Transcript [Machine Generated PDF]: Deborah Kerr: [00:43:53] Um, whose turn is it to go first? Okay. That’s fine. Yeah, we’re pretty good at figuring this out. Um, [00:44:00] so that’s one thing we can do. Um, yes, I support the FORT. I fo I support the Praxis test. So you gotta think about something. Why … Continue reading Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test→
Wisconsin Democracy: Liberal groups are winning the money race in the so-called “nonpartisan” state school superintendent race, where Pecatonica Area School Superintendent Jill Underly faces Deborah Kerr, a retired Brown Deer schools superintendent. Three groups that generally back Democratic candidates in partisan elections – A Better Wisconsin Together, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin – … Continue reading 13-1 Special interest $pending for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Jill Underly→
Hams Bader: The Biden administration is expected to reinstate the Obama administration’s 2014 school-discipline guidelines, which prodded schools to suspend all racial groups at the same rate, even if there was more misbehavior among students of one race than another. In response to those guidelines, and worried about being investigated by the Education Department, some … Continue reading Commentary on federal education practices→
KC Johnson: ‘One of the most sweeping bipartisan judicial rejections of an administration’s policy in decades,” commentator David French recently noted, involved the Obama administration using Title IX to undermine due process on American college campuses. The administration’s record, French wrote, “has been rejected by judges across the ideological spectrum and has cost universities millions.” Given this … Continue reading The Biggest Enemy of Campus Due Process from the Obama Years Is Back→
There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments … Continue reading Commentary on the SAT→
Michael Horn: That means, as Stephen Covey wrote in one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” beginning “with the end in mind.” Or, as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote in the context of education in “Understanding by Design,” good teachers start with the goals and … Continue reading Begin With The End: What’s The Purpose Of Schooling?→
Michael Horn: What’s the purpose of schooling? Even though it may seem like a straightforward question, once you scratch the surface, it’s anything but. There are countless views on the topic. But as we seek to build schools back better—and not just return to how schools operated prior to the pandemic when the system writ … Continue reading Begin With The End: What’s The Purpose Of Schooling?→
Will Flanders and Libby Sobic: For many years, Wisconsin has reserved the position of state superintendent of schools for someone steeped in union politics and promising the status quo. But over the past year, COVID-19 has turned many such situations on their heads and polarized politics in a way never seen before. The superintendent election … Continue reading Commentary on the 2021 Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Election→
Armand Fusco: What is the real underlying reason why schools put up with disrespectful, outrageous and uncivil student behaviors? Unfortunately, the culture of victimology is the insidious philosophy that permeates the school and the societal landscape e.g. troubled kids are not responsible for their actions—they are viewed, instead, as victims of school and society’s injustices. … Continue reading Part 2 Discipline: Can corporal punishment bring back discipline?→
Hui Zheng, Paola Echave: Morbidity and mortality have been increasing among middle-aged and young-old Americans since the turn of the century. We investigate whether these unfavorable trends extend to younger cohorts and their underlying physiological, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms. Applying generalized linear mixed effects models to 62,833 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination … Continue reading Trends in U.S. Adult Physiological Status, Mental Health, and Health Behaviors across a Century of Birth Cohorts→
Scott Girard: [I have received 3 text messages and a door knock from a paid lit drop person, for one of the candidates. Guess?] 13-1 Special interest $pending for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Jill Underly, running against Deborah Kerr. In that same forum, Kerr outlined a plan to decentralize the Department of Public Instruction by … Continue reading Commentary on the 2021 Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Superintendent election→
Joanne Ingram, Christopher J. Hand and Greg Maciejewski: Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID‐19‐induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants ‘shielding’ due to underlying … Continue reading Social isolation during COVID‐19 lockdown impairs cognitive function→
Wispolitics: State superintendent candidate Deb Kerr called for all K-12 schools to reopen for in-person instruction, claiming “the science is clear” such a move is kids’ best interest. Meanwhile, Kerr’s opponent Jill Underly slammed her for lying about the science behind reopening schools. At a Saturday news conference on the Capitol steps, Kerr warned the … Continue reading Wisconsin’s open and closed taxpayer supported K-12 Schools; on the April 6 Ballot→
Will Flanders: In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay. CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, … Continue reading Civics: Special Interest Grants and US election sausage making→
Rory Linnane: Deborah Kerr, one of two candidates competing to lead the state Department of Public Instruction, said she would move or rehire most of the agency’s over 400 employees away from Madison and into offices around the state. “Under DPI’s current model, agency staff are plucked from the Madison area, and that’s not inclusive … Continue reading A proposal to decentralize the Wisconsin DPI→
Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French & Basit Zafar: The college experience involves much more than credit hours and degrees. Students likely derive utility from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities. Quantitative measures of the value of these individual components have been hard to come by. Leveraging the COVID-19 shock, we elicit students’ intended likelihood … Continue reading Estimating Students’ Valuation for College Experiences→
Matt Taibbi: This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 … Continue reading Civics: News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism.→
Andrew Michta: Collectivism in any guise, including its postmodern progressivist variety, has been historically antithetical to a free society. The idea of the self-constituting citizen, endowed with rights and constrained by law, has been indispensable to the forging of a stable democratic political system in America, legitimizing its institutions and ultimately birthing a cohesive nation … Continue reading “The oligarchization of American elites and the parallel pauperization of the citizenry”→
George Leaf: Geher invited professor Jonathan Haidt, founder of Heterodox Academy and a firm believer in freedom of speech for all, to give a talk at the school. Haidt gave his presentation, arguing that academia cannot be devoted to the search for truth if it also has a political agenda. Geher found Haidt’s talk to … Continue reading The Campaign to Stamp Out Academic Heresy→
: Six of the seven candidates to become Wisconsin’s next state superintendent of public instruction participated in a forum Wednesday night focused on funding and equity. The Association for Equitable Funding hosted the virtual forum with candidates Steve Krull, Jill Underly, Sheila Briggs, Troy Gunderson, Shandowlyon Hendricks-Williams and Deb Kerr. Candidate Joe Fenrick was unable … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI superintendent candidates talk equity, school funding in forum→
David Bernstein: 13. Rather, I am concerned about institutional legitimacy. When you have a country divided into two tribes, and one tribe increasingly dominates most major cultural institutions, regardless of why, those institutions will gradually lose legitimacy within the other tribe. 14. Imagine instead of liberals and conservatives, the U.S. was divided between Catholics and … Continue reading The Need for Ideological Diversity in American Cultural Institutions→
Robby Soave: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) told her social media followers earlier this week that Democrats in Congress might respond to the Capitol riot with some sort of “media literacy” initiative. The phrase media literacy ordinarily implies helping individuals make sense of the media landscape, but AOC seems to have more in mind than that: She suggested … Continue reading The First Amendment doesn’t come with an exception for “disinformation.”→
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: Seven candidates who want to be the state’s next top school chief in the upcoming spring elections collectively raised more than $200,000 last year. The seven candidates will face off in the Feb. 16 primary. The top two finishers will vie for a four-year term as state school superintendent in the April … Continue reading Top Contributors to the Candidates for Wisconsin School Superintendent→
Elizabeth Beyer: “I think it is becoming a little too precise to say that adding one title in an otherwise completely perfect document should be sufficient to overcome the nomination,” she said. Hendricks-Williams has worked in Gov. Tony Evers’ Milwaukee office and as an assistant director of teacher education at the state Department of Public … Continue reading Commentary on The Wisconsin DPI candidate Nomination Process→
MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.
Quanta: Science seeks the basic laws of nature. Mathematics searches for new theorems to build upon the old. Engineering builds systems to solve human needs. The three disciplines are interdependent but distinct. Very rarely does one individual simultaneously make central contributions to all three — but Claude Shannon was a rare individual. Despite being the … Continue reading How Claude Shannon Invented the Future→
Inciteful: Find the most relevant literature, faster The vast majority of academic search engines focus on “importance” (as measured by number of citations) and keyword matching to retrieve their results. They typically show you stats about who the papers cite and who cites those papers. But there is value and information in the underlying structure … Continue reading A better way to search through academic literature→
Marcella Alsan , Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, David Y. Yang: The respect for and protection of civil liberties are one of the fundamental roles of the state, and many consider civil liberties as sacred and “nontradable.” Using cross-country representative surveys that cover 15 countries and over 370,000 respondents, we study … Continue reading Civics: Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis→
Tony Young: You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is a petition started by three scientists on October 4 calling for governments to adopt a policy of ‘focused protection’ when it comes to COVID-19. They believe those most at risk should be offered protection — although it shouldn’t be mandatory — and those … Continue reading Civics: Why can’t we talk about the Great Barrington Declaration?→
The Gradient: As the field of machine learning has become ever more popular, a litany of online courses has emerged claiming to teach the skills necessary to “build a career in AI”. But before signing up for such a course, you should know whether the skills acquired will directly allow you to apply machine learning … Continue reading The Gap: Where Machine Learning Education Falls Short→
Eugene Volokh: The legally strange dimension: A claim that the magazine article author sexually harassed the subject of her article, apparently by “seek[ing] inappropriate personal and romantic intimacy with Plaintiff.” See Hay v. New York Media LLC, a breach of contract, libel, and sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Bruce Hay (representing himself) against New York Media … Continue reading “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge” Story Gets Even Stranger→
Joel Kotkin: Where there is no bread, there is no Law. Where there is no Law, there is no bread. — Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah Racial identity politics has become the rage in the media, entertainment, and political worlds. You cannot read a mainstream publication, attend a sporting event, or browse a new educational curriculum … Continue reading How Race Politics Burns Out→
Wisconsin State Journal: Unfortunately, the Madison School District announced Friday it will offer online classes only this fall — despite six or seven weeks to go before the fall semester begins. By then, a lot could change with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dane County recently and wisely implemented a mask requirementfor inside … Continue reading Commentary on 2020 K-12 Governance and opening this fall→
Veronique de Rugy: New data confirm what we already knew; namely, that many people did not wait for the governments to lock down the economy to stay home and shelter in place. Such fear-based behavior contributed much to the economic collapse. That means that most consumers will be careful and watch out for their health … Continue reading Surrounded by Government Failure, Why Do People Still Believe?→
Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values at the root of postmodernism have broken the bounds of academia and gained great cultural power in western society. … Continue reading How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained→
Katherine Ye, Wode Ni, Max Krieger, Dor Ma’ayan, Jenna Wise, Jonathan Aldrich, Joshua Sunshine, and Keenan Crane: We introduce a system called Penrose for creating mathematical diagrams. Its basic functionality is to translate abstract statements written in familiar math-like notation into one or more possible visual representations. Rather than rely on a fixed library of … Continue reading Penrose: from mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams→
Brendan O’Neill: It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. … Continue reading Commentary on The Price of “we Know Best→
Lei Mao: So sounds like you don’t need to know anything and there is no prerequisite in order to do life science studies. This is true to some extent. Otherwise you would not see there are so many middle school or high school students spending their summer doing life science research in some labs. The … Continue reading Reasons Not to Study Life Science or Anything Related→
Matt Weber: As an AoPS Academy campus director, a big part of my job is meeting with parents of prospective students. One of the most common complaints I hear is that their children never show any work. Parents are surprised when I push back, gently, on the underlying assumptions. In fact, showing work is sometimes … Continue reading Why Won’t My Child Show Any Work?→
James Hatch: My first class of the semester was absolutely terrifying. I don’t know if it was for the kids in my class, but it damn sure was for me. It was a literature seminar with the amazing Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor David Quint. He is an amazing human in that he has … Continue reading My Semester With the Snowflakes→
Laura Spinney: Turchin set out to determine whether history, like physics, follows certain laws. In 2003, he published a book called Historical Dynamics, in which he discerned secular cycles in France and Russia from their origins to the end of the 18th century. That same year, he founded a new field of academic study, called … Continue reading History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future→
Reid Cramer, Fernaba R. Addo, Colleen Campbell: The Millennial generation is on a much lower trajectory of wealth accumulation than their parents and grandparents. Dramatically so. Their generational balance sheet, tabulating assets and liabilities, is historically poor. Despite its dramatic emergence and real world consequences, the Millennial wealth gap has received scant attention to date. … Continue reading K-12 Tax & SPENDING Climate: The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap→
Logan Wroge: On Oct. 9, Anderson, who had worked at West for three years and at East High School for eight years before that, said he responded to a call about a disruptive student who was being escorted out of the school by an assistant principal. When the situation with the male student escalated, Anderson … Continue reading Black Madison school staffer appeals firing for repeating student’s racial slur→
Dan Kopf: The books are based on the concept of “statistical learning,” a mashup of stats and machine learning. The field of machine learning is all about feeding huge amounts of data into algorithms to make accurate predictions. Statistics is concerned with predictions as well, says Tibshirani, but also with determining how confident we can … Continue reading These Are the Best Books for Learning Modern Statistics—and They’re All Free→
Geoffrey Miller: Ever since grad school, I’ve been fascinated by moral hypocrisy as a hallmark of virtue signaling. People say they believe passionately in issue X, but they don’t bother to do anything real to support X. That kind of behavior seemed highly diagnostic of hypocritical signaling, and hypocritical signaling is bad, because hypocrisy is … Continue reading ‘Virtue Signalling’ May Annoy Us. But Civilization Would Be Impossible Without It→
Lucas VebberWilliam D. Flanders: The Fordham Institute’s recent survey of teachers has brought the issue of discipline reform back to the forefront. But even as teachers say that discipline policies are leading to unsafe educational environments, a new federal rule threatens to further exacerbate the issue. In the final month of the Obama Administration, the … Continue reading An Obama-era regulation is likely to establish unconstitutional racial quotas→
Daniel Barth, Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom: Our use of the EA score as a measure of biological traits linked to human capital is related to previous attempts in the literature to measure ability through the use of tests scores such as IQ or the AFQT…We note two important differences between the EA score … Continue reading Genetic Endowments and Wealth Inequality→
Jonathan Zittrain: Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of instructions and precautions, a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure—make for anodyne reading. The subsection called “Mechanism of Action,” however, contains a sentence … Continue reading The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking→
Kaleem Caire, writing within Facebook’s walled garden. Via a kind reader: The Capital Times published my editorial below on March 12, 2019. I then posted the article on my FB page the same day. This terrible, awful and destructive generational disease didn’t get nearly the same rise out of people as me imploring our children … Continue reading COPS IN SCHOOLS or BLACK KIDS CAN READ?→
Holly Else: “This is terrible for the field, as it is for any field”, in particular because the investigator’s grants could have gone to more deserving researchers, says James Brown, a cancer researcher at the National University of Ireland Galway. Many scientists have used the Nature paper to build an understanding of DNA-repair processes mediated … Continue reading Top journals retract DNA-repair studies after misconduct probe→
Neil Irwin: A new report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank funded in large part by tech investors and entrepreneurs, adds rich new detail, showing that parts of the United States are already grappling with Japanese-caliber demographic decline — 41 percent of American counties with a combined population of 38 million. At … Continue reading K-12 Tax &Spending Climate: America’s Biggest Economic Challenge May Be Demographic Decline→
Luca Dellana: The fact that (almost) all degrees have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field is the best evidence that education has been built around the universities’ needs, not the students’.
Gehl Porter: Our political system will not be self-correcting. The problems are systemic and structural, involving multiple factors that are self-reinforcing. This means that the only way to reform the system is by taking a set of steps to change the industry structure and the rules that underpin it—shifting the very nature of political competition. … Continue reading Politics and Anti-Trust→
Chad Aldeman: But this result is impossible. According to the same official state projections that Rhee and Joyner apply to their sample, Colorado’s teacher pension plan assumes that 37 percent of males and 34 percent of females will leave in their first year, let alone make it to five years. Rhee and Joyner are trying … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Teacher Pensions and Accurate Accounting→
SG Cheah: Professor Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist mentioned how males tend to be more skilled than females at civil discourse. He opines the reason behind that was because all face-to-face discussions between males were backed by the underlying threat of violence. Males tend to be better at logical and controlled debates because males are … Continue reading Civics: Civility on the Decline — A Crisis in Free Speech and Violence→
Wendy Liu: My contribution to this panel will be less about the details [of how to tame the tech giants] and more about the bigger picture of what’s wrong with the way things are. I don’t know a lot about trade policy or international regulation. Instead, I’d like to take a step back to analyse … Continue reading Beyond Taming the Tech Giants→
Tim Martin: When I came across two books recently that try to make the subject more fun and approachable, I was initially quite sceptical. In my opinion, the main problem with statistics is not that people don’t spend time trying to learn it, but rather that they don’t properly comprehend the underlying principles. Too often … Continue reading The Manga Guide to Statistics→
Shaun Raviv and Mosaic: I told the Pates about ABC’s case and the worry that it could theoretically push the duty of care too far in the U.K. They said that their lawyer mentioned a similar concern with Heidi’s case back in the early 1990s, when HIV was still essentially untreatable and killing thousands of … Continue reading Do children have a right to their parents’ medical information?→
Kristine E. Guillaume: Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein ’75 praised Faust for leading Harvard through “a decade of growth and transformation” during her presidency in an emailed statement Thursday. “Her perspective and experience running one of the most complex and preeminent institutions in the world will benefit our board, our … Continue reading Days After Exiting Harvard Presidency, Faust Joins Goldman Sachs Board of Directors→
John Robb: For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them … Continue reading Centralization risks→
Smithsonian: As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it … Continue reading The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation→
CÉDRIC VILLANI : Since the 1956 Dartmouth conference, artificial intelligence has alternated between periods of great enthusiasm and disillusionment, impressive progress and frustrating failures. Yet, it has relentlessly pushed back the limits of what was only thought to be achievable by human beings. Along the way, AI research has achieved significant successes: outperforming human beings … Continue reading FOR A MEANINGFUL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE→
Robin Abcarian: The question is, what is really underlying this urge to disrupt? As I read the Cal 3 website, my eyes glazing over at the bromides about lower taxes, safe streets and a stronger education system, the only concrete concept that jumped off the page at me was this: “Areas like Sacramento are currently … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: breaking up California→
Marlene Melchior: In Part 2: Diehm discusses the “echo chamber” effect of Facebook’s interface. He says that while Zuckerberg made “apologetic commitments” and rolled out an interface with new privacy controls, ultimately “there’s no transparent way of actually assessing whether or not this interface either works better or even has any meaningful effect on the … Continue reading Tactical Tech tells us what they would have asked Mark Zuckerberg→
Kyle Smith: Except if you tell them they’re jeopardizing their financial aid or their housing. Then they fold immediately. The extent of student fortitude was mapped out in a natural experiment conducted at New York University last week, when students vowed to occupy a student center around the clock (it normally closes at 11 p.m.) … Continue reading Campus governance commentary→
Coursera: For a lot of higher level courses in Machine Learning and Data Science, you find you need to freshen up on the basics in maths – stuff you may have studied before in school or university, but which was taught in another context, or not very intuitively, such that you struggle to relate it … Continue reading Mathematics for machine learning→
Marilyn Wedge: French children don’t need medications to control their behavior. In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established … Continue reading Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD→
Andrew McCarthy: So we arrive at the knotty question for Obama political and law-enforcement officials: How do we “engage with the incoming team” of Trump officials while also determining that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia”? How do we assure that an investigation of Trump can continue when Trump is about … Continue reading Civics: Presidents Obama, Trump, The FBI, Politics and the FISA Court→
Helen Barrett: All fintech is doing is changing the way in which financial services are delivered. It is not a transformation of the underlying principles of finance — it is focused solely on the operational implementation of it. As one dean put it to me recently, fintech is really just about writing apps. So why, … Continue reading Business schools have a problem with fintech→
NPR: What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids? That’s a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new books that arrived over the holidays. And it’s a question that inspired a team of researchers to set up a study. Specifically, they wondered how the … Continue reading What’s The Difference Between Children’s Books In China And The U.S.?→
Greg Stor: To get the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention these days, try saying your speech rights are being violated. Whether the underlying topic is abortion, elections, labor unions or wedding cakes, the First Amendment is starting to dominate the Supreme Court’s agenda. The court on Monday granted three new speech cases, including a challenge to … Continue reading Free Speech Is Starting to Dominate the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda→
Andre Stalz: The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still depend on submarine internet cables (the “Backbone”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the internet will lose their relevance, and the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It … Continue reading The Trinet→
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: “Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.” It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if … Continue reading Honoring the English Curriculum and the Study of U.S. History—Sandra Stotsky→
Jorie Koster-HaleAug: Predicting future crime poses a particularly interesting data challenge because it has both geospatial and temporal dimensions and may be affected by many different types of features like weather, city infrastructure, population demographics, public events, government policy, etc. In September 2016, the National Institute of Justice launched a Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge to … Continue reading Predicting Crime in Portland Oregon→
NCTQ (National Council on Teacher Quality): Our nation has open teaching positions that need to be filled by trained teachers. This is not a new national crisis but rather one America has been living with for years due to our unwillingness to adopt more strategic pay approaches. With rare exceptions, states have also shown no … Continue reading Questions “National Teacher Shortage” Narrative, Releases Facts to Set the Record Straight→
Carol Christ This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance … Continue reading On free speech→
Matt Taibbi: The admission comes by way of Andrew Bailey, head of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. He said recently (emphasis mine): “The absence of active underlying markets raises a serious question about the sustainability of the LIBOR benchmarks. If an active market does not exist, how can even the best run benchmark measure it?” As a few … Continue reading Is LIBOR, Crucial Financial Benchmark, a Lie?→
Greg McGinnis: A state pension plan’s annual funded ratio gives an end-of-fiscal-year snapshot of the assets as a proportion of the accrued liabilities. In aggregate, the funded ratio of these plans dropped to 72 percent in 2015 from 75 percent in 2014. Across the country, funded ratios for plans reviewed by The Pew Charitable Trusts … Continue reading Measuring the Fiscal Health of State Pension Plans→
Bruce Goldman: “I wanted to find and explore neural circuits that regulate specific behaviors,” says Shah, then a newly minted Caltech PhD who was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. So, he zeroed in on sex-associated behavioral differences in mating, parenting and aggression. “These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation,” says Shah, MD, PhD, … Continue reading The cognitive differences between men and women→
Alan Borsuk: t’s an emergency. It says so right there on the legal papers: “Order of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Adopting Emergency Rules.” But it’s a curious kind of emergency. Elsewhere in the paperwork, it uses the term “difficulties.” Maybe that’s a better way to put it. Underlying the legal language lie questions … Continue reading ‘Emergency’ effort to address teacher shortages reflect larger education issues→
AEI One reason this problem is hard to tackle is that the Left and Right disagree on the ultimate cause of the bloat. Many progressives see it as a product of the free market: If students and parents select colleges based on the quality of student spas and diversity centers and other amenities, then of … Continue reading Why Higher Education Is Stagnating→
Five Books: What life exists below the surface of the earth? Previously biologists believed the only subsurface life was at the soil zone, that you go a metre down and it is inconsequential, except for in caves. But even then the people looking in caves didn’t realise the caves were being formed by sub-surface life. … Continue reading Life below the surface of the earth (and on Mars) — a Five Books interview→
Timothy Lee: Decade after decade, health care and education have gotten more expensive while the price of clothing, cars, furniture, toys, and other manufactured goods has gone down relative to the overall inflation rate — exactly the pattern Baumol predicted a half-century ago. Baumol’s cost disease is a powerful tool for understanding the modern economic … Continue reading William Baumol, whose famous economic theory explains the modern world, has died→
Hashi Mohamed: t is a common promise made to the next generation. “If you work hard, and do the right thing, you will be able to get on in life.” I believe that it is a promise that we have no capacity to fulfil. And that’s because its underlying assumptions must be revisited. Imagine a … Continue reading Telling children ‘hard work gets you to the top’ is simply a lie→
Cal Newport On the other hand, as a writer I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media and am indifferent to my smartphone. Recently, I’ve been trying to clarify the underlying philosophy that informs how I think … Continue reading On Digital Minimalism→
Julia Friedman: In Perspectiva Corporum Regularium, Jamnitzer rotates and carves each of the solids to demonstrate how they might function as the building blocks of the world. Though science has since demonstrated the atom to be the most basic part of all matter, Jamnitzer’s studies possess a captivating artistic merit. With the manipulation, repetition, and … Continue reading The Minimalist Beauty of a Renaissance-Era Geometry Book→
nctq Why teacher prep programs should have strong preparation in elementary mathematics Teaching elementary children the fundamentals of arithmetic—dividing fractions, operations with signed numbers, or basic probability—requires a deep understanding of the underlying mathematics. For elementary teachers, it’s simply not suf cient just to know “invert and multiply.” One must know and be able to … Continue reading A Closer Look at Elementary Mathematics: Undergraduate Elementary Programs (UW-Madison Mentioned)→