germany over its handling of sensitive personal data that enables it to micro-target online advertising.
 
 The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzvb) said that Facebook’s default settings and some of its terms of service were in breach of consumer law, and that the court had found parts of the consent to data usage to be invalid.
 
 “Facebook hides default settings that are not privacy-friendly in its privacy center and does not provide sufficient information about it when users register,” said Heiko Duenkel, litigation policy officer at the vzvb.
 
 “This does not meet the requirement for informed consent.” The vzvb posted a copy of the ruling on its website. A court spokesperson confirmed that a judgment had been handed down but declined further comment.

Sarah Zhang:

Every big, ambitious project has to start somewhere, and for U.K. Biobank, it was at an office building south of Manchester, where the project convinced its very first volunteer to pee into a cup and donate a tube of blood in 2006.

U.K. Biobank would go on to recruit 500,000 volunteers for a massive study on the origins of disease. In addition to collecting blood and urine, the study recorded volunteers’ height, weight, blood pressure; tested their cognitive function, bone density, hand-grip strength; scanned their brains, livers, hearts; analyzed their DNA. In breadth and depth, the study is the first of its kind.

Handling all the samples was a logistical challenge. To process thousands of tubes of blood, for example, U.K. Biobank’s lab needed a new robotics system. (This ultimately came from a company that builds machines for packing sausages, not unlike tubes of blood in shape.) Each tube of blood was split into its component parts—red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma—and run through a battery of tests. White blood cells contain DNA, which the project had analyzed, too. When all was said done, U.K. Biobank had assembled one of the largest single genetic data sets ever. It all took a while.

Claudio Sanchez:

Mark Seidenberg is not the first researcher to reach the stunning conclusion that only a third of the nation’s school children read at grade level. The reasons are numerous, but one that Seidenberg cites over and over again is this: The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child’s brain.

Seidenberg is a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his latest book, Language at the Speed of Sight, he points out that the “science of reading” can be a difficult concept for educators to grasp. He says it requires some basic understanding of brain research and the “mechanics” of reading, or what is often referred to as phonics.

I talked with Seidenberg about what it will take to improve reading instruction. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Much more on Mark Seidenberg and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Dan Schulz.

Julian Sanchez:

Back in the 1980s, the late philosopher Robert Nozick wrote an essay asking: “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Happily, the question as Nozick framed it is somewhat less relevant today, as Western intellectuals have increasingly accepted the superiority of someform of market economy to full-blown socialist planning. But a variant form remains: Why do intellectuals seem so disproportionately attracted to “progressive” political views and government-centric means of remedying social ills?

For those of us who tend to favor a relatively small and limited government, and prefer that social problems be addressed by private and voluntary mechanisms, it should be a source of some discomfort that these views find so little favor among some of the most highly educated and intelligent sectors of the population—the “elites” of popular conservative demonology. One simple explanation for this pattern, after all, would be that left wing political views are disproportionately attractive to the highly educated and intelligent because they’re best supported by logic and evidence. Following Aumann’s agreement theorem, this would imply that libertarians should regard the disagreement of large numbers of well-informed people who are at least as intelligent as we are as prima facie evidence that our views are in error, and revise them accordingly.

Andrew Sullivan:

Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet; the campus Title IX sex tribunals where, under the Obama administration, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the absence of a “reasonable doubt” could ruin a young man’s life and future are just a product of a hothouse environment. And I can sometimes get carried away.

The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

Stephanie Riegg Cellini:

As the U.S. Department of Education proposes weakening the Gainful Employment (GE) rules regulating for-profit and vocational education programs, accurate estimates of the earnings outcomes and debt incurred by students in these programs are essential for judging the merits of various policy options.

In a forthcoming paper for the Journal of Human Resources, co-authored with Federal Reserve Board of Governors Senior Economist Nicholas Turner, we generate comprehensive new estimates of labor market outcomes and debt incurred by students in vocational (or career-technical education, “CTE”) certificate programs in the for-profit sector. We compare for-profit students’ outcomes to the outcomes of similar students in similar public sector certificate programs. We further compare the employment and earnings of for-profit students to demographically similar individuals who do not pursue any postsecondary education.

Eric Levitz:

Late last year, congressional Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, which delivered the lion’s share of its benefits to the wealthy and corporations. The GOP did not justify this policy on the grounds that all corporate shareholders and trust-fund hipsters deserved to have their wealth increased. Rather, the party argued that, however one felt about making the rich richer, the tax cuts would ultimately benefit all Americans by increasing economic growth and lowering unemployment.

But what if we could have achieved those objectives, at roughly the same price, by forgoing tax cuts — and wiping out every penny of student debt in the United States, instead?

Alan Borsuk:

“Of the 2.5 million students who dropped out of high school last year, about 1.6 million were firmly set on that trajectory when they were 8 years old.”

I know that the gaps in success that are such a central education problem in America are clear by the time millions of children start kindergarten, not to mention when they are 8 and generally entering third grade.

But that statement, in a report issued several days ago by the Education Commission of the States, hit me with fresh force. The commission, based in Denver, is a nonpartisan organization that serves legislators and policy-makers in just about every state.

Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels:

Abstract: One of the most important findings that has emerged from human behavioral studies involves the environment rather than heredity…

Tim Harford:

“The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card.” That’s the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack’s bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card and scribble some bullet points — with respectable results.

When I heard about Pollack’s notion — he elaborated upon it in a 2016 book — I asked myself: would this work for statistics, too? There are some obvious parallels. In each case, common sense goes a surprisingly long way; in each case, dizzying numbers and impenetrable jargon loom; in each case, there are stubborn technical details that matter; and, in each case, there are people with a sharp incentive to lead us astray.

The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent. Statistical claims fill our newspapers and social media feeds, unfiltered by expert judgment and often designed as a political weapon. We do not necessarily trust the experts — or more precisely, we may have our own distinctive view of who counts as an expert and who does not. 

Dave Zweifel:

The MTI case was a narrow one. Like all public unions, thanks to Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10 MTI has to hold an annual certification election supervised by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to continue representing workers. But Act 10 requires approval of not the majority of those voting, but a majority of all members, whether they vote or not.

During a recent multiday election, the union had asked WERC for a list of members who had voted, but WERC turned down the request, claiming that it might open employees who hadn’t voted to intimidation from the union. MTI filed suit for the list under the state’s open records law and won in Dane County Circuit Court.

The state appealed to the high court, which quickly reversed the lower court’s decision. It shouldn’t, given the current control of the court, have come as a surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the court’s cavalier dismissal of the open records argument, a dismissal that many openness advocates believe could spell huge problems for future records cases. In essence, the court ruled that it is more important to protect union members from the possibility they may be pressured to vote than to uphold the state’s historic openness laws.

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.

Helen Barrett:

All fintech is doing is changing the way in which financial services are delivered. It is not a transformation of the underlying principles of finance — it is focused solely on the operational implementation of it. As one dean put it to me recently, fintech is really just about writing apps. So why, with a handful of exceptions, are business schools great at teaching finance, but dismal at fintech?

According to our anonymised alumni survey, it is because many schools are not teaching it at all. “I would have appreciated courses around technology and finance,” wrote one, wistfully. Some other schools were teaching it, but clearly not well. “We did fintech case studies, but I did not leave the programme with a firm grasp of it,” wrote another.

This matters because fintech is no longer an upstart movement. A 2015 Goldman Sachs report estimated that $4.7tn of financial services revenues was at risk of displacement from fintech groups. As my colleague Jonathan Moules has reported, talented MBA graduates are clamouring to work in fintech — either in start-ups or new “intrapreneurship” jobs created by established banks and professional services firms.

Emma Platoff:

Laura Yeager founded Texas Educators Vote in fall 2015 to spur local educators to practice what they preached. Why, she wondered, were Texas teachers talking about the importance of political participation in class, but not always modeling that behavior themselves?

More than two years later, her civic engagement effort has stirred up a right-wing maelstrom, leading conservative organizations and some powerful elected officials to question whether it’s breaking the law.

Headed up by the influential group Empower Texans, adversaries say the educators’ organization, and others like it, might be using illegal tactics to boost liberal policies. Yeager counters that her group is merely trying to promote voting — and is only drawing backlash because staunch conservatives are worried public education-focused voters will unseat their candidates.

Travis Pillow:

Florida’s newest private school choice program is no ordinary voucher, a new report finds.

The analysis, released this week by EdChoice, found that in the first two years of the Gardiner Scholarship program, roughly four out of ten parents used the scholarships to pay for multiple educational services — not just private school tuition.

The scholarship program is available to children with specific special needs. It has grown to become the nation’s largest education savings account. The accounts allow parents to control the funding the state would spend to educate their child. They can spend the money on a range of education-related expenses, from textbooks and school tuition to tutoring and therapy.

Leonid Bershidsky:

British writer David Goodhart’s “somewhere versus anywhere” framework, pitting those who are left behind by modernity versus globalist cosmopolitans, has worked for many people as an explanation of recent populist successes throughout the Western world. But what if the places in which rooted “somewheres” live explain the populist phenomenon better than any other problems these people face in adapting to what passes for progress these days?

That, in a nutshell, is the idea London School of Economics professor of economic geography Andres Rodriguez-Pose puts forward: in other words, that populist ballot-box successes are a “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” Interpersonal inequality, he argues, isn’t the driving force here. Territorial inequality is.

“Lagging or declining regions voted differently to prosperous ones,” Rodriguez-Pose writes, in the Brexit referendum, the 2016 U.S. and Austrian presidential elections, the 2017 French presidential and German parliamentary elections — as well as, for example, in Thailand’s 2011 election.

Irina Dumitrescu:

Around the year 1116, Fulbert, the canon of Notre-Dame Cathedral, sought a live-in tutor for his gifted niece. The young woman was already well-known for her learning, so Fulbert chose an ostentatiously brilliant philosopher for the job. The man he hired had already challenged some of the best minds of his time, and was currently employed as master of the schools at Notre-Dame. He was a leading light of the Parisian intelligentsia. Given complete authority to teach and punish Héloïse, Abelard seduced her instead.

Jeff Schechtman:

The shrinking role of facts and evidence-based analysis in American public life poses a threat to democracy, to policy making, and to the very notion of civic discourse.

This is the alarming conclusion spelled out in the RAND Corporation’s recently released 300+ page report provocatively titled “Truth Decay.” The co-author of this report, RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh, is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.

The report’s authors compare what’s happening now in the public arena to four other historical periods when truth was under siege: the era of “yellow journalism,” the rise of tabloids and talk radio, the impact of television on news media, and even the advent of so-called New Journalism.

What the authors found, Kavanaugh says, is that disagreements over objective facts have never been so wide and so deep.

Pam Louwagie:

Students in Duluth will no longer automatically get schooled in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the trials of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In an effort to be considerate of all students, the two novels, which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading in the district’s English classes next school year. They will still be available in the schools for optional reading, however.

“The feedback that we’ve received is that it makes many students feel uncomfortable,” said Michael Cary, director of curriculum and instruction for the district. “Conversations about race are an important topic, and we want to make sure we address those conversations in a way that works well for all of our students.”

Cary said the decision, made as a group by district leaders and leaders in Duluth’s secondary schools, came after years of concerns shared by parents, students and community groups. The change was announced to district staff members late last week.

Dan Walters:

From one end of California to the other, hundreds of cities are facing a tsunami of pension costs that officials say is forcing them to reduce vital services and could drive some—perhaps many—into functional insolvency or even bankruptcy.

The system that manages pension plans for the state government and thousands of local governments lost a staggering $100 billion or so in the Great Recession a decade ago and has not recovered. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) is rapidly increasing mandatory contributions into its pension trust fund to make up for those losses, cope with a host of rising expenses and, it would appear, stave off the prospect of its own insolvency.

City managers, facing annual increases in contributions of 15-plus percent, are feeling the squeeze, which a new Stanford University study finds is crowding out “resources needed for public assistance, welfare, recreation and libraries, health, public works, other social services, and in some cases, public safety.”

Ryan Holiday:

There is a trend afoot to conveniently remember the works of authors like Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley as warnings against distant totalitarianism and control. But this only scratches the surface of what these books are about.

Earlier this year a community college student in San Bernardino protested being required to read a Neil Gaiman graphic novel in one of her classes. It was too graphic, apparently. Her father—who does not seem to understand that his daughter is a separate human being (an adult one no less)—told The Los Angeles Times, “If they [had] put a disclaimer on this, we wouldn’t have taken the course.” A mom in Tennessee has complained that the gynecological information in the book in the bestselling nonfiction science book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is too pornographic for her 10th grade son.

While these conservative complaints about the content of books is unfortunately as old as time. We’re also seeing surge in a different type.

A Rutgers student has proposed putting trigger warnings on The Great Gatsby. Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” was banned on many college campuses for promoting rape. Last year, Wellesley students created a petition to remove an art project featuring a lifelike statue of a sleepwalking man in his underwear in the snow because it caused “undue stress.” Controversial speakers (many conservative) have been blocked from speaking at college commencements. Pick up artists—never convicted of any crime—have had their visas revoked due to trending Twitter hashtags.

Public Charters:

In 2010, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (National Alliance) collected data to determine the teachers’ union status of every charter school nationwide. Prior to the release of the 2010 report, the number of unionized charter schools was largely unknown. In 2009-10, the National Alliance reported that roughly 12 percent of charter schools participated in collective bargaining agreements with teachers’ unions. In the years since the 2010 report, union votes at several charter schools in Illinois, Louisiana, and Washington, DC received significant media attention, raising questions about whether a growing number of charter schools were unionizing. To examine whether there has been a growth in unionized charter schools, the National Alliance collected data from the 2016-17 school year. The national data from 2009-10 and 2016-17 are presented in Table 1. The state data from 2009-10 and 2016-17 are presented in Table 2. D

Katia Moskvitch:

Sixteen years ago, on a cold February day at Yale University, a poster caught Gil Kalai’s eye. It advertised a series of lectures by Michel Devoret, a well-known expert on experimental efforts in quantum computing. The talks promised to explore the question “Quantum Computer: Miracle or Mirage?” Kalai expected a vigorous discussion of the pros and cons of quantum computing. Instead, he recalled, “the skeptical direction was a little bit neglected.” He set out to explore that skeptical view himself.

Adam Andrzejewski:

The only thing the bureaucratic resistance hates more than President Trump is the disclosure of their own salaries. It’s a classic case of the bureaucracy protecting the bureaucracy, underscoring the resistance faced by the new administration.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

Clint Smith:

Since the Puritans set up the first public schools in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, local school districts have largely relied on property taxes for funding. In 1973, Demetrio Rodriguez sued the state of Texas, accusing it of violating the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the grounds that his children in the predominantly Mexican American West Side of San Antonio were not receiving adequate funding for their schools. The case advanced to the Supreme Court, which ultimately held that the school-funding mechanisms in Texas were constitutional. In his opinion, Justice Powell stated that the system of school funding in Texas “was not the product of purposeful discrimination against any class, but instead was a responsible attempt to arrive at practical and workable solutions to the educational problems.”

Justice Powell’s opinion, however, seems to under-appreciate the extent to which resource allocation allows students to receive any semblance of a quality education. It also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about how systemic inequality perpetuates itself—it need not exist under the pretense of being purposeful in order to be real.

The federal government has never stepped up in a substantive way establish more equitable funding practices. Lyndon Johnson—who had, as a young man, taught fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in an impoverished school for the children of Mexican immigrants in the Rio Grande—signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law in 1965 as part of his War on Poverty, giving schools some federal funding to reduce the disparities between rich and poor school districts. But the federal government still contributes only 10 percent to the cost of running public schools in the United States, less than its counterparts in most other developed countries in the world. Per the National Center for Education Statistics, 93 percent of education expenditures come from state and local funding. As a result, as disparities in wealth and income continue to expand, so do the disparities in school funding. As The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels has previously pointed out, in the 2014-15 school year the schools in the wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, spent $6,000 more per pupil as compared to the impoverished city of Bridgeport, in the same state.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most K-12 taxpayer supported Districts.

Pam Louwagie:

Students in Duluth will no longer automatically get schooled in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the trials of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In an effort to be considerate of all students, the two novels, which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading in the district’s English classes next school year. They will still be available in the schools for optional reading, however.

“The feedback that we’ve received is that it makes many students feel uncomfortable,” said Michael Cary, director of curriculum and instruction for the district. “Conversations about race are an important topic, and we want to make sure we address those conversations in a way that works well for all of our students.”

Cary said the decision, made as a group by district leaders and leaders in Duluth’s secondary schools, came after years of concerns shared by parents, students and community groups. The change was announced to district staff members late last week.

Farhad Manjoo:

THIS MULTIMEDIA INTERNET has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable. The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia.

Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants that were the hit of the holidays, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality — which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings.

These advances are all about cameras, microphones, your voice, your ears and your eyes.

Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future.

Matthew Ladner:

My guess is that reformers picked the low-hanging fruit of education reform in the early aughts. The introduction of standards and testing in the early days seems to have produced a bump in achievement. Over time however this effect may be fading.

Political Science 101 teaches that organized interests defeat diffuse interests 99 times out of a hundred, so the ability of states to employ a cat o’ nine tails and whip schools into improvement has limits. Dozens of decisions taken daily in the musty basements of State Departments of Education and obscure measures voted on by State Boards of Education can slowly but surely defang and/or subvert state accountability systems.

If there are two things that the organized employee interests of adults working in schools are expert at it is passive resistance and bureaucratic infighting. In my book, much of the reform crowd chose to fight their opponents on ground they did not choose wisely, and upon which they have little chance to prevail. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Mike Petrilli recently and correctly imo noted that the 2017 NAEP would be a pretty definitive test on the efficacy of the Obama year projects- promoting Common Core and teacher evaluation, student discipline reform. Top down directives have a funny way of not working out, even backfiring. Let’s see what happens next.

Zachary Wright:

We must be honest with ourselves. We cannot say out of one side of our mouths that teaching is among our society’s most important professions, and then not ensure that our teachers are effective. We cannot insist that education is a major lever of social justice and equity, and then resist holding our schools accountable for educating our most at-risk youth.

RELAX, I’M NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT TESTS
To be clear, accountability needs to be more than simply a yearly state exam. These one-off exams are vulnerable to many of the arguments hurled against accountability; in addition to not only running the risk of being socially biased, the massive importance placed upon one such exam can incentivize teachers and schools to teach students to pass an exam, rather than master a concept. This risk, however, ought not push us to eliminate accountability, but rather increase and diversify our methods of measuring effectiveness.

In my school, I am held accountable to a variety of measures that do not just include student test performance, but also take into account in-class observations, student surveys, and student growth algorithms that emphasize student growth alongside student proficiency.

Peter Cook:

Over the past few years, a series of troubling scandals have shaken Portlanders’ trust in their public school system.

In 2016, it was revealed that district officials had withheld lab test results showing that most of the city’s public schools had elevated levels of lead in their drinking water. Last year, in-depth investigations by The Oregonian found that the district had helped conceal allegations of sexual misconduct against two teachers – Mitch Whitehurst and Norm Scott – who later went on to assault at least a dozen female students. A subsequent investigation in the Portland Tribune uncovered that Andrew Oshea, a special education teacher who had been placed on administrative leave in 2015 after he was charged with drunk driving and assault, was still on the district’s payroll. In fact, Oshea continued to collect paychecks while serving time in jail for a violating a restraining order filed by his ex-girlfriend.

These scandals make clear that Portland Public Schools has a serious transparency problem. Yet the Portland Association of Teachers is now trying to limit access to public records in the district and they’re using their new collective bargaining agreement to do it.

David Evans:

Here is a selected round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries, with a few findings from high-income countries that I found relevant. This is mostly but not entirely from the “economics of education” literature. If I’m missing recent articles that you’ve found useful, please add them in the comments!

What is education good for?
Education saves lives, but only some of them! “Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives.” But is that mere correlation, or is a causal link? It depends! This review finds no impact on obesity, inconsistent impact on smoking, and “an effect of education on mortality exists in some contexts but not in others, and seems to depend on (i) gender; (ii) the labor market returns to education; (iii) the quality of education; and (iv) whether education affects the quality of individuals’ peers” (Galama, Lleras-Muney, and van Kippersluis).

Mckinsey:

To understand what matters in student achievement, we applied analytics to data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These reports take on a few of the most active debates: Do mindsets matter? If so, to what extent? What teaching practices work best? Does technology help?

Cas Mudde:

Ever since Brexit and Trump took the political establishment by surprise, its representatives have been claiming that we are living in a “post-truth” world, where facts and experts are no longer trusted, and information is dominated by “fake news”. This is an understandable, if self-serving, coping mechanism of liberals and establishment conservatives to deal with their shocking loss of political power. It is also simplistic and self-defeating.

Let’s look at the evidence.

At first sight, recent studies seem to provide a solid basis for the popular assertion that populism and fake news are closely connected, and have therefore been widely cited in the media. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) found that “on Twitter, a network of Trump supporters shares the widest range of junk news and circulates more junk news than all other political audience groups combined”.

Robert Pondisco:

Did you hear the one about a curriculum with fifty years of research that actually demonstrates its effectiveness? There’s a new meta-analysis in the peer-reviewed journal the Review of Educational Research that looks at over five hundred articles, dissertations, and research studies and documents a half-century of “strong positive results” for a curriculum regardless of school, setting, grade, student poverty status, race, and ethnicity, and across subjects and grades.

Ready for the punchline? That curriculum is called “Direct Instruction.”

Hey, wait. Where’s everybody going? I’m telling you, Direct Instruction is the Rodney Dangerfield of education. It gets no respect.

I know what you’re thinking. “Direct Instruction? DISTAR, Corrective Reading and Reading Mastery? Basal programs? Scripted curriculum? That stuff’s been around since the Earth cooled. It’s not just old school, it’s the oldest school. Who cares about ‘DI’ when there’s so much cool, cutting edge, and disruptive stuff going on education? This is the age of ed tech, personalized learning, and competency-based progressions. The future is here and it’s OER, social media integration, virtual reality, and makerspaces. Direct instruction!? You gotta be kidding me. See you at SXSW EDU!”

Ian Johnson:

This might have resulted in no more harm than local officials’ falsifying statistics to meet quotas, except that the state relied on these numbers to calculate taxes on farmers. To meet their taxes, farmers were forced to send any grain they had to the state as if they were producing these insanely high yields. Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring.

Compounding this crisis were equally deluded plans to bolster steel production through the creation of “backyard furnaces”—small coal- or wood-fired kilns that were somehow supposed to create steel out of iron ore. Unable to produce real steel, local party officials ordered farmers to melt down their agricultural implements to satisfy Mao’s national targets. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in.

When, in 1959, Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies. Enveloped by an atmosphere of terror, officials returned to China’s provinces to double down on Mao’s policies. Tens of millions died.

No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate. The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers.

Christopher Yaluma, Adam Tyner, Ph.D., Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. and Chester E. Finn, Jr. :

Schools have long failed to cultivate the innate talents of many of their young people, particularly high-ability girls and boys from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. This failure harms the economy, widens income gaps, arrests upward mobility, and exacerbates civic decay and political division.

To address these issues, researchers Christopher Yaluma and Adam Tyner examined the extent to which access to and participation in gifted programs vary for different groups of students nationally and in each state, particularly in high-poverty schools. Here’s what they found:

Related:

TAG Complaint

English 10

Small Learning Communities

Jordan Weissmann:

On paper, Denmark looks like a paradise for working mothers. There’s the ample paid leave. Danish families are entitled to 52 weeks of it after the birth of a child, meaning parents have a year to care for their new baby without having to worry about their job or their ability to pay rent. Once a mom decides to go back to work, there’s generously subsidized public day care—the government picks up at least three-quarters of the tab—to help them juggle a job and kids. More than 90 percent of children younger than 6 end up enrolled.

Here in America, by comparison, mothers get a paltry 12 weeks of unpaid time off to bond with their infant, and day care can cost more than college. It’s enough to give you an acute case of Scandi envy. Remember when Bernie Sanders said America could stand to be more like Denmark? Their family-friendly approach to government was a big reason why.

Bryan Caplan:

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

How, you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions.

Karen Herzog:

Another faculty backlash is brewing against University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross because Republican lawmakers got a heads-up about his far-reaching plans to restructure the two-year colleges while faculty, staff and students were kept in the dark.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported last fall that Cross wanted to cluster two-year colleges with four-year campuses by region as part of a plan to stem rapid enrollment declines on the UW’s two-year campuses. The restructuring is the biggest shift for the UW System since its creation by the Legislature in 1971.

Harper Lanier:

A substantial number of young Americans hold negative views towards the term “capitalism.” As a millennial, this is troubling. This negative attitude is pervasive among our cohort and is frequently referenced in both in-person discussions and on social media. Indeed, there have been plenty of references to “late stage capitalism” and the ever-sardonic joke that millennials will not be able to afford to buy houses in the future because of our affinity for avocado toast. A 2016 study conducted by researchers at Harvard University found that 51 percent of 18 to 29 year olds reject the term “capitalism.” A similar 2016 Gallup poll showed that millennials are the only age group to view capitalism more negatively than socialism. So, what is the reason for this animosity?

Millennials have a more pessimistic perception about their current and future financial situations than older generations have about their own. In 2013, the Brookings Institution published a report whose authors stated that 58 percent of millennials believe they are worse off than their parents. For comparison, 51 percent of Generation X-ers perceive themselves to be worse off than their parents and 45 percent of Baby Boomers believe that they are worse off. In 2011, researchers at the Pew Research Center published a study indicating that the more affluent and Republican members of the public are twice as likely to hold a favorable view of capitalism. Researchers noted in another Pew study that “faith in capitalism is another victim of the Great Recession.” It is reasonable to conclude that those who are pessimistic and have negative financial perceptions have less faith in their own economic system.

BBC:

A 500-year-old secret code used in letters between one of Spain’s most famous monarchs and a military commander has been cracked.

Ferdinand of Aragon’s letters have tantalised historians for centuries.

Constructed using more than 200 special characters, they were deciphered by the country’s intelligence agency.

He was behind the final recapture – Reconquista – of Spain from the Moors in 1492 and Columbus’s journeys to the Americas.

The letters between Ferdinand and Gonzalo de Córdoba include instructions on strategy during military campaigns in Italy in the early 16th Century. They were written using secret code in case they fell into enemy hands.

Karen Rivedal:

The high school has raised $1.3 million in donations, staff said, including $1 million from one East High graduate who wants to remain anonymous, and $300,000 from a group of alumni. The district would commit up to $1.5 million in public funds, or a 55 percent cost share, whichever is less.

Barry said the district’s portion of the project could be found through careful budgeting over three fiscal years.

Maintenance referendem spending issues at East High School became the subject of a potential audit a few years ago.

Eillie Anzilotti:

In a recent paper co-authored with Harvard Kennedy School PhD candidate Lauren Russell, Daniel Shoag, a Kennedy School and Case Western Reserve professor, found “a significant relationship between land-use restrictions and fertility rates across all measures and geographies.” Shoag and Russell determined the relative restrictiveness of a city’s land-use policies by the number of cases brought to court around housing issues; they crossed that data with listings like the Wharton Residential Land Use Index to arrive at a complete picture of a city’s zoning codes and housing stock. When overlayed with fertility data from the CDC, they found that the cities and towns that actively stifle or restrict development are seeing fertility rates, especially among young women, plummet.

The Economist:

UNIVERSITY used to be seen as a luxury reserved for elites. But attitudes towards higher education changed after the second world war, and enrolment drastically expanded. Governments today have come to rely on higher spending on education to boost economic growth.

Katrina Onstad:

For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Hinton hovered at the edges of artificial intelligence research, an outsider clinging to a simple proposition: that computers could think like humans do—using intuition rather than rules. The idea had taken root in Hinton as a teenager when a friend described how a hologram works: innumerable beams of light bouncing off an object are recorded, and then those many representations are scattered over a huge database. Hinton, who comes from a somewhat eccentric, generations-deep family of overachieving scientists, immediately understood that the human brain worked like that, too—information in our brains is spread across a vast network of cells, linked by an endless map of neurons, firing and connecting and transmitting along a billion paths. He wondered: could a computer behave the same way?

The answer, according to the academic mainstream, was a deafening no. Computers learned best by rules and logic, they said. And besides, Hinton’s notion, called neural networks—which later became the groundwork for “deep learning” or “machine learning”—had already been disproven. In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective—to recognize images. The goal was to show it a picture of an apple, and it would, at least in theory, spit out “apple.” The Perceptron ran on an IBM mainframe, and it was ugly. A riot of criss-crossing silver wires, it looked like someone had glued the guts of a furnace filter to a fridge door. Still, the device sparked some serious sci-fi hyperbole. In 1958, the New York Times published a prediction that it would be the first device to think like the human brain. “[The Perceptron] will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”

Robert Weissberg:

The gist of Professor Caplan’s case is that there is way too much education, students waste hundreds of hours and millions of government-supplied dollars learning material that adds nothing of productive value or personal enrichment. Yes, high schools and colleges may occasionally produce a genius who invents Microsoft Word, but such accomplishments are exceedingly rare and cannot justify society’s massive investment in schooling. Learning history, for example, is only valuable for future history teachers, and how many history courses enrollees will pursue that vocation? Nor does the college experience broaden student cultural horizons. Most students, Caplan claims, are bored by “high culture” and even those who ace English Literature quickly forget everything.

Is It Just ‘Signaling?

Wastefulness understood, why do millions embrace the “more education” and “college-for-all” mantras? Is everybody delusional regarding the alleged financial payoff of a high school diploma or a college BA? Caplan explains this oddity with the concept of “signaling.” That is, a student’s educational record tells a potential employer a great deal about a person’s intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, so students will invest prodigious (or minimal) effort to demonstrate worthiness largely independent of what is substantively acquired in the classroom.

Alex Baumhardt and Emily Hanford:

At the age of 21, Robyn Young was in and out of jobs, living on friends’ couches, and struggling to take care of her daughter.

“I recognized that education was a way out,” she says.

Young enrolled in college, but she couldn’t keep up with the child care bill. So she dropped out.

According to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), the number of single mothers in college more than doubled between 2000 and 2012, to nearly 2.1 million students.

“There are more single mothers than there used to be,” says Barbara Gault, vice president and executive director at IWPR. “Another reason is that for-profit colleges have aggressively recruited single mothers to attend their programs.”

Only 28 percent of single mothers who start college complete degrees, and there has been no systematic effort to address the obstacles they face. The Trump administration wants to cut a federal aid program that provides money for campus-based child care programs, the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program (CCAMPIS).

Michael Wayland:

The UAW’s cornerstone principle of solidarity among its membership is under growing pressure as a federal corruption investigation widens and more details emerge about the luxuries purchased with millions of dollars intended to train workers.

Three rank-and-file members sued the union in January, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars for what they claim was collusion with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Separately, former UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell, who oversaw 2015 contract negotiations, became implicated in the scandal.

The latest revelations come with Monica Morgan, the widow of former UAW Vice President General Holiefield, expected to plead guilty this week to reduced charges in Detroit federal court. That could allow authorities to move forward with actions against more players in the $4.5 million scheme.

Jewell, who abruptly retired at the end of last year, has not been formally named or charged with any crimes.

A plea deal released Jan. 22 between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and former FCA US labor relations chief Alphons Iacobelli alludes to Jewell but does not name him directly. It also identifies a charity run by Jewell as one of several to receive restricted funds.

Traditional K-12 teacher union “Collective Bargaining Agreements” are often based on the UAW model.

Colleen Flaherty:

A Kenyon College professor of drama called off her original play after some on campus complained about how it portrayed Latinos.
Wendy MacLeod, a Kenyon alum and its James Michael Playwright-in-Residence, released her script for The Good Samaritan last month with a planned April premiere. The play is inspired by a true story in which a group of Guatemalan minors were forced to work on an Ohio egg farm; three of their captors were convicted and a fourth was indicted last year. MacLeod’s play imagines what might happen if one of the youth escaped to a nearby liberal arts college and encountered a group of less-than-culturally-sensitive white undergraduates.

Matthew Feeney:

A passenger on a bus at Fort Lauderdale’s Greyhound station recently recorded disturbing footage of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers walking up the bus’ aisle and asking for proof of citizenship. Although nothing new, it’s sad to see American law enforcement conducting the kind of “Papers Please” stops that many Americans usually associate with foreign authoritarian governments. Thanks to advances in facial recognition technology, CBP and other law enforcement agencies will soon not have to ask us for identification. Our faces will be our papers.

Lindsey Rupp, Chloe Whiteaker, Matt Townsend and Kim Bhasin:

The apparel industry has a big problem. At a time when the economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are rebounding and consumers are eager to buy, Americans are spending less and less on clothing.
 
 The woes of retailers are often blamed on Amazon.com Inc. and its vise grip on e-commerce shoppers. Consumers glued to their phones would rather browse online instead of venturing out to their local malls, and that’s crushed sales and hastened the bankruptcies of brick-and-mortar stalwarts from American Apparel to Wet Seal.
 
 But that’s not the whole story. The apparel industry seems to have no solution to the dwindling dollars Americans devote to their closets. Many upstarts promising to revolutionize the industry drift away with barely a whimper. Who needs fashion these days when you can express yourself through social media? Why buy that pricey new dress when you could fund a weekend getaway instead?
 
 Apparel has simply lost its appeal. And there doesn’t seem to be a savior in sight. As a result, more and more apparel companies—from big-name department stores to trendy online startups—are folding.

Dominic Geen:

I have been reading books on writing style. My teachers at Beechwood Park Preparatory School for Boys taught me to avoid writing in the first person whenever possible, so up with that opener one shall not put, though of course, nowadays only the Queen uses the Nob’s Pronoun. Begin again.

This reader has been reading books on writing style. But that is a tautology: all readers read, and all writing has style, good or bad. Worse, I have blundered into the bog of elegant variation. Henry Fowler, coining elegant variation in The King’s English (1906), filed it under “Airs and Graces,” as a kind of unmanly vice. Beechwood Park Preparatory School for Boys was a hotbed of unmanly vices, but inelegant variation was not one of them. I was taught that elegant variety was a mark of learning and taste, and a necessary technique for avoiding confusion. Begin again, again.

Jeni Tennison:

Earlier in the year I went to an OECD workshop on enhanced access to data. The workshop covered four general themes: open data, data sharing communities, data marketplaces and data portability. The discussion on the implications of data portability were particularly interesting.

Data portability is a new right under the EU-level General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) due to come into force in May 2018 and a version of which will be written into UK law through the Data Protection Bill currently going through parliament.

The data portability right is a version of the existing data access right (which gives you the right to get hold of data about you held by an organisation). It is both more powerful, in that it gives you the right to have that data given to you or a third party of your choice in a commonly used machine readable format, and has a narrower scope in that it doesn’t apply to everything the organisation captures about you. It only applies to data captured automatically, and when it is either explicitly provided by you (eg when you fill in a form on a website) or generated as part of your activity (eg the records of your bank transactions). It does not apply to data that is inferred about you based on this data (eg if they’ve guessed that you’re gay or pregnant) or that they’ve got about you from other sources (eg your credit rating).

Heather Long:

It was another crazy news week, so it’s understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget.

That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.

Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to a documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.

Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.

Yohan John:

How long has randomness been an element in the periodic table of ideas? For ancient people, chance was wrapped up with the concepts of fate and divine will. “Divination” comes from the Latin for “to be inspired by a god”. For the Romans, chance or luck was personified by the goddess Fortuna. To tell a person’s fortune was to determine the hidden intentions of Lady Luck. The ancient Chinese used yarrow stalks, coins, and dice when consulting the 4000-year-old I Ching, or Book of Changes. Divination either led to, or co-evolved with, games of chance. The earliest known board game is Senet, which was played by ancient Egyptians as early in the 30th century BCE. The game seems to have involved casting two-sided tokens. A 5000 year old backgammon set,complete with dice, was excavated at a site in Iran. Dice from 2000 BCE have also been found at sites that were part of the Indus Valley civilization [1].

Ancient peoples seem to have attached great meaning to chance events — even in the context of games. Confronted with the sheer unpredictability of nature, ancient people populated their pantheons with gods and demons who were capricious in the extreme. They seem to have believed that participating in chance events of their own invention could give them a glimpse into the otherwise inscrutable ways of divine beings [1]. Or perhaps they reasoned that they could become like gods through imitation of their ludicrous whims. The word “ludicrous”, incidentally, derives from the Latin root ludus,which means “game” or “play”. At some point in the past few hundred years,the word came to mean “ridiculous” — perhaps the Enlightenment made Europeans look unfavorably upon frivolity and play. There are streams within Hinduism, however, that preserve an echo of the ancient worldview — in some scriptures the universe is described as as lila, or divine play. The gods, according to this view, engage in creation and destruction for fun or sport. In India the term lila did not pick up any connotations of ridiculousness: it is a well-known theological concept, as well as a popular name given to girls.

Eric Fish:

When 22-year-old Langou Lian looks back at her decision to study in the United States, one influence sticks out: Disney Channel movie High School Musical.

“I hated Chinese education,” Lian says, the high-pressure, test-centred schooling in her native Sichuan province. High School Musical presented an alternative: a carefree atmosphere where even adolescent students are independent, free to speak their mind and have a palette of social activities to choose from.

But after she arrived in the US, that rosy image became complicated.

“The one word that describes my impression of America before coming is ‘freedom’,” says Lian, who currently studies at the University of California, Irvine. “[But] after I studied here for a while, I started to kind of understand American society. My impression went from good to bad.”

And that had a knock-on effect, on her as it had on others. “A lot of [Chinese] students become more patriotic,” Lian says.

Liz Mineo:

Understanding geography is fundamental to understanding the world, says Ryan Enos, associate professor of government and a specialist in American politics. People often classify places or neighborhoods simply by who lives in them, he says, and build their allegiances by asking, “Are they one of us?”

In his new book “The Space Between Us,” Enos discusses the strong influence of social geography on psychology, behavior, and politics, and explains how an “us versus them” mentality can be tightly connected to a “here versus there” paradigm of place. The Gazette interviewed Enos, a specialist on race and ethnic politics, about his book and talked about what people might do to overcome the power of geography on the mind in order to increase inclusion in American cities, many of which are increasingly segregated through gentrification.

Molly Beck:

The polling also showed 60 percent of public sector employees favor returning to collective bargaining, compared with only 39 percent in the private sector. Nearly 70 percent of union members favor bargaining, while only 38 percent of non-union members support it. Those polled in the city of Milwaukee and Madison media markets favor collective bargaining while the rest of the state, to different degrees, do not, Franklin said.

Timing the message
“(Focusing on Act 10) would be a good primary tactic but for the general election, I don’t think so,” said Joe Heim, a longtime political science professor at UW-La Crosse. “By the general election, the union people and anybody who opposes Act 10 would know exactly where they are going. If you are trying to get some crossover supporters who generally think Act 10 was not a bad idea, but don’t necessarily like Walker, reminding them of that time is not a good idea.”

Republicans have touted how the law saved state and local governments billions of dollars, though that’s based mostly on provisions of the law separate from bargaining that required public employees to contribute to pension and health insurance premiums. Democrats say it has contributed to a statewide teacher shortage, though school districts are facing shortages across the country.

“You don’t need to remind anyone of it,” Heim said. “Time to move on and I would hope the Democrats are smart enough to look forward.”

A spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin did not respond to a request for comment on whether the issue will be prominent in the 2018 campaign.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Walker’s campaign cited Act 10 as the catalyst for a “Wisconsin comeback” that resulted in $5 billion in savings to local governments.

“The extreme Democrat candidates running in the wide-open field for governor have a choice: raise taxes to pay for undoing the governor’s reforms, or accept that he fixed the financial crisis their party created,” spokesman Brian Reisinger said.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Rebecca Boyle:

The story of the European settlement of North America usually features a few main characters: red-headed Norsemen who sailed across an icy sea to set up temporary outposts, Spanish conquistadors, white-collared English separatists, French trappers, and Dutch colonists. Now a team of Greek scholars proposes another—and much earlier—wave of European migration: the Hellenistic Greeks, in triremes powered by sail and oar in the first century CE, nearly a millennium before the Vikings.

These ancient Greeks regularly visited what is now Newfoundland, the study’s authors say. They set up colonies that lasted centuries, and they mined gold. They made recurrent trips every 30 years. Some travelers would return home after only a brief stay, but for others the voyages were one way—they came to know the North Atlantic, not the warm Aegean, as their home waters.

To be clear, there is no firm evidence of the ancient Greeks’ purported voyages. There are no known physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America, nor are there first-hand descriptions of such journeys in anything but one account from antiquity. The idea is based entirely on a new examination of a dialogue written by the influential Roman author Plutarch, who lived from 46 to 119 CE.

“Our intention is to prove, with modern science, that it was possible for this trip to be made,” Ioannis Liritzis, an archaeologist at the University of the Aegean who proposed that the ancient journeys took place, wrote in an email. Liritzis presents his argument in a new paper, co-authored with astronomer Panagiota Preka-Papadema, philosopher Konstantinos Kalachanis, meteorologist Chris G. Tzanis, and information technology consultant Panagiotis Antonopoulos.

Olga Mecking:

I’d only been living in Amsterdam for a year when we met my husband’s friends in one of the many cafes and bars in the city’s famous Vondelpark.

We chose our seats and waited, but the waiter was nowhere to be seen. When he finally materialised, seemingly out of nowhere, he didn’t ask ‘What would you like to order’, or ‘What can I get you?’. He said ‘What do you want?’. Maybe it was the fact that he’d said it in English, or maybe he was just having a bad day, but I was shocked nonetheless.

My Dutch teacher later explained that the Dutch are very direct – and nowhere are they so direct as they are in Amsterdam.

James Millward:

As multiple news outlets have reported, he has also deployed high-tech tools in the service of creating a better police state. Uighurs’ DNA is collected during state-run medical checkups. Local authorities now install a GPS tracking system in all vehicles. Government spy apps must be loaded on mobile phones. All communication software is banned except WeChat, which grants the police access to users’ calls, texts and other shared content. When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code.

This digitized surveillance is a modern take on conventional controls reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s. Some Uighurs report getting a knock on their door from security agents soon after receiving a call from overseas. Last autumn one Uighur told me that following several such intimidating visits over the summer, his elderly parents had texted him, “The phone screen is bad for our old eyes, so we’re not using it anymore.” He had not heard from them since.

Xinjiang authorities have recently enforced a spate of regulations against Uighur customs, including some that confound common sense. A law now bans face coverings — but also “abnormal” beards. A Uighur village party chief was demoted for not smoking, on grounds that this failing displayed an insufficient “commitment to secularization.” Officials in the city of Kashgar, in southwest Xinjiang, recently jailed several prominent Uighur businessmen for not praying enough at a funeral — a sign of “extremism,” they claimed.

Any such violation, or simply being a Uighur artist or wealthy businessman, can lead to indefinite detention in what the government euphemistically calls “political training centers” — a revival of punitive Maoist re-education camps — secured by high walls, razor wire, floodlights and guard towers. A revered Uighur Islamic scholar is said to have died in one of those centers this week.

Peter Jamison, Fenit Nirappil:

The scandal is reverberating far beyond the District, as a busy cottage industry of education policy analysts takes stock of whether the inflated graduation rates point to basic flaws in reforms the city has exported to other struggling school districts.

Jack Jennings, founder of the Center on Education Policy and former general counsel for the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, said school leaders across the country are paying “a great deal of attention” to what is happening in the District — especially because high graduation rates have been so heavily emphasized by reformers as a measure of success.

Michael Johnson
:

Here are some indicators on how the black community has influenced the Greater Madison region and Wisconsin for more than 175 years. Attached is a timeline created by the Cap Times, Madison 365, myself and leaders from the African-American community.

One additional note: this is not a list of every black Madisonian who has done or is doing great things. There are far too many people doing great work than we could possibly recognize. This is simply our best attempt to outline the rich history of our community, the important moments, the firsts and the pioneers for those who might not know these important stories.

Andy Ngo:

One of the professors at the center of the 2015 Yale Halloween costume controversy, who publicly accused the former governor of Vermont and Democratic leader, Howard Dean of dishonesty for his remarks at a free speech panel held at an Ohio college last year, is finding support among other prominent academics.

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociology professor at Yale University, slammed the former Democratic National Committee Chair for spreading “off-base and reckless” misinformation about him and his wife at the “Free speech, Civil Discourse” conference at Kenyon College in a series of tweets.

David Matthews:

A Dutch university has scrapped plans to offer full degrees on a new campus in China following a row in the Netherlands about academic freedom and high costs.

The University of Groningen said on 29 January that it had decided not to seek approval from the Dutch minister of education, culture and science as there was “insufficient support” from the university council.

In 2015, the university announced plans to create a joint campus in Yantai, a port city south-east of Beijing, with China Agricultural University, offering degrees at undergraduate, master’s and PhD level. They hoped to reach 3,000 students within three years of opening.

On its website, Groningen says that a “large part” of the new campus has “already been developed”.

Josh Verges:

A St. Paul Public Schools teacher strike sidelining more than 4,000 employees and some 34,800 students could be less than two weeks away.

The St. Paul Federation of Teachers said all three bargaining units voting Wednesday easily authorized their leadership to strike. That includes 85 percent of voting teachers, 90 percent of educational assistants and 82 percent of school and community service professionals.

The union said it would give notice of intent to strike Thursday, starting a 10-day cooling off period before a strike can begin. They’re considering walking off the job as early as Feb. 13.

Sandor Farkas:

A conservative group at Rutgers University has launched a campaign to help students request a refund for the semesterly fee they are forced to pay towards a liberal-leaning publication.

Rutgers’ left-leaning student newspaper The Daily Targum is a private corporation, but the majority of its funding comes from a seemingly mandatory student fee that the Rutgers Conservative Union is now combating.

“The majority of students who gave us a negative reaction revealed to us that they ‘worked for The Targum.’”

Since 1980, The Targum has existed independently of Rutgers, though the public school still collects $11.25 from each student on their semesterly bill, which it then turns over to the private newspaper.

Considering Rutgers has roughly 49,000 students, The Targum collects an estimated $1 million every year, according to the Rutgers Conservative Union.

Philip Ball:

There is now talk of impending “quantum supremacy”: the moment when a quantum computer can carry out a task beyond the means of today’s best classical supercomputers. That might sound absurd when you compare the bare numbers: 50 qubits versus the billions of classical bits in your laptop. But the whole point of quantum computing is that a quantum bit counts for much, much more than a classical bit. Fifty qubits has long been considered the approximate number at which quantum computing becomes capable of calculations that would take an unfeasibly long time classically. Midway through 2017, researchers at Google announced that they hoped to have demonstrated quantum supremacy by the end of the year. (When pressed for an update, a spokesperson recently said that “we hope to announce results as soon as we can, but we’re going through all the detailed work to ensure we have a solid result before we announce.”)

It would be tempting to conclude from all this that the basic problems are solved in principle and the path to a future of ubiquitous quantum computing is now just a matter of engineering. But that would be a mistake. The fundamental physics of quantum computing is far from solved and can’t be readily disentangled from its implementation.

Data Science @ Berkeley :

The data from speeches can be used to compare more than just overall values like reading level. For example, it’s easy to predict that the economy will come up in a State of the Union address. But data shows that presidents tend to talk about taxes more than jobs, and jobs more than banks. Also, among presidents since Wilson, Harry Truman talked about the economy the most — 2.9 percent of his speech was made up of words like “business,” “debt,” and “dollar.”

Overall, education isn’t talked about as frequently. Of the words listed, President Roosevelt only said “education” once, and Wilson mentioned “schools” just one time as well.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20k per student.

Google Youtube:

YouTube has always allowed people to report content they believe violates our Community Guidelines and we often hear questions about what happens to a video after you’ve flagged it. When a flag is received, the reported content is always reviewed by YouTube before being removed. We have internal teams from around the world who carefully evaluate reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and these teams remove content that violates our policies or are careful to leave content up if it hasn’t crossed the line.

Brian Gallagher:

Last week, for the first time in recent memory, a news story in this troubling period had me, a bachelor of arts in philosophy, sitting up straight in stunned delight. Johns Hopkins University was gifted $75 million to expand its philosophy department to near-twice its size—more professors (13 to 22 over a decade) and postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, as well more undergraduate courses. It’s apparently the largest donation any philosophy department has ever received, and for Johns Hopkins, it’s the largest gift the university has ever received for one of its humanities departments.

The giftee isn’t remaining anonymous; the philosophy department, which gave birth to American pragmatism in the late 19th century, will be named after the star investor, and former Johns Hopkins philosophy graduate student, William H. “Bill” Miller III, who you may remember making a bullish-on-banks blunder as “Bruce” Miller in The Big Short. Miller attributes “much” of his success—beating the Standard & Poor’s 500 for 15 consecutive years, from 1991 to 2005—to the “analytical training and habits of mind” his philosophical study at Johns Hopkins inculcated. The way he sees it, more students should have the chance for that intellectual stimulation. Miller agrees with the president of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald J. Daniels, when he says, “Philosophy matters…The contemporary challenges of the genomics revolution, the rise of artificial intelligence, the growth in income inequality, social and political fragmentation, and our capacity for devastating war all invite philosophical perspective.”

Robert Pondisco:

A blog post by Kate Walsh, the longtime leader of the National Council on Teacher Quality, asks if the education reform movement has “lost its way.” She’s overtired of conferences where reformers “plead for forgiveness for our narrow-minded approach” and agree to “exchange our convictions for anything that will suggest just how broad-minded we now are—as long as we de-emphasize academic goals.” If we expand the scope of reform efforts “to include the social, economic, racial, and political contexts of students’ lives, we’ll surely be more successful,” she writes, taking care not to be dismissive of those goals, but noting how “their collective impact leaves me limp and rudderless, rather than inspired. This job was hard enough.”