Joshua Rothman:

A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.

Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.

Aleks Kajstura and Russ Immarigeon:

We already know that when it comes to incarceration, the United States is truly exceptional. As we have reported previously, the United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. Worldwide, and within the U.S., the vast majority of those incarcerated are men. As a result, women’s incarceration rates are overshadowed and often lost in the data. As a first step in documenting how women fare in the world’s carceral landscape, this report compares the incarceration rates for women of each U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world.

George Eaton:

“I consider myself in the same business as journalists,” Taleb says when I raise the subject of my trade. “But if you don’t take risks it becomes propaganda or PR.” Taleb, a man sometimes described as having praise only for himself, speaks admiringly of the New Statesman’s in-house philosopher John Gray. “My respect for him is so great… He, visibly, has skin in the game, he was not afraid to be a Thatcherite when it was unpopular and later an anti-Thatcherite when it was also unpopular.”

In Taleb’s universe, the fieriest circle of hell is reserved for bankers and neoconservatives. “The best thing that could happen to society is the bankruptcy of Goldman Sachs,” he tells me. “Banking is rent-seeking of industrial proportions.” Taleb, who became rich as a derivatives trader, is not a foe of capitalism but of “cronyism”. “If you’re taking risks, God bless you. This is why I accept inequality. I’ve seen people go from trader to cab driver and back again.”

Legislatove Technology Service Bureau:

This interactive map shows the Wisconsin school districts that will benefit from Representative Nygren and Senator Marklein’s bill. Click on a district to see its revenue limit, projected low revenue adjustment, when the school district will become eligible for additional aid, and projected increased sparsity aid.

Via Molly Beck.

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

Richard Adams:

Vice-chancellors’ pay at British universities has far outstripped that of their peers in senior leadership roles elsewhere across the public sector, according to research conducted by the Guardian.

Analysis of the salaries of vice-chancellors at leading universities shows they are paid well above the chief executives of NHS hospital trusts and local authorities in a number of cities in England.

The £185,000 pay of the chief executive of Birmingham city council – the largest local authority in Europe, with gross annual expenditure of £3bn – was less than half that of the University of Birmingham’s vice-chancellor, Sir David Eastwood, on £378,000.

Eastwood also chairs the Universities Superannuation Scheme – for which he earns an additional £90,000 – and is a board member of the Universities UK group, at the heart of the bitter dispute over staff pensions that has provoked strikes in more than 60 universities in recent weeks.

Mark Sommerhauser:

The proposal also reignited questions about the value of higher education in an era of skyrocketing student debt and questions about U.S. worker productivity: Should universities cultivate niche specialties of academic subjects or offer a broad array of them? Should they teach students skills tied to specific occupations, or widen students’ worldview while honing broad skills of analysis, creativity and communication?

Critics say UW-Stevens Point is placing its bets on the first answers to both questions — at the risk of undermining educational quality and access.

Some, such as state Rep. Katrina Shankland, D-Stevens Point, say it’s part of a broader effort by Republican lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker to transform the UW System.

Noel Radomski, who directs the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education at UW-Madison, said the plan could hurt the university’s reputation and hamper student and faculty recruitment. Few other universities that faced budget deficits took similar steps, he said, and for good reason.

Michael Miller:

The old minivan appeared near the school on a Tuesday morning, its Illinois plates the only thing out of place in the blue-collar suburbs of central Long Island. But as backpack-toting teenagers passed by on their way to Brentwood High, the van’s doors suddenly swung open.

Out sprang members of the violent street gang MS-13, armed with baseball bats.

They attacked three 16-year-old students they suspected of being rivals before driving off. When police spotted the van in the same neighborhood the following afternoon and surrounded it at gunpoint, the MS-13 members were in the midst of trying to abduct a fourth.

Related:

Gangs and School Violence Forum

Police calls, Madison Schools:1996-2006.

Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett:

Myths abound about standardized tests, but the research is clear: They provide an invaluable measure of how students are likely to perform in college and beyond

This Saturday, hundreds of thousands of U.S. high-school students will sit down to take the SAT, anxious about their performance and how it will affect their college prospects. And in a few weeks, their older peers, who took the test last year, will start hearing back from the colleges they applied to. Adm

Allie Stuckey:

Confident, self-assured men – the kind our society needs – don’t rape women. They don’t harass their female employees. Brave men don’t bully their peers. Strong men don’t shoot up schools. They don’t patronize or hurt others to prove their masculinity.

Weak, insecure ones do.

That’s why 26 out of the last 27 deadliest mass shooters were fatherless. That’s why boys who grow up in single-mother homes are twice as likely to commit crimes than those who grow up with a present dad. That’s why both sons and daughters are more likely to become depressed without a strong relationship with their father. That’s why 71% of high school dropouts are fatherless.

Not because they had too much male strength in their lives, but because they didn’t have enough.

If masculinity were truly toxic, then wouldn’t boys and girls who grow up without dads be happier and healthier? If it were better that men were more like women, wouldn’t kids be just as content with a mom than with having a father, too?

Like it or not, masculinity — in its best, strongest form — is the kingpin of the family. Humble, strong leadership as expressed by a father is simply not, in most cases, adequately replaced by a mother. Those without a strong father tend to act out in aggression in their adolescent and adult years– not because they’re oversaturated with maleness, but because they’re starving for it.

The void caused by fatherlessness, along with its consequential damage, should be a pretty good indication that it’s not less or weaker men that we need, but more strong ones. If the family deteriorates because of a lack of a strong male figure, doesn’t it follow that society, too, falls apart without strong, honorable men?

If we know that kids who grow up without dads are more likely to be a threat to themselves and to others, shouldn’t we be trying to save masculinity, rather than kill it?

Kathryn Wisniewski:

It was a rough day yesterday for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

We all, staff, students and faculty alike, started our day with a death sentence. It was not unironic that it was a bulleted list that delivered the news. We didn’t even warrant a full sentence, just a bullet point, a bullet wound in the heart of the university, our alma mater.

Chancellor Bernie Patterson had the unfortunate job of pulling that trigger, under the subject line of “Reimagining the university.” At 10:32 a.m. on Monday, March 5, 2018, Patterson’s email delivered a digest of the proposal of upcoming changes to the programs at UWSP in order to address our declining enrollment and resulting budget crisis.

Mike Antonucci:

But for the moment let’s suppose you were an exemplary New Mexico teacher paying agency fees to your exclusive bargaining agent. Then you read this:

This week, Gov. Susana Martinez signed off on a budget bill that provides for $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses for exemplary teachers in New Mexico. And while she used her line-item veto authority to strike the language giving teachers unions the ability to decide whether the school districts and charter schools they represent will participate, one union leader says her group might still be able to block the bonuses by invoking their collective bargaining rights under state law.

NEA-NM President Betty Patterson says “school employees can rest assured our local associations will use negotiations to locally determine whether their district will go forward with this wildly unpopular ‘merit pay’ program that undermines collaboration among school teams.”

Karen Rivedal:

DPI’s data showed 73 percent of African-American students graduated on track from Madison public high schools last spring, compared with 59 percent who did the same in spring 2016. That’s by far the highest single rate and year-over-year jump posted for black students over the past five years in the district, with rates of 54 percent, 56 percent and 59 percent from 2012-13 to 2014-15.

But district officials were unable to say, for instance, where last year’s increase was more heavily weighted — in the district’s main high schools or in the alternative programs — or whether the rise was distributed proportionately across programs and schools.

“We still need to dig into that,” said Andrew Statz, the district’s chief accountability officer, noting the district typically gets graduation numbers from the state later in the year and releases its own detailed report in May.

Cheatham also pointed to the district’s six-year graduation rate for black students, which has risen more steadily over the past five years, from 72 percent in 2012-13 to 77 percent in 2016-17, with a high of 79 percent in 2015-16.

“We have been on a positive trajectory when it comes to graduation rates for the last several years,” she said. “The most positive part of our trajectory has been in the six-year rate, and because of that I wasn’t surprised to see the four-year rate is starting to see that similar uptick.

Patrick Martin:

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.

A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.

Adam Baidawi:

At Lumineer Academy, a newly opened primary school in Williamstown, Australia, there is no homework. There are no classrooms, uniforms or traditional grades.

Instead, there are “creator spaces,” “blue-sky thinking” sessions and “pitch decks.”

If the school — furnished like a start-up with whiteboards and beanbag chairs — sounds like the idea of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, that’s because it is.

:

We have reviewed carefully your letter dated March 7, 2018.

The pending Citizen Lab report concerning the use of Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices (“Report”) is a peer-reviewed, comprehensive research paper on a serious issue of significant public interest.

As is its standard protocol, Citizen Lab has engaged in best practices in conducting the research underlying the Report and in providing Sandvine with ample time and information to respond to the core findings of Citizen Lab’s research.

Specifically, before finalizing the Report, by letter dated February 12, 2018 Citizen Lab provided Sandvine with a detailed synopsis of the research findings, including core technical findings, and sought Sandvine’s comment or statement in response. Citizen Lab posed specific questions to Sandvine and committed to publishing, in full, any statement or clarification that Sandvine wished to provide. Citizen Lab remains committed to this position, and intends to publish the exchange of communication with Sandvine along-side the final report, including this letter.

David Bell:

Enlightenment Now has few of these qualities. It is a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world’s great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt. The genre it most closely resembles, with its breezy style, bite-size chapters, and impressive visuals, is not 18th-century philosophie so much as a genre in which Pinker has had copious experience: the TED Talk (although in this case, judging by the book’s audio version, a TED Talk that lasts 20 hours).

Like a TED Talk, Enlightenment Now is easy to summarize. Despite all the doom and gloom bandied about today, Pinker argues, things are good—in fact, the best they’ve ever been. More specifically, human beings today lead longer, safer, healthier, wealthier, and indeed happier lives than at any point in recorded history, and they do so thanks to the Enlightenment. The nay-saying that is so prevalent in our culture is simply an error, the product of cognitive biases compounded by the influence of foolish intellectuals and ignorant politicians.

Sarah Jeong:

Paul Spencer, a Congressional candidate in Little Rock, Arkansas, has never worked at a tech company. He doesn’t represent tech industry issues. He doesn’t even own a laptop or smartphone. He typically dictates the tweets on his campaign’s official Twitter account; occasionally he’ll type them out on a campaign staffer’s computer. Sometime last year, he was tagged in a tweet with someone going by the handle of @Pinboard, who was telling Spencer that he could raise money for him.

“I don’t know who this @Pinboard guy is,” he said to his staffers. The campaign ignored the tweet for a couple of days before someone decided they might as well send the guy a message. “We like to say it’s the most lucrative DM we’ve ever sent,” Reed Brewer, a spokesperson for the Spencer campaign, told me.

Spencer was being invited to be a beneficiary of the Great Slate, a fundraising campaign that raised nearly a million dollars in 2017, mostly through Twitter, for eight seemingly random congressional candidates from across the country. The Great Slate has no splashy slogans, no slick logos: just a bare-bones website, a donate button, and a lot of jokes on Twitter. It isn’t being run by the candidates, a PAC, or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The fundraising is almost entirely driven by rank-and-file tech workers — some working for big companies like Google — living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Morgan Polikoff & Kate Kennedy:

California is nothing if not a rebel. While more than 40 states have chosen to give schools summative/overall ratings in their new accountability systems, California is bucking that trend.

These overall grades—often on an A-F (e.g., Alabama, Florida, North Carolina), 0-100 (e.g., Connecticut, Wisconsin), or 1-5 (e.g., Oregon) scale—are intended to offer parents and other stakeholders a clear evaluation of school performance. An A-F rating, for example, might aggregate academic measures (e.g., reading and math test scores) with nonacademic factors, such as suspension and absenteeism rates. (Examples of states’ report cards, including California’s Dashboard, are presented throughout this post.)

Capital Times Podcast:

From police in schools to racial disparities in the classroom, there’s no shortage of daunting issues that the Madison School Board is grappling with in 2018. At a forum on the city’s south side earlier this week, three candidates running for the board in this spring’s election weighed in.

The Cap Times collaborated with Delta Sigma Theta Alumnae and the Simpson Street Free Press on this event, hosted at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church.

Nikhil Sonnad:

Learning has an evolutionary purpose: Among species, individuals that adapt to their environments will succeed. That’s why your brain more easily retains important or surprising information: It takes very little effort to remember that the neighbor’s dog likes to bite. Remembering the dog’s name is harder. One ensures safety, the other is just a random fact.

But today, the kinds of things humans want to learn are rarely focused on survival; we also use our adaptive, evolutionary memory to remember new languages, 11-step face-washing routines, obscure vocabulary words, and facts about Star Wars. The trick to doing so, once you’ve decided to acquire a new skill or build up your knowledge in a particular area, lies in convincing your brain that the information matters. In other words, you have to overcome the “forgetting curve.”

Mike Rogoway:

Oregon parents won’t get a state tax break on money they save to pay for K-12 private schooling, lawmakers have decided. That’s despite a federal tax break approved in December as part of a congressional tax overhaul.

Traditional college savings plans known as 529 accounts have offered an incentive for families to save for college. Parents and students invest in 529s and, if the accounts increase in value, they can withdraw that increase tax free to pay for college expenses.

NY Times:

A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just calculate but also create, as it “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

The computer she was writing about, the British inventor Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, was never built. But her writings about computing have earned Lovelace — who died of uterine cancer in 1852 at age 36 — recognition as the first computer programmer.

ewa:

It began with a feel-good story: A struggling high school in Washington, D.C., had turned itself around and was sending all its seniors to college. When a reporter dug deeper, however, she discovered that many students should not have qualified to graduate—one in five had even missed more than half the school year.

Using data collected from attendance records, class rosters, and internal emails, combined with dogged shoe-leather journalism, reporter Kate McGee of WAMU unraveled the narrative of Ballou High as a success story. This enterprising journalism opened the door to a government investigation that has revealed a broader pattern of inflated graduation rates across the city’s public school system.

The issues raised—about credit recovery, chronic absenteeism, and the pressure to deliver high graduation rates—are playing out in communities across the country. What kind of data should education reporters look for when shedding light on local school districts? Where should they turn for help? What questions should they ask?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

This short piece looks at the growing phenomenon of intra-state secession movements. From California, where plans have been floated to split the state into two, five, or six pieces, to more traditional secessionist movements in Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington, to plans to separate upstate New York and downstate Illinois from the large metropolitan areas that dominate state politics, various states are facing internal separatist movements. The paper looks at the sources of the dissatisfaction driving these movements, and suggests a number of solutions to address that dissatisfaction without amending the Constitution or adding stars to the flag.

Richard Florida:

Contrary to popular perception, Millennials are fairly evenly distributed among urban areas, mature suburbs, and exurbs. However, the cohort in cities tends to be far more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. Nearly three-quarters (72.3 percent) of Millennials in exurbs are white, and more than half (51.9 percent) of those in mature suburbs are too. But urban Millennials are majority-minority: Nearly 60 percent of them are non-white. As Frey puts it: “Suburban categories get less diverse as distance from the core increases.”

But which places are attracting the most Millennial talent—the recent college grads so frequently stereotyped and mischaracterized in popular media? Is this group really so different from previous generations of smart, young people who migrated to cities?

The map from the study below shows the big picture. In 60 of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, the share of college grads within the total Millennial population ranges between 30 and 45 percent. However, some metros have much higher shares. The gap between the leading and lagging metros on Millennial talent reflects the extreme spatial inequality and polarization that define, and increasingly plague, the United States today.

Elizabeth Hinton:

Imagine if prisons looked like the grounds of universities. Instead of languishing in cells, incarcerated people sat in classrooms and learned about climate science or poetry — just like college students. Or even with them.

This would be a boon to prisoners across the country, a vast majority of whom do not have a high school diploma. And it could help shrink our prison population. While racial disparities in arrests and convictions are alarming, education level is a far stronger predictor of future incarceration than race.

The idea is rooted in history. In the 1920s, Howard Belding Gill, a criminologist and a Harvard alumnus, developed a college-like community at the Norfolk State Prison Colony in Massachusetts, where he was the superintendent. Prisoners wore normal clothing, participated in cooperative self-government with staff, and took academic courses with instructors from Emerson, Boston University and Harvard. They ran a newspaper, radio show and jazz orchestra, and they had access to an extensive library.

Alicia McElhaney:

Members of the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday to eliminate the new excise tax on university endowments.

The bill, sponsored by Reps. John Delaney (D-Md.) and Bradley Byrne (R-Al.), would repeal the 1.4 percent excise tax under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Donald Trump in December. The proposed legislation follows a letter that 49 college presidents sent yesterday to Congress, urging lawmakers to do away with the tax in order to preserve their resources.

The Delaney-Byrne Don’t Tax Higher Education Act would restore university endowments’ tax-exempt status to help ensure schools have the funding they need for scholarships, research and other student services.

“Colleges and universities rely on their endowments to provide essential funding for financial aid, support difference-making research and teaching and effectively manage complex long and short term costs,” Delaney said in a statement Thursday.

Endowments provide almost half of annual revenues at many schools, according to the letter sent by the universities to Congress. The letter was signed by presidents from Ivy League schools including Harvard University, Dartmouth College and Yale University, as well as colleges such as University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University.

The new tax will result in unprecedented damage to charitable resources, the presidents said.

Related: Taxpayer Ivy League subsidies and grants.

More on endowments from Brookings.

Texas Review of Law & Politics, Forthcoming San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 18-321 :

On March 8, 2010, one year into the Obama Administration, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a passionate speech in which he asserted (correctly) that African-American students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than white students. Although he did not mention it, it is also true that white students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than Asian American students and that male students are disciplined at higher rates than female students.

In response to the racial disparity he identified, Duncan promised that the Department of Education would be stepping up its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years that followed, the Department of Education made good on that promise by opening numerous investigations based on statistical disparities. On January 18, 2014, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice jointly issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on school discipline in which they asserted that the law prohibits not only actual discrimination in discipline on the basis of race, but also what they called “unjustified” disparate impact.

Branko Blagojevic:

ut he goes one step farther. He says on a long enough time scale, as long as you have an absorbent barrier (e.g. no capital left to wager or death), then you will end in ruin unless you engage in these types of strategies. This is true even if you have the edge.

Taleb: … Actually, what I’m saying is even stronger. I am saying that even if you have the edge, in the presence of the probability of ruin, you will be ruined. Even if you had the edge … If you play long enough. Unless you engage in strategies designed by traders and rediscovered by every single surviving trader, very similar to what we call, something called the Kelly Criterion, which is to play with the house money. In other words, you start betting in a casino, the strategy is as follows: You go with $100, whatever you want; and you bet $1. If you lose your bet less than a dollar, you bet, say, 90 cents, or whatever; and if you make money, you start betting with the house money. And this is called, playing with the market money or playing with the house money. And so increase your bet as you are making money, and you reduce your bet as you are losing money. And that strategy is practically the only one that allows you to gamble or engage in risky strategy without ruin.
Normally we think about it the other way around. If we have a slight edge, we should just keep playing and in the long run, we’re better off since we have the edge. But what Taleb is saying is in the presence of absorbent barriers, we’ll eventually hit ruin using a naive strategy.

This makes sense in a way since. On a long enough time scale we’re all dead. Also, randomness doesn’t behave as people normally expect and long runs are more common than we anticipate.

Christine Ro:

One key benefit is improved creativity. Gregory Feist, who focuses on the psychology of creativity at California’s San Jose State University, has defined creativity as thinking or activity with two key elements: originality and usefulness. He has found that personality traits commonly associated with creativity are openness (receptiveness to new thoughts and experiences), self-efficacy (confidence), and autonomy (independence) – which may include “a lack of concern for social norms” and “a preference for being alone”. In fact, Feist’s research on both artists and scientists shows that one of the most prominent features of creative folks is their lesser interest in socialising.

One reason for this is that such people are likely to spend sustained time alone working on their craft. Plus, Feist says, many artists “are trying to make sense of their internal world and a lot of internal personal experiences that they’re trying to give expression to and meaning to through their art.” Solitude allows for the reflection and observation necessary for that creative process.

A recent vindication of these ideas came from University at Buffalo psychologist Julie Bowker, who researches social withdrawal. Social withdrawal usually is categorised into three types: shyness caused by fear or anxiety; avoidance, from a dislike of socialising; and unsociability, from a preference for solitude.

A paper by Bowker and her colleagues was the first to show that a type of social withdrawal could have a positive effect – they found that creativity was linked specifically to unsociability. They also found that unsociability had no correlation with aggression (shyness and avoidance did).

David Fickling:

The smarter move for China might be to stand pat. Despite Xi’s boasts at Davos and elsewhere, the country’s record on free trade is dismal, a potential handicap if matters degenerate into a wider trade war. The better policy would be to let Trump raise costs for American consumers with ill-advised tariffs; refuse to retaliate; then pose as the innocent victim.

Governments in Washington’s sphere of influence, motivated by strategic investments in the likes of Deutsche Bank AG and Brazilian utility CPFL Energia SA and taken aback by Trump’s aggressive stance, may be persuaded to regard Beijing as the friendlier ally.

That would be the greater victory for a Chinese president without term limits and with a view to posterity: To subdue the enemy without fighting, as the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote, is the supreme art of war.

Philip Hensher:

He came out of nothing, and the eruption of his genius is a complete mystery. There was no musical tradition in his very ordinary family. Within two years of starting to play the piano he was admitted to the Conservatoire; and two years after that, aged 12, he was being given prizes for his performance of a Chopin concerto. Almost from the start, his own music was exquisitely formed, and even the earliest of the songs and piano pieces give a lot of pleasure.

When his mature period began in 1894, that satisfying form was filled with inventions of extraordinary beauty and, at first, strangeness — there are chords in the sumptuous ‘Les sons et les parfums’ prelude of extreme discord. Oddly enough, his music, apart from the etudes, is not difficult for pianists to play — even the showy ‘L’isle joyeuse’ is much easier to get round than most of Ravel. Nor is he difficult to listen to. He was the first composer I really loved when I was a boy, and I don’t think there’s anything in his work that would challenge any open-minded 12-year-old. He wrote to give pleasure, and the depth of the pleasure he gives is immense.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Brenner:

In spring 1954, Judith Ann Hiller, a bright, promising 20-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was terrified.

She had grown up in a working-class, largely Jewish neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west side, where families valued academic achievement and wanted a better life for their children. At Madison, she was an active and popular student.

But some two months shy of graduation, Judy learned she was pregnant.

A baby meant shame, disgrace, expulsion from the university. It would shatter her dreams, and the dreams Sarah and Abe Hiller had for the third of their four daughters. Marriage was out of the question; she barely knew the father.

Judy said nothing to anyone but her parents and one close friend. She pushed through to graduation, then quickly moved to the farmlands of central Washington to stay with relatives.

During the summer, she lied to their neighbors in the tiny community of Ephrata, claiming to be the wife of a deployed soldier. She wore a fake gold wedding ring. It was arranged that she would deliver her baby in Seattle, some 200 miles away. The infant would be placed immediately with a Jewish couple through a private adoption service.

Jamie Fisher:

Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat. The Chinese typewriter is ‘one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese techno-linguistic innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries … one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology’, and ‘a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity’. It was where empires met.

Amber Walker:

“Now, more than ever, we need someone that has the pulse of our community serving on the School Board to have a voice for all of our students,” Reyes said.

Moffit, who also grew up in Madison, said she has a lifelong commitment to education, teaching for seven years before joining the board in 2015.

“I truly believe that education is the greatest equalizer that we can have in society to transcend the many barriers that exist for students in our district,” Moffit said.

Campus Reform:

In the University of Wisconsin system, student fees are known as segregated university fees (SUF), and fall into two categories: non-allocable and allocable, with the former constituting 83 percent of SUF and “support commitments for fixed financial obligations,” and the latter providing “substantial support for campus student activities.”

In 2017, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed making allocable fees—which total $8,231,986.37—optional, though the proposal was ultimately nixed from his budget.

But student Jake Lubenow, chairman of both the Wisconsin Federation of College Republicans and the College Republicans chapter at UW Madison, told Campus Reform that the College Republicans organization “stands firm in its stance that allocable student fees should be made optional.”

The fees “force students to fund organizations they may find morally reprehensible,” Lubenow asserted, arguing that “compulsion is contrary to everything this country stands for.”

Although funding decisions must be made in a viewpoint neutral manner, in accordance with a 2000 Supreme Court ruling involving three UW Madison students who objected that the mandatory fees were used to fund groups they did not support, left-leaning organizations still wind up with more than 20 times the amount of funding allocated to conservative groups.

Katie Shepherd:

For two years, professors at PSU’s Graduate School of Education conducted a research project using unwitting K-12 students as subjects. The university has since acknowledged it failed to inform parents of the research and did not get their permission to access the student data. University officials say they are still examining whether any laws were broken.

Starting in 2016, two PSU graduate school professors asked teaching candidates to collect the personal data of students by taking it off school computers, including names, race, gender, disability status and whether they were learning English as a second language.

PSU says the aim of the study was to create better results for students of color, by changing teaching methods to reduce racial disparities in test scores.

But WW has exclusively obtained an internal report showing that in trying to reach that goal, PSU professors and grad students collected personally identifying data from minors without asking for the consent of their parents—as federal law typically requires.

CBC News:

A commission looking into child protection cases involving the Motherisk test lab says bad science removed vulnerable children from more than 50 families based on now-discredited hair analysis, but few parents have a chance of finding a satisfactory legal remedy.

The Motherisk Commission was set up by the Ontario government to analyze legal cases dating from 1990 to 2015. The cases involved flawed hair-strand drug and alcohol tests from a lab run by the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

On Monday, the two-year review into more than 1,200 child welfare cases involving hair tests concluded that in 56 cases the test results had a substantial impact, such as being used to pull children from their parents’ care.

Provincial court judge Judith Beaman led the independent commission, which said parents were often powerless in the face of tests imposed by children’s aids societies.

In seven of the 56 cases, families achieved a legal remedy. In four of those seven, children have been returned home.

One of the four whose children were returned is a woman that the Motherisk test suggested was having at least 18 drinks a day. CBC News can’t use her real name due to a publication ban.

Peter Wood:

The students at the Parkland high school who helped organize their own walkout and who have organized the coming national walkouts have been lionized in the media. David Hogg, Sara Imam, Cameron Kasky, and several other Parkland students have been featured in interviews on television and cited in news stories for their roles in calling on legislatures to adopt more stringent gun control measures and calling on fellow students across the country to walk out of class in protest.

Hogg, Imam, and the others may be perfectly sincere, but the story is a little more complicated than it first seemed. The students have received a great deal of help from a teachers’ union (it bussed the students to a protest in Tallahassee) and various progressive organizations, including the Women’s March and MoveOn.org. Conservative media responded with accounts such as David Hines’ “Why Did It Take Two Weeks to Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?” and Charles Cooke’s “David Hogg Is Fair Game for Critics.”

In the meantime, college admissions offices across the country have been rushing out announcements that they will not penalize any students who walk out of their classes because of the protests. One such announcement came from Ken Anselment, dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, who wrote:

Maryam Saleh:

For a brief moment in December 2017, the international spotlight shined on the case of 92 deportees who were on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement-chartered flight to Somalia. Most such flights unload their human cargo once they land, but this flight, for logistical reasons, returned home — and brought witnesses back with it.

The Somalis told of abuse on the flight, saying they were shackled with chains on their wrists, waists, and legs for more than 40 hours; forced to urinate in bottles or on themselves; and that ICE officers beat and threatened some passengers. (ICE has denied that it mistreated detainees on the flight.)

But even after the spotlight dimmed, the abuse continued. The Somalis are still being held at the Krome Detention Center and the Glades County Detention Center in Florida, as their lawyers try to fight their deportations. At Glades, where half the group is being held, they have complained of a litany of abuses, including violent assaults by guards, denial of medical care, lack of access to their lawyers, and racism.

“The guards and the administration up there at Glades, they think they’re immune. To me, it’s so brazen to be doing this. They know there’s a federal case. They know we’re up there all the time. They know there are investigators up there,” said Lisa Lehner, an attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice, one of the groups representing the Somalis. “They called them ‘niggers.’ They called them ‘boy.’ They’ve said things like, ‘We’re sending you boys back to the jungle.’” An ICE spokesperson in Miami declined to answer questions about the complaints coming from Glades, citing pending litigation.

Fabian Giese:

While in the middle of writing “Reading bits in far too many ways, part 3”, I realized that I had written a lot of background material that had absolutely nothing to do with bit I/O and really was worth putting in its own post. This is that post.

The problem I’m concerned with is fairly easy to state: say we have some piece of C++ code that we’re trying to understand (and perhaps improve) the performance of. A good first step is to profile it, which will give us some hints which parts are slow, but not necessarily why. On a fundamental level, any kind of profiling (or other measurement) is descriptive, not predictive: it can tell you how an existing system is behaving, but if you’re designing something that’s more than a few afternoons worth of work, you probably don’t have the time or resources to implement 5 or 6 completely different design alternatives, pick whichever one happens to work best, and throw the rest away. You should be able to make informed decisions up front from an algorithm sketch without having to actually write a fleshed-out implementation.

Dan Goodin:

A US senator is holding the nation’s biggest voting machine maker to account following a recent article that reported it has sold equipment that was pre-installed with remote-access software and has advised government customers to install the software on machines that didn’t already have it pre-installed.
 
 Use of remote-access software in e-voting systems was reported last month by The New York Times Magazine in an article headlined “The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine.” The article challenged the oft-repeated assurance that voting machines are generally secured against malicious tampering because they’re not connected to the Internet.
 
 Exhibit A in the case built by freelance reporter Kim Zetter was an election-management computer used in 2016 by Pennsylvania’s Venango County. After voting machines the county bought from Election Systems & Software were suspected of “flipping” votes―meaning screens showed a different vote than the one selected by the voter―officials asked a computer scientist to examine the systems. The scientist ultimately concluded the flipping was the result of a simple calibration error, but during the analysis he found something much more alarming―remote-access software that allowed anyone with the correct password to remotely control the system.

Amber Walker:

Out-of-school suspensions are up in the Madison Metropolitan School District at this point in the school year compared to last year.

On Monday, the Madison School Board received its midyear update on the Behavior Education Plan. District data shows 1,122 suspensions across the district so far this school year, compared to 892 at the same point last year, an increase of 230.

MMSD officials said the uptick in suspensions is isolated to four high schools and one middle school. The schools were not named, but represent half of all in-school and out-of-school suspensions. Freshman and sophomores account for 75 percent of all incidents at the high school level.

Realated: Gangs and school violence forum audio / video.

Police calls: Madison Schools 1996-2006.

Keri Rodrigues :

It’s the first week of March — and once again, I am sitting on a throne of pins and needles that I am forced upon year after year. I don’t like it here. And frankly, I’m tired of it.

The seconds continue to tick past, marching forward toward my moment with destiny — which will happen on Friday afternoon at 3pm sharp.

That’s when the applications I filled out several weeks ago will be pulled out of their files. My children will be assigned random numbers and then one by one given seats at Springfield Prep.

Joel Kotkin:

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”

Christopher Mims:

As location-aware advertising goes mainstream—like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.

It’s true that your smartphone’s location-tracking capabilities can be helpful, whether it’s alerting you to traffic or inclement weather. That utility is why so many of us are giving away a great deal more location data than we probably realize….

Democracy Now:

On Tuesday, former U.S. intelligence contractor Reality Leigh Winner appeared in court in Augusta, Georgia, where her lawyers asked the judge to exclude her statements to FBI agents on the day she was arrested, arguing she was denied her Miranda rights. Winner is a former National Security Agency contractor who has pleaded not guilty to charges she leaked a top-secret document to The Intercept about Russian interference in the 2016 election. She is facing up to 10 years in prison on charges she violated the Espionage Act. For more, we speak with two guests. In Chicago, we’re joined by Kevin Gosztola, a journalist and managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He was in the courtroom in Augusta on Tuesday, and his recent article is titled “In Reality Winner’s Case, Defense Seizes Upon FBI Testimony to Bolster Motion to Suppress Statements.” And in Augusta, Georgia, we speak with by Reality Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis. She’s joining us from her daughter’s house, where Reality Winner was questioned and arrested by FBI agents on June 3.

Alex Roy:

Do you like driving? I do. It’s not about speed. It’s about freedom. It’s about choice. Car in the garage. Keys in hand. Hands on wheel. We choose where we go and when we go, and we choose how we get there. With the rise of self-driving cars, an army of experts would have us believe freedom and choice are a bad thing. From behind the banner of safety, they claim autonomous technology will save us from the tyranny and danger of human control. Their strategy is to claim that autonomous technology creates an either/or scenario where human driving is in conflict with safety.

That strategy is based on a lie.

Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans. We don’t know what “safe” or “safer” means. There is no government regulation defining a safety standard, nor has any self-driving car maker declared what that standard might be.

Unless self-driving car technology is demonstrably safer than humans—and even if it is—human freedom and choice must come first. We don’t need to sacrifice safety for freedom. The same technology that enables self-driving cars will allow humans to retain control within the safe confines of automation. Those that say otherwise seek to profit from reducing our freedoms, rather than make us safer while protecting them.

Education Trust- Midwest (PDF):

This decline has come as state leaders have invested nearly $80 million to raise third-grade reading levels — and during the same period when many other states that also adopted higher standards for teaching and learning produced notable learning gains for their students in the same metric.

In some respects, Michigan’s continued decline should come as no surprise. As our organization has documented in recent years through its Michigan Achieves campaign to make Michigan a top ten education state, Michigan student achievement has fallen steeply for every group of students — black, brown and white — compared to other states since the early 2000s. Less well known is the story behind that data: despite the state’s growing educational crisis, Michigan’s achievement efforts to date do not re ect a fundamental shift on how our state approaches improvement strategies, such as educator capacity-building and public reporting — a shift which will be absolutely necessary moving forward. For that reason, the state’s ongoing statewide investment in raising third-grade reading levels provides an important case study to examine how Michigan’s k-12 improvement strategies, design and delivery systems stack up compared to the nation’s top states.

After almost two years of research, including conversations with educators working at the classroom, school, district, intermediate school district and state level, our team found a profound need for far more robust implementation and improvement systems, guided by sustained and visionary leadership. Indeed, the lack of coherent systems and accountability for consistent improvement are holding back third-grade literacy efforts and squandering millions of dollars. As it stands, the only real accountability for Michigan’s third-grade reading investment exists for the state’s students: under the state’s 2016 policy, students are at-risk for retention in third grade if they are unable to meet grade-level reading expectations.1

And while leading states like Tennessee have invested
in strategic improvement systems for ongoing training and support for their teachers and principals — by far the most critical lever for improving literacy outcomes
— no such strategic support system exists in Michigan. Meanwhile, the Legislature has done its part to create better support for educators and approved the creation of Michigan’s rst statewide system of educator
support and evaluation. but weak implementation has sabotaged this high-leverage opportunity for widespread improvement of teaching and learning — the very lever that top states such as Tennessee have used to lift all students’ learning outcomes.

Related:

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

Foundations of Reading Examination Results (Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge licensing requirement).

MTEL

SXSW.

Part 2.

RELATED: they’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine, not!

Wayfinder Foundation.

Tyler Cowen:

“Afford” is a tricky word here. If the goal is simply to avoid bankruptcy, at the expense of the life satisfaction of the main child rearer (usually the wife), that isn’t so difficult for most Americans and Europeans. But of course people wish to maximize utility. And so here are some trends operating against having large numbers of children:

1. Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families.

2. Divorce is these days socially imaginable, and for many people desirable if feasible. The larger the number of children, the harder it is to take advantage of the divorce option, and so that too encourages smaller families.

3. Living space has become especially costly in so many of the major Western cities and suburbs.

4. Given the connection between where you live and your public school system, the very best neighborhoods have become very costly positional goods, in part because of their school systems and the embedded social peers for your kids (even if they bus away to private schools.)

Julia McCandless/a>:

Kate Campbell:

SUICIDAL thoughts and depression, viewing pornography and searches to buy or sell drugs are the most common incidents detected by a global online program used by eight WA high schools to monitor the computer use of about 9000 students.

The WA schools have signed up to UK-based company eSafe Global’s software, which homes in on “early warning markers” — tens of thousands of “red flag” words, phrases, abbreviations, euphemisms and colloquialisms — typed or searched for by students from Year 7-12.

In the past two years, more than 8000 incidents were identified by “behaviour specialists” in the UK and deemed legitimate for intervention.

By far the most prevalent has been students’ mental health — anxiety, depression and self-harm risk — at 38 per cent of all identified incidents last year followed by pornography (20 per cent) and drugs (11 per cent).

Tom Bartlett and Nell Gluckman:

Terry Karl lost count of how many times he tried to kiss her. In his office, in her office, at a hotel during a conference. She remembers the night in her car when he confided that he would be the next department chairman, and that he would review the book she was writing. It was unfortunate, he said, that he had to decide the fates of people he liked. He moved his hand to her thigh, beneath her skirt, and leaned in for a kiss.

It was November 5, 1981. Karl had been at Harvard University for less than a year. She was an assistant professor of government, and Jorge Domínguez was her senior colleague. He had tenure; she didn’t. Domínguez would soon be president of the Latin American Studies Association; she studied Latin America. He sat on the editorial boards of prestigious journals like American Political Science Review and Social Science Quarterly. He was already a name in the field, while she was still establishing hers. He could be helpful to her — or not.

For two years, according to Karl, Domínguez made numerous sexual advances, disregarding both verbal and written pleas to stop. It eventually led her to file a complaint, and Domínguez was found guilty by the university of “serious misconduct.” Domínguez was removed from administrative responsibilities for three years and told that any future misconduct could trigger his dismissal. Karl considered his punishment a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, she decided that she couldn’t remain at the same university as Domínguez considering what he’d done, and what she feared he might do.

Steven Sinofsky:

Michael Lynch wrote a fascinating, albeit somewhat disheartening, post on his personal experience with Google’s performance review and promotion process. There was quite a bit of discussion so I thought I’d update this post from 2013 on the topic.

Much has been written recently about performance ratings and management at some large and successful companies. Amazon has surfaced as a company implementing OLRs, organization and leadership reviews, which target the least effective 10% of an organization for appropriate action. Yahoo famously introduced QPRs, quarterly performance reviews, which rates people as “misses” or “occasionally misses” among other ratings. And just so we don’t think this is something unique to tech, at the end of every year Wall St firms begin the annual bonus process which is filled with any number of legendary dysfunctions given the massive sums of money in play. Even the Air Force has a legendary process for feedback and appraisal.

Like so many company processes, when a company is doing “well” then the processes are exactly the right ones and magical. When a company is not doing so “well” then every process is either a symptom or the cause of the situation.

Janet Lorin:

Now he’s found himself in a spat with the student newspaper over coverage of the endowment and subsequent publication of an email exchange between Swensen and editors.

The dispute flared up over his op-ed column in the Yale Daily News, which he asked the staff to publish without editing. His March 1 piece took exception to the paper’s reporting in February of a teach-in event led by student activists that criticized the endowment’s investments.

He said the student reporter didn’t contact Yale’s investment office for the February article. The newspaper on March 3 issued a correction over the news story.

Editors of the newspaper eliminated what they called an erroneous sentence in Swensen’s piece that said he wasn’t contacted by a reporter, which he deemed as editing.

Related: Open The Books:

Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

David Hines:

On February 28, BuzzFeed came out with the actual story: Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz aiding in the lobbying in Tallahassee, a teacher’s union organizing the buses that got the kids there, Michael Bloomberg’s groups and the Women’s March working on the upcoming March For Our Lives, MoveOn.org doing social media promotion and (potentially) march logistics, and training for student activists provided by federally funded Planned Parenthood.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers told BuzzFeed they’re also behind the national school walkout, which journalists had previously assured the public was the sole work of a teenager. (I’d thought teachers were supposed to get kids into school, but maybe that’s just me.)

In other words, the response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room. Nor is it surprising that the professionalization happened right off the bat. Broward County’s teacher’s union is militant, and Rep. Ted Lieu stated on Twitter that his family knows Parkland student activist David Hogg’s family, so there were plenty of opportunities for grown-ups with resources and skills to connect the kids.

Tom Phillips:

At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed.

Radio Free Asia (RFA), a US-backed news group whose journalists have produced some of the most detailed reporting on the heavily securitised region of Xinjiang, said it obtained the figure from a security official in Kashgar, a city in China’s far west that has been the focus of a major crackdown.

Last year, as Xi Jinping was crowned China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao at a politically sensitive congress in Beijing, Xinjiang’s re-education centres were “inundated” by detainees, who were forced to endure cramped and squalid conditions, the report said. Just in the city of Kashgar – which has a population of about half a million inhabitants – tens of thousands of people were allegedly confined. Taking into account the wider region around Kashgar, the number allegedly rose to 120,000.

Ladar Levisin:

It’s clear that a secret process, and a complacent judiciary which has elevated prosecutors and members of law enforcement onto a dangerous perch, provides no safety.

It has become clear that a secret, non-adversarial system of judicial review is an insufficient check to our intelligence agencies and law enforcement. When express disagreement on a foreign policy issue — namely the current sanctions against Russia — form even part of the basis of an allegation which meets the bar for a probable cause warrant, there is something terribly wrong with the current system. The health of our political system depends on the ability to express an unpopular opinion without official recrimination.

Unfortunately the growing number of transgressions against people, like Carter Page, remain hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Officials speak of safeguards, but it’s clear that a secret process, and a complacent judiciary, which has elevated prosecutors and members of law enforcement onto a dangerous perch, provides no safety. The FISC, where the warrant for Page was issued, has grown particularly notorious for granting broad surveillance authority based on little, or in some cases, no evidence. Out of more than 39,000 applications presented to the FISC through the end of 2016, only 51 have been rejected, with the majority, 34, of those rejections coming in 2016.

While most FISC warrants remain classified, the few which have emerged through leaks, or been forced into the public domain by First Amendment lawsuits, paint a rather bleak picture. These warrants tell us the FISC has issued “mass” warrants which permit government surveillance based on statistical “selectors.”

Rachel Ohm:

What is tenure and how is it awarded?

Tenure is the principle by which faculty can continue in their appointments indefinitely. At UT and elsewhere, it’s based on the expectation that a faculty member will continue to show professional excellence over time and is granted only after rigorous review.

At the same time, tenure also guarantees faculty the right to academic freedom and free speech because they know they won’t be fired for expressing different views.

Currently, 818 of the 1,567 faculty at UT Knoxville are tenured and 313 are tenure-track.

The current policy on tenure dates back to a board review in 1998, though some modifications have been put in place since.

Stephen Buranyi:

The program turns this data into a score, which is then compared against one the program has already “learned” from top-performing employees. The idea is that a good prospective employee looks a lot like a good current employee, just not in any way a human interviewer would notice.

Approaches like vocal analysis and reading “microexpressions” have been applied in policing and intelligence with little clear success. But Mondragon says automated analyses compare favourably with established tests of personality and ability, and that customers report better employee performance and less turnover.

HireVue is just one of a slew of new companies selling AI as a replacement for the costly human side of hiring. It estimates the “pre-hire assessment” market is worth $3bn (£2.2bn) a year.

langliter:

The Passionate

For some people, learning a language is a passion. It is an activity that they could happily do for hours a day for the rest of their lives. I admire those people, but I am not one of them. Like many of you, I like the idea of learning a language in the same way that I like the idea of always eating healthy and exercising every day. I do an okay job of doing those things, but I won’t be running a marathon any time soon or writing a nutritional blog.

Diminishing Returns

If you’ve made it past the honeymoon phase of learning a language (ie, you’ve been working at it semi-consistently for over a year) then you know it can be harder to find the motivation to put the time in every day. It’s not your fault, it’s in large part due to the fact that learning a language is a long tail process. It can be relatively easy to make a lot of progress in the beginning because a large percentage of the words people use every day are made up of a relatively small number of words. As you continue learning a language there is diminishing marginal utility associated with every new word you learn. You may have only seen the word for “spatula” once, but if you suddenly find yourself helping out your friend’s abuelita in the kitchen, it might be a handy word to know. It’s a word that doesn’t have much value until it does.

Pamela Cotant:

The fleet service high school apprenticeship program was launched this semester at the division’s central repair shop on North First Street.

The students, who are paired with automotive technician mentors, are learning how to inspect and repair equipment like police squad cars, parks department pickup trucks, engineering cargo vans and fire department ambulances. They also work on abandoned vehicles.

The students are working 10 to 15 hours a week during the semester and earning school credit and $13.01 per hour. The students are expected to continue working through the summer to complete 450 hours.

Samuel Moyn:

For a long time, a faction of U.S. liberals shouldered the burdens of a fully inclusive social compact. They rightly indicted welfare-state compromises that served some and not others, and that served even the most privileged beneficiaries—white working-class men—only to some extent. Recognizing that the New Deal was a raw one for the neglected poor as well as African Americans and women, some liberals in the early and mid-1960s gave sustained critique to the structural limitations of New Deal liberalism and the Cold War geopolitics that framed the enterprise.

After 1968, disaster set in. Faced with the sins of Vietnam, the Democrats flirted with ending Cold War militarism only to double down on it. The critique of the welfare state, not the demand for its extension, prevailed. A toxic brew of white identity politics, a rhetoric of “family values” and “personal responsibility,” and, above all, anti-statist economics wafted across party lines. Fifty years later, Donald Trump is in the White House, embattled but victorious.

How did we get here? Much depends on how one narrates the path from 1968 to Trump’s election.

Mark Lilla’s book of last year, The Once and Future Liberal—a follow-up to his hugely influential New York Times op-ed “The End of Identity Liberalism,” published days after Trump’s win—has gone far toward defining the terms of that story. But instead of looking carefully at how liberal self-reinvention failed in facing down its scurrilous enemies, Lilla cuts off his enterprise in a dodge. Lilla thinks that U.S. welfare-state liberalism was doomed in the 1970s, when its neoconservative enemies rightly sounded its death knell. He goes on to report that the heirs of the raucous sixties, failing to reinvent liberalism beyond its prior statist limits, embraced the anti- and pseudo-politics of “identity.” For much of the book, indulging his Francophile proclivities, Lilla channels the moralist Alexis de Tocqueville, blaming our contemporary degeneration on a culture of narcissism, adding a whiff of the novelist Michel Houellebecq in unmasking the “real” legacy of the sixties as a journey into the interior. A cult of the self prospered as politics died.

Alice Walton:

The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank. In the United States, however, the poverty rate has been more stubborn—41 million people lived below the country’s poverty line in 2016, about 13 percent of the population, nearly the same rate as in 2007. Recent policy initiatives haven’t meaningfully reduced that rate. House Speaker Paul Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin) indicated this past December that the government would make fighting poverty, but also welfare, which many Republicans believe is a failed policy, a priority in 2018.

US lawmakers have expressed frustration when investments such as welfare programs don’t pull people out of poverty. “I believe in helping those who cannot help themselves but would if they could,” said Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican of Utah) this past December, when explaining his views on government spending. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Hatch’s statement reflects a common view that removing government support would force many poor people to improve their conditions themselves. Without welfare and government assistance, would able-bodied people find a job, get an education, stop buying lottery tickets, and focus on paying bills?

Not quite, indicate researchers, whose work is telling a different story of poverty. Contrary to the refrain that bad decisions lead to poverty, data indicate that it is the cognitive toll of being poor that leads to bad decisions. And actually, decisions that may seem counterproductive could be entirely rational, even shrewd. The findings suggest that to successfully reduce poverty, it would help to take this psychology into account.

Sean Rossman:

California ranked last in urban air quality and 45th in “low pollution health risk,” although it was 13th in drinking water quality. The state also found itself second-to-last in voter participation, 44th in community engagement and 38th in social support.

Despite its beaches, redwood trees and Hollywood glam, the state’s blemishes are often highlighted. Los Angeles consistently leads as the world’s most traffic-congested urban area and even its own citizens have tried to secede multiple times.

Rounding out the rest of bottom five in quality of life were Texas, Illinois, Indiana and New Jersey.

Victory Girls:

But we’re supposed to listen to Generation Snowflake, because they somehow have the moral authority to speak on domestic policies about which they know exactly jack and shit?

We’re supposed to refrain from criticism about their obviously uninformed opinions, because they’ve been through what had to be a traumatic experience?

We’re supposed to ignore their errors in reasoning, false equivalencies, and flawed analysis fed to them by groups with obvious political agendas, because our Founding Fathers were around the same age when they took up arms and started a revolution?

Hate to tell you this, Snowflakes, but people like Henry Lee, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Lafayette took up actual ARMS – things you want to see banned – and went to war against a tyrannical government. They bled. They fought. Hamilton was an aide-de-camp to General George Washington at the ripe old age of about 21.

Joel Kotkin:

In reality, immigrants vary tremendously, but some of their contributions to the economy are very real, with higher levels of labor participation than natives. Newcomers tend to be disproportionately more entrepreneurial than native born Americans — both on Main Street and Silicon Valley — at a time when our startup culture has weakened. There is some evidence that the undocumented commit more crimes than citizens but most research suggests overall newcomers commit less crime. Cities with high numbers of immigrants such as New York and Los Angeles are safer than those, like Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis and Baltimore which have relatively few.

Ironically many smaller cities, particularly in the Midwest and South, where opposition to immigration tends to be strongest, actually could use more immigrants. These are often communities that have a hard time holding onto their local pool of young talent. Earlier this month employers in Springfield, Missouri, a city with thriving blue collar sectors and growing STEM economy, repeatedly complained about labor shortages and spoke of efforts to recruit immigrants from places like the Philippines.

Kumbaya is not a country

The ugliness of nativist rhetoric has also reinforced the self-righteousness with which the progressive left, and their media allies, address immigration and diversity. Yet like their Trumpian foes they have created their own mythology which skips over reality and ignores basic facts.

Mario Vargas Llosa::

Mario Vargas Llosa is in good form. The Peruvian Nobel Laureate laughs easily as he expounds on his theories of freedom and the individual and talks about his new book, La llamada de la tribu, or, The Call of the Tribe, which argues in favor of liberal thought in reference to seven influential authors: Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich von Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin and Jean-François Revel.

These men belong to a school of thought that believes in the individual as an autonomous and responsible being, and freedom as the supreme asset. They defend democracy and the separation of powers as the best system available to reconcile society’s contradictory values. They espouse a doctrine that rejects the “tribal spirit” that has historically fueled fascism, communism, nationalism and religious fanaticism. The Call of the Tribe is also an intellectual autobiography that takes the reader from Vargas Lllosa’s Marxist and existentialist beginnings through to his endorsement of liberalism.

Question. Why are there so many attacks on liberal thought?

Answer. It has been targeted by ideologies that are enemies of freedom and which justifiably consider liberalism to be their most tenacious adversary. And that’s what I wanted to explain in the book. Fascism and communism have attacked liberalism strongly, mainly by caricaturing it and linking it to conservatism. In its early stages, liberalism was besieged primarily by the right. There were papal encyclicals – attacks from pulpits everywhere on a doctrine that was considered the enemy of religion and of moral values. I believe that these adversaries define the close relationship that exists between liberalism and democracy. Democracy has moved forward and human rights have been recognized basically thanks to liberal thinkers.

Q. The authors you analyze in your book all swam against the tide

A. Hayek and Ortega even had two books banned. Are liberals condemned to walk alone? Liberalism doesn’t just embrace, it actually stimulates difference. It recognizes that society is composed of very different kinds of people and it’s important to keep it that way. It’s not an ideology; an ideology is a secular religion. Liberalism defends some basic ideas: freedom, individualism, the rejection of collectivism and nationalism – in other words, all the ideologies or doctrines that limit or annihilate freedom within society.

Merriam Webster:

Grammar is technically a pretty narrow term. It includes the categories we put words in—that is, whether a word is a noun or an adjective; inflections—like what the past tense form of a particular verb is; and syntax—why we say “I left it there” instead of “I it there left.”

But in the wild revelry that typically accompanies National Grammar Day celebrations, amid all the fireworks with their shimmering punctuation raining down, the term grammar turns into a giant carnival tent celebrating word choice, spelling, punctuation, and pretty much anything else you can think of that’s language-related.

Todd Gaziano and Tommy Berry:

After Kimberly Manor lost her husband to lung cancer, she was inspired to make a dramatic career change. Kimberly now owns and operates Moose Jooce in Lake, Mich., a “vape shop” that sells various electronic nicotine devices. These products use battery-powered coils to vaporize liquids, with differing levels of nicotine or none at all.

Annysa Johnson:

But a $530 increase? Up 18.4%? Just for her school taxes?

“People are livid,” said Neuroth, whose school district taxes have risen nearly 30% over the last decade, though her assessed value has fallen.

Now, Neuroth and all but one of her neighbors on S. Pohl Drive have petitioned to move their tax dollars out of West Allis-West Milwaukee into the New Berlin School District.

New Berlin’s board welcomed the move in a 5-0 vote Monday. But West Allis-West Milwaukee effectively nixed it by refusing to take up the question at its Monday meeting.

Madison K-12 tax and spending practices have grown significantly over the years, with per student expenditures now approaching $20,000 annually.

Despite spending more than most, Madison has long tolerated disastrous results.

The Economist:

AUTOMATION and globalisation have brought drastic changes to Western labour markets. Middle-skilled jobs are disappearing fast. In America, wages for blue-collar workers have been largely stagnant since the 1970s, whereas those for university graduates have soared. Silicon Valley types frequently warn that advances in technology, especially in artificial intelligence, will be devastating for low-skilled workers. One prominent study, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University, estimated that 47% of jobs in America could be automated over the next two decades. The spectre of mass unemployment, along with increasing levels of income equality, has led many policymakers to see investment in university as crucial for economic prosperity.

Governments have plenty of reason to be bullish about higher education. Perhaps the best piece of evidence they have of the wisdom of investing more in universities is the graduate-wage premium—the difference in wages between those with university degrees and those without. In their book “The Race between Education and Technology”, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University point out that this premium fell during the first half of the 20th century in America as universities expanded enrolment, but started rising sharply around 1980. Although the premium has started to level off in recent years, the fact that university graduates still make around 70% more than non-graduates suggests that demand for skilled workers still far exceeds supply.

Across the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, 43% of adults aged 25-34 now have tertiary degrees, up from 23% in 1995. Yet it is not clear to what extent these degrees have translated into economic gains. An analysis by The Economist of American labour-market data finds that since 1970 the share of workers with degrees has increased in virtually every occupation. But in around half of occupations with better-educated workers average wages have still fallen in real terms. The ubiquity of the degree means that for many workers going to university is more of an obligation than a choice. Moreover, university does not suit all learners. Estimates of the economic returns to higher education tend to assume that all students will graduate. In practice, around 30% of students in Europe and 40% of students in America will drop out before earning their degrees. This means that the expected economic returns of a university education for average students are far lower than commonly understood. Governments are right to fret about training future workers, but they should look beyond just universities.

Jane Smiley:

Cather’s early prairie novels were published over the course of six years that were extremely eventful in American and world history—O Pioneers! in 1913, The Song of the Lark in 1915, and My Ántonia in 1918. She did not address the issues of World War I until her next novel, One of Ours, published in 1922. (It won the Pulitzer Prize.) But in all four works, the main characters—Alexandra, Thea, Ántonia, and Claude—wrestle with more or less the same question, maybe the essential question of the twentieth century: to stay or to go, and if so, how and why?

O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia (and also the first half of One of Ours) are linked by place, not by character—unlike Émile Zola’s or Anthony Trollope’s series, Cather does not write about characters who are related to or know each other. As a result, once we have read the early novels, we feel as though we are watching the characters from a distance as they put their lives together and move across the landscape. Other prominent and bestselling authors in the first two decades of the twentieth century were looking at Europe and high society (Henry James, Edith Wharton) or the future (H. G. Wells) or the trials of the urban poor (Upton Sinclair, Winston Churchill—not the Winston Churchill, but a bestselling, now unknown novelist from St. Louis). Authors who wrote about the West wrote books like Zane Grey’s The Lone Star Ranger, disparaged by critics as unrealistic and unnecessarily violent. Cather, who began her career in magazine publishing, knew perfectly well what was popular and what was respected, but like Alexandra, Thea, and Ántonia, she was determined to go her own way. As a result, her novels stick in the reader’s mind as flickering memories of places we may never have seen with our own eyes.

Aaron Smith and Monica Anderson:

Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.

As has been the case since the Center began surveying about the use of different social media in 2012, Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.

But the social media story extends well beyond Facebook. The video-sharing site YouTube – which contains many social elements, even if it is not a traditional social media platform – is now used by nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18- to 24-year-olds. And the typical (median) American reports that they use three of the eight major platforms that the Center measured in this survey.

Bre Payton:

Facebook is now saying its decision to threaten to censor a Christian satire site because it was flagged by Snopes for reporting fake news was a mistake. The social media giant apologized, but that doesn’t make the censorship any less disconcerting.

The Babylon Bee set off Facebook’s alarm bells by publishing a satirical piece stating that CNN had purchased an “industrial-size washing machine to spin news before publication.” This is obviously a joke and is clearly marked satire and is published on a site entirely devoted to satire. But the uptight jerks over at Snopes decided to fact check the Bee’s claim, to ensure that no one actually thought that CNN “made a significant investment in heavy machinery.” Uh, okay. Thanks, Snopes! Would’ve totally fallen for that one!

Alex King:

We’re standing on top of a crumbling concrete water tower, looking out over a cloud-covered valley in central Greece. Our guide is Borkin, a 16-year-old artist and photographer, who was forced to flee the violence in Syrian Kurdistan. He points out toward Ritsona camp – a small cluster of containers nestled among the trees below, 75km outside Athens, in the middle of nowhere. With a barbed-wire fence behind us, the limit of his world right now is not even as far as the eye can see.

After the EU shut its borders nearly two years ago, many camps were hastily constructed across Greece to house around 50,000 people who became stuck in the country, and then largely forgotten about. But young people from this camp have produced their own magazine, Ritsona Kingdom Journal, which features original writing, poetry, photography and artwork. It’s a bold statement of their diversity and creative talent – if only people would listen to what they have to say.

Cai Yiwen:

Su Yingzi knows this all too well. Her son, 11-year-old Xiaogu, is clever and witty in many ways. He excels at devising new games, cracking jokes comes naturally to him, and he makes friends easily. However, reading and writing Chinese characters seemed an insurmountable obstacle. While some of his classmates needed less than half an hour to memorize a few characters, Xiaogu could spend hours on the task and still forget how to write the words. When it came to exams, he often failed to understand the questions because many characters simply did not make sense to him.

In hindsight, Su believes her son showed early signs of the disability in kindergarten: His handwriting was messy, and he was often the last to finish writing exercises. “But the teacher attributed his performance to laziness, and I believed it, too,” Su said.

When Xiaogu entered primary school, Su spent thousands of yuan to send him to a cram school, but the family saw little improvement. Su started to lose patience. She scolded Xiaogu for his disappointing exam scores and admits to beating him when he wrote characters incorrectly.

Xiaogu could not understand why he struggled so much in something his peers could easily master. His aversion to schoolwork grew. Eventually, he stopped trying altogether, submitting blank exam papers even though he could have answered some of the questions.

jfg:

The demand for AI experts has grown exponentially over the last few years. As companies increasingly adopt AI solutions for their businesses, the need for highly experienced, PhD-educated, and technically-adept talent shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

This report summarizes our research into the scope and breadth of the worldwide AI talent pool. Although these data visualizations map the distribution of worldwide talent at the start of 2018, we want to acknowledge that this is a predominantly Western-centric model of AI expertise.

We are submitting our work amidst similar, though much broader, reports such as Tencent’s recent “2017 Global AI Talent White Paper,” which focused primarily on China in comparison to the United States. Tencent’s research found that currently “200,000 of the 300,000 active researchers and practitioners” are already employed in the industry, while some 100,000 are researching or studying in academia. Their number far exceeds the high-end of our measure at 22,000, primarily because it includes the entire technical teams and not just the specially-trained experts. Our report, however, focuses on finding out where the relatively small number of “AI experts” currently reside around the world.

Wall Street Journal:

Since 1990, more than 150 children and adults have been killed in shootings at American elementary, middle and high schools.

Yves Smith:

We’ve said for some time that Uber and Lyft are exploiting the fact that their drivers don’t understand their own economics and don’t factor in the wear and tear on their vehicles. One former Uber driver did a back of the envelope work up and argued that you’d make more than minimum wage only if your car was more than six years old. The fact that only 4% of Uber drivers continue for more than a year suggests that working for these ride-sharing companies is an unattractive proposition.
 
 A large-scale study confirms these doubts about driver pay, and then some. A team from Stanford, Stephen M. Zoepf, Stella Chen, Paa Adu and Gonzalo Pozo, under the auspices of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research obtained information from 1100 Uber and Lyft drivers using questionnaires and information about vehicle-specific operating costs, such as insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel and depreciation.
 
 Their main finding:
 
 Results show that per hour worked, median profit from driving is $3.37/hour before taxes, and 74% of drivers earn less than the minimum wage in their state. 30% of drivers are actually losing money once vehicle expenses are included. On a per-mile basis, median gross driver revenue is $0.59/mile but vehicle operating expenses reduce real driver profit to a median of $0.29/mile.
 
 If you gross up the median hourly profit to gross revenue, using the same ratio for gross revenue versus net profit per mile, median gross revenue is only $6.86 an hour, still below minimum wage. These drivers would be better off doing almost anything else. Consider the safety risks. From Wired:
 
 

Milovan:

Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.

Now, while academia has turned into an athletic contest, Wittgenstein held the exact opposite viewpoint: if anything, knowledge is the reverse of an athletic contest. In philosophy, the winner is the one who finishes last, he said.
…
In some areas, such as gender studies or psychology, the ritualistic publishing game gradually maps less and less to real research, by the very nature of the agency problem, to reach a Mafia-like divergence of interest: researchers have their own agenda, at variance with what their clients, that is, society and the students, are paying them for. The opacity of the subject to outsiders helps them control the gates. Knowing “economics” doesn’t mean knowing anything about economics in the sense of the real activity, but rather the theories, most of which are bullshit, produced by economists. And courses in universities, for which hard-working parents need to save over decades, easily degenerate into fashion. You work hard and save for your children to be taught a post-colonial study-oriented critique of quantum mechanics.
…
The deprostitutionalization of research will eventually be done as follows. Force people who want to do “research” to do it on their own time, that is, to derive their income from other sources. Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious. For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are building their original ideas.

Yasha Levine:

The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine

Alexander Russo:

The Post’s troubling tendency towards feel-good coverage and a revolving door of reporters obscured what many describe as an ‘open secret’ in DC public schools.

Give the Washington Post credit for being on top of last week’s District of Columbia Public Schools scandal, which led to the resignation of schools chief Antwan Wilson.

From the announcement that Wilson had obtained special treatment for his daughter to transfer to another school to his resignation, Post reporters dogged the trail of fast-breaking events.

Ditto for this week’s scandal, which focuses on revelations that substantial numbers of students were fraudulently enrolled in a highly-coveted DC public school.

If only the Post had been so aware and tenacious about a much broader and more far-reaching scandal facing the DC school system. As it turns out, educators and administrators have been reporting inflated graduation rates on a large scale – committing academic fraud right in the Post’s (and several public agencies’) back yard.

This failure to catch and report what was going on inside DC schools is a serious disservice to local parents, an illustration of how hard it can be for reporters to penetrate dense bureaucracies like DCPS, and an example of how relentless turnover on an important beat can result in missed opportunities.

Most of all, it’s a substantial journalistic failure by a news outlet that should — and could — be doing much better work.

Ariana Kiener:

Everyone deserves options

“I’m for whatever kind of school works. And I’m for poor parents having the same type of access that people with money have. Cause all y’all in this room know that if you’ve got money in America, you’ve got choice. If the schools don’t work for you, either you’re going to move to a place where they do work, you’re going to put your kids in private schools, or you’re going to get the most expensive tutor on the planet, or you’re going to do all three…As a black person, one thing I’m absolutely clear about is any time white people tell me I only have one option, we’re in deep trouble.”

Neerav Kingsland:

My formal education started at a Montessori pre-k. It’s a little difficult to use introspection to determine whether this was a waste of time and money, as I don’t remember much about pre-k. I do have a vague memory of being confused most of the time. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do there. But perhaps this is the point of Montessori. I don’t know.

But I don’t view this as a waste of time (what else was I supposed to do at the age of 3?) or a waste of money (the pre-k was not that fancy so I assume it was priced just a bit above the cost of babysitting). So seems like a decent use of mine and my parent’s resources. It allowed me to be confused in a safe environment and it allowed my parents to work.

Elementary School: Not wasteful!

At Parkview Elementary, I learned to read and write and do math, which have all been very useful in my life. Me being at school also allowed my parents to work, which provided our family with a home, food, and the comforts of a middle class lifestyle, which made for a happy childhood. If I had not been at school, I can’t really think of many productive uses of my time, so I don’t see many trade-offs in having attended Parkview Elementary. The combination of the school teaching me the basics and providing cost-effective babysitting (Indiana is not an extravagant spender on elementary schools) seem well worth the time and money.

Kevin Rector:

The students at Excel Academy in West Baltimore don’t fear school shootings.

In a city where bullets pop most everywhere else — when they’re walking home from school, riding a city bus, hanging out with friends, sitting on their porches, even just taking out the trash — their alternative public high school, with its brick walls and metal detector at the door, is one of the only places they feel safe.

The students have lost seven schoolmates to gun violence over the last two school years, and can share stories going back years before that about the havoc guns have wrought in their lives.

Like their peers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman last month shot 17 students and faculty to death, the Excel students have strong thoughts and feelings about the impact of gun violence on their lives, and the changes they want to see locally and nationwide.

And like their peers in Parkland, they want leaders to listen to what they have to say.

Robert Tracinski:

The events since the Parkland shooting have convinced me that we need to change the Constitution to eliminate an ill-considered amendment that has done more harm than good. We need to repeal the 26th Amendment and raise the voting age back to 21.

That’s the opposite of what a lot of people are advocating. Seeing Parkland students go on television and agitate for gun control has people on the Left excited at the prospect of lowering the voting age to 16. That is, they’re excited about the small subset of Parkland students opportunistic talk-show hosts have paraded in front of television cameras—not the ones who dropped out of scripted “town halls” when they refused to let CNN tell them what they could say.

Another perspective from John Nichols.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

Simon Kuper:

I’ve never had great success, which is lucky, because I have seen it ruin many previously excellent writers and thinkers. This is an age-old phenomenon, but it has got worse in our era.

The best business nowadays is selling to the 1 per cent. A caste of pundits has accordingly arisen to supply them with thoughts, or at least talking points. These pundits make decent money themselves, especially on the speakers’ circuit, which is now the place where original thinkers go to die. Here are some case studies:

You are a historian. You spend years in the archives producing good books. You emerge blinking into the light, turn out to be fluent on television, and pretty soon are getting $25,000 to pontificate in Dubai on “What’s next for China?” (The 0.1 per cent want to know the future, because that’s where the money is.) When you aren’t being an oracle, you are explaining why you were right five years ago. Eventually you realise you aren’t a historian any more. You’re a content provider who plays a parody of himself on TV.

You are a reporter. You are multilingual, hardworking and sit in ordinary people’s homes trying to understand what’s going on in their country. But once you are a star, you become a talking head in a complimentary limousine, separated from your material. Now you’re sitting in a prince’s palace trying to understand what’s going on in his country. He’s charming, he loves your work, and over dinner you realise that his ostensibly self-serving power play is in fact intended only to root out corruption.

The work that survives from past eras often wasn’t done by the biggest names. John Galsworthy and JB Priestley were star writers in Britain in the first half of the past century but no longer. Meanwhile, George Orwell went almost unnoticed until 1945, less than five years before his death, when he finally managed to get Animal Farm published. By analogy, today’s most interesting thinker is not the fiftysomething ­multimillionaire giving the keynote address, but the ignored 30-year-old blogger.

Still, who can say no to money and fame? For speaking engagements, do contact my agent.

Antonio Regalado:

When Amit Khera explains how he predicts disease, the young cardiologist’s hands touch the air, arranging imaginary columns of people: 30,000 who have suffered heart attacks here, 100,000 healthy controls there.

There’s never been data available on as many people’s genes as there is today. And that wealth of information is allowing researchers to guess at any person’s chance of getting common diseases like diabetes, arthritis, clogged arteries, and depression.

Doctors already test for rare, deadly mutations in individual genes. Think of the BRCA breast cancer gene. Or the one-letter mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia. But such one-to-one connections between a mutation and a disease—“the gene for X”—aren’t seen in most common ailments. Instead, these have complex causes, which until recently have remained elusive.

project censored:

A whopping $21 trillion was found to be missing from the US federal budget as of this past year. Michigan State University professor Mark Skidmore and a group of graduate students made the discovery after overhearing a government official say that the 2016 report by the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General (DoDIG) indicated $6.5 trillion in adjustments had not been adequately documented. Attempting to uncover the reasoning behind these adjustments, Skidmore began to dig deeper. He says, “I tried to call and talk to the office of the Inspector General to talk to the people who helped generate these reports. I haven’t been successful, and I stopped trying when they disabled the links.”

The Next Web:

I’ve spent the past few months trying to teach myself the piano, pretty much from scratch. It’s been tough, and sometimes disheartening, but also hugely rewarding.

You might be wondering by now what an article about learning to play piano is doing on a tech blog. The answer is simple: I might not still be trying if it weren’t for technology.

Though I occasionally feel like I’m in way over my head starting out as a 27-year old, and traditional methods are still the core part of this musical journey, I’m lucky to live in a time where a wealth of resources are available to me at the click of a button.

This is intended to be the first part of a long-term series on learning the piano. It’s primarily a personal account, but I hope it might just help someone else starting out too.

Melissa Sanchez and Sandhya Kambhampati:

By last summer, Laqueanda Reneau felt like she had finally gotten her life on track.

A single mother who had gotten pregnant in high school, she supported her family with a series of jobs at coffee shops, restaurants, and clothing stores until she landed a position she loved as a community organizer on Chicago’s West Side. At the same time, she was working her way toward a degree in public health at DePaul University.

But one large barrier stood in her way: $6,700 in unpaid tickets, late fines, and impound fees.

She had begun racking up the ticket debt five years earlier, in 2012, after a neighbor who saw her riding the bus late at night with her infant son sold her her first car, a used Toyota Camry, for a few hundred dollars. She was grateful for the shorter commute to work but unprepared for the extra costs of owning a car in Chicago.

That year alone, Reneau got 15 tickets, including seven $200 citations for not having a city sticker. Later, she received a dozen tickets for license plate violations on another used car that couldn’t pass emissions testing, a state requirement to renew her plates.

“Those tickets have followed me until this freaking day,” said Reneau, who is 25.

Because of the unpaid tickets, the city garnished her state tax refunds. Her car was impounded and she couldn’t pay for its release. Her driver’s license was suspended. Unable to come up with $1,000 to enter a city payment plan, Reneau did what thousands of Chicago drivers do each year: She turned to Chapter 13 bankruptcy and its promise of debt forgiveness.

Peter Jamison, Valerie Strauss, Perry Stein:

An investigation by District officials has uncovered signs of widespread enrollment fraud at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a nationally recognized incubator of theatrical talent and one of the city’s most revered public schools, according to current and former D.C. government officials with knowledge of the probe.

Scrutiny of a sample of the records of roughly 100 students whose families claimed D.C. residency — thus avoiding the annual tuition of more than $12,000 charged to nonresident students — found that more than half may live outside the city, two officials said.

That finding was shared in December at a meeting attended by representatives from the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education — which was managing the investigation — and the office of the D.C. attorney general, the officials said.

Shortly after that, a lawyer in the state superintendent’s office told those handling the case in that office to slow-track it because of the risk of negative publicity during a mayoral election year, said the officials with knowledge of the probe. It is unclear how far the investigation has progressed since then.

Bjarke Smith-Meyer, Joanna Plucinska:

According to a 12-page draft report obtained by POLITICO Pro, the European Commission wants to tax digital companies’ gross revenues at rates between 1 and 5 percent, based on where their users are located and how much advertising revenue they bring in.

If implemented, this move is bound to further ratchet up tensions between Europe and the United States.

From its aggressive enforcement of antitrust regulations, most prominently in recent years against Google, to its crackdown on Apple‘s use of Ireland as a tax haven, to its stringent approach on online privacy, Brussels is pushing to set the rules for the global digital economy — often to the dismay of Silicon Valley and Washington.

Josh Zumbrum:

A decade after the global financial crisis, household debts are considered by many to be a problem of the past after having come down in the U.S., U.K. and many parts of the euro area.

But in some corners of the globe—including Switzerland, Australia, Norway and Canada—large and rising household debt is percolating as an economic problem. Each of those four nations has more household debt—including mortgages, credit cards and car loans—today than the U.S. did at the height of last decade’s housing bubble.

At the top of the heap is Switzerland, where household debt has climbed to 127.5% of gross domestic product, according to data from Oxford Economics and the Bank for International Settlements. The International Monetary Fund has identified a 65% household debt-to-GDP ratio as a warning sign.

In all, 10 economies have debts above that threshold and rising fast, with the others including New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, Hong Kong and Finland.

Scott Berson:

A discussion among students at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the student’s homes, according to the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office.

On the afternoon of Feb. 20, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required drawing the square-root sign.

Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied by itself equals another number, looked like a gun.

Nicky Case:

Garry cringed, like someone just spit in his breakfast. Pawn to f5. Blue remained silent, like it just spit in someone else’s breakfast. Rook to e7: taking Garry’s queen. This was Game 6, but Garry had already lost his nerve when Blue beat him at the end of Game 2, and they’ve been drawing ever since. Garry made the move that would be his last. Bishop to e7: taking the rook that took his queen. Blue responded. Pawn to c4. Garry quickly recognized this was a set-up for Blue to invade with its queen — and knew there was no hope after that.

Garry Kasparov resigned, in less than 20 moves. On May 11th, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first AI to beat a human World Chess Champion.

You can now download a chess-playing AI better than Deep Blue on your laptop.

Zachary Karabell:

In this case, though, Thiel’s criticisms are themselves newsworthy. He may be an imperfect messenger, but his message had best be heard.

The size and scale of technology companies now surpasses that of most of the industrial, energy, and finance companies that dominated the American economy during the 20th century. The Valley’s close-knit groups of funders, founders, CEOs, and listed companies seem to think they can remain both insular and dominant without either government or social backlash. That was always far-fetched, and is now utterly absurd. It’s one thing for renegades to reinvent the operating system for society. But once those renegades become the rulers, the rest of society will—and should—demand a greater say in how these technologies and services shape our lives and consume our time, energy, and money.

Once upon a time—and in Valley-land, there is a once-upon-a-time—the tech ecosystem represented not just a small group of companies and funders, but also a relatively small slice of the nation’s economy. The early years of Apple, HP, and Intel may be looked at fondly and mythologized. But as recently as 1985, there was only one Valley company in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list: Hewlett-Packard at No. 60. Xerox, based elsewhere but with a strong research presence in Palo Alto, was No. 38. IBM, based in New York, was then the largest tech company in the world. It clocked in at No. 6, and its rigid corporate culture and focus on selling to other corporations were seen as the antithesis to the Valley’s startup, countercultural vibe.

Even with the internet boom of the 1990s, the ethos of the Valley could rightly claim to be separate, new, and different, propagated by a band of misfits and upstarts, libertarian and utopian. Companies such as HP were more corporate and traditional, but the predominant meme was not just liberal and left, but dismissive of government, avid about a future where technology liberated all, and seemingly bemused by the vast wealth that these new products and services generated.

Today, however, some of those companies are more dominant than even the robber barons of old. At his apex, the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world, worth about $11 billion, adjusted for inflation. Today, there are 53 tech billionaires in California alone, and 78 in the United States; Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates (both of course in Seattle), and Mark Zuckerberg each have fortunes in excess of $50 billion. Peter Thiel has an estimated $2.5 billion.

Jeffry Bartash:

The sizzling U.S. labor market has knocked the unemployment rate down to a 17-year low, but millions of Americans in their prime who would have been working back then do not have jobs now.

How come? China, robots, disability benefits, minimum wages and jail-time are the biggest culprits, according to a pair of researchers at the University of Maryland.

The percentage of the U.S. population with jobs sank from a record 64.7% in 2000 to a 28-year low of 58.2% by 2011 before beginning a gradual recovery. The brunt of the decline occurred during the 2007-2009 recession, but the problem had been long in the making.

“These worrisome developments were exacerbated by the Great Recession, but their roots preceded its onset,” wrote economists Katharine Abraham and Melissa Kearney at the University of Maryland in a new
report distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Abraham is a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The problem is still acute among young people and even Americans in their prime working years of 25 to 54, especially men.