Marc Sternberg:

On Thursday, a million New York City children will return to school. Educators have long been concerned about a “summer slide” — the learning loss that often occurs when students are out of school for two months. It’s a serious problem. But it’s not just students who can slide backward during these months. Facing political and budgetary pressures, an entire school system can slide without strong leadership. That’s now happening in New York.

In July, two weeks after the State Legislature reauthorized mayoral control of the public school system, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration quietly announced a policy reversal: In the coming year, schools will once again be forced to hire teachers that no other school has wanted to hire. As a former principal of a high school in the Bronx, I find it hard to imagine receiving worse news.

The new policy concerns the approximately 800 teachers in the city’s Absent Teacher Reserve pool, a remnant of a teacher-placement system based on seniority, not what’s best for schools or children. These are teachers who, for whatever reason, have not gotten a job in any of the city’s 1,700 schools, sometimes for many years. The city is in this position because the union contract makes dismissing teachers a virtual impossibility. A result is that taxpayers spend more than $150 million a year to pay them not to teach. Given the alternative, though, it’s money well spent.

Joseph Turrow, Michael Hennessy and Nora Draper:

New Annenberg survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans give out information about themselves as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not believe that ‘data for discounts’ is a square deal.

The findings also suggest, in contrast to other academics’ claims, that Americans’ willingness to provide personal information to marketers cannot be explained by the public’s poor knowledge of the ins and outs of digital commerce. In fact, people who know more about ways marketers can use their personal information are more likely rather than less likely to accept discounts in exchange for data when presented with a real-life scenario.

Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.

By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also—over time—for the institution of consumer commerce.
Marketers justify their data-collection practices with the notion of tradeoffs, depicting an informed public that understands the opportunities and costs of giving up its data and makes the positive decision to do so. A 2014 Yahoo report, for example, concluded that online Americans “demonstrate a willingness to share information, as more consumers begin to recognize the value and self-benefit of allowing advertisers to use their data in the right way.”1 This image of a powerful consumer has become a way to claim to policymakers and the media that Americans accept widespread tracking of their backgrounds, behaviors, and lifestyles across devices, even though surveys repeatedly show they object to these activities.

Our study challenges the assertion that tradeoffs explains what most Americans are doing. With the help of Princeton Survey Research Associates International, we conducted a representative national cell phone and wireline phone survey of 1,506 Americans age 18 and older who use the internet or email “at least occasionally.” We presented them with everyday circumstances where marketers collect people’s data, phrasing the situations as tradeoffs— and learned that very many feel those tradeoffs are unfair.

Maximillian Alvarez:

WHAT CAME FIRST,” in the immortal words of Nick Hornby, “the music or the misery?” During one of the most highly anticipated panels at the biggest academic conference of the year in my field, I’m sitting on the floor with a bunch of other eager dopes who didn’t show up in time to snag a seat. Everyone’s still in high spirits, though. One of the hottest names in “theory” today is running the panel and all the papers sound fascinating, in an obsessive hobbyist sort of way—it all promises to be a thunderous nerdgasm.

Then, halfway through the panel, it hits me: this is awful. The redeeming insights are just so few and far between, stranded between deserts of lame, forced conference humor and straightforward, even banal points dressed up in comically unnecessary jargon. And everyone in the audience keeps nodding. I’m annoyed first, then just overwhelmingly sad. Being overwhelmingly sad is, to be fair, a regular part of being an academic, and oftentimes it can feel like there’s just something about the profession that attracts overwhelmingly sad people. But, for the first time, I start to wonder if it’s not just me. In my head, all I can hear is Hornby by way of John Cusack . . . Did I join academia because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I joined academia?

Kristin Hoppa

Burnett said this is the first time a baby has been relinquished at a Waco fire station in his tenure. He said other firefighters could not remember another infant left at a Waco fire station. But the firefighters’ focus was on the health and well-being of the child and mother.

‘One of our youngest’
“We talked with her and made sure that she didn’t need medical attention either, but she said she was fine,” Burnett said. “In our job, it is our mission to take care of the oldest citizen down to the youngest, so we knew we would definitely be taking care of one of our youngest that night.”

Waco Fire Chief Bobby Tatum said the woman told firefighters that she did not know she was pregnant before the child’s birth. She said she had other children at home and brought a diaper bag with supplies for the baby, but she believed she could not properly care for the infant.

“I’ve been told this is the first child who has been taken to a fire station under the Baby Moses law (in Waco),” Tatum said. “The mom left minimal information, but we are very grateful that she left the baby at a safe place, because you always hear about situations about a baby being left in a Dumpster or in a dangerous situation.”

When the woman left the fire station, police and emergency medical professionals were called to retrieve the child. The baby was taken to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center for medical evaluation.

The law
Texas became the first state to enact safe haven laws in 1999, allowing a parent to bring an infant 60 days old or younger to a designated safe place, including a hospital, freestanding emergency medical care facility, fire station, or emergency medical services station. Officials will take temporary custody of the child and the parent’s identity will remain confidential, Texas Department of Family and Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins said.

sSuzy Hansen:

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely.

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldn’t keep Latin American countries straight), Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq – nope.

I knew “Saddam Hussein”, which had the same evil resonance as “communism”. I remember the movie Wag the Dog, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign “terrorists” to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal – which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesn’t matter which one they choose.

Andrew Granato:

I grew up attending public schools in Iowa and Ohio until increasing frustration with my schooling led my family and me to reply to a flier about boarding schools. Up until then, I believed boarding schools only existed in England; I had never heard of “Exeter” or “Andover.” I applied to four schools and chose to attend the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, despite knowing essentially nothing about the place, because it gave me full need-based aid.

I do not come from a low-income family; for most of my childhood, my family’s income was close to that of the median American household, which was $56,516 last year. However, at Middlesex, I had one of the lowest family incomes in the entire school: More than 70 percent of the student body did not receive any need-based aid at a school that cost over $50,000 a year for boarding students and over $40,000 a year for day students.

Many students came from families with storied histories. Many others, while not necessarily the kids of CEOs, had parents who were financiers, doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. In my senior speech to the school  —  part critique and part love letter  —  I talked about the culture clash between my upbringing in the Midwest and my years at an institution that has long been part of the Northeast’s WASP culture.

Noah Smith:

In the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” a middle-aged businessman has one word of life advice for our hero: “plastics.” He meant that the younger man should try to get rich by going into the booming plastics industry. In the 1960s, plastics and other technology industries of the day seemed like a gold rush. But they weren’t the first or the last.

From whale oil and the actual California gold rush in the 1800s, to the dot-com boom and the finance mania in recent decades, Americans have always been entranced by the idea of an industry where everyone can get rich quick. Like Bill Gates dropping out of college to start Microsoft Corp., millions of young entrepreneurs over the centuries have picked up and moved to where they saw opportunity.

Now, though, the U.S. economy looks like it might have run out of gold rushes. Overall, the economy is doing pretty well — unemployment is low, labor force participation is recovering, wages have risen and stock markets are at record highs. But if you’re a young, energetic American entrepreneur or talented worker looking to strike it rich, where do you go in 2017? The Wall Street and real estate booms of the 2000s are now ancient history. What’s left?

Shannon Gilchrist

Fake addresses, leased apartments that go unused, long-distance commutes to drop kids off at school bus stops: Some parents go to great lengths to enroll their children in a desirable school district, or to keep them there once they have to move away.

Often, those are the same school districts that work hard to root out people they suspect of being outsiders.

In April, lots of Bexley residents chimed in over social media when an outraged mother posted that the Bexley school district hired a private investigator to tail her for months to see if she and her young son actually live at her mother’s house. She said she works multiple jobs and isn’t at home much.

In the Facebook post that has since been removed, she said her son had been kicked out of school with only five weeks left in the year, and that she was talking to a lawyer. Some commenters were appalled that the school would be so unwelcoming to kick out any child; some called the investigation process “creepy”; but others were dubious about her claim that she lives there and said the district had the right to do it.

Bill Bonney:. Video.

Andrew Liptak:

A couple of years ago, a small publisher called Kroncker Wallis issued a handsome, minimalist take on Isaac Newton’s Principia. Now, the publisher is embarking on its next project: Euclid’s Elements.

The publisher is using Kickstarter to fund this new edition. Euclid’s Elements is a mathematical text written by Greek mathematician Euclid around 300 BCE and has been called one of the most influential textbooks ever produced. The treatise contains 13 separate books, covering everything from plane geometry, the Pythagorean theorem, golden ratio, prime numbers, and quite a bit more. The books helped to influence scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton. In 1847, an English mathematician named Oliver Byrne re-wrote the first six books of Euclid’s Elements, taking its concepts and illustrating them.

The publisher explains that this is an attempt to complete Byrne’s work. It is working with a group of mathematicians and academics to illustrate all thirteen books in the style of Byrne’s original book in a beautiful, minimalist edition.

Sarah Buchter:

t can read your mind

If you’re interviewing for a graduate position with an investment bank for 2017 and you haven’t heard of HireVue, wake up. HireVue is the new, new thing. Goldman Sachs is using it this year. So is J.P. Morgan. So, undoubtedly are many others.

At its most fundamental, HireVue is a digital interviewing system. The bank or finance firm in question asks you to film yourself answering some prerecorded interview questions using HireVue’s portal. So far, so normal. Except….HireVue is more than that. The HireVue system also incorporates something known as “predictive analytics.” This allows it to analyze your responses in almost frightening detail.

Bob Bowden:

The chapters on charter schools primarily focus on the KIPP and Mastery charter management organizations. Abrams admits that KIPP—for “Knowledge Is Power Program,” which establishes schools under state charter laws—has exhibited “exponential…

David Cutler:

It’s tough for a historian to earn the adoration of both academia and popular culture, but Eric Foner has managed to do it. His books on American history are assigned reading at universities and colleges across the country. Reviewers have praised his work as “monumental in scope” and declared that it “approaches brilliance.” He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2011 book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery—and appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss it. (In addition, I can’t overstate the lasting influence that Foner has had on my career as a high-school history teacher. I constantly refer to his growing body of work when teaching students not only original thinking, but also effective writing and analysis. I’ve also used his textbook to teach Advanced Placement United States History with terrific results.)

I recently spoke to Foner about the teachers who influenced him and how high-school history teachers can better prepare students for college.

Bill Wadge:

This trouble takes many forms. The Banach Tarski paradox is just one. AC also (obviously) implies that there are sets that don’t have a volume (or area, or length).

The supposed existence of nonmeasurable sets seriously complicates analysis. (Analysis is, roughly speaking, generalized calculus.) Analysis textbooks are full of results which state that such-and-such a procedure always generates a measurable set. If students ask to see an example of one of these mysterious objects that don’t have a volume (or area, or length), the instructor is in trouble. AC tells you that such sets exist, but says nothing about any particular one of them. It’s non constructive.

In fact it can be shown that almost any set that is in any sense definable (say, by logical formulas) is measurable. For example, all Borel sets are measurable. If authors simply assumed that all sets are measurable, the average text would shrink to a fraction of its size. And they wouldn’t get into trouble – it is not possible, without AC, to prove the existence of a non measurable set.

Sean Stevens:

Norms about speech seem to be changing rapidly on many college campuses. Universities are offering or requiring training in recognizing “microaggressions,” and they are creating “bias response teams” to make it easy for students to report professors and fellow students who commit microaggressions. In response, many students and professors say they now feel like they are “walking on eggshells”, not just in the classroom but in informal interactions as well.

But how do we know that these changes are real? Might the stories just be a collection of anecdotes from a few disgruntled people who are over-reacting to being censured for a rude remark? Where is the data showing that students are afraid to speak their minds?

We know of no good survey to measure this phenomenon, so a group* of social scientists at Heterodox Academy created one – the Fearless Speech Index. This post explains the first draft of the survey and reports preliminary results obtained from an internet sample.

The FSI was designed to give professors and administrators a tool to assess the degree to which students feel comfortable (or reluctant) to speak up and offer their opinions in a relatively small class, with 20-30 students. We use this as the focal situation because it is the place where it is most urgent for students to participate honestly. If students are self-censoring in such class discussions, they are harming their fellow students by giving them a less interesting class and a false impression of the social consensus.

The Curious Brain.

Jon Marcus:

our floors above a dull cinder-block lobby in a nondescript building at Ohio State University, the doors of a slow-moving elevator open on an unexpectedly futuristic 10,000-square-foot laboratory bristling with technology. It’s a reveal reminiscent of a James Bond movie. In fact, the researchers who run this year-old, $750,000 lab at OSU’s Spine Research Institute resort often to Hollywood comparisons.

Thin beams of blue light shoot from thirty-six of the same kind of infrared motion cameras used to create lifelike characters for films like Avatar. In this case, the researchers are studying the movements of a volunteer fitted with sensors that track his skeleton and muscles as he bends and lifts. Among other things, they say, their work could lead to the kind of robotic exoskeletons imagined in the movie Aliens.

Jessica Brand

In February, San Antonio District Attorney Nico LaHood allegedly did just that. LaHood was prosecuting Miguel Martinez, who stood accused of shooting a graduate student named Laura Carter in the head during a drug deal gone bad. Martinez’s trial derailed soon after it began. On the second day, the government disclosed that its star witness, who was also a possible suspect in the killing, had once had a sexual encounter with a prosecutor in the DA’s office. The defense argued that the relationship gave the witness a motive to help the government and gave the government a reason not to investigate or charge the witness. The defense accused prosecutors of violating their constitutional duty by failing to disclose that information before trial. The defense lawyers asked for a mistrial and indicated they may ask the judge to bar further prosecution.
According to defense pleadings, LaHood threatened to shut down the opposing counsels’ practice during a meeting in the judge’s chambers. He allegedly said he would “go to the media and do whatever it took” and that he did “not care what happened to him.” Their client would also be at risk, LaHood allegedly said, because he would be “better prepared for trial the next time” and he would “pick a better jury.” The defense lawyers, Christian Henricksen and Joe Gonzalez, asked for a mistrial. Trial Judge Lori Valenzuela granted their motion.

Jesse Singal:

Setting aside the very real harm done to Katz and Boermeester here, it shouldn’t come as a shock that political conservatives feast on these cases to score points in the broader culture war. “The war on men on college campuses rages on …” intoned the subhed of the Daily Wire’s coverage. But these cases aren’t really about ideology, per se. Rather, they’re the predictable result of the past administration’s guidance, which put schools in a position where they quite reasonably inferred that if they didn’t pursue even questionable or flimsy cases aggressively, they risked running afoul of the government. Big, risk-averse, corporate-style bureaucracies created to handle what is perceived as a crisis are not going to make sage decisions about this sort of thing, and the confusing federal-enforcement climate has only exacerbated the problem. Things are so tangled that at one point in 2016, the Justice Department told universities that in some cases they could be in Title IX violation if they didn’t investigate certain types of constitutionally protected speech (courts have ruled that public but not private universities need to adhere to the First Amendment in their dealings with students). If universities are simultaneously being told by the government they need to respect students’ free speech, but also that they need to investigate protected speech in other instances, something is seriously wrong.

Mark Harris:

When Sergeant Lee DeBrabander marked a case confidential in the Long Beach drug squad’s Palantir data analysis system in November 2014, he expected key details to remain hidden from unauthorized users’ eyes. In police work, this can be crucial—a matter of life and death, even. It often involves protecting vulnerable witnesses, keeping upcoming operations hush hush, or protecting a fellow police officer who’s working undercover.
Yet not long after, someone working in the gang crimes division ran a car license plate mentioned in his case and was able to read the entire file. “Can you please look at this?” DeBrabander wrote to a Palantir engineer in an email, which was obtained by Backchannel in response to public records requests.

According to the California Tax Foundation, since the beginning of this year Sacramento lawmakers have introduced more than 90 bills that would cost taxpayers more than $370 billion annually in higher taxes and fees. Now these lawmakers want to add another tax but this time on your drinking water. Will there be anything that is not taxed in California?

Winston Churchill once said, “I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” And I agree, continuously taxing Californians is not the answer.

When SB623 was presented in the Environmental Safety and Toxics Material Committee, I wanted to support it. It was a feel-good bill that was trying to find a solution for getting more clean drinking water in California and it didn’t have any burdensome tax language. It was my hope that the bill would improve once it left the Appropriations Committee. But in the end, I was wrong. The solution they came up with was to add more than one tax to help fund the program.

minding the campus:

The campus witnessed two dramatic racist events during the past academic year. A white student threw a banana at an African-American student in her dorm room and scribbled obscene graffiti on her door’s whiteboard. Later, during final exams, someone hung nooses with bananas marked with racist messages, including one attacking the African-American sorority of the new student body president, at three separate locations on campus, and vicious white supremacist attacks on her followed.

Both incidents were widely and laudably condemned by students, faculty, and administration alike in a positive exercise of free speech. The student who perpetrated the invasion of another student’s room was caught and disciplined by the university. AU has enlisted the FBI’s assistance and vowed to catch and to punish the other guilty parties.

But as those who follow campus news well know, racist or sexist events rarely end with punishment or a return to normality. They often trigger cries of “systemic” racism or sexism, curable only by reform programs, usually mandatory, to reshape the attitudes of all students.

Dana Goldstein:

West Virginia has especially big challenges transitioning students to life after high school. According to the Social Science Research Council, 17 percent of the state’s young adults are “disconnected,” neither working nor in school, the second-highest rate among states, behind only New Mexico.
But in few other states have the changes in vocational education — now rebranded as “career and technical education” — been as dramatic. Thirty-seven percent of West Virginia high school seniors completed a technical course of study in 2016, up from 18 percent in 2010.

Many are now in simulated workplaces where they learn to work with stethoscopes, welding torches and drafting tables as well as more sophisticated technology.

Allison Harbin

About two months before I submitted the full draft of my 300+ page dissertation to my committee for my Ph.D. approval, my computer died. But that is not what this story is about.

Panicked about the time lost without a computer, I rushed to the Apple store as soon as I could. I was spending winter break in my parent’s barn that had just been converted into an apartment next to their house so I could write without interruption. The Apple store was a solid hour and a half away, in a huge mall in the center of Atlanta. It felt strange to be in such a public place, the bright lights and minimalist design of the store had always unnerved me. It was loud and crowded. As I waited for my turn at the Genius Bar, I checked my email on a sample computer. At the top of my inbox was an email from Academia.edu alerting me that a professor on my dissertation committee, we’ll call them Dr. Mao here, had uploaded a paper they had recently published in a journal that I loved. Curious, I downloaded the paper and read it as I waited my turn.

As I read it, my stomach churned and my heart dropped. The constant murmur of conversation around me fell away, and all of a sudden, I was completely alone with my thoughts as I scrolled through the essay. The language was so familiar, though the argument had been expertly changed just enough. It sounded like my paper, one that I had sent to Dr. Mao for advice a year earlier. I never received that advice, but I guess it had been read after all.

Ben Southwood:

It’s so far unclear whether extra school in middle adolescence benefits or harms those affected—some studies find a benefit to cognitive or non-cognitive skills, others don’t. Some find benefits to earnings. These are all affected by the usual problems: issues with identification, lack of controls, fade-out, and publication bias. But the evidence on earlier schooling is much less divided—and it almost universally finds that going to school too early stunts child development.

What’s more, “too early” is well within the range of when we currently send kids to school. In Britain kids go to school at four or five. But a Danish study (pdf) found that even at around age seven starting school later led to less crime and delinquency through life. This study—and most of the others I present—used a “quasi-random” study design.

For example, the authors might use arbitrary cutoffs. If someone is born on 31st August and another person on 1st September it’s likely that a jump in some variable between them that isn’t seen between 30th & 31st August birthdays, or between 1st & 2nd September birthdays, is down to the effects of the cutoff.

Arif A. Mamun, PhD, Erik W. Carter, PhD, Thomas M. Fraker, PhD, …

To better understand how early work experience shapes subsequent employment outcomes for young people (ages 18 to 20) with disabilities, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation to test whether the employment experiences of 1,053 youth during the initial year after entry affected their employment during the third year after entry. To derive causal estimates, we used a dynamic-panel estimation model to account for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that may be correlated with youth’s self-selection into both early and later employment. We also controlled for other socioeconomic and health factors that may affect later employment. We found that early work experience increases the probability of being employed 2 years later by 17 percentage points. This estimate is an important advancement over the correlational approaches that characterize the current literature and provides stronger evidence that early work experience is a key determinant of subsequent labor market success.

Pagez:

And if this is the case for some of the simplest human activities, it’s far more true for the most complex ones — writing symphonies and novels, developing new technologies, inventing new scientific paradigms. Geniuses are rarely the best teachers, the best critics, or the best explainers. So it’s rare to come across a genius’s account of “how genius works.”

But such accounts do exist, and we were lucky enough to unearth one near the end of our research into the life of Claude Shannon (1916-2001), the intellectual architect of the information age.

NextGov:

A new rule will prevent millions of people from finding out if their fingerprints, iris scans and other biometric information is stored in a massive federal database.

The FBI’s Next Generation Identification system stores the biometric records of people who have undergone background checks for jobs, volunteer positions and military service, as well as of those who have criminal records. Effective Aug. 31, that database will be exempt from certain parts of the Privacy Act, a law that allows people whose records are held by the federal government to request more information about which records those are.

The exemption means the FBI doesn’t have to acknowledge if it is storing the biometric records of an individual in that database; the bureau has argued that notifying people that they were in the database could compromise investigations.

Zahir Janmohamed:

At a lecture in Portland last October, Isabel Wilkerson—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote about the great migration of Black Americans from the south to the north—said that when people leave a place, it’s often a referendum on the very place they leave.

So then what does it mean when I, and other people of color (POC), walk away from Portland because we can no longer stomach its racism? What does it say about Portland and specifically, the failure of its liberalism?

I’ve been wrestling with these issues ever since I moved to Columbus, Ohio, in July. But before I left, I spent my last month in Portland traveling the city, asking POC how their experiences mirrored or differed from my own. What struck me was the very frank and seldom heard opinions by POC born and raised in Portland who are tired—understandably so—by new transplants like myself criticizing their city.

They have a point. Perhaps I was naïve in thinking I would like Portland. When my partner and I moved to Oregon in 2015 from Santa Barbara, California, I thought Portland might be the place for me. After all, it’s a literary city, a soccer city, a food lovers’ city, and a solidly Democratic city—four things central to my identity. But almost immediately after I arrived, I found myself eager to get out.

I quickly grew accustomed to being asked by white people about my ethnic heritage—whether at the grocery store, sports bar, or on TriMet—and learned to say that I’m Indian American in the first few minutes of practically every conversation, just to set them at ease. It never really worked. They specifically wanted to know about the “Mohamed” in my last name.

Rudy Rucker:

I didn’t know where his real office door was, so I went around to knock on the outside door instead. This was a glass patio door, looking out on a little pond and the peaceful woods beyond the Institute for Advanced Study. It was a sunny March day, but the office was quite dark. I couldn’t see in. Did Kurt Gödel really want to see me?

Suddenly he was there, floating up before the long glass door like some fantastic deep-sea fish in a pressurized aquarium. He let me in, and I took a seat by his desk.

Kurt Gödel was unquestionably the greatest logician of the century. He may also have been one of our greatest philosophers. When he died in 1978, one of the speakers at his memorial service made a provocative comparison of Gödel with Einstein … and with Kafka.

Like Einstein, Gödel was German-speaking and sought a haven from the events of the Second World War in Princeton. And like Einstein, Gödel developed a structure of exact thought that forces everyone, scientist and layman alike, to look at the world in a new way.

Elizabeth B. Isaacs, Bruce R. Fischl, […], and Alan Lucas:

Although observational findings linking breast milk to higher scores on cognitive tests may be confounded by factors associated with mothers’ choice to breastfeed, it has been suggested that one or more constituents of breast milk facilitate cognitive development, particularly in preterms. Because cognitive scores are related to head size, we hypothesised that breast milk mediates cognitive effects by affecting brain growth. We used detailed data from a randomized feeding trial to calculate percentage of breast milk (%EBM) in the infant diet of 50 adolescents.

James Queally:

Beck said he still can’t believe it took six years, and outside intervention by prosecutors, to get to the bottom of the conduct he uncovered long ago.

“All these internal control entities that were supposed to be exercising internal control were not doing it,” he said. “I brought it to their attention, and they did nothing about it.”

Carissa Schoenick, Peter Clark, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Turney, Oren Etzioni

The field of artificial intelligence has made great strides recently, as in AlphaGo’s victories in the game of Go over world champion South Korean Lee Sedol in March 2016 and top-ranked Chinese Go player Ke Jie in May 2017, leading to great optimism for the field. But are we really moving toward smarter machines, or are these successes restricted to certain classes of problems, leaving others untouched? In 2015, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) ran its first Allen AI Science Challenge, a competition to test machines on an ostensibly difficult task—answering eighth-grade science questions. Our motivations were to encourage the field to set its sights more broadly by exploring a problem that appears to require modeling, reasoning, language understanding, and commonsense knowledge in order to probe the state of the art while sowing the seeds for possible future breakthroughs.

Jenny Anderson:

When you walk into École 42, a teacher-less coding school in Paris, a few things leap out at you: a killer collection of provocative street art, including an illustrated condom machine at the front desk; iMacs as far as the eye can see; and a palpable buzz from the roughly 1,000 students bustling around the building.

It is week two of la piscine (the “swimming pool”), a one-month, Hunger Games-like test students must endure to get a place at the school. No degrees or special skills are required to apply, and those who are accepted attend for free for three to five years. Around 80% of students get jobs before they finish the course; 100% are employed by the end.

The school is the brainchild of Xavier Niel, a French billionaire who has so far spent about €48 million ($57 million) on the Paris campus and an additional $46 million on a school in Silicon Valley. Niel founded Free, France’s second-largest internet service provider, among other ventures. He is a serial entrepreneur who is always looking for the best and brightest talent. In 2013, struggling to find it, he declared that France’s education system was broken and set out to fix one part of it.

Rachel Metz:

Amazon’s Alexa, my four-year-old niece Hannah Metz is an early adopter. Her family has four puck-like Amazon Echo Dot devices plugged in around her house—including one in her bedroom—that she can use to call on Alexa at any moment.

“Alexa, play ‘It’s Raining Tacos,’” she commanded on a recent sunny afternoon, and the voice-controlled helper immediately complied, blasting through its speaker a confection of a song with lines like “It’s raining tacos from out of the sky” and “Yum, yum, yum, yum, yumidy yum.”

Jimmy Sonu & Jessica Lin:

With his marriage to Norma Levor over, Claude Shannon was a bachelor again, with no attachments, a small Greenwich Village apartment, and a demanding job. His evenings were mostly his own, and if there’s a moment in Shannon’s life when he was at his most freewheeling, this was it. He kept odd hours, played music too loud, and relished the New York jazz scene. He went out late for raucous dinners and dropped by the chess clubs in Washington Square Park. He rode the A train up to Harlem to dance the jitterbug and take in shows at the Apollo. He went swimming at a pool in the Village and played tennis at the courts along the Hudson River’s edge. Once, he tripped over the tennis net, fell hard, and had to be stitched up.

His home, on the third floor of 51 West Eleventh Street, was a small New York studio. “There was a bedroom on the way to the bathroom. It was old. It was a boardinghouse … it was quite romantic,” recalled Maria Moulton, the downstairs neighbor. Perhaps somewhat predictably, Shannon’s space was a mess: dusty, disorganized, with the guts of a large music player he had taken apart strewn about on the center table. “In the winter it was cold, so he took an old piano he had and chopped it up and put it in the fireplace to get some heat.” His fridge was mostly empty, his record player and clarinet among the only prized possessions in the otherwise spartan space. Claude’s apartment faced the street. The same apartment building housed Claude Levi-Strauss, the great anthropologist. Later, Levi-Strauss would find that his work was influenced by the work of his former neighbor, though the two rarely interacted while under the same roof.

Sal Nuzzo & Trey Kovacs:

Over the past 20 years, Floridians have consistently made conscious decisions about the type of government we want to leave to our kids, our grandkids, and their grandkids. Those decisions have, for the most part, focused on a commitment to limited government, low taxes, and economic liberty. From the governorship of Jeb Bush through Rick Scott (in collaboration with our leaders in the House and Senate), with very few exceptions we have sought to control the size and scope of government encroachment in our lives. That commitment has largely been effective at providing a consistent and healthy business climate, and a small footprint of government reach at both the state and local levels. Floridians largely enjoy a quality of life free of government intrusion.

That same philosophy has also extended to our status as a “right to work” state. Florida has embraced the notion that individuals should be able to secure employment without being coerced into joining a union against their wishes. Right to work status is not unique to Florida – in fact a national trend is occurring even in typically “union heavy” states to guarantee the rights of workers to be free of coercion from unions. In February 2017, the state of Missouri became the 28th state to join the ranks of the free.

Alan Borsuk::

I’m about to make such a politically touchy statement that I want to preface it with a few words about my role.

A few people have tried to figure out (or think they know) whether I am pro- or anti-voucher schools. Waste of time.

I tell people that my wife doesn’t know whether I would give a thumbs up or thumbs down overall to the program that now allows almost a quarter of all the students in Milwaukee who are getting publicly funded education to attend private (almost all of them religious) schools.

I view myself like the color commentator on broadcasts of football games. I talk about how the teams are doing, how well the quarterback is playing and so on. But I don’t say whether I’m rooting for the Packers or the Bears.

This distinction is especially important when it comes to vouchers because the program has a 27-year history of being polarizing and controversial.

I admit I’m in favor of good schools and opposed to bad schools. There are quite a few good to excellent private schools in the voucher program. And there have been — and still are — bad schools. I have asked often for more than a decade whether enough was being done about them.

Brittany Karford Rogers:

The 32 BC Mark Antony takedown: it began with a fake-news campaign masterminded by Octavian, complete with Tweet-like proclamations on ancient coins.

The Simon of Trent humdinger: in 1475 a prince-bishop in Italy set off a story that local Jews murdered missing 2-year-old Simon—and used his blood for rituals. Fifteen Jews burned at the stake.

The Benjamin Franklin special edition: he concocted an entire 1782 newspaper, peddling a fake story about Native Americans scalping 700 men, women, children, and infants.

In short, fake news is old news.

For all the handwringing over fake news today, BYU journalism professor Joel J. Campbell’s (BA ’87) response is more “meh.” It’s another punch for a profession that’s been in the ring for the better part of a decade. Trust in news media is at an all-time low. Revenue models are upended. Reporters are exhausted. Readers are fragmented. And that’s just a short list of jabs.

Looming larger in Campbell’s eyes are analytics-driven newsrooms and disenfranchised readers, who, flooded with content, are living in information silos or, worse, opting out altogether.

So how does one make sense of the crowded, increasingly polarized news landscape? And what’s left of journalism as we knew it?

Ryan Grim:

The United Arab Emirates is on pace to contribute $20 million over the course of 2016 and 2017 to the Middle East Institute, one of Washington’s leading think tanks, according to a document obtained by The Intercept. The outsized contribution, which the UAE hoped to conceal, would allow the institute, according to the agreement, to “augment its scholar roster with world class experts in order to counter the more egregious misperceptions about the region, inform U.S. government policy makers, and convene regional leaders for discreet dialogue on pressing issues.”

The Emirates, according to the Associated Press, operate a network of torture pens in Yemen where detainees are grilled alive.

MEI was founded in 1946 and has long been an influential player in Washington foreign policy circles. It serves as a platform for many of the U.S.’s most influential figures, allowing them to regularly appear on cable news, author papers, host private briefings and appear on panels in between stints in government.

University of Wisconsin libraries – digital collections:

From 1965–1970, Fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3,000 “Informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and D.C., collecting local words, phrases, and pronunciations. In addition to answering more than 1,600 questions from the DARE Questionnaire, many of the Informants, along with auxiliary speakers, agreed to be recorded by the Fieldworkers. These recordings consisted of conversational interviews as well as readings of “The Story of Arthur the Rat” (devised to elicit the essential differences in pronunciation across the country). This fieldwork data provided invaluable regional information for the Dictionary of American Regional English Volumes I–VI (1985–2013) and Digital DARE.

Curtis Newbold:

You’re likely familiar with the term “plagiarism.” We’re taught, early in our education, that plagiarism is copying someone else’s work and claiming it as our own. Sounds simple enough, right? The reality is, there are many ways of being dishonest about the work we produce and giving appropriate credit to whom the original work belongs. The next time you write a paper, make sure you’re keeping your citation standards high. Don’t allow yourself to succumb to any of the thirteen possible ways to plagiarize.

For a similar reference I created in 2015, please see the popular Did I Plagiarize? flowchart.

Andrew Beaton:

Winning goes a long way in college football. It packs stadiums, brings in money and can even lead to the glory of a national championship. But at many programs, there’s a qualifier for evaluating that winning: How much did fans have to grit their teeth and pinch their noses on their way to those victories?

This is the awkward harmony of college football. There’s what happens on the field, which grips fans like nothing else on Saturdays. Then there’s what goes on off the field, which may be the only thing capable of overshadowing the football itself.

Now the season is set to kick into full gear this weekend, with the first full slate of games for most teams in the country. Which means it’s time for The Wall Street Journal’s annual Grid of Shame, an exercise that quantifies answers to the two most important questions about your favorite team: How good are they? And how embarrassed should you be about them?

Greg Williams:

A few months ago, we noticed a notable trend in our web-traffic data: stories with a political aspect were extremely popular with readers. Perhaps this isn’t surprising; today’s news cycle ­- from the chaos of Brexit to the shambles in the White House, the tragedy of Grenfell to an iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg breaking away from the Antarctic ice shelf – is relentlessly political and possesses an existential urgency.
 
 At one point, it seemed that liberal democracy was cruising towards comfortable middle age. The world order had been established and we were edging in the direction of greater freedoms and equality, some of it driven by increased access to technology. Sometimes progress was dramatic but, more often, it was simply the direction of travel, pulled inexorably in one direction by the tide of history.
 
 Today, whether we are addressing issues of security or the environment, employment law or corporate takeovers of global organisations with vast amounts of data, the WIRED perspective of the world – one that is centred on how technology and science are shaping every aspect of society – is the norm, not an outlier.

Maria Popova:

Autism and its related conditions remain among the least understood mental health issues of our time. But one significant change that has taken place over the past few years has been a shift from perceiving the autistic mind not as disabled but as differently abled — and often impressive in its difference, as in extraordinary individuals like mathematical mastermind Daniel Tammet or architectural savant Gilles Trehin. And yet despite the stereotype of the autistic mind as a methodical computational machine, much of its magic — the kind most misunderstood — lies in its capacity for creative expression.

Three years after the original publication, New-York-based behavior analyst Jill Mullin returns with an expanded edition of Drawing Autism (public library | IndieBound) — a beautiful and thoughtful celebration of the vibrantly creative underbelly of autism, featuring contributions from more than 50 international graphic artists and children who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, with a foreword by none other than Temple Grandin.

80,000 hours

If one skill is much harder to learn than another, it lowers the “return on investment” of time spent learning that skill. We think STEM skills might be faster to improve than “leadership” skills, which means that they are still contenders for the best skills to learn, especially technology.

We tried to estimate how difficult the skills are to learn with the “time to learn” score. If a skill is useful in jobs that take a long-time to enter, we rated it as “hard to learn”, and vice versa.

We found that many of the most employable skills take the longest to learn, such as judgement, active learning and critical thinking. The STEM skills, however, came out mid-table for “time to learn”.

This makes sense. Programming is a concrete body of knowledge that can clearly be improved. If you go to App Academy, you’ll probably be much better at coding than you were before.

It’s much less obvious how to improve your “judgement” or “social perceptiveness”. We expect that practice and mentorship can help, but they probably partly boil down to personality traits or general mental ability. A meta-analysis of efforts to teach critical thinking skills found that while critical thinking improves during college, it’s unclear that deliberate attempts to train critical thinking have any positive long-term effects, or that some majors improve critical thinking more than others.3

This means that depending on how you weigh the difficulty of learning each skill, STEM skills could still be among the best to learn.

Relatedly, even if you do improve your soft skills, it’s hard to prove to an employer that you possess them. This also reduces the boost you get from learning them.

Anthony Gockowoski:

Similarly, when it comes to “tests and exams” for Watson’s “Data Management” and “Energy Informatics” courses, all will be “open book and open notes” and “designed to assess low level mastery of the course material” (the “Stress Reduction” section has been removed from both syllabi, but an archived version of the “Data Management” syllabus has been provided here).

Finally, for in-class presentations, Watson will allow “only positive comments” to be made, while “comments designed to improve future presentations will be communicated by email.”

Carl Frey:

 This report, the third in the Technology at Work series, focuses on the automation driven by e-Commerce for physical goods. We look at the technology needed to automate order fulfillment, inventory management, and delivery when consumers shop online and examine the implications in a wide range of areas for industry, retailers, supply chains, real-estate, and transportation, looking too at the impact on labor and employment.
 
 Growth in e-Commerce is the main driver of warehouse automation, a driver which itself will increase with broadband and mobile device penetration. In Japan, 32% of all goods bought on the Internet were bought on smartphones in 2016, up from 27% a year earlier. Millennials, those most likely to shop online, will soon enter their peak spending years. Global e-Commerce sales have grown at a compound annual growth rate of 20% over the last decade, and online retail sales have gone from ~2% of total to ~8%%.
 
 While technology is not yet either capable or cost effective in all cases, this is likely to change. Our estimates show that that 80% of jobs in transportation, warehousing, and logistics are susceptible to automation as a consequence of the trends we observe in technology. Retail is one industry in which employment is likely to vanish, but unlike manufacturing jobs which are highly concentrated, the downfall of retail employment will affect every city and region. U.S. companies employ 2 million people just to do stock and order fulfillment work and over 90% of warehouse picking is currently done by hand. Migrating to automated picking gives productivity gains of 2x–3x that as compared to pick-to-conveyor operations and 5x–6x as compared to manual pick-to-pallet fulfillment centers.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

Despite the critical importance of free speech on campus, too many universities—in policy and in practice—censor and punish students’ and faculty members’ expressive activity. One way that universities do so is through the use of speech codes: policies prohibiting speech that, outside the bounds of campus, would be protected by the First Amendment.

FIRE surveyed 449 schools for this report and found that 39.6 percent maintain severely restrictive, “red light” speech codes that clearly and substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech. This is the ninth year in a row that the percentage of schools maintaining such policies has declined, and this year’s drop was nearly ten percentage points. (Last year, 49.3 percent of schools earned a red light rating.)

David Lynch:

There are not many agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation like Ed You. In a workforce that cultivates anonymity, his clean-shaven head gleams. While most of his colleagues are notoriously tight-lipped, Mr You is the chatty star of technology conferences such as South-by-Southwest and DEFCON.

He is also at the forefront of a potential dispute between the US and China, which could have implications for both commercial relations between the world’s two biggest economies and for the future of biomedical research.

The high profile that Mr You has adopted is part of an unusual FBI campaign to highlight the risks in America’s headlong pursuit to unlock the secrets of the human genome. A supervisory special agent in the bureau’s biological countermeasures unit, Mr You warns that the US is not protecting the genomic data used to create lucrative new medicines — but which can also be used to develop fearsome bioweapons.

“We don’t know how much bio data has left our shores,” he says. “Our concept for biological security needs to be broadened.”

Brilliant Maps:

The map above shows the percentage of residents in various European countries who are willing to fight and go to war for their country.

Full results below:

From high to low, these are the percentages by country:

Stephen Hiltner:

“I’m a little embarrassed by the state of this room,” said Will Shortz, The New York Times’s crossword editor, as he waded through a seemingly endless array of puzzle ephemera in his upstairs library. “The problem is, I recently lent part of my collection for use at an exhibition. I got everything back, but I haven’t put it all away yet.”

He paused, looking up from a stack of old magazines.

“Well, it’s more than that, of course,” he said. “Things are just — piling up.”

Indeed they are. Mr. Shortz’s collection includes more than 25,000 puzzle books and magazines, dating to 1534, along with pamphlets, small mechanical puzzles and other ephemeral items. It overwhelms the décor of his home in Pleasantville, N.Y., where he lives and works. A clock in his office is — well, its face is a crossword puzzle. (The hands? Two stubby pencils.) A display case in the living room holds, among other treasures, the first crossword puzzle ever published — in a 1913 Sunday “Fun” section of The New York World. Even the tiled floor in the upstairs bathroom, made of small black and white squares, calls to mind a crossword grid.

Alexander Monge-Naranjo :

At the turn of the 20th century, according to historical estimates, the United States took over from the United Kingdom as the world’s leading economy, a rank it has sustained ever since. Before World War I, in 1913, income per capita in the U.S. was 8 percent higher than in the U.K., 52 percent higher than in all of Western Europe combined and almost 3.5 times the world average income per person.1 By the end of World War II, those gaps were much higher: In 1950, the U.S. income per capita was 38 percent higher than that in the U.K., 112 percent higher than that in Western Europe and more than 4.5 times the world average income per person.2

This global dominance by the U.S. economy can be sustained only by a superior qualification of its workers. This article compares the education of U.S. workers with that of workers in other developed countries and in emerging economies. Although American workers have historically been much better trained than their counterparts abroad, that lead has been quickly disappearing in recent years as other countries have accelerated the skill formation of their workers. Formal skill through education has become increasingly important in a knowledge-based world economy.

Then: U.S. Workers Were No. 1

Figure 1 shows the level of education in 1950 for workers in the U.S. and several other countries that are identified today as developed.3 The levels range from no formal schooling to college completed, which includes workers with education beyond an undergraduate degree. The data for this and the other figures cover males and females of all ages; in all cases, the education levels are the maximum achieved for that group.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results and Stretch Targets.

Alexander Muse:

Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing.

Josh Marshall:

An unintended effect of Google’s heavy-handed attempt to silence Barry Lynn and his Open Markets program at New America has been to shine a really bright light both on Google’s monopoly power and the unrestrained and unlovely ways they use it. Happily, Lynn’s group has landed on its feet, seemingly with plenty of new funding or maybe even more than it had. I got a press release from them this evening. This seems to be their new site. I’ve already seen other stories of Google bullying come out of the woodwork. Here’s one.
 
 I think it’s great that all this stuff is coming out. But what is more interesting to me than the instances of bullying are the more workaday and seemingly benign mechanisms of Google’s power. If you have extreme power, when things get dicey, you will tend to abuse that power. It’s not surprising. It’s human nature. What’s interesting and important is the nature of the power itself and what undergirds it. Don’t get me wrong. The abuses are very important. But extreme concentrations of power will almost always be abused. The temptations are too great. But what is the nature of the power itself?
 
 Many people who know more than I do can describe different aspects of this story. But how Google affects and dominates the publishing industry is something I know very, very well because I’ve lived with it for more than a decade. To say I’ve “lived with it” makes it sound like a chronic disease or some huge burden. That would be a very incomplete, misleading picture. Google has directly or indirectly driven millions of dollars of revenue to TPM over more than a decade. Not only that, it’s provided services that are core parts of how we run TPM. So Google isn’t some kind of thralldom we’ve lived under. It’s ubiquitous. In many ways, it makes what we do possible.
 
 What I’ve known for some time – but which became even more clear to me in my talk with Barry Lynn on Monday – is that few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat?
 
 I’m not worried about that for a few reasons: 1: We’ve refocused TPM toward much greater reliance on subscriptions. So we’re less vulnerable. 2: Most people who know these mechanics don’t write. I do. 3: We’re small and I don’t think Google cares enough to do anything to TPM. (If your subscription to Prime suddenly doubles in cost, you’ll know I was wrong about this.) What I hope I can capture is that Google is in many ways a great thing for publishers. At least it’s not a purely negative picture. If you’re a Star Trek fan you’ll understand the analogy. It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.
 
 It all starts with “DFP”, a flavor of Doubleclick called DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), one of the early “ad-serving companies” that Google purchased years ago. DFP actually started as GAM – Google Ad Manager. We were chosen to be one of the beta-users. This was I think back in 2006 or 2007. What’s DFP? DFP is the application (or software, or system – you could define it in different ways) that serves ads on TPM. I don’t know the exact market penetration. But it’s the hugely dominant player in ad serving across the web. So on TPM, Google software manages the serving of ads. Our ads all drive on Google’s roads.
 
 Then there’s AdExchange. That’s the part of Google that buys ad inventory. A huge amount of our ads come through ad networks. AdExchange is far and away the largest of those for us – often accounting for around 15% of total revenues every month – sometimes higher. So our largest single source of ad revenue is usually Google. To be clear that’s not Google advertising itself but advertisers purchasing our ad space through Google. But every other ad we ever run runs over Google’s ad serving system too. So Google software/service (DFP) runs the ad ecosystem on TPM. And the main buyer within that ecosystem is another Google service (Adexchange).
 
 Then there’s Google Analytics. That’s the benchmark audience and traffic data service. How many unique visitors do we have? How many page views do we serve each month? What’s the geographical distribution of our audience? That is all collected through Google Analytics. Now, that’s not our only source of audience data. We have several services we use for that in addition to our own internal systems. But we do use it for the big aggregate numbers and longterm record keeping. In many ways it’s the canonical data people on the outside look at to see how big our audience is. Do we have to share that data? No. Unless we want potential advertisers to see we have an audience.
 
 Next there’s search. Heard of that? There’s general search and then there’s Google News, a separate bucket of search. Search tends not to be that important for us in part because we’ve never prioritized it and in part because as a site focused on iterative news coverage what we produce tends to be highly ephemeral – at least in search terms. We don’t publish a lot of evergreen stories. Still, search is important. For other publishers it’s the whole game.
 
 One additional Google implant is Gmail, which we use to provision our corporate email. The backbone of the @talkingpointsmemo.com email addresses is gmail. Lots of companies now do this.
 
 So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email.
 
 But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. Chrome is responsible for 41% of our page views. Safari comes in second at 36%. But the Safari number is heavily driven by people using iOS devices. On desktop Chrome is overwhelmingly dominant.

Related: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
Company paid $5,000 to $400,000 for research supporting business practices that face regulatory scrutiny; a ‘wish list’ of topics. By Brody Mullins and Jack Nicas m

Lauren Letherby:

The biggest financial recession since the Great Depression dealt a particular blow to those who came of age in the US during the crisis. Many older millennials — an age group just entering the labour force for the first time when the crisis hit — suffered early career setbacks that have hindered their ability to afford aspects of the lifestyle that their parents may have enjoyed at the same age.

Compounding a lower employment rate, the cost of US higher education has grown sharply. The total cost of college tuition and fees rose 63 per cent in the decade between 2006 and 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Student debt now exceeds all other forms of consumer debt except mortgages.

Taken together with a home ownership rate that is lower than for previous generations at the same age, the picture that emerges is of a generation falling behind their parents in terms of net worth.

Venkatesh Rao:

A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie Grill qualified. In the weeks that followed, premium mediocre turned into a term of art for us, and we gleefully went around labeling various things with the term, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly agreeing. And it wasn’t just us. When I tried the term on my Facebook wall, and on Twitter, again everybody instantly got the idea, and into the spirit of the labeling game.

As a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of fine premium-mediocre memes, I was intrigued. It’s rare for an ambiguous neologism like this to generate such strong consensus about what it denotes without careful priming and curation by a skilled shitlord. Sure, there were arguments at the margins, and sophisticated (well, premium mediocre) discussions about distinctions between premium mediocrity and related concepts such as middle-class fancy, aristocratic shabby, and that old classic, petit bourgeois, but overall, people got it. Without elaborate explanations.

But since the sine qua non of premium mediocrity is superfluous premium features (like unnecessary over-intellectualized blog posts that use phrases like sine qua non), let me offer an elaborate explanation anyway. It’s a good way to celebrate August, which I officially declare the premium mediocre month, when all the premium mediocre people go on premium mediocre vacations featuring premium mediocre mai tais at premium mediocre resorts paid for in part by various premium-mediocre reward programs.

It is not hard to learn to pattern-match premium mediocre. In my sample of several dozen people I roped into the game, only one had serious trouble getting the idea. Most of the examples below, and all the really good ones, came from others.

McKenna Oxenden:

“I am juicy, gooey, hot, cheesy and heaven in your mouth. What am I?” the teacher asked.

Hands shot in the air and 10 children bounced up and down in their seats. “Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!” they squealed.

The children, ages 8 to 12, were practicing giving their teacher descriptive words about their favorite food item without saying its name.

It’s just one small piece of a curriculum created by 17-year-old Katie Eder.

Four years ago, Eder’s sister started tutoring kids in math, and she wanted to follow in her big sister’s footsteps. There was one problem — Katie is bad at math.

But the thing she is good at is writing, and Eder couldn’t find anywhere that offered tutoring for children, so she approached Milwaukee’s COA Youth and Family Center to allow her to teach creative writing.

They took a chance on the 13-year-old and agreed — and the result was Kids Tales, a program to empower children, often in low-income areas or in juvenile detention centers, to use creative writing to discover their voice and share their story.

Teenagers, and only teenagers, volunteer to teach children for a week and guide them as they write their own short story, working on brainstorming and plot and character development. Once the stories are completed, they are put into a book, making each child a published author.

:

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) last week introduced legislation that would extend $2.5 billion in funding over five years for states combating the opioid crisis, money that would be spent on top of the $1 billion appropriated in 2016 for two years of support.

Luján noted last week in introducing the Opioid and Heroin Abuse Crisis Investment Act that national overdose deaths topped 59,000 in 2016, with deaths from synthetic opioids increasing by 73 percent. Prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin were responsible for more than 17,500 deaths, according to the announcement.

“The sad fact remains that much more must be done if we are going to ensure that all those who want help can get help,” Luján said in a statement.

The $2.5 billion would be offered through a block grant, with states receiving funding to increase access to treatment, boost prevention programs and “expand evidence-based initiatives that will help address this deadly epidemic.”

Arizona-based general surgeon Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said that if lawmakers continue the status quo by “throwing money at addiction treatment centers,” they’re wasting taxpayer dollars.

“It’s not like we have shortage of rehab centers,” Singer said. “People who are addicted to this are addicted because they enjoy it, so having a rehab center available to them isn’t going to make them want to go in and sign up. I just think it’s a waste of money.”

Techdirt:

The DOJ — despite issuing its own guidance requiring warrants for Stingrays in 2015 — argued in court earlier this year that no warrant was needed to deploy the Stingray to locate a shooting suspect. It actually recommended the court not reach a conclusion on the Fourth Amendment implications of Stingray use, as it had plenty of warrant exceptions at the ready — mainly the “exigent circumstances” of locating a suspect wanted for a violent crime.
Unfortunately for the federal government (and all other law enforcement agencies located in the court’s jurisdiction), the court declined the DOJ’s offer to look the other way on Constitutional issues. It found a Stingray’s impersonation of cell tower to obtain real-time location information is a search under the Fourth Amendment.

The court adopts Judge Koh’s reasoning in In re Application for Telephone Information, 119 F. Supp. 3d at 1026, to hold that cell phone users have an expectation of privacy in their cell phone location in real time and that society is prepared to recognize that expectation as reasonable. While Judge Koh limited her analysis to the privacy interest in historical CSLI, the court determines that cell phone users have an even stronger privacy interest in real time location information associated with their cell phones, which act as a close proxy to one’s actual physical location because most cell phone users keep their phones on their person or within reach, as the Supreme Court recognized in Riley. In light of the persuasive authority of Lambis, and the reasoning of my learned colleagues on this court recognizing a privacy interest in historical cell site location information, the court holds that Ellis had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his real-time cell phone location, and that use of the Stingray devices to locate his cell phone amounted to a search requiring a warrant, absent an exception to the warrant requirement.

John Tozzi:

Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.

In 2015, the American death rate—the age-adjusted share of Americans dying—rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings. “Revised assumptions indicating a shortened longevity,” for instance, led Lockheed Martin to adjust its estimated retirement obligations downward by a total of about $1.6 billion for 2015 and 2016, it said in its most recent annual report.

The Crimson:

The Crimson’s survey of more than 50 percent of incoming freshmen in Harvard College’s Class of 2021 asked them about their backgrounds and expectations for life on campus. Read Part I of The Crimson’s three-part series on the freshman survey here.

Sally Weale:

Lawyers acting for families who claim their children have been illegally excluded from St Olave’s grammar school are considering launching proceedings against a number of other London schools after being contacted by parents.

The news comes as a former St Olave’s governor complained about a lack of transparency in the governance of the school and called on the headteacher and current governing body to “right the wrong” being done to pupils.

The row at St Olave’s, in the London borough of Bromley, over sixth formers being kicked out halfway through their course has prompted a number of inquiries from families who say they are facing similar situations in other selective and non-selective London schools.

Michael Halls-Moore

Last week I posted an article, which formed the first part in a series on Linear Algebra For Deep Learning. The response to the article was extremely positive, both in terms of feedback, article views and also more broadly on social media.

Many of you commented that there was “an appetite” for introductory mathematical content and this only confirms the results of the QuantStart 2017 Content Survey. Hence I’ve decided to write more introductory articles, not only continuing with Linear Algebra, but also on the topics of Calculus and Probability, which are fundamental topics for machine learning—and quantitative finance more broadly.

In the previous article we introduced the three basic entities that will be used in linear algebra, namely the scalar, vector and the matrix. We saw that they were all really specific versions of a more general entity known as a tensor.

In this article we are going to look at how to form operations between these entities. Such operations include addition and multiplication. While you will be very familiar with scalar addition and multiplication, the rules differ somewhat when dealing with more general tensor entities. This article will precisely define those operations and provide numeric examples to give you some intuition.

At this stage it is not likely to be clear why these operations will be useful in the context of deep learning. However, in the previous article I stated that linear algebra was the ‘language in which machine learning was written’. If we can understand the basics of the language, we’ll be in a much better position to grasp the more complex ideas that form the backbone of neural network models in later articles.

We will begin by looking at matrix addition and then consider matrix multiplication. These operations will eventually allow us to discuss a topic known as matrix inversion, which will form the basis of the next article.

Matrix Addition

What does it mean to add two matrices together? In this section we will explore such an operation and hopefully see that it is actually quite intuitive.

Matrices can be added to scalars, vectors and other matrices. Each of these operations has a precise definition. These techniques are used frequently in machine learning and deep learning so it is worth familiarising yourself with them.

Matrix-Matrix Addition

Given two matrices of size m×n
, A=[aij]
and B=[bij]
, it is possible to define the matrix C=[cij]
as the matrix sum C=A+B
where cij=aij+bij
.

That is, C
is constructed by element-wise summing the respective elements of A
and B
. This operation is only defined where the two matrices have equal size, except in the case of broadcasting below. The definition implies that C
also has size m×n
.

Matrix addition is commutative. This means that it doesn’t matter which way around the matrices are added:

A+B=B+A
It is also associative. This means that you get the same result if you add two matrices together first, and then another, as if you add another two together first and then the other:

A+(B+C)=(A+B)+C
Both of these results follow from the fact that normal scalar addition is itself commutative and associative, because we’re just adding the elements together.

I’m stressing commutivity and associativity for matrix addition because matrix multiplication (defined below) is certainly not commutative. We’ll see why later.

Example

Consider two matrices A
and B
. We can create a new matrix C
through addition:

A+B=⎡⎣⎢118543191721⎤⎦⎥+⎡⎣⎢1242318356338⎤⎦⎥=⎡⎣⎢1322282262423359⎤⎦⎥=C

It is clear to see that the elements of C
are simply the elements added in the corresponding positions from A
and B
.

Matrix-Scalar Addition

It is possible to add a scalar value x
to a matrix A=[aij]
to produce a new matrix B=[bij]
where bij=x+aij
. This simply means that we’re adding the same scalar value to every element of the matrix. It is written as B=x+A
.

Scalar-matrix addition is once again commutative and associative, because normal scalar addition is both commutative and associative.

Broadcasting

For certain applications in machine learning it is possible to define a shorthand notation known as broadcasting. Consider A∈Rm×n
an m×n
-dimensional real-valued matrix and x∈Rm
an m
-dimensional vector.

It is possible to define B=A+x
, despite the fact that the matrices A
and x
are unequal in size. The definition of the sum takes bij=aij+xj
.

That is, the elements of x
are copied into each row of the matrix A
. Since the value of x
is `broadcast’ into each row the process is known as broadcasting.

Matrix Multiplication

The rules for matrix addition are relatively simple and intuitive. However when it comes to multiplication of matrices the rules become more complex.

Matrix Transpose

In order to define certain matrix-matrix multiplication operations such as the dot-product (discussed below) it is necessary to define the transpose of a matrix. The transpose of a matrix A=[aij]m×n
of size m×n
is denoted by AT
of size n×m
and is given element-wise by the following expression:

AT=[aji]n×m
That is, the indices i
and j
are swapped. This has the effect of reflecting the matrix along the line of diagonal elements aii
. The operation is defined for non-square matrices, as well as vectors and scalars (which are simply 1×1
matrices). Note that a scalar is its own transpose: x=xT
. In addition the transpose of the transpose of a matrix is simply itself: ATT=A
.

Examples

A=[a11a21a12a22a13a23],AT=⎡⎣⎢a11a12a13a21a22a23⎤⎦⎥

x=⎡⎣⎢x1x2x3⎤⎦⎥,xT=[x1x2x3]

Note here that AT
does not represent A
multiplied by itself T
times. This is an entirely different operation. However, it will usually be clear from the context whether we mean the transpose of a matrix or repeated multiplication by itself.

Matrix-Matrix Multiplication

We are now going to consider matrix-matrix multiplication. This is a more complex operation than matrix addition because it does not simply involve multiplying the matrices element-wise. Instead a more complex procedure is utilised, for each element, involving an entire row of one matrix and an entire column of the other.

The operation is only defined for matrices of specific sizes. The first matrix must have as many columns as the second matrix has rows, otherwise the operation is not defined.

The definition below can be a bit tricky to understand initially, so have a look at it first and then try working through the examples to see how specific numeric instances match up to the general formula.

Given a matrix A=[aij]m×n
and a matrix B=[bij]n×p
the matrix product C=AB=[cij]m×p
is defined element-wise by:

cij=∑k=1naikbkj
That is the elements cij
of the matrix C=AB
are given by summing the products of the elements of the i
-th row of A
with the elements of the j
-th column of B
.

Note that matrix-matrix multiplication is not commutative. That is:

AB≠BA

Examples

Given the following two matrices:

A=[275316],B=⎡⎣⎢193845⎤⎦⎥

It is possible to construct the product AB
of size 2×2
:

AB=[2⋅1+5⋅9+1⋅37⋅1+3⋅9+6⋅32⋅8+5⋅4+1⋅57⋅8+3⋅4+6⋅5]=[50524198]

It is also possible to construct the product BA
of size 3×3
:

BA=⎡⎣⎢1⋅2+8⋅79⋅2+4⋅73⋅2+5⋅71⋅5+8⋅39⋅5+4⋅33⋅5+5⋅31⋅1+8⋅69⋅1+4⋅63⋅1+5⋅6⎤⎦⎥=⎡⎣⎢584641295730493333⎤⎦⎥

The above definition does not initially seem to be motivated in a simple way. Why is matrix-matrix multiplication defined like this? It has to do with a deeper result involving matrices representing linear map functions between two vector spaces. We need not worry about these certain deeper aspects of linear maps as they are beyond the scope of this article series.

However, we can briefly provide some intuition through the idea of composing functions together. It is common in mathematics to compose two functions together to produce a new function. That is the function h
can be defined as h=f∘g
, with the ∘
symbol representing function composition. This notation means that h
is equivalent to g
being carried out first, and then f
.

If, for example f=sin(x)
and g=x2
then h=sin(x2)
. Function composition is not commutative and as such f∘g≠g∘f
. Instead g∘f=sin2(x)
, which is a completely different function. This is why matrix-matrix multiplication is not commutative and also why it is defined as above.

Note also that this definition does not imply that the elements of the matrix C
are defined as the element-wise multiplication of those from A
and B
. That is, the elements in each location cannot simply be multiplied together to get the new product matrix. That is an entirely different operation known as the Hadamard Product and will be discussed below.

Since a column vector is in fact a n×1
matrix it is possible to carry out matrix-vector multiplication. If the left-multiplying matrix has size m×n
then this is a valid operation that will produce another m×1
matrix (column vector) as output.

Matrix-matrix and matrix-vector multiplication are extremely common operation in the physical sciences, computational graphics and machine learning fields. As such highly optimised software libraries such as BLAS and LAPACK have been developed to allow efficient scientific computation–particularly on GPUs.

Scalar-Matrix Multiplication

Scalar-matrix multiplication is simpler than matrix-matrix multiplication. Given a matrix A=[aij]m×n
and a scalar λ∈R
the scalar-matrix product λA
is calculated by multiplying every element of A
by λ
such that λA=[λaij]m×n
.

If we take two real-valued scalars λ,μ∈R
the subsequent useful relationships follow from the definition above:

λ(A+B)(λ+μ)Aλ(μA)===λA+λBλA+μA(λμ)A

The first result states that you will get the same answer if you add two matrices together, and then multiply them by a scalar, as if you individually multiplied each matrix by the scalar and then added them together.

The second result states that if you add two scalars together and then multiply the result by a matrix it gives the same answer as if you individually multiplied the matrix separately by each scalar and added the result.

The third result states that the order of scalar multiplication does not matter. If you multiply the matrix by one scalar, and then multiply the result by another scalar it gives the same answer as if you first multiplied both scalars together and then by the matrix.

All of these results follow from the simple rules of scalar multiplication and addition.

Hadamard Product

It is possible to define element-wise multiplication of matrices, which differs from the definition of matrix-matrix multiplication above. The Hadamard product of two matrices A=[aij]m×n
and B=[bij]m×n
is denoted by A⊙B
and calculated by the following expression:

A⊙B=[aijbij]m×n
That is, the elements of the new matrix are simply given as the scalar multiples of each of the elements from the other matrices. Note that since scalar multiplication is commutative so is the Hadamard Product, unlike normal matrix-matrix multiplication.

When might it be necessary to use the Hadamard product? In fact such a process has wide applications, including correcting codes in satellite transmissions and cryptography, signal processing as well as lossy compression algorithms for images in JPEG format.

Dot Product

An important special case of matrix-matrix multiplication occurs between two vectors and is known as the dot product. It has a deep relationship with geometry and is useful in all areas of the physical and computational sciences.

We have to be extremely careful here in regards to notation. I am being particularly precise about this definition, which may be unusual to some of you who have it seen it written before. In particular the dot product is really only defined as a true matrix-matrix multiplication, where one of the vectors is a row “matrix” and the other a column “matrix”. However, you will often see a slight “notational abuse” where it is defined for any two vectors (row or column).

The usual notation for a dot product between two n
-dimensional vectors x,y∈Rn
is x⋅y
, which is where the name of the operation comes from. However in more advanced textbooks (particularly the popular graduate level statistics, machine learning and deep learning texts) you will see it written as xTy
, where T
represents the transpose of x
.

This is because x
and y
are usually considered to both be column vectors. A matrix-matrix multiplication between two column vectors is not defined. Hence, one of the vectors needs to be transposed into a row vector such that the matrix-matrix multiplication is properly defined. Hence you will see the xTy
notation frequently in more advanced textbooks and papers. Now we can proceed with the definition!

Given two column vectors x,y∈Rn
it is possible to define the dot product (or scalar product) between them by taking the transpose of one to form a product that is defined within the rules of matrix-matrix multiplication. Such a product produces a scalar value and is commutative:

xTy=∑i=1nxiyi=yTx
The dot product has an important geometric meaning. It is the product of the Euclidean lengths of the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. In subsequent articles the concept of norms will be introduced, at which point this definition will be formalised.

Another way to think about a dot product is that if we take the dot product of a vector with itself it is the square of the length of the vector:

xTx=∑i=1nxixi=∑i=1nx2i
Hence to find the (Euclidean) length of a vector you can simply take the square root of the dot product of the vector, xTx−−−−√
.

The dot product is a special case of a more general mathematical entity known as an inner product. In more abstract vector spaces the inner product allows intuitive concepts such as length and angle of a vector to be made rigourous. However such spaces are beyond the scope of this article series and will not be discussed further.

Next Steps

This article has all been about operations applied to one or more matrices. We can now add and multiply matrices together. But what does this give us? How can we use it?

In the next article we are going to look at one of the most fundamental topics in linear algebra—inverting a matrix. Matrix inversion allows us to solve matrix equations, in exactly the same way that scalar algebra allows us to solve scalar equations.

This is a widespread operation in the physical and computational sciences and will be indispensible in our studies of deep learning.

Article Series

Scalars, Vectors, Matrices and Tensors – Linear Algebra for Deep Learning (Part 1)
Matrix Algebra – Linear Algebra for Deep Learning (Part 2)
References

[1] Blyth, T.S. and Robertson, E.F. (2002) Basic Linear Algebra, 2nd Ed., Springer
[2] Strang, G. (2016) Introduction to Linear Algebra, 5th Ed., Wellesley-Cambridge Press
[3] Goodfellow, I.J., Bengio, Y., Courville, A. (2016) Deep Learning, MIT Press

Saksham Gupta, Sukhad Anand, Atul Rai

In the previous decade, there has been a considerable rise in the usage of smartphones.Due to exorbitant advancement in technology, computational speed and quality of image capturing has increased considerably. With an increase in the need for remote fingerprint verification, smartphones can be used as a powerful alternative for fingerprint authentication instead of conventional optical sensors. In this research, wepropose a technique to capture finger-images from the smartphones and pre-process them in such a way that it can be easily matched with the optical sensor images.Effective finger-image capturing, image enhancement, fingerprint pattern extraction, core point detection and image alignment techniques have been discussed. The proposed approach has been validated on FVC 2004 DB1 & DB2 dataset and the results show the efficacy of the methodology proposed. The method can be deployed for real-time commercial usage.

Lucy Kellaway:

It was clear from the start — even to my partial eye — that many of the 1,000 applicants were going to be catastrophes in the classroom. One chief executive of a consultancy firm applied, claiming that he had a strong urge to teach. The following day he sent an email withdrawing his application. He had told his wife over supper what he was planning to do. She pointed out the flaw in his scheme: he didn’t like children very much — not even his own.

It was clear from the start — even to my partial eye — that many of the 1,000 applicants were going to be catastrophes in the classroom. One chief executive of a consultancy firm applied, claiming that he had a strong urge to teach. The following day he sent an email withdrawing his application. He had told his wife over supper what he was planning to do. She pointed out the flaw in his scheme: he didn’t like children very much — not even his own.

Many of the applicants had not set foot in a school since they attended one themselves 30 or 40 years earlier, and so were sent off for a week’s immersion. This weeded out all those who had a fond vision of themselves as Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. It also got rid of those unsuited to the rigidity of school life. One man was told to leave after his first day — he had sat at the back of class checking his emails and then proceeded to go to sleep.

But for many others, time in school had the reverse effect. Richard Lewis, a 64-year-old consultant, emailed exultantly: “This is the best fun I have had since I bought my new motorbike . . . and I’ve only been here for four lessons. I want to do this all the time!”

Those who survived the week were put through the same assessment as any 22-year-old entering the profession. I sat in on some of the early interviews, wincing as former corporate titans failed to jump through hoops set out for them by people three decades their junior. A senior partner of a magic circle law firm was asked to think of a time when he had received negative feedback and explain how it had made him feel. This floored him. “Gosh”, he replied. “That’s a hard one. I haven’t received any feedback at all in living memory. It’s me who gives it to others . . . ” He didn’t make it. Lots of others didn’t make it, either — they came over as too arrogant, too inflexible or entirely out of touch.

Derek Thompson:

Kind of. In a fascinating new paper published this summer, five economists, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, call into question higher education’s role in promoting upward mobility. The centerpiece of the paper is “mobility report cards” for each college in America. The researchers considered 30 million students between 1999 and 2014 and compared their parents’ incomes to their own post-college earnings, by school. With this data, they could see exactly which colleges helped the most students rise from the bottom of the earnings ladder to the top.

Geoffrey Miller:

If the U.S. Constitution can’t protect free speech on campus, what can?

Campus speech codes are hard to understand and hard to follow for the neurodivergent, as I argued in my previous article. In principle, this problem could be reduced by rewriting speech codes to be more concrete and detailed, with complete lists of prohibited words, forbidden ideas, banned images, and unwelcome mating tactics. The neurodivergent could simply memorize these lists and feel a little more confident that they understand what they are not allowed to say or do. But no public university would dare to print such lists of communication taboos, since the First Amendment violations would be all too conspicuous, and the lawyers from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) would sue for prior restraint.

WEF:

Sperm count in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand declined by 50-60% between 1973 and 2011, according to a new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Surprisingly, the study, which analysed data on the sperm counts of 42,935 men, found no decline in sperm counts in men from Asia, Africa and South America, although there was limited data from these areas.

Overall, this is a very disturbing report. There has been a longstanding debate among scientists as to whether sperm counts have decreased or not. But what’s different about this study is the quality of the analysis. It was done in a systematic manner, accounting for several of the problems that had affected previous studies, such as the method used to count sperm and comparing studies performed sometimes decades apart. As such, most experts agree that the data presented is of a high quality and that the conclusions, although alarming, are reliable.

So what is going on? There has been concern for a number of years about an increase in abnormalities in male reproductive health, such as testicular cancer. The decline in sperm counts is consistent with these increases and this adds weight to the concept that male reproductive health is under attack and is declining rapidly.

Brendan O’Neill:

In a few weeks, a new intake of students will arrive, all fresh-faced and excited, at universities around the country. They’ll be thrilled at the prospect of escaping the wagging finger of mum and dad, eager to absorb new ideas. But I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. Unless they’re very fortunate, they will soon find themselves enveloped in a world that’s more censorious than stimulating and taught not to question ideas but to learn by heart the progressive creed. It will take a brave and resilient youngster to survive university with their intellectual curiosity intact.

Every aspect of campus life, from what you can say to how you should party, is minutely policed by what I called the Stepford Students in this magazine three years ago. ‘No Platform’ policies strictly govern who can speak on campus. Anybody, no matter what their political background or supposedly liberal credentials, can find themselves shunted off campus for having the wrong opinion in the eyes of the Stasi of student politics.

Lawrence Klepp:

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a disappointing muddle, but the future had better be very good or very bad, or it won’t sell.

Harari, an Oxford-educated Israeli historian who teaches in Jerusalem, is the author of Sapiens (2015), a provocative, panoramic view of human evolution and history upward from apedom. It became an international bestseller, recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. Harari’s style is breezy and accessible, sprinkled with allusions to pop culture and everyday life, but his perspective is coolly detached and almost Machiavellian in its unflinching realism about power, the role of elites, and the absence of justice in history. He is an unapologetic oracle of Darwin and data. And he is clearly a religious skeptic, but he practices a form of Buddhist meditation, and among the best things in his new book, like his previous one, are his observations on the varieties of religious experience.

Harari begins by assuring us that humanity is on a winning streak. Famine and plague, two historical scourges, are disappearing, and a third, war, is no longer routine statecraft. For the first time in history, more people die of eating too much than eating too little. More people succumb to ailments related to old age than to infectious diseases. Victims of all kinds of violence are, as percentages of the population, at historical lows in most places. The next stop, presumably, is Utopia.

Arian Campo-Flores:

For years, Misti Boackle had watched several cities break away from the Jefferson County school district that includes this Birmingham suburb, each forming what she considers superior school systems. So in 2012, she joined other residents to do the same for Gardendale.

“I felt it was the best thing for our family and our community,” said Ms. Boackle, a white mother of three children, two of whom attend Gardendale High School.

This spring, after years of battles, a court granted Gardendale a roadmap to having its own schools, though legal appeals have delayed it. Like many of the other area municipalities that have created separate school districts, Gardendale is a mostly white city while the county district is predominantly black.

The effort is one of a growing number of attempted school-district secessions—in states including California, Georgia and Wisconsin—highlighting deep divisions nationwide over race, class, and the role of desegregation orders six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. That decision declared racially separated schools unconstitutional.

Supporters of the moves say they are a way for communities to exert control over education policy and retain property-tax revenue for local benefit. Opponents say the separations can resegregate schools and exacerbate income disparities by breaking off wealthier, whiter areas.

Kenneth Vogel:

In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates with its enormous wealth is criticized.

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.

But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.

The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.

Matthew Yglesias:

Telecom companies, too, have their own favorite think tanks. And for years Google’s regulatory agenda seemed aligned with the public interest in a relatively uncomplicated way. As a dominant web search and web advertising company, they benefitted financially from lots of people having affordable high-quality internet access, and thus supported approaches to spectrum and wireline internet regulation that were likely to produce a consumer-friendly outcome.

But as Google itself grew, it came to be the target of possible regulatory action rather than simply the beneficiary of a competitive market in allied industries.

Jack Encarnacao

The trend is “unique in American history,” said Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and an economics professor at Ohio University.

“Even in the Great Depression, enrollments went up,” Vedder said. “There’s an increasing skepticism on the part of the public that college produces the bang for the buck that it claims to.”

Attorney General Maura Healey, who opened a unit in her office dedicated to assisting debt-addled students, said college’s traditional bargain is in question.

“It’s not the case anymore that a four-year, liberal arts education is going to be the ticket to economic mobility in today’s economy,” Healey said. “As I talk to employers in this state, I know there are certain jobs that are open, but they’re looking for a certain skill set that I don’t think we have done as good a job filling.”

Graduates with bachelor’s degrees still earn appreciably more than high school graduates, a median weekly pay of $1,156 compared to $692 for high school grads, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Zephyr Teachout:

About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”

Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.

This summer, a small team of well-respected researchers and journalists, the Open Markets team at the New America think tank (where I have been a fellow since 2014), dared to speak up about Google, in the mildest way. When the European Union fined Google for preferring its own subsidiary companies to its rival companies in search results, it was natural that Open Markets, a group dedicated to studying and exposing distortions in markets, including monopoly power, would comment. The researchers put out a 150-word statement praising the E.U.’s actions. They wrote, “By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, [the E.U.] is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend.” They called upon the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice and state attorneys general to apply the traditional American monopoly law, which would require separate ownership of products and services and the networks that sell products and services.

Dr Johnny Ryan:

Google and Facebook will be unable to use the personal data they hold for advertising purposes without user permission. This is an acute challenge because, contrary to what some commentators have assumed, they cannot use a “service-wide” opt-in for everything. Nor can they deny access to their services to users who refuse to opt-in to tracking.[1] Some parts of their businesses are likely to be disrupted more than others.
 
 The GDPR Scale
 
 When one uses Google or Facebook.com one willingly discloses personal data. These businesses have the right to process these data to provide their services when one asks them to. However, the application of the GDPR will prevent them from using these personal data for any further purpose unless the user permits. The GDPR applies the principle of “purpose limitation”, under which personal data must only be “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes”.[2]
 
 Google and Facebook cannot confront their users with broad, non-specific, consent requests that cover the entire breadth of their activities. Data protection regulators across the EU have made clear what they expect:

Kashmir Hill

But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know-how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google.
 
 Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet. I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google.
 
 Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep-sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending.

Cornelia Dean:

In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.

Robbie Feinberg:

It was the year 2000 and Maine’s governor at the time, Angus King, was excited about the Internet. The World Wide Web was still relatively young but King wanted every student in the state to have access to it.

“Go into history class and the teacher says, ‘Open your computer. We’re going to go to rome.com and we’re going to watch an archaeologist explore the Catacombs this morning in real time.’ What a learning tool that is!”

Fast-forward a couple of years and that dream became a reality. Maine became the first, and still only, state to offer a statewide laptop program to certain grade levels.

Alison King, no relation, was just a toddler when the program launched. Back then, kids lugged big, bulky iBooks around all day. In her senior year at Gorham High School, she says she uses her laptop — now much smaller — for most of the day, “We hardly ever use paper.”

Her American politics class is totally paperless. Alison’s teacher, James Welsch, says when he arrived in Gorham seven years ago, he’d never seen so many computers in one classroom. Welsch says it turned the class into an interactive discussion, “It’s like, we can put the world on the desk of each kid.” His students write blog posts, read each other’s work, and share videos and articles — all online.

Then he started to notice that when some students turned in their essays, the writing wasn’t as fluid as it was when the students were putting pen to paper. “You could also see an increase in copy-and-paste,” he says. “Whether it’s from another student, whether it’s from a piece online, digital sharing is what these guys do.”

Joel Kotkin:

The Silicon Valley and its Puget Sound annex dominated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft increasingly resemble the pre-gas crisis Detroit of the Big Three. Tech’s Big Five all enjoy overwhelming market shares—for example Google controls upwards of 80 percent of global search—and the capital to either acquire or crush any newcomers. They are bringing us a hardly gilded age of prosperity but depressed competition, economic stagnation, and, increasingly, a chilling desire to control the national conversation.

Jeff Bezos harrumphs through his chosen megaphone, The Washington Post, about how “democracy dies in the dark.” But if Bezos—the world’s third richest man, who used the Post first to undermine Bernie Sanders and then to wage ceaseless war on the admittedly heinous Donald Trump—really wants to identify the biggest long-term threat to individual and community autonomy, he should turn on the lights and look in the mirror.

Kimberly Houser & Debra Sanders

This Article examines the privacy issues resulting from the IRS’s big data analytics program as well as the potential violations of federal law. Although historically, the IRS chose tax returns to audit based on internal mathematical mistakes or mismatches with third party reports (such as W-2s), the IRS is now engaging in data mining of public and commercial data pools (including social media) and creating highly detailed profiles of taxpayers upon which to run data analytics. This Article argues that current IRS practices, mostly unknown to the general public are violating fair information practices. This lack of transparency and accountability not only violates federal law regarding the government’s data collection activities and use of predictive algorithms, but may also result in discrimination.

David Kroman & Lilly A. Fowler

One day last fall, a month before Donald Trump was elected president, Lassana Magassa disappeared from his job with Delta Airlines at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Employees are fired or quit all the time, but Magassa, who is Black and Muslim, had given no indication he was ready to leave and, according to his colleagues, was a perfectly capable ramp agent. So without any word from supervisors or Magassa himself, all that was left to do was speculate.
“It just seemed super weird,” says a former colleague. “One day everything was fine and the next thing he was gone.”

Jorge Harris, another of Magassa’s former co-workers, says “I couldn’t figure out what happened.”

As it turned out, the rank-and-file Delta employees were not the only ones in the dark. A directive to deny him access to the secure areas where he’d worked for over a year had been passed down to the Port of Seattle, Sea-Tac’s operator, from the Transportation Security Administration. And the explanation — to Delta supervisors, to Port of Seattle employees and to Magassa — was thin.

“Mr. Magassa,” reads an almost apologetic one-page note from the Port of Seattle’s head of airport security, “We are in receipt of notification from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), that your status in their vetting system has changed requiring immediate revocation of your security badge.”

“TSA does not provide any further information to the airport operator (Port of Seattle),” concludes the note. Magassa, for all intents and purposes, had been fired.

For Magassa, 36, it was the most puzzling piece in a series of perplexing interactions with federal law enforcement. A year earlier an FBI agent had started efforts to recruit him as an informant. And hours before losing his airport badge, he’d learned that he no longer qualified for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s global entry program, which expedites security for low-risk travelers.

Charlotte Gao:

China’s internet censorship is getting tougher and more comprehensive every day. On August 25, China’s top internet regulator announced new rules to manage internet forums and communities, forbidding unidentified netizens from posting anything on internet platforms. The new rules will become effective on October 1.

As The Diplomat has been following, since Chinese president Xi Jinping took office, China has been systematically increasing online control, and 2017 has witnessed the most fierce wave of internet censorship yet: Banning VPNs and independent multimedia contents, demanding international publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press remove specific content, punishing China’s top three internet giants for failing to manage their online platform properly, to name just a few.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the top internet censor, just gave Chinese netizens further bad news. On August 25, the administration issued “Management Regulations on Internet Forum and Community,” in order to “promote the healthy and orderly development of online community” and “safeguard national security and public interests.”

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Tom Chivers:

It started simply enough – with suggestions that her child should follow an unremarkable-sounding special diet. “They did these tests: a stool test and a urine test,” Layla (not her real name) tells BuzzFeed News. “I can’t remember where they were from – not the NHS, obviously, but some lab. The results had all these red markers.” The tests, from an alternative medicine practitioner who was recommended by and paid for by a major charity, apparently showed that Layla’s son, an autistic boy who was 3 at the time, had various issues with his gut and his metabolism. “I was shocked,” says Layla. “I didn’t realise – my son had all these deficiencies, these toxins in his system.”

The tests recommended a gluten-, casein-, and dairy-free diet. “It didn’t seem like a really big deal,” says Layla. “I thought, gluten, it’s bread and pasta – it’s not a massive thing.” The practitioner told her to monitor her son’s sleep and behaviour, and to expect improvements in the symptoms of his autism if they followed the diet.

Charles Bolden

When Katherine began at NASA, she and her cohorts were known as “human computers,” and if you talk to her or read quotes from throughout her long career, you can see that precision, that humming mind, constantly at work. She is a human computer, indeed, but one with a quick wit, a quiet ambition, and a confidence in her talents that rose above her era and her surroundings.

“In math, you’re either right or you’re wrong,” she said. Her succinct words belie a deep curiosity about the world and dedication to her discipline, despite the prejudices of her time against both women and African-Americans. It was her duty to calculate orbital trajectories and flight times relative to the position of the moon—you know, simple things. In this day and age, when we increasingly rely on technology, it’s hard to believe that John Glenn himself tasked Katherine to double-check the results of the computer calculations before his historic orbital flight, the first by an American. The numbers of the human computer and the machine matched.

Mike Antonucci

“Financially it’s a ticking time bomb, we think,” Ingersoll said. “The main budget item in any school district is teachers’ salaries. This just can’t be sustainable.”
It’s easy to see what Ingersoll means. NCES produces its survey every four years. Almost all public school staffing took a hit during the 2012 survey, as districts laid off thousands during the recession. Hiring was bound to return to normal levels afterwards.
If we go back to 2008 we get a clear picture of the growth of America’s public school workforce. While, student enrollment in 2015-16 was virtually identical to what it was in 2007-08 — almost 49.3 million students — the number of employees in 2016 was substantially higher.

The population of teachers grew from 3.4 million to more than 3.8 million — an increase of 12.4 percent.
But teachers comprise only half of the public school labor force. Over the past eight years, the numbers of administrators, bureaucrats, specialists and infrastructure support employees have also ballooned. The ranks of vice principals and assistant principals grew by 8.3 percent. Instructional coordinators and curriculum specialists increased by 10.5 percent, and there was between 5 and 12 percent growth in the number of nurses, psychologists, speech therapists, and special education aides.

Again, this larger group of employees is responsible for the same number of students as were enrolled in 2008.

Related: NCTQ “Questions Teacher Shortage Narrative, Release Facts to Set the Record Straight”.

NCTQ (National Council on Teacher Quality):

Our nation has open teaching positions that need to be filled by trained teachers. This is not a new national crisis but rather one America has been living with for years due to our unwillingness to adopt more strategic pay approaches. With rare exceptions, states have also shown no interest in limiting the number of teacher candidates their institutions can accept in some teaching fields to bring down the numbers nor in encouraging candidates to consider other teaching areas in shorter supply.

Teacher shortages are largely a product of local conditions, requiring local solutions. For example, until the state of Oklahoma pays its teachers more, it will struggle to fill positions, but solving its problem does not require us to raise teacher pay everywhere. Detroit suffers because its schools are so challenging. No solution will solve its problem until we address these local environments. The teaching field does not need solutions that set us back, like lowering teacher standards, hiring long-term substitutes and handing out emergency teacher certifications. There has been a mad rush by states to adopt these sorts of solutions. Instead, to fully understand the nature of teacher supply and demand trends, it is incumbent upon the nation, states, and school districts to collect better data and put these data into an historical context. States and districts should be able to identify the number of new teachers trained in each subject, how many graduate and do not end up teaching (because we know that nationwide, 50 percent of candidates do not end up in teaching jobs), where candidates apply for jobs, how many vacancies are open in each subject, and where these vacancies are located. In the absence of strong data systems that can pinpoint the broken points along the teacher pipeline, states and districts will continue to look for band-aids without resolving the underlying problems and the very real shortages which are not new but have gone on now for decades.

NCTQ Questions Teacher Shortage Narrative, Release Facts to Set the Record Straight.

Kashmir Hill

Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.
 
 The People You May Know feature is notorious for its uncanny ability to recognize who you associate with in real life. It has mystified and disconcerted Facebook users by showing them an old boss, a one-night-stand, or someone they just ran into on the street.

Tim Harford

To understand how humble, cheap inventions have shaped today’s world, picture a Bible — specifically, a Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s. The dense black Latin script, packed into twin blocks, makes every page a thing of beauty to rival the calligraphy of the monks. Except, of course, these pages were printed using the revolutionary movable type printing press. Gutenberg developed durable metal type that could be fixed firmly to print hundreds of copies of a page, then reused to print something entirely different. The Gutenberg press is almost universally considered to be one of humanity’s defining inventions. It gave us the Reformation, the spread of science, and mass culture from the novel to the newspaper. But it would have been a Rachael — an isolated technological miracle, admirable for its ingenuity but leaving barely a ripple on the wider world — had it not been for a cheap and humble invention that is far more easily and often overlooked: paper.
 
 The printing press didn’t require paper for technical reasons, but for economic ones. Gutenberg also printed a few copies of his Bible on parchment, the animal-skin product that had long served the needs of European scribes. But parchment was expensive — 250 sheep were required for a single book. When hardly anyone could read or write, that had not much mattered. Paper had been invented 1,500 years earlier in China and long used in the Arabic world, where literacy was common. Yet it had taken centuries to spread to Christian Europe, because illiterate Europe no more needed a cheap writing surface than it needed a cheap metal to make crowns and sceptres.

Paul Bloom, Nicholas Christakis, Carlos Eire, Maria E. Garlock, Robert P. George, Mary Ann Glendon, Joshua Katz, Thomas P. Kelly, Jon Levenson, John B. Londregan, Michael A. Reynolds, Jacqueline C. Rivers, Noël Valis, Tyler VanderWeele and Adrian Vermeule:

We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who are headed off to colleges around the country. Our advice can be distilled to three words:

Think for yourself.

Now, that might sound easy. But you will find—as you may have discovered already in high school—that thinking for yourself can be a challenge. It always demands self-discipline and these days can require courage.

In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student—or faculty member—faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink.

At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.

Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Julia Carrie Wong:

The primary principle at stake – that the US and the internet both remain free speech zones, even for Nazis – has never been more fraught.

“This is a really terrible time to be a free speech advocate,” said Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a ‘First they came for the … situation,” she said, referring to the famous Martin Niemöller poem about the classes of people targeted by Nazis, “only in reverse”.

Though these are dark days for American exceptionalism, the US remains distinct in its commitment to freedom of speech. Even as many Americans increasingly favor European-style limitations on hate speech, the constitution’s first amendment ensures that any such legislative effort is likely a non-starter.

But the fate of the Daily Stormer – as vile a publication as it is – may be a warning to Americans that the first amendment is increasingly irrelevant.

Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff:

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence. If Milo Yiannopoulos speaks on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, is that an act of violence?

CIA:

Here’s a list of five particularly timeless tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual:

Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

Employees: Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one.
Organizations and Conferences: When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
Telephone: At office, hotel and local telephone switchboards, delay putting calls through, give out wrong numbers, cut people off “accidentally,” or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again.

Transportation: Make train travel as inconvenient as possible for enemy personnel. Issue two tickets for the same seat on a train in order to set up an “interesting” argument.

James Hague

I’ve spent most of my career working on games, either programming or designing them or both. Games are weird, because everything comes down to this nebulous thing called fun, and there’s a complete disconnect between fun and most technical decisions:

Does choosing C++14 over C++11 mean the resulting game is more fun?

Does using a stricter type system mean the game is more fun?

Does using a more modern programming language mean the game is more fun?

Does favoring composition over inheritance mean the game is more fun?

Now you could claim that some of this tech would be more fun for the developer. That’s a reasonable, maybe even important point, but there’s still a hazy at best connection between this kind of “developer fun” and “player fun.”

Gennie Gebhart:

Students and their families are backed into a corner. As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats the privacy of students is undergoing profound changes—often without their parents’ notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to opt out of privacy-invading technology.

Students are using technology in the classroom at an unprecedented rate. One-third of all K-12 students in U.S. schools use school-issued devices.1 Google Chromebooks account for about half of those machines.2 Across the U.S., more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators use Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education), and that number is rapidly growing.3

Student laptops and educational services are often available for a steeply reduced price, and are sometimes even free. However, they come with real costs and unresolved ethical questions.4 Throughout EFF’s investigation over the past two years, we have found that educational technology services often collect far more information on kids than is necessary and store this information indefinitely. This privacy-implicating information goes beyond personally identifying information (PII) like name and date of birth, and can include browsing history, search terms, location data, contact lists, and behavioral information. Some programs upload this student data to the cloud automatically and by default. All of this often happens without the awareness or consent of students and their families.

Lydia Saad:

As another school year begins, Americans believe private schools provide students with the best K-12 education of five different types of schools in the U.S. The 71% who rate the quality of private school education as excellent or good exceeds the ratings for parochial, charter, home and public schooling, in that order.

Derek Lowe:

What do you get if you publish a paper in a highly-ranked journal? Some prestige, certainly. If you’re in academia, it certainly helps your application for tenure, and it’s no bad thing come grant renewal time. Looks good on your CV if you’re applying for another job, no doubt. But how about a big pile of cash?

That is apparently just what you get in some organizations and in some countries. This collaboration between Science and Retraction Watch has the numbers, although I wish that there were more information. For example, the top payout found in each country is listed, but I would also be interested in the median, and in the total number of institutions that offer such bonuses. No countries in continental Europe appear, so the practice seems unknown (or at least uncommon) there. The UK and the US both show up, though, with similar top payouts (in the $6000 range), but again, I’d like to know more about just how widespread this is. To give you an idea, the only two US examples actually given in the paper are the $10 that Oakwood University (Huntsville, AL) gives anyone whose published work gets cited, and the Miller College of Business (Muncie, IN), which pays $2000 for publication in a list of approved business journals. Those would make it seem like direct pay-to-publish is not quite in the mainstream of US academia, but it’s hard to say.

David Cole:

Does the First Amendment need a rewrite in the era of Donald Trump? Should the rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups lead us to cut back the protection afforded to speech that expresses hatred and advocates violence, or otherwise undermines equality? If free speech exacerbates inequality, why doesn’t equality, also protected by the Constitution, take precedence?

After the tragic violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, these questions take on renewed urgency. Many have asked in particular why the ACLU, of which I am national legal director, represented Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, in challenging Charlottesville’s last-minute effort to revoke his permit. The city proposed to move his rally a mile from its originally approved site—Emancipation Park, the location of the Robert E. Lee monument whose removal Kessler sought to protest—but offered no reason why the protest would be any easier to manage a mile away. As ACLU offices across the country have done for thousands of marchers for almost a century, the ACLU of Virginia gave Kessler legal help to preserve his permit. Should the fatal violence that followed prompt recalibration of the scope of free speech?

Rod Dreher:

Raising little ones is hard these days, particularly because — even by ages five and six — kids on the playground are educating them about topics I didn’t even know much about until I was a preteen. Consequently, my wife and I began talking to the girls about sexuality in age-appropriate ways last year. It’s a sensitive area, but we wanted to go ahead and introduce our values to them early on, before a kid at school did and potentially caused confusion.

In that spirit, last weekend I decided to talk to the girls about the topic of people who identify as transgendered. Shortly after starting the conversation, however, I learned that [their teacher] had already talked to [our daughter] and her classmates about it. This involved her reading a book called “I Am Jazz” and conducting a classroom discussion on the topic.

First of all, let me say this: [my wife] and I think a lot of [the teacher]. She has been an excellent teacher and [our daughter] has seen great progress in her class. Furthermore, she has made a point to encourage us and compliment [our daughter’s] progress anytime she sees us. She’s a good and professional teacher, and I suppose that’s part of the reason we were so disappointed. We wouldn’t have expected it from her. And even though I’m sure she meant well, those good intentions don’t make [our daughter’s] experience any more appropriate, especially because I had already let the school know my wishes about any such discussion with the students.