Civics: “revealed that political deals created serious obstacles in the project from the beginning”

Ralph V.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

The goal in California in 2008 was to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours 40 minutes, putting it among the fastest trains in the worldin average speed.

The most direct route would have taken the train straight north out of Los Angeles along the Interstate 5 corridor through the Tejon Pass, a route known as “the Grapevine.” Engineers had determined in a “final report” in 1999 that it was the preferred option for the corridor.

But political concerns were lurking in the background. Mike Antonovich, a powerful member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was among those who argued that the train could get more riders if it diverted through the growing desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale in his district, north of Los Angeles.

The extra 41 miles to go through Palmdale would increase costs by 16 percent, according to the 1999 report, a difference in today’s costs of as much as $8 billion.

According to interviews with those working on the project at the time, the decision was a result of political horse-trading in which Mr. Antonovich delivered a multi-billion-dollar plum to his constituents.

“I said it was ridiculous,” said Mr. Tennenbaum, the former rail authority chairman. “It was wasteful. It was just another example of added expense.”

The horse-trading in this case involved an influential land developer and major campaign contributor from Los Angeles, Jerry Epstein.

Young Canadians go to school longer for jobs that pay less, and then face soaring home prices

Paul Kershaw:

It is a cliché now to suggest that young people today drink too many lattes and eat too much avocado toast, so can’t afford their major costs of living; that they rely too much on handouts from parents – far past when a responsible adult should. They want it all now without working for it.

You may have heard this nonsense enough that you’ve come to believe it.

As founder of Generation Squeeze, I’ve been on a mission to show it’s not true. Because these myths inflict real harm, causing many younger people to feel that they are doing something wrong, or that they are personally failing when they struggle to establish a solid financial foundation.

Commentary on partisan, distributed disinformation

Scott Johnson:

Earlier this week Axios reported on the Democrats’ real fake news gambit: “Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states[.]” It’s an interesting and well-researched story written up in the dumbed down Axios form by Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley. They found that David Brock was a key operative and fundraiser for the American Independent, “a Washington-based progressive news outfit” that appears on each of the sites’ mastheads.

14th Federal Judge Join Boycott, Refuses To Hire Yale Students As Law Clerks

Nate Hochman:

Elizabeth Branch, a federal judge serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, is joining a concerted push by conservatives on the federal judiciary to no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School. Judge Branch, who was nominated for the Eleventh Circuit by Donald Trump in 2017, informed National Review of her decision in response to NR’s inquiry about the trend, citing the “legitimate concerns” that had been “recently raised . . . about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular.” Branch is the 14th federal judge to have pledged to decline clerkships from Yale Law over the course of the past nine days. …

When asked for a comment on Judge Ho’s speech and the growing number of federal judges joining the boycott, Judge Branch told NR of her decision to add her name to the list:

My friend, Judge Jim Ho, recently raised legitimate concerns about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular. Like Judge Ho, I am gravely concerned that the stifling of debate not only is antithetical to this country’s founding principles, but also stunts intellectual growth. Accordingly, I accept Judge Ho’s invitation to join him in declining to consider students from Yale Law School for clerkships with me, with an exception for past and current students.

Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult for AI

Dan Falk:

The field of artificial intelligence has never lacked for hype. Back in 1965, AI pioneer Herb Simon declared, “Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” That hasn’t happened — but there certainly have been noteworthy advances, especially with the rise of “deep learning” systems, in which programs plow through massive data sets looking for patterns, and then try to make predictions. Perhaps most famously, AIs that use deep learning can now beat the best human Go players (some years after computers bested humans at chess and Jeopardy).

Mastering language has proven tougher, but a program called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI, can produce human-like text, including poetry and prose, in response to prompts. Deep learning systems are also getting better and better at recognizing faces, and recognizing images in general. And they have contributed to the software behind self-driving vehicles, in which the automobile industry has been investing billions.

What Does It Mean When Students Can’t Pass Your Course?

The Chronicle:

If you’ve got an opinion about what’s wrong with higher education today, it was probably confirmed by a recent New York Times story about the departure of an organic-chemistry professor from New York University after students complained about how he taught his course and graded their performance in it. The still-murky facts of the case have allowed it to serve as an inkblot open to interpretation.

Students these days aren’t serious, can’t study, and expect to be spoon-fed. Financially motivated administrators at overpriced colleges fancy themselves in the customer-service business, letting the students — and parents — who pay the bills call the shots. The bulk of instructors, who labor off of the tenure track, are expendable: With their employment conditional on keeping both the undergraduates and the administrators happy, they’re unable to resist their demands.

Polio Returns to New York City

Spencer Kimball:

When a young adult in a New York City suburb visited an emergency department in June after experiencing weakness in their lower legs, the shocking diagnosis would lead local officials to declare a health emergency in New York and put authorities across the U.S. and around the world on a state of alert.

The individual, a resident of Rockland County, had suffered from a fever, a stiff neck, back and abdominal pain as well as constipation for five days. The patient was hospitalized and tested for enterovirus, a family of pathogens that in rare cases can cause weakness in the arms and legs.

New York state’s Wadsworth Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would subsequently confirm the worst: The young adult was suffering from paralysis after contracting polio, the first known U.S. case in nearly a decade and the first in New York since 1990.

Civics: The Hypocrisy of Supreme Court Ethics Journalism

Wall Street Journal:

“Rules for thee but not for me” seems to be the phrase these days when it comes to criticizing Supreme Court justices. Politico adds to the double standard in its recent story that attacks Justice Amy Coney Barrett for not providing a client list from her husband’s law firm on her annual financial disclosure form. 

Disclosing such clients is neither required nor appropriate, but that didn’t stop Gabe Roth of the group Fix The Court, which was funded by a left-wing money outfit connected to Arabella Advisors, from bemoaning the supposed loss of public trust in the court resulting from the lack of information about the clients of Jesse Barrett’s firm. And I don’t recall Mr. Roth, or anyone else on the left, hand-wringing over a lack of disclosure from the law firms of the spouses of liberal justices.

The Politico story makes much of Mr. Barrett’s continuing to practice law after moving to Washington when his wife joined the Supreme Court. But by sticking with his Indiana-based firm, SouthBank Legal, Mr. Barrett hasn’t raised any appearance issues. SouthBank Legal doesn’t have a Supreme Court practice and has never represented clients before the court.

Civics: An ongoing look at voter data (Wisconsin charges $10k per request!)

MATTHEW DeFOUR, MATT MENCARINI, and JACOB RESNECK Wisconsin Watch:

Helping fuel the concern over ineligible voters is the case of Sandra Klitzke, a resident of the Brewster Village nursing home in Outagamie County, who voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections, even though a court had removed her right to vote in February 2020.

On March 31, the Thomas More Society filed a complaint with WEC on behalf of Klitzke and her daughter, Lisa Goodwin, who stated she “could not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother voted” in 2020 or 2021.

Normally the county register in probate mails notification of an ineligible voter to the WEC, according to Jennifer Moeller, president of the Wisconsin Register in Probate Association. The WEC then updates its information and notifies the local clerk, who is the only official authorized in Wisconsin to deactivate a voter’s registration.

It’s unclear why Klitzke’s name was not switched to “ineligible” in the WEC voter file, although it appears to have been an administrative error. Court records related to Klitzke’s guardianship information are confidential under state law

A contract to centralize voter data was given to Accenture under former Governor Jim Doyle. After that failed, the State built an in house system. Yet, this public data requires a $10,000 payment for each request.

The “Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism” or Wisconsin Watch, has received substantial funding from George Soros:

Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-fundedUW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.

When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

Civics: PayPal is no pal to free expression

Aaron Terr:

UPDATE (Oct. 7, 2022): Instead of rethinking its arbitrary policing of users’ expression in the wake of the Free Speech Union incident, PayPal is doubling down: The company has now informed users of changes to its acceptable use policy, including the addition of new categories of prohibited speech. These changes take effect on Nov. 3. 

The new policy dramatically expands PayPal’s power to take action against users for activity on the service involving disfavored speech. That includes “any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion” are “harmful” or “objectionable,” depict or even appear to depict nudity, “depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups,” present a risk to a user’s “wellbeing,” “promote misinformation,” or are, in PayPal’s opinion, “otherwise unfit for publication.” 

That last provision effectively means PayPal can slap you with a violation of its acceptable use policy for anything you say as part of a transaction and any expressive content or materials for which you seek payment through PayPal. (FIRE accepts PayPal donations and hopes the company will not find that this blog is “unfit for publication.”) To amplify the chilling effect, each violation of the policy may subject a user to a $2,500 penalty, which PayPal reserves the right to debit directly from the user’s account. 

As FIRE explains in our statement on free speech and online payment processors:

When these companies appoint themselves the arbiters of what speech and views are acceptable, shutting people and organizations out of the online financial ecosystem for wrongthink, they seriously undermine our culture of free expression.

We will continue to monitor this space.

NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks, Eric Adams put each other’s girlfriends in top posts

Susan Edelman:

Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned.

Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show.

Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21. 

Both women’s advancement underscores the tight inner circle of the Adams administration.

Wright, 52, previously CEO of United Way of NYC, helped lead Adams’ transition team. Banks and Wright live together in Harlem. Banks and Adams took office on Jan. 1.

A Queens teacher was stunned to learn of the quid pro beau.

“The district reinstated Cusato and suspended the policy forcing teachers to use preferred pronouns.”

Mary Chastain:

Over 400 people attended Wednesday’s school board meeting. More than 40 of the people who spoke to the board showed support for Cusato:

“My uncle Daren is standing up for what is right, even though he is standing by himself. I am thoroughly embarrassed that South Side School District has taken this arbitrary stance in choosing to align with the one percent,” his niece said.

“I am standing up here tonight to ask you to separate these two things: the very divisive but trendy topic of pronouns and the precedent that you are setting, which is that teachers need to modify their engagement of students based on how that student feels,” another said.

One woman derided the district for acting in what she perceived to be a fear of “getting sued.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of being sued. Fine. If you want to sue us, sue us. Let’s take it to the Supreme Court. Let’s take it all the way,” she said.

Failing Introductory Economics:
A Davidson professor bemoans the state of his classroom.

Clark Ross:

In June 2014, I wrote a piece entitled “Reform Intro Economics” for Inside Higher Ed. There, I arguedthat then-current introductory economics courses were little changed from those of decades past. I further stated that the students of 2014 found the unrevised course somewhat unsatisfactory:

Today’s students are … not accustomed to sitting through 50-minute lectures, taking detailed notes of material and techniques, the value of which has yet to be demonstrated to them. Thus, it is little wonder that more students do not elect [to take] introductory economics or, following the course, do not take more economics.

I would argue that this student dissatisfaction persists today, perhaps at an even higher level. What I have noticed, post-pandemic, is that general student interest and student performance in introductory economics have been dropping. (I teach economics at Davidson College and have done so for more than 40 years.) I say “general student interest” because we still have some economics majors who truly enjoy the subject. However, the typical student, taking the course to satisfy a requirement or to assess a possible interest in economics, is not the equal of his or her peer from the year 2000 where course performance is concerned.

What Do Girls Do?
Girls Become Women

Heather Heying

Sometimes, in fact, sex is observed before birth. Most commonly, this happens via ultrasound imaging of the fetus. Less commonly, it is possible to look at the karyotype—a visual representation of fetal chromosomes, organized roughly by size—which has been obtained through the usefully diagnostic but somewhat risky mid-pregnancy procedure known as amniocentesis.

All mammals have “Genetic Sex Determination,” which means that we have chromosomes dedicated to starting us down the path of maleness or femaleness. They are called sex chromosomes, in contrast to the autosomes which comprise most of our genetic makeup, and which do not vary predictably by sex. A tiny number of mammals—the echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus—have several pairs of sex chromosomes. The remaining several thousand of us mammals, however—everything from bats to koalas, kangaroos to whales—all the many thousands of other species of mammals have just one pair of sex chromosomes in each of our cells. Humans are mammals, so we have Genetic Sex Determination. Humans are neither echidnas nor duck-billed platypi, so we have just the one pair of sex chromosomes.

The number of chromosomes in each of our cells varies between species. Ocelots and margays have 18 pairs of chromosomes, for instance, while most other cats have 19 pairs1. Most of the great apes, including chimps, have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have only 23. That is: humans have 22 pairs of autosomes, and at that 23rd position: one pair of sex chromosomes.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in almost all of our cells. Gametes—sex cells—are a notable exception to this2, however, having only 23 chromosomes each, instead of 23 pairs. If you’re female, your gametes are called eggs; if you’re male, they’re called sperm. If successful (as the vast majority are not), an egg or a sperm will combine with a gamete of the other type and make a new life. As such, so as not to create a new life with double the chromosomes of their parents, gametes have halfthe chromosomal complement of somatic (body) cells: one copy of chromosome 1, one copy of chromosome 2, etc., all the way down to chromosome 23.

Columbia’s recent data scandal undermines the pretense of objectivity at “U.S. News.”

Akil Bello:

Last month U.S. News & World Report released its 2023 college rankings. The most notable move belonged to Columbia University, which for decades had been steadily rising in the ranks toward the very top of the list. This year it tumbled from No. 2 to No. 18.

That’s better than might have been expected. After a blog post in February by Michael Thaddeus, a math professor at the university, showed that Columbia had provided fraudulent data to the magazine, U.S. News summarily unrankedit. When the university was able to update only some of the data in time for the latest rankings, the editors “

Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art

Andres Guadamuz:

As AI creative tools are becoming widespread, the question of copyright of AI creations has also taken centre-stage. But while copyright nerds obsess over the authorship question, the issue that is getting more attention from artists is that of copyright infringement.

AI is trained on data, in the case of graphic tools such as Imagen, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, and MidJourney, the training sets consist of terabytes of images comprising photographs, paintings, drawings, logos, and anything else with a graphical representation. The complaint by some artists is that these models (and accompanying commercialisation) are being built on the backs of human artists, photographers, and designers, who are not seeing any benefit from these business models. The language gets very animated in some forums and chats rooms, often using terms such as “theft” and “exploitation”. So is this copyright infringement? Are OpenAI and Google about to get sued by artists and photographers from around the world?

This is a question that has two parts, the input phase and the output phase.

Madison public charter school mostly mum on gun found in employee’s backpack

Chris Rickert:

A state-authorized public charter school in Madison initially refused to work with police after a student found a gun in a school employee’s backpack, according to a recently released police report, and the employee refused to answer questions about the incident.

Police ultimately closed their investigation of the June 1 incident involving Milestone Democratic School teacher Art Richardson, saying they did not have enough evidence that Richardson knew he had the gun in his backpack and after Richardson put off speaking to them and then cut off communication entirely.

Knowingly bringing a firearm into a school is a Class I felony under state law, punishable by up to three and a half years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Thin Madison K-12 Commentary (Achievement?)

Scott Girard:

Two years into the job, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent Carlton Jenkins received praise from the Madison School Board for his handling of the district’s 2022-23 budget and leadership.

A summary of the board’s annual performance review of the district’s top staff member was released Wednesday evening. While most of the review was in praise of Jenkins’ work, the board wrote that it “would like to partner with Dr. Jenkins to build upon and enhance district-community relationships.”

“This would bolster community perceptions of district accountability and transparency,” the board wrote. “Superintendent Jenkins has begun to proactively increase his team’s work in partnering with community members and business leaders.”

HEDI RUDD and RUTHIE HAUGE:

This, in a way, encapsulates the secret recipe that many Madison charter schools use to create environments that don’t fit a traditional educational model. To explore what that looks like, photographers Hedi Rudd and Ruthie Hauge recently visited three local charter schools.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Diversity Thursday
power, money, sex, and shahadaesque statements

CDR Salamander

Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.

The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what OrwellHuxleyDith Pran, and others warned us about.

While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.

It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.

Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.

Diversity Thursday
power, money, sex, and shahadaesque statements

CDR Salamander

Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.

The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what OrwellHuxleyDith Pran, and others warned us about.

While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.

It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.

Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.

SAT score distributions in Michigan

Steve Hsu

Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, …) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.

This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.

Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

Alhussein Fawzi, Matej Balog, …Pushmeet Kohli

Improving the efficiency of algorithms for fundamental computations can have a widespread impact, as it can affect the overall speed of a large amount of computations. Matrix multiplication is one such primitive task, occurring in many systems—from neural networks to scientific computing routines. The automatic discovery of algorithms using machine learning offers the prospect of reaching beyond human intuition and outperforming the current best human-designed algorithms. However, automating the algorithm discovery procedure is intricate, as the space of possible algorithms is enormous. Here we report a deep reinforcement learning approach based on AlphaZero1 for discovering efficient and provably correct algorithms for the multiplication of arbitrary matrices. Our agent, AlphaTensor, is trained to play a single-player game where the objective is finding tensor decompositions within a finite factor space. AlphaTensor discovered algorithms that outperform the state-of-the-art complexity for many matrix sizes. Particularly relevant is the case of 4 × 4 matrices in a finite field, where AlphaTensor’s algorithm improves on Strassen’s two-level algorithm for the first time, to our knowledge, since its discovery 50 years ago2. We further showcase the flexibility of AlphaTensor through different use-cases: algorithms with state-of-the-art complexity for structured matrix multiplication and improved practical efficiency by optimizing matrix multiplication for runtime on specific hardware. Our results highlight AlphaTensor’s ability to accelerate the process of algorithmic discovery on a range of problems, and to optimize for different criteria.

Students with disabilities are often met with off-the-books suspensions

Meredith Kolodner and Annie Ma:

When she asked why he couldn’t stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didn’t take him home.

The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldn’t stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class. But none of these pickups were ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.  

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Department of Education as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day – or even indefinitely.

“So far in fiscal 2022, the US Treasury has forked out $471 billion just to fund the government’s interest payments”

Tyler Durden:

To put that number into context, at this point in fiscal 2021 the Treasury’s interest expense stood at $356 billion. That represents a 30%  year-on-year increase. Interest expense ranks as the sixth largest budget expense category, about $250 billion below Medicare. If interest rates remain elevated or continue rising, interest expenses could climb rapidly into the top three federal expenses. (You can read a more in-depth analysis of the national debt HERE.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this is exactly what will happen. It projects interest payments will triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal 2022 to $1.2 trillion in 2032. And it’s worse than that. The CBO made this estimate in May. Interest rates are already higher than those used in its analysis.

Mentoring, committee work, and other campus service disproportionately burden women

Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart

Lise attended a promotion-and-tenure committee meeting where the dean asked for a volunteer to write the recommendation report and one of the few women in attendance agreed to do it. Laurie walked into the first meeting of an important university committee to find only women in the room. Brenda mentored countless junior staff members, many who weren’t even in her department. Linda was asked to serve on the institutional review board, a request made even more difficult because everyone else had declined. “Service” assignments like those — or, to use our term, “non-promotable tasks” (NPTs) — are important to the college or university. They help it run smoothly, improve its culture, and foster a productive workplace. But an overload of NPTs can have significant negative effects on a faculty member’s progress since this work rarely enters into performance evaluations or promotion and tenure decisions.

Ed prof says there are 2 sexes, keeps her job

Joanne Jacobs:

Instead, the graduate students, who are seeking certification as teachers, will be offered an alternative class taught by a non-heretic.

All but one of Christy Hammer’s students walked out of her Sept. 14 class, “Creating a Positive Learning Environment.” In a discussion the previous week, the professor and one student had argued that biological sex is not “on a spectrum.”

A non-binary student, Elizabeth Leibiger, who’d missed the previous class, brought up the issue on Sept. 14.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face,’ says Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Michael Derby:

Americans’ wages are losing ground to inflation at a steep rate, a report on Tuesday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said, a finding that offers some support for the central bank’s super-charged campaign to lower price pressures.

“Despite the stronger wage growth due to the tightness of the labor market, a majority of workers are finding their wages falling even further behind inflation,” economists for the Dallas Fed wrote. A majority of workers’ wages, once adjusted for inflation, “have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5%.”

The report acknowledged over the last 25 years there have been other periods of lost ground on wages relative to inflation, but added “the current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face.”

Civics: Elon Musk May Have a Point About Bots on Twitter

Marek Posard:

Here’s a possible hypothesis: Twitter might not want to look too closely at this problem because then they would have to remove accounts, reducing the number of reported “active users” on the platform. More than 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. And it is probably safe to assume that most of these advertisers are paying Twitter to display ads to real human beings, not bots or Russian trolls masquerading as Americans. If Twitter removed more of these inauthentic accounts, it would ding its “active user” metrics, which drive advertising revenue—the source of value for the platform.

Why American boys are failing at school—and men are losing in life

Richard Reeves:

In New York, boys are now lagging behind girls in math and a full grade level behind in English. Similar patterns can be seen across the nation. Boys graduate high school at about the same rate as poor students, while girls account for two out of three high schoolers in the top 10% ranked by GPA. One in four black boys repeat a grade, and 60% of students on college campuses are now women. 

When almost one in four boys (23%) are categorized as having a “developmental disability,” it is fair to wonder if it is the boys — or the system — that is not functioning properly.

“Critical Race Theory: What It Is And What It Is Not”

Aaron Sibarium:

There do not appear to be any dissenting voices on the panel. All three scholars—Devon W. Carbado of UCLA School of Law, Osamudia James of UNC School of Law, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University School of Law—are outspoken proponents of critical race theory, which claims, among other things, that ostensibly neutral laws perpetuate white supremacy.

The panel demonstrates how a fringe critique of the American justice system has become conventional wisdom for many within it. Derrick Bell, widely considered the godfather of critical race theory, wrote in 1992 that “a perilously racist America” would never accept such a radical challenge to the status quo. In the three decades since, critical race theory went from baroque elective to required coursework at many law schools, which must now educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” under rules from the American Bar Association.

Civics: Institutions, Politics and the global affairs

Conversations with Tyler – Walter Russell Mead:

With the ballooning of the national security bureaucracies in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these ossified institutions. There’s always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is one — if you can find the right one. Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking that’s being done inside them.

Seniors Are Moving From High-Tax States To Low-Tax States

Chris Edwards:

Americans are moving from high‐​tax states to low‐​tax states. The smart states know this and are cutting income tax rates, as discussed in the forthcoming Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.

One group that states want to attract with tax cuts are seniors and retirees. Just this year, 10 states cut their taxes on retirement income, which means income from Social Security, defined‐benefit (DB) plans, and defined contribution (DC) plans, such as 401(k)s. Currently, about three‐quarters of the states fully exempt Social Security benefits from taxes. About a dozen states fully exempt DB and DC benefits from taxes, and about half the states partly exempt it. …

A look at Wisconsin State Government Spending and Regulatory climate

Institute for reforming government:

The Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s budget is $221,221,800 for the 2021-2023 biennium, a 15% increase since 2017. DATCP employs 633 employees.

Beyond the economic challenges facing Wisconsin’s farmers, the state government has done little to alleviate unnecessary burdens. The regulatory environment in Wisconsin makes it harder for them to thrive and focus on farming.

Currently, farmers have to comply with regulations from two state agencies, DATCP and DNR. Like many areas of the Wisconsin economy, this industry would benefit from a more streamlined approach and a regulatory state that works alongside, rather than against the regulated community.

“Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale”

Aaron Sibarium:

“I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.”

With one exception, the judges made clear this is a policy they are imposing on future—not current—Yale Law School students. …

The judges joining the boycott, all of whom requested anonymity in order to speak freely, cited a series of incidents where they say free speech has come under attack at Yale Law …

The law school’s ideological monoculture also poses a problem for vetting clerkship applicants, some judges said, because there are simply no professors whom they trust to recommend conservative clerks. 

The feeder judge told the Free Beacon that he had long relied on Amy Chua, a left-leaning but heterodox Yale Law professor, for recommendations, but that the law school has made it a “speech and thought crime” for students to associate with her.

Native Boarding School Archives Reveal Defiance, Loss & Love

Marianna McMurdock & Meghan Gallagher:

The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one of many efforts to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to their families and tribes. 

Last summer, the discovery of more than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore through international media and reignited investigations of U.S. boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death

Archivists and community members have continued to retrieve haunting letters, student and local newspapers, photographs and other school documents that paint a poignant picture of resistance and survival in day-to-day student life in the boarding schools. 

Still, many records remain out of reach to descendants, and those that are accessible can be traumatizing. Some collections sit dormant, held by churches or universities with no plans to return them to tribal communities; others require extensive time and travel to physical archives

“Native people have never had easy access to their records. And that in itself has continued to contribute to the genocide,” said Tawa Ducheneaux. a citizen of the Cherokee nation working as an archivist at Oglala Lakota College’s Woksape Tipi library on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she raised her family for 19 years. “You’re not having access to relatives and descendants that can educate you more about who you are and where you come from.”

Civics: Big Tech’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Stewart Baker:

Just to remind us why everyone hates Big Tech’s content practices, we do a quick review of the week’s news in content suppression.

  • A couple of conservative provocateurs prepared  a video consisting of Democrats embracing “election denial.” The purpose was to highlight the hypocrisy of those who criticize the GOP for a trope that belonged mainly to Dems until two years ago. And it worked all too well: YouTube did a manual review of the video before it was even released and demonetized it because, well, who knows? An outcry led to reinstatement, but too late for YouTube’s reputation. Jane has the story.
  • YouTube also steps in the same mess by first suppressing then restoring a video by Giorgia Meloni, the big winner of Italy’s recent election. She’s on the right, but you already knew that from how YouTube dealt with her.
  • Mark covers an even more troubling story, in which government officials flag online posts about election security that they don’t like for NGOs that the government will soon be funding, the NGOs take those complaints to the platforms, and the platforms take a lot of the posts down. Really, what could possibly go wrong?
  • Jane asks why Facebook is “moderating” private messages sent by the wife of an FBI whistleblower.  I suspect that this is not so much content moderation as part of the government and big tech’s hyperaggressive joint pursuit of anything related to January 6. But it definitely deserves investigation.
  • Across the Atlantic,  Jane notes, the Brits are hating Facebook for the content it let 14-year-old Molly Russell read before her suicide. Exactly what was wrong with the content is a little obscure, but we agree that material served to minors is ripe for more regulation, especially outside the US.

For a change of pace, Mark has some largely unalloyed good news. The ITU will not be run by a Russian; instead it has elected an American, Doreen Bodan-Martin to lead it.

The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too

Mark Joseph Stern:

Khiara Bridges remembers the exact moment she lost faith in the Supreme Court. At first, at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Bridges—a professor who now teaches at UC–Berkeley School of Law—held out hope that the court might be “this great protector of individual civil liberties right when we desperately needed it to be.” Then came 2018. That June, the justices issued Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the president’s entry ban for citizens of eight countries, six of them Muslim-majority. Suddenly, Bridges told me, she realized, “The court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And it’s going to help him get away with it.”

Four years later, the justices completely shattered whatever remaining optimism Bridges could muster about the court by overruling Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. When the decision came down on June 24, she got a migraine for the first time in a decade. The image of the court as a majestic guardian of liberty was, she concluded, “a complete lie.” And it wasn’t just about her own personal feelings, either: Now she had to teach her students about the work of an institution that made her sick to contemplate.

Bridges is not alone. At law schools across the country, thousands of professors of constitutional law are currently facing a court that, in their view, has let the mask of neutrality fall off completely. Six conservative justices are steering the court head-oninto the most controversial debates of the day and consistently siding with the Republican Party. Increasingly, the conservative majority does not even bother to provide any reasoning for its decisions, exploiting the shadow docket to overhaul the law without a word of explanation. The crisis reached its zenith between September 2021 and June 2022, when the Supreme Court let Texas impose its vigilante abortion ban through the shadow docket, then abolished a 50-year-old right to bodily autonomy by overruling Roe v. Wade. Now law professors are faced with a quandary: How—and why—should you teach law to students while the Supreme Court openly changes the meaning of the Constitution to align with the GOP?

A version of this question has long dogged the profession, which has fought over the distinction between law and politics for about as long as it has existed. For decades, however, the court has handed enough victories to both sides of the political spectrum that it has avoided a full-on academic revolt against its legitimacy. That dynamic changed when Trump appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to replace far less conservative predecessors and created a Republican-appointed supermajority, a coalition further aided by the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to a seat that should have been filled by Barack Obama. The cascade of far-right rulings in 2022 confirmed that the new court is eager to shred long-held precedents it deems too liberal as quickly as possible. The pace and scale of this revolution is requiring law professors to adapt on several levels—intellectually, pedagogically, and emotionally.

Notes on taxpayer supported censorship

Just the news:

The Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, think tank Atlantic Council, and social media analytics firm Graphika claimed their consortium had a 35% success rate getting flagged content removed, throttled or labeled

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee, also flagged purported misinformation through the consortium.

“No news organization should be subjected to an enemies/censorship list for reporting newsworthy facts” Just the News Editor in Chief John Solomon said in a statement. “It’s even more egregious that this censorship machinery was prodded, aided and sanctioned by the federal government.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies

Eran Amsalem, Alon Zoizner:

Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics on social media is rarely fulfilled. The current study tests which of these conflicting theoretical claims is supported by the existing empirical literature. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies (N=442,136) reveals no evidence of any political learning on social media in observational studies, and statistically significant but substantively small increases in knowledge in experiments. These small-to-nonexistent knowledge gains are observed across social media platforms, types of knowledge, countries, and periods. Our findings suggest that the contribution of social media toward a more politically informed citizenry is minimal.

India: The Revolution in Private Schooling

Alex Tabarrok

As the private share of school enrollment increases simple cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. If the private schools cream skim when they are at 10% of public school enrollment how much cream can be left in the public school pool when the private schools account for 60% of total enrollment? Thus, if this simple form of cream skimming is the explanation for the higher achievement rate in private schools, we would expect the “private effect,” the difference between private and public scores, to be smaller in regions with a high
share of private schooling.

The Illinois K-12 Report Card

Wall Street Journal:

Statewide, in 2019, 36% of all third grade students could read at grade level. That’s an F, and that’s the good news. That number drops to 27% for Hispanic students and 22% for black students statewide. In certain public school systems, the numbers plummet to single digits. In Decatur, 2% of black third-graders are reading at grade level and only 1% are doing math at grade level. 

We aren’t often speechless, but the extent to which that performance is betraying a generation of schoolchildren is hard to put into words. Third grade children are eight years old, full of potential with minds like sponges to absorb what they are taught. Third grade is the year that children need to achieve a level of reading fluency that will prepare them to tackle more complex tasks in upper elementary grades that require comprehension.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: state by state tax burden comparison

Jared Walczak:

Everyone owes taxes to non-domiciliary states in which they work, often after working there a single day, though some states adopt reasonable thresholds, like allowing someone to spend up to 30 days in the state before having an income tax obligation. (Every state should adopt these traveler- and remote worker-friendly “mobile workforce” laws.) But athletes and other entertainers operate under different rules than the rest of us: even in states with a multi-day threshold, athletes are always taxed, and the calculations are typically based on what are called “duty days,” which is the number of days they spent in that state as a percentage of their season. These athlete-specific rules are often termed “jock taxes,” though they’re part of the individual income tax.

The table below estimates Hill’s tax liability this season on his $30 million-a-year contract if he played for every team, taking into account taxes paid for each team’s home and away games. We make a number of simplifying assumptions. Most importantly, we assume that each out-of-state away game involves three duty days in that state. Depending on how far a team has to travel and what their schedule looks like, the actual number of duty days will vary. Secondly, we focus entirely on the regular season: calculations change if a team makes it to the postseason, but such schedules are, of course, unknowable. We also disregard the preseason and any out-of-state training camps, though this is a trivial omission, as veteran players are only paid $1,600 a week during this time, truly a drop in the bucket in Hill’s $30 million annual salary.

Because of these and other simplifying assumptions, this table should not be relied upon for tax planning. If you are Tyreek Hill looking to force a trade in the offseason, please consult with your financial advisor or ask Drew Rosenhaus to recommend one.

With that said, let’s explore how much Hill would have paid in taxes this season if he had signed with each team. The value of credits for taxes paid for other states is shown broken out, but these credits are included in the calculation of the amount paid to the home state.

How to Fix What is Broken in Academia

Wesley Yang:

Progressive dominance was obtained through a slow, incremental process of institutional capture that accelerated through the decades as various inflection points were reached; we are now in the home stretch in which the pace has become a sprint. Ceaseless retail activism by a minority of implacable administrators and faculty over budgets, mandates, sinecures, and faculty hiring eventually delivered a critical mass of power able to dominate whole departments and the institution as a whole. Much of this activity was flagrantly in violation of civil rights law and equal protection, enabled by a combination of progressive consensus to flout the law and conservative lassitude or incompetence in fighting back.

Reversing this trend will require a concerted, comprehensive, well-coordinated, and intelligent application of political power to reshape a crucial domain of elite formation. This will in turn require that the party break with its reluctance to exercise government power in service of shaping our major cultural and educational institutions. After decades of negligence, conservatives must get serious about acting to secure and widen their foothold in the institutions of higher learning by rolling back pervasive abuses and lawlessness normalized therein. Fortunately, there are many ways that conservatives, with sufficient will and proper direction, can use politics to both protect and widen their own stake within universities while preserving the core values of free and disinterested inquiry that the left monoculture now threatens to consume.

It is at the federal level, whenever conservative regain control of it, that the greatest opportunities will lie. In general, conservatives must become as active in using the investigative authorities of Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education to ferret out and punish wrongdoing as their progressives counter parts have been in shielding it from scrutiny. Universities should be made to fear a Republican administration as much or more than they thrill at a Democratic one. And it would not be impossible to strike some fear into these places, however arrogant they seem at present, if only Republicans knew which rocks to look under and would sustain the will to keep turning them over. Any professor who is honest will tell you, a great amount of conduct of dubious legality, especially with regard to hiring practices, is right there over email.

“it is important for public schools to “fully inform parents about what is being taught to their children in classrooms”

Paul Bedard:

The survey, conducted with the Capitol Resource Institute, a parents’ rights organization, is the latest to show how the last two years of school board fights have affected the nation. What started as a clash over teaching critical race theory turned into a broader battle over parental involvement and decision-making during the Glenn Youngkin-McAuliffe gubernatorial campaign.

Near the end of that 2021 campaign, McAuliffe said in a debate that parents should not be determining what goes on in classrooms. He said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He also said that he was “not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”

The backlash reportedly helped Youngkin, a Republican businessman, win in the Democratic state and led to a national fight over schools and parents, leading to some talk of a Youngkin 2024 presidential or vice presidential bid. The issue of parents’ rights has been among Youngkin’s top issues as he’s ridden a wave of support in Virginia.

Oklahoma has 33,000 teachers choosing not to teach; we need them back

Ginnie Graham:

In 2017, the state Education Department completed a comprehensive survey on why educators retained their certification but didn’t work as teachers.

A task force report found that pay was a top concern followed by classroom management problems and lack of autonomy in making instructional decisions. The pay raise following the 2018 walkout helped but hasn’t kept up with surrounding states.

How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

OpenCulture:

The oldest known writing systems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alphabet, which I’m using to write this post and you’re using to read it, gradually took the shape we know between the seventh century BC and the Middle Ages. Over the eras since, it has spread outward from Europe to become the most widely used script in the world. These are important developments in the history of writing, but hardly the only ones. It is with all known writing systems that historical map animator Ollie Bye deals in the video above: not just those used today, but over the whole of the past five millennia.

The conquests of Alexander the Great; the Gallic Wars; the colonization of Latin America; the “scramble for Africa”: these and other major historical events are vividly reflected in the spread of certain writing systems.

Parental Rights Lawfare

Michael Graham:

On Thursday, NHJournal reported on a press conference held by GOP congressional candidate Karoline Leavitt outside the district’s headquarters, denouncing both the policies and the Democrats who support it. Her opponent, Rep. Chris Pappas (D) voted on Thursday to kill a proposal requiring schools that receive federal funds to inform parents about counseling they receive at school.

“Parents have an inalienable right to know what’s going on in their child’s classroom, and in Congress, I will proudly support legislation to enact a federal parental bill of rights,” Leavitt said. “I will always ensure that Granite State moms and dads feel heard at the highest level of our government. That is why I am here today, and I will always put parents over politicians.”

Friday morning, Buckley tweeted to NHJournal: “You’re purposely going after children, endangering their lives, mental health & safety & its disgusting. Not all families are the same, some kids will be kicked out or beaten (to death), or commit suicide. All to try to get votes for Karoline?”

Commentary on Wisconsin K-12 Governance and the November 2022 elections

Alan Borsuk:

But the results for MPS were terrible. They were bad before the pandemic, and they’re worse now. The percentages of students proficient in reading and math were in single digits in many schools. What can be done about that? Would the plans either candidate is advocating bring real change in how thousands of Milwaukee students are doing?

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

“But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him”

Stephanie Saul:

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.

But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.

Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.

The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing.

He said the plan would “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills,” an apparent reference to parents.

The university’s handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement.

“The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher,” said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.

More On Judge Ho’s Proposed Boycott Of Yale Law School Grads For Judicial Clerkships

Paul Caron:

Bill would force universities to repay portion of student loan default

Black Mauro:

A U.S. senator has introduced legislation that seeks to require colleges and universities to pay 50 percent of student loan balances that go into default.

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced the “Make the Universities Pay Act” on Sept. 21 in the wake of President Joe Biden’s announcement that taxpayers will absorb student loan debt to the tune of at least $400 billion, estimated to cost individual American taxpayers $2,500 each.

“For decades, universities have amassed billion-dollar endowments while teaching nonsense like men can get pregnant. All while charging extortionary tuition,” Senator Hawley stated in a news release.

“Now Joe Biden wants to give away another $1 trillion to prop up the system. That’s wrong. Instead, it’s time to put universities on the hook and give students the information they need to make informed decisions.”

K-12 Literacy Governance Climate

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Two new books examine the ordinary roots of our extraordinary regime of high-tech monitoring.

Sophia Goodriend:

The Listeners tells the history of wiretapping in the United States through ordinary biographies. “Wherever possible, this book is centered on people,” Hochman writes in the introduction. “In part, this is to counteract the long-standing tendency in surveillance studies to grant extraordinary agency to agencies”—the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Instead he looks to the lives of regular criminals, businessmen, spies, and innovators. His story begins with D. C. Williams, an infamous Californian convict. Williams was thrown in jail for intercepting corporate communication, selling the information to stock traders, and amassing millions via illicit espionage. Williams may sound like the cybercriminals of today, who regularly hack into corporate servers and defraud financial markets, but he was actually the first person to be convicted of intercepting electronic messages in America: “The year—and here’s the twist to the story—was 1864.”

The Listeners resurrects figures like Williams in order to underscore that “surveillance is, and always has been a constitutive element of our communications ecosystem.” Wiretappers arrived on the scene around the Civil War, with soldiers tapping into electric cables as soon as they began transmitting wartime communication. Electronic listening spread from military campaigns to criminal pursuits and then to the arsenal of local law enforcement. In 1895, around the time municipal telephone companies established networks in New York City, mob bosses and police forces rented out vacant offices to set up eavesdropping nests. They paid a host of freelance listeners to sit hunched over telephone receivers, listening in on private phone calls across the city. Many received special technical training in signal intelligence during their time in the army and were eager to cash in on their skills.

Notes on Wisconsin Choice schools and exam outcomes

School Choice Wisconsin:

On Thursday, September 29, 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released the state test scores via the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.

As in prior years, students in Wisconsin’s school choice programs outperformed traditional public school students on the college-readiness ACT exam.

“This continuing pattern is quite noteworthy,” said Nic Kelly, School Choice Wisconsin President. He added: “The fact that choice students from low-income and working-class families score higher on average than public school students is consistent with other data and research. Despite taxpayer funding at 60% of public school levels, choice students are ahead of the pack.”

While students are required by state law to take the ACT (and other) exams, more than a quarter of Milwaukee Public Schools students did not do so. By comparison, 90% of choice students took the exam*.

“Private schools in the Choice programs navigated many obstacles to get their kids to take the required tests,” Kelly said.

The dangers of a headline figure

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

The problem is that the media are so keen to feed people a single, simple number, that for weeks we’ve been hearing about what’s happening to the energy costs for the average household and referring to that as a capped number, when in fact, of course, it’s the price per kWh that’s been capped. (More info here.) If, say, you use twice as much as the average household, your bill could be £5000. Some not-very-smart people even think they can use as much as they like, because, hey, it’s been capped now, and they’re going to get a nasty surprise! And similarly, of course, if you use half as much, you can worry a bit less about that headline figure.

This desire to reduce things to one number causes problems in many situations. Remember when the only way most people had to assess the PC they wanted to buy was based on its CPU’s GHz? (Or MHz for those with longer memories?)

Now, the headline figure for every electric car is the number of miles it can do on a charge, when lots of other factors will affect how easy it is to use in reality, like how fast it charges, or its drag coefficient (which affects how its energy use varies with speed). For many people, long journeys are relatively rare, and the important question when embarking on one will actually be something like, “How fast will this be able to recharge at the type of chargers available about 150-200 miles from my house?” And even that question is much less important if the chargers happen to have a nice cafe or restaurant next to them!

Just type a description and the AI generates matching footage

James Vincent:

A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.

“indoctrinated with the idea that academic standards and rigor needed to be swept away to achieve equity on campus”

Zachary Marschall:

Roughly a third of college students are “indeed ‘quiet quitting’ in order to preserve their mental health this fall semester,” Intelligent discovered in its survey of 1,000 participants earlier last month.

“Quiet quitting” is the national trend of over half of the American labor force putting the bare minimum into their jobs because they no longer feel engaged or motivated to grow within the company, according to Gallup.

This trend is the passive – and cowardly – alternative to actively submitting a resignation or bringing up work-related grievances with a supervisor or HR. To borrow from Lionel Trilling, there is a moral obligation to work hard and strive for betterment in all areas of life. Virtue demands it.

Civics: Hong Kong authorities reject Jimmy Lai request for UK lawyer

China News Asia:

Hong Kong’s government has refused permission for jailed pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai to be represented by a British lawyer at his upcoming national security trial, a court heard Friday (Sep 30).

Lai and a group of executives from the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper are being prosecuted for “colluding with foreign forces”, an offence under a new security law China imposed on Hong Kong to stamp out dissent.

‘There’s only so far I can take them’ – why teachers give up on struggling students who don’t do their homework

Jessica Calarco and Ilana Horn:

We were curious about how teachers reward students who complete their homework and penalize and criticize those who don’t – and whether there was any link between those things and family income.

By analyzing student report cards and interviewing teachers, students and parents, we found that teachers gave good grades for homework effort and other rewards to students from middle-class families like Gina, who happen to have college-educated parents who take an active role in helping their children complete their homework.

But when it comes to students such as “Jesse,” who attends the same school as Gina and is the child of a poor, single mother of two, we found that teachers had a more bleak outlook.

The names “Jesse” and “Gina” are pseudonyms to protect the children’s identities. Jesse can’t count on his mom to help with his homework because she struggled in school herself.

“I had many difficulties in school,” Jesse’s mom told us for the same study. “I had behavior issues, attention-deficit. And so after seventh grade, they sent me to an alternative high school, which I thought was the worst thing in the world. We literally did, like, first and second grade work. So my education was horrible.”

Jesse’s mother admitted she still can’t figure out division to this day.