Gene Epstein:

Who won last Monday’s verbal smack-down between the two main presidential candidates? On issues relating to the economy, it was too close to call: They both lost, each having matched the other with displays of economic illiteracy. Space limitations permit only one ignoramus award per candidate.

Consider Democrat Hillary Clinton’s analysis of the Great Recession of 2008-09. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession,” she noted, “the worst since the 1930s.” After that valid observation, she declared that the disaster “was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”

That somewhat jumbled formulation almost seemed calculated to stir class hatred. The horrors of the Great Recession must still haunt millions of Americans. As Clinton herself went on to remark, “Nine million people lost their jobs” and “five million people lost their homes.” Yet in her view, “slashed taxes on the wealthy” was a principal cause of this misery, while the “tax policies” that apparently kicked “the middle class” to the curb was a related factor.

Jonathan Gruber on “stupid Americans”.

Alexandra Wolfe

For younger students, Prof. Christensen thinks that education needs to be reformed across the board. In his 2008 book “Disrupting Class,” he asked why government investment in education has yielded so little progress. He believes that his latest theory can help here too. “The job is that kids need to feel successful every day,” he says. As one example, he points to Khan Academy, which offers free online courses. Students have to master each level before they can move on, giving them a feeling of achievement.

DN Lee

I am sitting in on a big lecture course – Biology for Majors – that I will teach next fall. Faculty, both junior and senior faculty, rotate and teach core courses here. I haven’t had to think about foundational biology in a decade and I’m taking notes on the material as well as the presentation emphasis of my senior colleague.

Thought bubble: Was there a memo about the rearranging and reassigning of organisms into different groups? Domains, Kingdom, Paraphyletic groups #howsway?!

Seriously, here I am in the course, sitting mid-range in this huge auditorium. I can see both my colleague’s expression and note the level of engagement (via facial expressions and the amount of scribbling students are doing)…He asks simple feedback questions and no response.

Chemistry Blog

Future chemistry faculty will have to be twice as smart, work with twice the efficiency, and reach the correct positions of influence if they want this type of unhealthy cultural attitudes to finally be put to rest. This is my goal at least.

Update 1: Guido Koch now.

Update 2: The underlying macroeconomic cause for why professors can get away with this behavior.

Update 3: This story has really struck a cord, thank you for sharing this link and supplying our first 20,000 visitor day!

Update 4: A transcribed letter from Robert Tjian

Maia Szalavitz

Drug education is the only part of the middle school curriculum I remember — perhaps because it backfired so spectacularly. Before reaching today’s legal drinking age, I was shooting cocaine and heroin.

I’ve since recovered from my addiction, and researchers now are trying to develop innovative prevention programs to help children at risk take a different road than I did.

Greg Durrett

The Berkeley Document Summarizer is a learning-based single-document summarization system. It compresses source document text based on constraints from constituency parses and RST discourse parses. Moreover, it can improve summary clarity by reexpressing pronouns whose antecedents would otherwise be deleted or unclear.

Kolmogorov Complexity

And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, each string has an equal chance (2^{-50}) in being chosen at random from all sequences of 50 binary digits. So in a sense, the huge body of mathematics underlying probability has already failed us at this basic juncture because we cannot speak of how random one particular outcome of an experiment is. We need a new notion that overcomes this difficulty.

Definition: The Kolmogorov complexity of a string w, denoted K(w) is the length of the shortest program which outputs w given no input.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

On Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm CST, more than 130 local Black men will participate in Madison’s Premiere Black Male Photo Shoot on the steps of Wisconsin’s State Capitol, City Hall and the Monona Terrace. The photo shoot has been organized One City Early Learning Centers in partnership with Marcus Miles Photography, Justice Productions and Hedi Rudd Photography.

As part of One City’s Ready by 5 Campaign that will kick-off in November 2016, this unique photo shoot will benefit the children of One City Early Learning Centers and promote the importance of high quality preschools being available, affordable and accessible to all children in Dane County. One City will sell printed calendars, posters and photos as a fundraiser during the 2016 holiday season to support the operations of our school. The Campaign will also promote positive images of Black men to children and adults across Dane County.

Participants include:
University of Wisconsin’s Associate Head Basketball Coach Howard Moore

UW-Madison Vice Provost for Diversity & Climate Patrick J Sims

UW-Madison Assistant Dean José J. Madera

UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Randolph Ashton

Deputy Mayor Enis Ragland

Judge Everett Mitchell

Madison Metropolitan School District Board President James Howard and Chief of Secondary Schools Alex Fralin

Health & Fitness champion Haywood Simmons

Pastors Colier McNair, David Smith Sr., Rick Badger and Kevin Doss

Several Members of the Madison Fire and Police Departments

Councilman Samba Baldeh

YWCA’s Bill Baldon

The Duke Dennis McClain

Radio Personality Derrell Connor

Retired Police Lt. and South Side Raiders President Wayne Strong

County leader Andre Johnson

…and many more

For more details about the photo shoot, please visit goo.gl/d9e36g. One City will host additional photo shoots featuring more diverse citizens to build a movement of awareness and support for its preschool, and for preschool education in general in Dane County.

Three additional photo shoots: Real Women of Madison – We Do Everything, Real Leaders of Madison – We Support All Children, and Future Leaders of Madison – Yes, We Have A Plan will take place during the winter and spring with a release at One City’s first annual event next year.

Caire stated that, “The photo shoots are fun and meaningful activities designed to build awareness, support and a movement for high quality, affordable and accessible early education for all children. They will also help cultivate a new vision of future career possibilities among our children while highlighting the widespread support that exists in all segments of our community to eliminate poverty and achievement gaps.”

Marcus Miles of Marcus Miles Photography added, “I’m very happy to be a part of this project. Our children’s future depends on how well we prepare them before age 5. They must be ready by then if we want them to succeed in school and life.”

About One City Early Learning
One City is a nonprofit preschool located in South Madison that opened in September 2015. They presently serves 35 children ages 1 to 5 and plan to grow to serve 110 (including infants) by 2018 in our current location. The organization’s mission is to prepare young children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life, and ensure they enter grade school reading-ready. We operate a year-round program from 6:45am to 5:30pm Monday through Friday. For more information about One City Early Learning Centers, visit www.onecityearlylearning.org and click below to like us on Facebook and Twitter.

Get Involved.

“Progressive Army”

A leaked memo titled “BRL Interview Prep MEMO – CO03, CO06, IA01, NE02, UT04” detailed the state of five competitive Congressional races. The document reveals the Party’s collusion and close tie with the press, its active work to control the narrative and ensuring positive press coverage in Utah’s 4th district:

Most reporters are a rather long way from Mencken.

Brian Krez’s:

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.

The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
Vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into “bots,” forcing them to report to a central control server that can be used as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The Hackforums user who released the code, using the nickname “Anna-senpai,” told forum members the source code was being released in response to increased scrutiny from the security industry.

“When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn’t planning on staying in it long,” Anna-senpai wrote. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO [link added]. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.”

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Mirai is one of at least two malware families that are currently being used to quickly assemble very large IoT-based DDoS armies. The other dominant strain of IoT malware, dubbed “Bashlight,” functions similarly to Mirai in that it also infects systems via default usernames and passwords on IoT devices.

According to research from security firm Level3 Communications, the Bashlight botnet currently is responsible for enslaving nearly a million IoT devices and is in direct competition with botnets based on Mirai.

Erin Richards:

On a mid-September morning, Pulaski High School on Milwaukee’s south side appeared peaceful and studious, its hallways free of roaming students and Principal Lolita Patrick holding sway in front of the auditorium.

Teachers instruct with the doors open now. Students wear uniforms, suspensions and incidents are down and the lunchroom is far more civilized this year, she said.

Those are small but meaningful steps for Pulaski, a struggling high school embarking on a big, urgent turnaround while hosting a new upstairs neighbor: Carmen Southeast, the third campus of the Milwaukee-based Carmen Schools of Science and Technology charter network. Downstairs, Pulaski is working on cementing an International Baccalaureate program into its curriculum.

The co-location deserves particular attention because the proposal to put Carmen in Pulaski drew a pitched fight last fall between Carmen supporters and the teachers union. Carmen is a popular, high-expectations charter school that wanted to add a third campus. Pulaski is a traditional high school with extra space because of declining enrollment. Patrick and MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver were in favor of the co-location, but the Milwaukee School Board was split. A key member changed his mind, and a narrow 5-4 vote let the partnership proceed.

Simon Keper:

‘A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain’

I’d like to have a soldier stationed outside the classroom door,” my son’s teacher told the parents’ meeting. “And I’d like him to be young and handsome.” My children’s primary school in Paris is a few minutes’ walk (or a frantic sprint) from the sites of last year’s terrorist attacks. Across the city, the new term has started with drills on what to do if terrorists get into the school. The teacher announces “Intrusion”, turns off the lights, puts something in front of the door, and everyone hides under their desks.

My kids don’t seem traumatised. One of my sons came home chuckling at the memory of his fat middle-aged teacher trying to squeeze under her desk. Still, his generation will be shaped by the spectre of terrorism.

Every society tries to make the trade-off between security and freedom. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s at the tail-end of a western era that prioritised freedom. According to Google, mentions of “freedom” exceeded mentions of “security” in English-language books every year from about 1830 through to 1985. When I was eight, living in a small Dutch town, all the children in my class cycled to school alone. Our parents rarely knew where we were (and probably didn’t care). Freedom was the spirit of the times.

Statistically, in fact, we were in much greater danger than children today. My two schoolmates who died of cancer might well have survived now. And when I was eight, Dutch traffic deaths were more than triple today’s level.

By the end of my childhood, society began getting more protective. In 1985, mentions of “security” surpassed “freedom” in books, and the word has steadily expanded its lead since. We entered an era of compulsory seatbelts, bans on public smoking and laws against drink-driving.

“Oh ye of little faith”….

Lawrence Summers

On the basis of these factors, I expect that more than one-third of all men between 25 and 54 will be out work at mid-century. Very likely more than half of men will experience a year of non-work at least one year out of every five. This would be in the range of the rate of non-work for high school drop-outs and exceeds the rate of non-work for African Americans today.

Will we be able to support these people and a growing retired share of the population? What will this mean for the American family? For prevailing ethics of self-reliance? For alienation and support for toxic populism? These are vital questions. Even more vital is the question of what is to be done.

Elizabeth Campbell

Chicago, the nation’s biggest junk-rated city, has raised taxes and moved to shore up its debt-ridden pension system, but for its schools, the triage still has a ways to go. […]

The Chicago Board of Education is facing a potential strike by its teachers, which could further strain its coffers. The third-largest U.S. school district’s budget counts on state aid and union concessions that may not come. And this week, Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating deeper into junk, citing its “precarious liquidity” and reliance on borrowed money, as preliminary data showed an enrollment drop of almost 14,000 students — a loss that may cut into its funding.

The chronic financial strains may lead investors to demand higher interest rates from the debt-dependent district. With $6.8 billion of general-obligation debt, it’s already paying yields of as much as 9 percent, according to Moody’s. More than 10 percent of this year’s $5.4 billion budget is eaten up by principal and interest costs.

Brian Resnick:

But Michèle Nuijten, a PhD student at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who co-created Statcheck, has her sights on fixing a much smaller but surprisingly impactful problem in science: rounding errors.

“When starting this project, I wouldn’t say [this was a big problem],” Nuijten tells me. “We’re detecting when people are making rounding errors, who cares?”

But she and some colleagues in the Netherlands were curious enough to check. They built a computer program that could quickly scan published psychological papers and check the math on the statistics. They called their program “Statcheck” and ran it on 30,717 papers.

Related: Math Forum.

David Tran:

I grew up in East Oakland, California, as the youngest son of Teochew-Vietnamese immigrants. School was always easy for me — I never really felt challenged throughout elementary school. Amid the droves of teacher strikes and substitutes, the truly dedicated teachers of Oakland’s Maxwell Park Elementary School were few and far between.

But in fifth grade, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mrs. Harris, who changed my life forever. On weekends, Mrs. Harris invited students to her house for lunch. Using her own money, she gave away trinkets to those who did well on assignments.

And during a parent-teacher conference, she did something unthinkable and so incredible that I didn’t fully comprehend its impact until years later. She begged my parents to have me apply to private middle schools to get me out of the failing Oakland public schools.

David Robson.

Thomas Donlan:

The dry-run delegates proposed:

• Requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to approve any increase in the national debt, and ending the power of Congress to mandate spending by states or municipalities.

• Placing 12-year term limits on members of Congress.

• Limiting the powers under the constitutional clause that authorizes Congress to regulate interstate and international commerce.

• Giving Congress a right of approval of federal regulations. No regulation challenged by 25% of the members of either house would go into effect without support from majorities in both houses, and the president would have no veto against their decisions.

• Repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized imposition of the income tax in 1913, and requiring supermajority votes for creating or raising federal taxes.

• Giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order by votes of three-fifths of state legislatures.

See more at conventionofstates.com.

David Pilling

For a group that has helped change the way economics is taught at universities up and down Britain, the Post-Crash Economics Society had a less than momentous start.

It was November 2012 when seven undergraduates met in a cramped room on the top floor of Manchester university’s student union. Chairs drawn into a semi-circle, they listened as the two founding members went through a brief PowerPoint presentation explaining what they thought was wrong with the economics curriculum. A polite discussion followed before everyone shuffled off for the Christmas holidays. It wasn’t exactly Paris 1968.

The students had gathered in response to an email with the subject line: “CALL OUT TO ALL THE ECONOSCEPTICS OUT THERE”. “In the middle of the biggest global recession for 80 years,” the email read, “students across the world are questioning the very foundations of our discipline.”

Sam Biddle:

Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.

This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address — which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that “we do not store data related to customers’ location,” identify a customer’s location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices,” orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.

The Intercept received the document about Apple’s Messages logs as part of a larger cache originating from within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Electronic Surveillance Support Team, a state police agency that facilitates police data collection using controversial tools like the Stingray, along with conventional techniques like pen registers. The document, titled “iMessage FAQ for Law Enforcement,” is designated for “Law Enforcement Sources” and “For Official Use Only,” though it’s unclear who wrote it or for what specific audience — metadata embedded in the PDF cites an author only named “mrrodriguez.” (The term “iMessages” refers to an old name for the Messages app still commonly used to refer to it.)

Elizabeth Patitsas, Jesse Berlin, Michelle Craig, and Steve Easterbrook

Although it has never been rigourously demonstrated, there is a common belief that CS grades are bimodal. We statisti- cally analyzed 778 distributions of final course grades from a large research university, and found only 5.8% of the dis- tributions passed tests of multimodality. We then devised a psychology experiment to understand why CS educators believe their grades to be bimodal. We showed 53 CS pro- fessors a series of histograms displaying ambiguous distri- butions and asked them to categorize the distributions. A random half of participants were primed to think about the fact that CS grades are commonly thought to be bimodal; these participants were more likely to label ambiguous dis- tributions as “bimodal”. Participants were also more likely to label distributions as bimodal if they believed that some students are innately predisposed to do better at CS. These results suggest that bimodal grades are instructional folklore in CS, caused by confirmation bias and instructor beliefs about their students.

CeliaSue Hecht

Every night and every morning, I wonder how it got to be like this. If I’m lucky, I’ll get maybe six hours of shuteye, but usually it’s a lot less. The fear of police or someone else finding me makes me nervous. After a while, the lack of sleep sets in. I feel groggy, low energy, and my legs and feet get swollen and stiff. Sleep deprivation is a torture technique the military uses, and it works just as effectively on an old lady like me.

Not having a home is hard. Now imagine not having a home at the age of 66.

Derek Thompson

A “crisis of abundance” initially seems like a paradox. After all, abundance is the ultimate goal of technology and economics. But consider the early history of the electric washing machine. In the 1920s, factories churned them out in droves. (With the average output of manufacturing workers rising by a third between 1923 and 1929, making more washing machines was relatively cheap.) But as the decade ended, factories saw they were making many more than American households demanded. Companies cut back their output and laid off workers even before the stock market crashed in 1929. Indeed, some economists have said that the oversupply of consumer goods like washing machines may have been one of the causes of the Great Depression.