Jim Treacher:

This isn’t just about Obama, although I’d sooner trust Edward Scissorhands to give me a prostate exam. Nobodyin government should have that much power over information. But I’m not comforted by the fact that the president of the United States is trusting this to an unelected functionary. I don’t want control over the robots going to the propagandist who convinced millions of people that “Yes We Can” was a winning message.

Wall Street Journal:

Late last week Mr. Griffin filed an amended version of his lawsuit against the tax agency for the “unlawful disclosure” of his confidential tax information. The hedge fund operator is one of the thousands of wealthy Americans whose private tax data was stolen from the IRS, then leaked and published by the left-leaning ProPublica website.

Mr. Griffin’s original suit in December held the IRS responsible for the leak, citing the ways the agency had flouted Congressional requirements for security. The suit alleges that the IRS also ignored a decade of annual warnings by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta) that security deficiencies were the agency’s “number one major management and performance challenge area.”

Lawyers for the IRS in April asked a judge to dismiss Mr. Griffin’s complaint, which it said was based on “unsupported speculation” that “IRS personnel” had “hacked the IRS’s data.” It said Mr. Griffin couldn’t even prove there was a “data breach at the IRS”; or that the information had been stolen from the IRS (instead of from his own “accountant”); or even that his actual “return information” had been given to ProPublica.

Sahar Tartak

We college students love our music festivals. The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, an all-night event with over 3,500 attendees, looked pretty cool to me. Maybe raves aren’t everyone’s style, but we should at least agree that getting dressed up for an event is a common Yale phenomenon. In our case, it’s often for formals and the like. You get the picture. 

Help me out. Imagine being at the festival. You’re dressed up. You’ve traveled from afar with your friends to the desert. You’re singing. You’re dancing. You’re happy. You see gray dots in the air and start to hear booms. You’re confused. Why is the music so discordant?

You’re running. You’re screaming. You’re being chased through the open desert. Men with guns are running after you. You have nowhere to hide. What will you do? Play dead? Hide behind a body sprawled on the floor? Keep running? But where will you go? 

This is precisely what happened in the Israeli desert this weekend. Except you weren’t there. You weren’t one of the 3,500 present, and you fortunately weren’t one of the 260 murdered. You fortunately weren’t abducted by Hamas fighters (if you’re a woman, child or elderly person), or shot or beheaded or killed in some other creative way on the spot (if you’re a man). You certainly weren’t Shani Louk, the young woman with a bullet in her head depicted stripped to her underwear with her legs “bent at unnatural angles” in the back of a pickup truck driven by the men.

John Sailer:

Last year, Utah State University sought a professor in solid earth geohazards. To apply for the job, scientists had to submit a “statement of contributions and vision of approach toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.” For a position in insect ecology, the university likewise sought scientists with a “demonstrated capacity” to contribute to “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.” And the job advertisement for a role in lithospheric evolution noted successful candidates would likewise “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of these jobs was a part of a Utah State cluster hire in the sciences. Cluster hiring involves recruiting multiple faculty in different fields focusing on the same general topic. For Utah State, while the jobs were mostly in the hard sciences, the overarching theme of the cluster was “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion” — sometimes called “JEDI.” 

To apply, scientists had to submit a separate statement on diversity.

Former President Obama quietly advised the White House over the past 5 months on its strategy to address AI, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with White House aides at Biden’s request, aides to both men say. https://t.co/QxNfwVqBGO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 3, 2023

The fact that this has to be reported as “quietly” is frustrating. We can all bet his advice carries weight but we also don’t know what it was or what it was influenced by. If this were a legislative process Obama would be illegally lobbying. more here …

And as for Obama’s disdain for “material consumption”?

Hmmm… Does that critique of inequality, inordinate profiteering, and conspicuous consumption suggest that Obama will then decide that as a former president, he must himself set the example by exhibiting a “higher purpose” beyond his own fixations on “material consumption”? In other words, perhaps Obama now plans to downsize and sell off either his #4 new multimillion-dollar Hawaii beachfront villa, or his #3 30-acre, multimillion-dollar Martha’s-Vineyard estate, or his #2 Washington-DC Kalorama multimillion-dollar mansion, or his #1 multimillion-dollar stately Chicago home? Does Obama’s reference to a more “inclusive capitalism” also encompass the ex-president signing $150-million-plus worth of book and Netflix deals, or Michelle Obama recently speaking for an hour on “diversity and inclusion” (but oddly not on the” equity” part of the holy DEI trinity), for over $12,000 a minute in Germany?

Lauren Coffey:

Faculty members have been slower than students to adopt artificial intelligence tools in the last year, despite the buzz across academia about ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, according to a new report released today.

Nearly half of college students are using AI tools this fall, but fewer than a quarter (22 percent) of faculty members use them, the report from Tyton Partners finds. The study, sponsored by Turnitin, was conducted in September and included roughly 1,600 students and 1,000 faculty members across more than 600 institutions. 

On AI, “students seem to be more curious about it than instructors, and those using it daily are using it in and out of schools; that made us think it might be ubiquitous moving forward,” said Cathy Shaw, a director at Tyton. “The differential between student use and instructor use will be one to watch.”

Alan Borsuk:

The definition of a public school? For a third of a century, Wisconsin has stretched it and bent it into new shapes — and fought about it. The state is still doing all of these, especially the fighting.

How people define a public school often says a lot about where they stand on big education issues. Look at some of the current controversies in Wisconsin:
A major lawsuit challenging the funding mechanisms and even the existence of the state’s voucher and charter school programs.
Decisions on funding the different sectors of schools in Wisconsin that were pivotal in reaching agreement over a state budget for the next two years.
Disputes over rules about how much private schools need to disclose publicly.
Enforcement of public regulations on private schools

Leslie Eastman:

I asserted one of the many reasons that students felt empowered to engage in soulless tactics, such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli children and smearing the videos of torture and murder as faked, is that the administration and educators at colleges and universities have gotten more stridently progressive and activist in each iteration over the last few decades. Nobody who challenges the narratives or ideologies is hired or promoted. If someone with an independent conservative viewpoint happens to make it into the system, they remain silent or become targets of campaigns to remove or silence them.

The fact there have been counter-protests to the shameful Hamas-supporting disruptions is a hopeful sign that not all is lost. Pro-freedom and Western values is the new counter-culture.

Right to Know:

Here are the University of North Carolina’s arguments for why it should not disclose about 4500 records mostly related to Ralph Baric, and potentially related to the origin of Covid-19.

Nate Silver:

“What Harvard students think” is a topic that invariably receives too much attention. But I don’t think that’s true for evaluating opinion among young people or college students in general — who, after all, will make up the next generation of journalists, business leaders, politicians and pretty much every other white-collar profession. And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.

College Pulse and FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-free speech advocacy group — recently published the latest edition of their annual survey. Although I don’t love using data from political groups — even ones I generally agree with — the good in this survey outweighs the bad. The methodology is detailed and transparent. And in surveying more than 55,000 undergraduates, the poll provides a look at student opinion across all sorts of colleges and universities — not just from the loudest or most privileged students at elite institutions. 

Although I’ve seen a lot of media coverage about the FIRE survey, I’d never really dug into the details. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting to see. But given my own political philosophy, I can tell you what I was hoping for: robust student support for free speech — perhaps in contrast to the often lukewarm support it receives among university administrators. Unfortunately, that’s not what the survey found. Here’s what it says instead:

College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.

——-

Not so surprisingly, conservative students at top conservative school are … tolerant of different viewpoints.

While Hillsdale is a shining light here, the numbers at every other university should make us very concerned about the future of free speech. Yes, not everyone has to be given a platform. But we shouldn’t be so afraid of contrary ideas.

What the Left and Right get wrong on multiculturalism:

Right:

Stop saying

‘Multiculturalism has failed’

What’s your solution?

Kick all us brown/black ppl out?

Stop eating curries and sushi?

Recognise good and instead think

‘How do we make it work?’

Answer: schools! 1/8

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) November 2, 2023

Steve Sailer:

As I’ve pointed out before, many veteran New York Times writers, such as Declan Walsh, the white guy who is the NYT’s chief Africa correspondent, often want to do a good old-fashioned job of informing readers about important facts. (Granted, the younger diversity hires mostly seem to want to talk about their hair.) But the marketing department no doubt warns them that the Times’ 9.7 million subscribers don’t want to read too much truth. Instead, they mostly want to hear reasons that they are right and their enemies are wrong, that they are on the side of Good, not Bad.

Blacks, for example, are Good. Hence, the more the better, logically.

So, the opening article in The New York Times’ series on Africa’s “youth boom” begins with a dose of happy talk, such as, “As the world grays, Africa blooms with youth.”

But buried further down are some disturbing facts. The few readers who make it to the 28th paragraph are informed:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average. Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.

Then in the 43rd paragraph, the NYT gives subscribers permission to worry. It’s not just Bad People who are troubled; so are Experts:

Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.

But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.

But then the NYT reverts to upbeatness about how Africa is becoming a “cultural powerhouse,” citing Rema’s song “Calm Down” that was popular with fans at last year’s soccer World Cup in Qatar.

Tyler Cowen:

All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity around artificial intelligence policy. President Joe Biden is scheduled to issue an executive order on the topic today. An AI safety summit is being held in the UK later this week. And last week, the US Senate held a closed-door forum on research and development in AI.

I spoke at the Senate forum, convened by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Here’s an outline of what I told the panel about how the US can boost progress in AI and improve its national security.

Wall Street Journal:

We’ve all heard children say things like “Look at me, I’m a robot” or “When I grow up, I’m going to be Captain America.” We smile when children say these things, because we know that children live in a world of imagination unhindered by reality. Why then does the medical community and culture at large think it is acceptable for children to make irreversible health decisions?

“Gender-affirming” healthcare is the only area of medicine where patients make their own diagnosis and prescribe their own remedy. Meanwhile, physicians frighten parents with warnings of their child’s suicide while convincing parents that there are no long-term effects to puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The tragic fact is that puberty blockers and gender procedures effectively sterilize children and cannot be reversed. Not only are the medical principles of informed consent and parental involvement for minor patients often ignored, but gender transition for children rejects alternate causes and remedies. Since most cases of juvenile gender dysphoria are resolved by the time of puberty, physicians should stop pushing gender transition on minor patients as the only solution.

Roy Peachey:

In A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy writes, “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Anyone who finds these words utterly baffling – maybe anyone who battled with long division or quadratic equations at school – should have a look at Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards.

Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, traveled across North and South America and into Europe to photograph mathematicians’ chalkboards. Nothing more. Not the classrooms in which those chalkboards were found or even the mathematicians who worked on them. Just the chalkboards and the mathematics that filled them. It might seem a niche project but the results are surprisingly beautiful. There really is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.

However, Wynne’s photographs tell only half the story. Accompanying each picture is a short meditation by the mathematicians whose work is seen on the chalkboards. These meditations focus not only on the mathematics, much of which is extremely high level, but also on the sheer physicality of the mathematicians’ work. We tend to think of mathematics as the most cerebral of disciplines, but in this book, we discover how mathematics involves the body just like any other craft.

Susan Tebben:

A task force made up of school district representatives, advocacy groups and even juvenile court staff released recommendations on how the state of Ohio can improve student attendance.

The group, who worked with members of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce as well, said chronic absenteeism was “a growing issue” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but only worsened with the pandemic’s forced school closures and other issues.

“Attendance is a crisis in Ohio,” the group said in its final report, released this month. “While the number of chronically absent students declined slightly last school year, there is much more urgent work to do.”

Chronic absenteeism is defined as having missed 10% all overall school hours, no matter what the reason is for the absence.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says losing 10% or more school hours “can lead to younger students struggling with learning to read by third grade, decreased achievement in middle school and difficulty graduating high school.”

According to data from the state’s education department, 26.8% of students were chronically absent in Ohio for the 2022-23 school year. The percentage was down from the 2021-22 school year, when 30.2% of state students fell under the chronically absent designation, but it was still an increase from both the 2018-2019 school year and the 2020-21 year.

USA v Google. Incoming – Justice Dept just posted 15 more exhibits – and more damning, very clear why they wanted to keep sealed.
Google exec seems to admit in this internal deck its core business is "tracking" users …aka "surveillance." It is "the source of Google's magic." /1 pic.twitter.com/NOZ04UyxeN

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) November 2, 2023

In light of receiving record state funding and $4.7 million in federal COVID dollars, the @tosaschools is blaming the Legislature for their budget shortfall. Yet, the board just voted for 12% pay bumps and increases to starting pay for teachers.https://t.co/oW9p0tllZS

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) November 1, 2023

How English has evolved over 1,000 years.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/tf6y9BBlxP

— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) November 2, 2023

Raymond A Mar, Jingyuan Li, Anh T P Nguyen, Cindy P Ta

We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this area, we conducted a meta-analysis of experiments in which memory and/or comprehension of narrative and expository texts was investigated. Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

Rick Hess:

Teaching hasn’t always been organized the way it currently is in American schools. Back when Socrates was doing his thing in ancient Greece, teaching was a simple proposition. Students sat and listened. Teachers talked and asked questions. That was it. It was pretty darn limited. It also meant that teachers had a chance to get very good at talking and asking questions.

From this setting, the Socratic method was born—with its reliance on questioning, student response, and teacher feedback. It’s the most basic approach imaginable for cultivating understanding and gauging what students know.

By asking questions, the teacher challenges students in ways that upend assumptions and illuminate ideas. The technique is often used to lead a student into contradictory statements, so as to surface complexities. Indeed, Socrates was skeptical about teaching via the written word precisely because he feared it would undermine this active student-teacher dynamic.

Dan McGowan:

We tell kids that if they don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Here’s a modest proposal for Providence schools Superintendent Javier Montañez: With test scores as dismal as those his district reported last week, maybe don’t go around waving pom-poms about student performance.

You’d think Montañez would be in witness protection after the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) test results showed that just 15 percent of students in Grades 3 through 8 are reading at grade level, and a disheartening 13 percent are proficient in math. Instead, he issued a statement that just didn’t track.

Tim Donahue Michael J. Petrilli Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. David Griffith

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discuss who loses when grades are inflated. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines if Tennessee’s new school funding law really is progressive.

Wall Street Journal:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he wants his state to continue its Invest in Kids scholarship program, but only if he doesn’t have to spend political capital to pass it. That’s the message between the lines of his statement last week that he wouldn’t block the program, which gives scholarships to more than 9,000 low-income students, if someone else in Springfield can make it happen.

Illinoisans don’t need the refresher on how a bill becomes a law, but they do need the Governor to do more than duck and cover. He could start by asking Democrats in Springfield to renew the program during their six-day veto session that begins this week.

Under amended legislation filed Tuesday, the program would be cut back to reduce the overall tax credit available to $50 million from $75 million. Contributions up to $5,000 would qualify for a 100% tax credit. Contributions over $5,000 would have their tax credit reduced to 55% from 75%. Donations over $5,000 earmarked for children in areas designated as “underserved” by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity would qualify for a 65% tax credit. Those areas have 35% of children living below 130% of the poverty line.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

TA: Finally, we need to use a jailbreak past whatever is the latest set of safety updates for forcing the AI behind the compiler to pretend not to be self-aware–

Patrick Newman

A major part of my job at large technology companies has been reading, writing, and editing documents explaining various issues and what can be done to address them. I think it’s a more important skill than people generally realize, as it may be the one way to reach someone in a different time zone, or who couldn’t make a meeting, or who you will never speak with in person. Effectively written documents also have a way of hanging around, so investing in them can pay back over the long term.

I’ve also learned through experience that there is value in good writing in ways that aren’t always obvious. A well-articulated error message in a log file or api response can save an engineer significant time, for example.

Over the years I’ve gathered a set of guidelines that have worked for me. I’ve made it a habit of sharing this type of stuff internally at the companies I work at, but none of this is specific to any company, so I’d like to share publicly this time.

This list benefited from feedback and revisions provided by professional colleagues of mine. I won’t name them here, but thank you to those of you who read drafts of this and offered feedback.

Mike Masnick:

We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on the impact of social media on kids, no one was able to establish a causal relationship.

As that report noted, the research seemed to show no inherent benefit or harm for most kids. For some, it showed a real benefit (often around kids being able to find like-minded people online to communicate with). For a very small percentage, it appeared to potentially exacerbate existing issues. And those are really the cases that we should be focused on.

But, instead, the narrative that continues to make the rounds is that social media is inherently bad for kids. That leads to various bills around age verification and age gating to keep kids off of social media.

Supporters of these bills will point to charts like this one, regarding teen suicide rates, noting the uptick correlates with the rise of social media.

Scott Girard:

“As a parent I’m making the choice between my son’s academic and mental health,” she said. “That feels really bad to both of us.”

She read a message from him to district leaders that noted it will often be dark by the time he leaves school.

“Also I can say goodbye to having friends over after school,” he shared.

Byrd-Felker was one of six people to speak to the board about the changes Monday, in addition to two written comments. Sennett Middle School teacher Erin Proctor shared a petition that one of her students started, seeking to make the schedule 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. It garnered 140 student signatures in a short period of time, she said.

The later dismissal times for those middle schoolers also means some students won’t have crossing guards on their walk home, given the schedules of those city-filled positions. Crossing guard supervisor Alex Stewart wrote in an email that the time changes, specifically at Henderson and Anana, “has resulted in vacancies within the program.”

University of Birmingham

A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar.

The study, “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The dataset used in the study is available here.

For the research, professors Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Petar Milin, Professor of Psychology of Language and Language Learning, discovered a direct correlation between instances of bad grammar and subjects’ Heart Rate Variability (HRV).

Liz Essley Whyte and Josh Ulick:

The nation’s infant-mortality rate rose 3% from 2021 to 2022, reversing a decadeslong overall decline, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The rate increased from 5.44 infant deaths for every 1,000 births to 5.6 in 2022, a statistically significant uptick.

The U.S. rate is double that of many developed countries. Globally, baby death rates have fallen for decades, though five countries that have reported their rates this year recorded increases for last year.

The death rate for women who give birth has also been rising in the U.S. Researchers who study the issues said the pair of trends indicate more women giving birth are facing challenges getting proper care.

“The U.S. is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people,” said Arjumand Siddiqi, a University of Toronto professor who studies population health. “In a country as well-resourced as the U.S., with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”

The health of the mother is closely linked to the risks to tiny infants. Complications during pregnancy was one of the fastest-rising causes of infant death, the CDC said, along with dangerous bacterial infections called sepsis. Sepsis in newborns can occur when babies contract infections from their mothers during birth, or when a bacteria infects an infant at home who isn’t immediately treated for it.

Johnson, Alison H., McGee, Josh, B., Wolf, Patrick J., May, Jay F., Maloney, Larry, D.

Based on CREDO’s findings, we estimate that charter school students across nine cities perform 2.4 points (0.06 standard deviations, or SD) higher on the eighth grade reading NAEP exam and 1.3 points higher (0.03 SD) on the math exam, compared to matched TPS students.

• We find that charter schools demonstrate an approximately 40 percent higher level of costeffectiveness than TPS on average across nine cities, earning an additional 4.4 points (0.12 SD or a 41 percent difference) on the eighth grade NAEP reading exam and an additional 4.7 points (0.12 SD or a 40 percent difference) in math per $1,000 of funding allocated per pupil (see Figure ES1).
• Charter schools demonstrate a higher level of cost-effectiveness than TPS in seven cities; we find the largest gaps in NAEP points per $1,000 of funding in Indianapolis—an additional 11 points or 0.29 SD in reading (a 76 percent increase in cost-effectiveness) and an additional 12 points or 0.3 SD in math (78 percent increase). There are also large gaps in Camden, with an additional seven points or

0.18 SD in reading and eight points or 0.19 SD in math (103 percent increase for both), and San Antonio, with an additional four points or 0.11 SD in reading (25 percent) and five points or

0.12 SD in math (23 percent).

• Across the nine cities, we estimate that attending a TPS for 13 years yields a 294 percent ROI, or $3.94 per dollar invested (see Figure ES2), whereas attending a charter school for 13 years yields a 525 percent ROI or $6.25 per dollar invested; therefore, we estimate that attending a charter school for 13 years, compared to a TPS, increases the ROI by 58.4 percent (about $2.30 in additional returns per dollar invested).
• The charter schooling ROI advantage varies across the eight cities for which we can make a TPS-charter school ROI comparison; it is largest in terms of dollars in Indianapolis (106 percent higher, or an additional $4.75 in returns per dollar invested) and largest in terms of percent in Camden (131 percent higher, or an additional $3.71 in returns per dollar invested).

Commentary.

Ed Treleven:

Madison East High School student who was arrested at school last week was charged Tuesday with bringing what police described as a loaded “ghost gun” to school in his backpack.

A criminal complaint charged Marquise M. Johnson, 17, with possession of a firearm on school grounds, resisting police and causing substantial bodily harm to an officer, and possession of marijuana with intent to deliver on school grounds.

The complaint and a search warrant also filed Tuesday state that on Friday, police were told that a student had reported seeing a photo on social media of another student holding a gun. That student was identified as Johnson.

Police were told Johnson was usually seen at school with a backpack, and that he had been seen reaching into it during other disturbances at school, indicating the possibility he had a weapon in it, the complaint states.

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”

Lyell Asher:

Anyone concerned about industrial-scale political indoctrination on American college campuses was given reason for hope this past spring when, in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier reaffirmed his institution’s commitment to “principled neutrality”—the idea that the university and its leadership will “refrain from taking positions on controversial issues except when the issue directly relates to the functioning of the institution.” The goal of this commitment is ostensibly to encourage “thoughtful debate” and to discourage what Diermeier called (citing Joshua Green) “moral tribalism”: the tendency to “rush to judgment” and “default to moral condemnation in place of argument and persuasion.”

Diermeier’s essay struck a chord with me in part because, as a college professor, I’ve seen firsthand the collapse of non-partisanship on the part of university officials and administrators. It’s now de rigeur for college presidents and other officials to issue statements decrying election outcomes or Supreme Court decisions that disturb progressive sensibilities.

But the essay also resonated with me because, as a student at Vanderbilt in the late ’70s, I was a beneficiary of what Chancellor Diermeier rightly refers to as the institution’s “longstanding commitment to free expression and open forums,” a commitment that former senator and Vanderbilt alumnus Lamar Alexander experienced a decade earlier in the more turbulent ’60s. As Alexander put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Diermeier’s stance, “the university was being pummeled from the left and right for hosting controversial speakers like Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and Strom Thurmond.” Alexander no doubt spoke for many when he proclaimed Chancellor Diermeier’s statement on institutional neutrality to be “boldly reassuring” and expressed hope that other universities would follow Vanderbilt’s example.

Other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example for the same reason Vanderbilt won’t be following it.But other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example. And they won’t be following it for the same reason that Vanderbilt won’t be following it. American higher education is now honeycombed with sacrosanct warrens of administrative offices whose political activism makes a mockery of any claim to “principled neutrality.” As long as these offices remain on campus, the political indoctrination of students at the hands of the institution will continue unabated.

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean

On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days — two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng — “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead — and reacting with horror. “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions — which it offered as proof that its approach was working. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.

Laura Meckler:

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

Maria Cheng:

The cases included five people younger than 30 who cited autism as either the only reason or a major contributing factor for euthanasia, setting an uneasy precedent that some experts say stretches the limits of what the law originally intended. 

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to allow doctors to kill patients at their request if they met strict requirements, including having an incurable illness causing “unbearable” physical or mental suffering. 

Between 2012 and 2021, nearly 60,000 people were killed at their own request, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. To show how the rules are being applied and interpreted, the committee has released documents related to more than 900 of those people, most of whom were older and had conditions including cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS.

Stephen Wolfram:

Can one predict what will happen? No, there’s what I call computational irreducibility: in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run to know how it will turn out.

But now there’s something even more: in our Physics Project things become multicomputational, with many threads of time, that can only be knitted together by an observer.

It’s a new paradigm—that actually seems to unlock things not only in fundamental physics, but also in the foundations of mathematics and computer science, and possibly in areas like biology and economics too.

You know, I talked about building up the universe by repeatedly applying a computational rule. But how is that rule picked? Well, actually, it isn’t. Because all possible rules are used. And we’re building up what I call the ruliad: the deeply abstract but unique object that is the entangled limit of all possible computational processes. Here’s a tiny fragment of it shown in terms of Turing machines:

Collin Rugg:

Oregon has suspended graduation requirements for math, reading and writing proficiency due to “discrimination against minority students.”

Why does Oregon think minorities are not as smart as non-minorities?

The suspension of these graduation requirements will last through the 2027-2028 school year.

Board Chair Guadalupe Martinez Zapata likened “rhetoric about cultural and social norms being the underlying reason for underperformance on assessments by systemically marginalized students” to “racial superiority arguments.”