Jane Shaw:

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump argued that requiring wealthy universities to spend more of their endowment funds on tuition aid would reduce students’ financial burdens.

Whether implementing that idea—which has floated around Congress since 2008—would lower college costs on the whole is doubtful. And, in my view, the federal government is already meddling too much in university policies.

Nevertheless, Trump raised an important issue when he discussed endowment spending at a campaign stop in September. Universities, by hoarding their donations, may not be serving the best interests of students and benefactors.

To unpack this issue, I would like to ask a fundamental question: why do universities have endowments, anyway?

Bryan Dik:

Do U.S. colleges provide students what they need to build successful careers? According to an article in a recent issue of The Atlantic, maybe not. Citing the results of a recent Gallup-Purdue Index study suggesting that just one in six college graduates in the U.S. found their Career Services office to be “very helpful,” the article argues that perhaps colleges should spend fewer resources on attracting inbound students and more on helping existing students establish a meaningful career once they graduate. The poll found that graduates who visit their career center and have a good experience fare better than those who don’t, but the proportion who visit at all is barely more than half. Some students expressed concern that the services they received were too basic, focused primarily on interviewing tips or resume support; others felt there was a mismatch between what they most needed and what they received. “All of this would indicate that there’s room for colleges to improve,” wrote the article’s author, Emily DeRuy, “not only how they connect with students, but also what they offer.”

Rosanna Xia

When that first class ended, she signed up for the next level, then another and eventually declared a joint major of computer science and math. Cheering her on were professors who had set out to show her that women belonged in computer science just as much as men did.

It’s a message that goes unheard at many universities. Nationwide, according to the Computing Research Assn., more than 84% of undergraduates who major in computer science are men.

Not so at Harvey Mudd, where more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago.

Glenn Fleishman

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It’s a small, infuriating difference: “this” versus “this.”

Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. But there’s a seemingly contrary motion afoot with quotation marks: At an increasing number of publications, they’ve been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes’ time has come and gone.

Mainichi:

The insurance firm will introduce an AI system based on IBM Japan Ltd.’s Watson, which according to IBM is a “cognitive technology that can think like a human,” and “can analyze and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video.” The Watson-based system will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names.

Molly Beck:

“This is a sleazy deal that lets a candidate for public office keep getting paid by taxpayers, with no oversight for how he spends his days,” said Ross. “All the while promoting selling out our public schools to chase campaign cash from the private school voucher industry and the billionaires that support it.”

Humphries said Ross’ comments were “unfortunate.”

“Running for office is quite challenging if you are not independently wealthy and I am making a very serious commitment to this effort while also trying to sustain my family,” he said. “I hope Mr. Ross could recognize this.”

Humphries is one of two candidates backed by conservatives seeking to defeat Evers in his bid for a third term as the head of DPI.

Madison’s former assistant Superintendent for Business Services administrator Erik Kass left (2012) to setup a consulting firm. (Linkedin)

Riseling Group.

Several current public employees offer consulting services via the Riseling Group, including University of Wisconsin-Madison Vice Provost and Dean of Students Lori Berquam and Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Jake New:

In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter spelled out how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and for the past five years it has been the guiding document for colleges hoping to avoid a federal civil rights investigation into how they handle complaints of sexual violence.

The department’s views were praised by victims and their advocates and led to many changes on college campuses, particularly on the issue of burden of proof when campus judicial systems handle sex assault charges. Republican lawmakers and other critics have argued that the guidance goes farther than just clarifying Title IX. They say the department illegally expanded the gender discrimination law’s scope without going through proper notice-and-comment procedures. At the center of that argument — as well as several recent lawsuits against colleges and the Department of Education — is the lower standard of proof.

Olivia Goldhill:

Scientists are able to use brain tests on three-year-olds to determine which children are more likely to grow up to become criminals. It sounds like Minority Report come to life: An uncomfortable idea presenting myriad ethical concerns. But, though unnerving, the research is nuanced and could potentially be put to good use.
In the study, published in Nature Human Behavior this week, researchers led by neuroscientists at Duke University showed that those with the lowest 20% brain health results aged three went on to commit more than 80% of crimes as adults. The research used data from a New Zealand longitudinal study of more than 1,000 people from birth in the early 1970s until they reached 38 years old. This distribution, of 20% of a population accounting for 80% of an effect, is strong but not unusual. In fact, it follows the “Pareto principle.” The authors write in their paper:

Lyell Asher:

Every year for nearly a decade, I’ve assigned Anna Karenina to students enrolled in my course on the novel. At more than 800 pages, Tolstoy’s saga can invite hurried reading, so a lot of class time is spent applying the brakes: “Not so fast.” “How do you know that?” “What’s it look like from her point of view?” There’s a useful speed bump in that famous first line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In its own way. Don’t assume you know who these people are, Tolstoy cautions, however familiar they may seem.

The book then proceeds to earn that caution, for what follows is a fantastic braid of self-deceptions, mistakes, and misunderstandings, all of which we see (as the characters themselves never can) from Tolstoy’s skybox of omniscience. The knowledge we’re exposed to can often seem too much—not just to take in, but to bear. Karenin’s solemn, impassive reaction to Anna’s tearful declaration of love for Vronsky, for example, seems initially to confirm Anna’s description of her husband as a mechanical functionary for whom time is a schedule and life a series of kept appointments. Only later do we learn that the dead look on Karenin’s face conceals a man so fully alive to his wife’s tears that he had to will himself inert so as not to fall apart. As happens so often in the book, just when we think we finally understand someone, Tolstoy drops a more powerful lens into the scope, or shifts its viewing angle, and we’re bewildered all over again.

RAJ CHETTY, JOHN N. FRIEDMAN, NATHANIEL HILGER,EMMANUEL SAEZ, DIANE WHITMORE SCHANZENBACH & DANNY YAGAN:

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the exper- imental data to administrative records. We rst demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are signi cantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a signi cant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings.

Christian Kriticos:

I learned more from Isaacson’s biography than I have from a single book in a long time, simply by virtue of the fact that it concerned a subject I previously knew nothing about and assumed I had no interest in. It is a credit to Isaacson that he manages to make the complex evolving world of computer technology so accessible and fascinating to a novice like me; when he concludes that Jobs will be placed “in the pantheon next to Edison and Ford” I can now see where he is coming from, where previously I would have, in my ignorance, snorted in disbelief at the notion.

Stephen Askey:

Once we were mighty. Once we were legion. Once we reigned over colleges and universities like demigods. Well, OK, we English majors were never that important, except maybe in our own eyes. According to a report in the New York Times, degrees awarded in English at American universities fell from seven point six percent of the total in 1971 to three point one percent of the total in 2011 — which goes to show, I suppose, that the golden age was never quite so golden. Still, better the periphery than where we are now — the periphery of the periphery.

One of the less-happy consequences of my decision to major in English 40 years ago is that I haven’t met many (or any) people who share my enthusiasm for the writings of John Dryden. Another is that I make about as much money as a janitor and live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I knew what I signed up for. My life sentence as an English major has taught me not to care overly much about what are laughingly called “the good things in life.” For better or worse, I can’t look at the glossy advertisements in The New Yorker without a feeling of cognitive dissonance. How could anyone who reads the poems and short stories and criticism in that magazine really want all that crap? If that’s a prejudice, the fault lies in me, not in my discipline, which includes plenty of practitioners with a somewhat more realistic financial outlook than my own. Anyway, for me, it’s less a discipline than a passion. I expect that that beleaguered three point one percent on campuses today feel much the same way. Against the advice of their parents, the social pressure of their peers, and the severely utilitarian direction of American society, they obdurately go on piling up their useless, unremunerative literary courses. See the trouble you get into when you listen to your soul?

Veronique Greenwood:

Babies’ ability to soak up language makes them the envy of adult learners everywhere. Still, some grown-ups can acquire new tongues with surprising ease. Now some studies suggest it is possible to predict a person’s language-learning abilities from his or her brain structure or activity—results that may eventually be used to help even the most linguistically challenged succeed.

In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, a team of researchers looked at the structure of neuron fibers in white matter in 22 beginning Mandarin students. Those who had more spatially aligned fibers in their right hemisphere had higher test scores after four weeks of classes, the scientists found. Like a freeway express lane, highly aligned fibers are thought to speed the transfer of information within the brain. Although language is traditionally associated with the left hemisphere, the right, which seems to be involved in pitch perception, may play a role in distinguishing the tones of Mandarin, speculates study author Zhenghan Qi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jason Ruiter

The fictional character was concocted by two employees at the library, complete with a false address and drivers license number.

After allegations by an unidentified person made in November, an investigation by the Lake County clerk of courts’ inspector general’s office concluded that Finley was a fake, and the county has since requested a systemwide audit of its libraries.

The goal behind the creation of “Chuck Finley” was to make sure certain books stayed on the shelves — books that aren’t used for a long period can be discarded and removed from the library system.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

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 about the role of these technologies in our personal lives (their role in the world of work is a distinct issue that I ‘ve already written quite a bit about). My thinking in this direction is still early, but I decided it might be a useful exercise to share some tentative thoughts, many of which seem to be orbiting a concept that I’ve taken to calling digital minimalism.

By Daniel Geng and Shannon Shih:

So what is Machine Learning?

At its core, machine learning is not a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, the vast majority of machine learning algorithms are concerned with just one simple task: drawing lines. In particular, machine learning is all about drawing lines through data. What does that mean? Let’s look at a simple example.

Classification

Let’s say you’re a computer with a collection of apple and orange images. From each image you can infer the color and size of a fruit, and you want to classify the images as either an image of an apple or an orange. The first step in many machine learning algorithms is to obtain labeled training data. In our example, this means getting a large number of images of fruit each labeled as either being an apple or an orange. From these images, we can extract the color and size information and then see how they correlate with being an apple or an orange. For example, graphing our labeled training data might look like something this:

Emily Ann Epstein & Alan Taylor:

This week’s Americans at Work essay focuses on inner-city agriculture programs by photographer Preston Gannaway: “Today, about a third of West Oakland residents live in poverty and with food insecurity. It’s a place where most people get their food from McDonald’s, the 99-cent store, or one of the many corner liquor stores. Due to a lack of nutritious food, low-income areas like this one face overwhelming rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes. In an effort to fill this need, new groups have formed to help combat the neighborhood’s food desert—a term to describe an area where most residents live below the poverty line and a mile or more away from a supermarket.

City Slicker Farms, which formed in 2001 and is one of the most established, recently built a 1.4-acre Farm Park complete with a sliding-scale farm stand and 28-plot community bed. Justin Vandenbroeck runs Fleet Farming Oakland, which constructs small farms in neighborhood yard spaces proclaiming, ‘grow food, not lawns!’ Working an economic angle as well as a dietary one, West Oakland Woods (WOW) Farms formed to help fill an employment need while taking advantage of the changing area’s restaurant boom. WOW operates both a produce and a flower farm that supplies high-end restaurants while training and employing local high-school students with financial need.

But industrial urban areas like West Oakland must also contend with decades of pollutants. The farmers say the soil is too toxic and must be either hauled away or lined to accommodate organic soil beds built on top. Water, soil, and air are all problems in West Oakland, said Vandenbroeck.”

Jefferson Pooley:

WHEN MARSHALL MCLUHAN published Understanding Media in 1964, the Cambridge-trained literary scholar was not well known, even inside the academy. By 1967, he was on the covers of Newsweek and the Saturday Review, and the subject of an hourlong NBC documentary, all in the same month. Over three manic years, McLuhan had shot from scholarly obscurity to klieg-lit fame.

Like most celebrity ascensions, McLuhan’s was the product of a conscious publicity campaign. Handlers, press agents, and impresarios worked together to make “McLuhan” a household name. He was packaged and promoted like a promising starlet, with multimedia gusto. Understanding Media garnered a few mainstream print reviews upon publication, but McLuhan’s break came in early 1965, when a pair of San Francisco prospectors — one, Gerald Feigen, a physician, the other, Howard Gossage, an ad-agency executive — “discovered” McLuhan and promptly arranged to visit the Canadian in Toronto. Feigen and Gossage were self-fashioned avant-gardists, using profits from their business consulting firm for “genius scouting”; the doctor read Understanding Media and alerted his partner. Together they plotted a full-fledged publicity rollout, starting with cocktail parties in New York City with media and publishing figures. The pair staged a weeklong “McLuhan Festival” that summer, with nightly parties and a rotating cast of ad executives, newspaper editors, mayoral aides, and business leaders in attendance.

John Harris:

By way of a gloomy seasonal party game, try this. Take the proverbial back of a cereal box, divide it into six rectangles, and on each one, write a supposed cause of the political turbulence now gripping the west: “the financial crash of 2008”, “inequality”, “racism and xenophobia”, “Tony Blair, basically”, and all the rest. Then get out the gin, maybe put on a Radiohead album, and enjoy hours of doom-laden conversational fun.

Were I daft enough to play the game myself, on one rectangle, I think I’d write an explanation so far barely mentioned in the acres of coverage of 2016’s chaos, but one right at the heart of it all: “Ever-increasing complexity, and the diminishing returns it now creates.” It’s not the snappiest conversation starter, I know. But if you’re looking for a grand catch-all theory that ties together Donald Trump, Brexit, and the general sense of a world spinning into chaos, it might not be a bad place to begin.

Stephanie Lee

At the same time, relatively few people took the extra step of doing some of the tasks that the app asked them to do. Just shy of 5,000 people completed a six-minute walk test, a common proxy of heart health, with their phones in hand, according to the study. And while 40,000 people filled out some portion of the app’s health questionnaires, only about 1,300 provided all the information needed to calculate their personalized health risks.

That squares with a recent study that showed that for the first five ResearchKit apps that launched, including MyHeart Counts, the percentage of daily users quickly dropped to 25% or below within the first three months.

“This is a very significant problem with this new form of medical research,” Topol said. “You accrue lots of people, but to keep them engaged, long-term, is perhaps the greatest challenge.” Apps could keep people coming back, he suggested, by offering participants something valuable in return, like personalized insights about their health.

Eliza Strickland:

Nimesh Patel, aggrieved user of Facebook and Illinois resident, isn’t naive: He well understands that the social networking company collects information about him. But Facebook went too far for his liking when it collected certain intimate details about his physiognomy, such as how many millimeters of skin lie between his eyebrows, how far the corners of his mouth extend across his cheeks, and dozens of other aspects of his facial geometry that enable the company’s face recognition software to identify him.

Patel is a named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Facebook alleging that the company’s use of face recognition technology violates an Illinois law passed in 2008. The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) sets limits on how companies can store and use people’s biometric identifiers, which the law defines as fingerprints, voiceprints, retina or iris scans, and scans of hand or face geometry. The case is scheduled for trial this October, and similar Illinois-based lawsuits are proceeding against Google and Snapchat. In the upcoming year, the courts will host a debate over who can keep our faces on file.

Alan Borsuk:

Overall, the number of bright spots on the Milwaukee education scene is increasing and there’s more reason for optimism. Someone who has a good handle on these things tried to convince me of this recently.

He made a pretty good case. I’m not exactly giddy — as you will see — but there are promising things happening. I’ve seen more willingness lately in some places to confront issues of quality, both overall and at specific schools. There are some new schools being run by talented leaders. There’s even occasional evidence of less acrimony among those involved in Milwaukee’s sometimes befuddling education landscape.

But when the overall indicators of student success remain generally so troubling — test scores, graduation rates, attendance, suspensions, the gap between kids from have and have-not backgrounds – we still have a crisis.

On that mixed note, I offer some awards for outstanding performance in 2016 in education matters in Milwaukee. In fact, there’s so much to say, I’m going to stretch this into two weeks, so come back next Sunday for more.

aEvan Goldstein:

The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. “I wrote in a fever,” he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.”

Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, pinned the blame, in part, on academe and its fixation on identity politics. “How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose … gender pronouns?” he asked. “How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?”

Ian Gordon:

Elizabeth Abel walked up to the front door of her house for the first time in four months and rang the bell. She’d just flown halfway around the world to drop in, unannounced, on the man who’d taken over her home.

When he came to the door, Abel says, the man didn’t seem surprised to see her—or the police officer standing beside her. “Oh, hi,” he said.

Abel peered behind him into her living room, which was practically empty. Most of her furniture was gone: a dining table and four chairs, two easy chairs, an antique piece. Her books and rugs were nowhere to be seen. Even the artwork had been taken off the walls.

As Abel walked around the place she’d called home for three decades, she had the distinct feeling that her life had been erased. In the family room, a small sofa, a table, and a television had been removed. Out on the back deck, the wooden table and benches were missing. The bedrooms were emptied out, her mattresses crammed into the office. Closets were sealed with blue painter’s tape. She turned to the man, who had been renting her place for the past several months—without paying. “What is going on here?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

Tyler Durden:

The end of the year is approaching, and data concerning government abuses of power has begun pouring in.

According to Facebook’s Global Government Requests Report, government’s requests for Facebook account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016.

Facebook’s official announcement explained that requests for user data went from 46,710 in the last half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016. At least 56 percent of these requests, Facebook added, “contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user.”

Law enforcement agencies from across the globe, Facebook continued, often send restriction requests demanding Facebook remove content from its forums. Fortunately, these requests dropped substantially this year, from 55,827 in the last half of 2015 to 9,663 in 2016 — an 87 percent drop. Most of the 2015 requests revolved around “French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks.”

Additionally, Facebook used its report to disclose for the first time what the company does when law enforcement agencies request “snapshots” of a user account that might be relevant to law enforcement for undisclosed reasons.

Po-Hung Liu:

This study aimed to reveal the effects of teaching with concrete learning objects taken from the history of mathematics on student achievement. Being a quasi-experimental study, it was conducted with two grade 8 classes in a secondary school located in Trabzon. The experimental group consisted of 27 students and the control group consisted of 25. Data were collected by using worksheets, an achievement exam and written opinion forms. The data from the achievement exam were analysed by using the Mann-Whitney U-test while the data from written opinion forms were analysed through content analysis. The Mann–Whitney U-test results showed a significant difference between the mean ranks of the experimental and control groups in favour of the former. Findings from the written opinion forms suggested that the students found the activities to be instructive and fun, enjoyed using concrete models in their classes, and learned from discovering the rules. It was also found that students had previously not engaged in similar activities and had only experienced the history of mathematics through the life stories and works of mathematicians and the representation of ancient numbers at the beginning of each unit.

Modern Algebra: Video.

Tony Sudbury:

So sang Doris Day in 1956, expressing a near-universal belief of humankind: you can’t know the future. Even if this is not quite a universal belief, then the universal experience of humankind is that we don’t know the future. We don’t know it, that is, in the immediate way that we know parts of the present and the past. We see some things happening in the present, we remember some things in the past, but we don’t see or remember the future.

Heather Mac Donald

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

FIRE:

Consumer Reports has included FIRE in its recently-released list of the “Best Charities for Your Donation.” The publication chose FIRE as one of its top five, highest-rated Human and Civil Rights charities alongside the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Community Change, the Fund for Global Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch.

To compile its list, Consumer Reports compared data from the three major charity watchdogs—CharityWatch, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance—to determine the best (and worst) charities in a variety of fields and help consumers “find one that really puts your money to work.”

Sarah Knapton:

High street shops including Marks & Spencer are secretly tracking the movements of their customers using their smartphones, it has emerged.

Companies such as footwear supplier Dune, Morrisons and Topshop are among major retailers taking advantage of new technology which picks up the pings emitted by phones as they look for wi-fi networks to join.

The ceilings of many major stores now contain small white receiver boxes which are continuously gathering data.

The shops use the data not only to record the numbers of their customers, but also to see where they move about in the shop, so they can alter the layout to make walking between departments more convenient, or steer customers towards goods they may have missed.

Jeffrey Mitchell:

Do apostrophes matter, even though “nothing matters” in the end? German Lopez thinks they do. Is the period “no longer how we finish our sentences”? So says Jeff Guo. If you’re an editor like me, you notice writing about little things like apostrophes and periods, especially when you see it in big news outlets. First, in Vox in January, came “Apostrophes, explained.” Then, in the Washington Post in June, came “Stop. Using. Periods. Period.” Lopez and Guo are on opposite sides in the long-running “language wars” over English usage between prescriptivists, who (as caricatured) believe that nothing is right in usage except what their outmoded rules permit, and descriptivists, who (as caricatured) believe that nothing can ever be wrong. Those wars aren’t news if you follow the story of English, but how the two writers took their positions did seem new. In each article, I saw an oddness and wondered what it might mean about the state of battle.

Alastair Gee:

Every night for the past year or so, Adriana and Omar Chavez have slept in an RV parked in East Palo Alto, a downtrodden community in Silicon Valley.

On a recent morning before sunrise, they emerged on to the empty street. Omar showed his phone to his wife: 7.07am. “Shall I wake up the girls?” he said, his breath visible in the freezing air.

He headed inside to rouse their three daughters, huddled together in the low-ceilinged bed just above the driver’s cab, and ready them for school.

Robert Shibley:

The University of Minnesota football team’s dramatic walkout in protest of what they saw as unfair treatment of 10 fellow players in a campus sexual-assault investigation came to an end on Dec. 17. But it made national headlines for imperiling the team’s trip to the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl and for the players’ demands that their accused teammates receive a “fair hearing”.

Ed Erhart, Samantha Lien:

Anecdotally, 2016 was a year of transition and change in much of the western world. Some events could be described as tragedy, others as cause for celebration.
Regardless of how you feel about this year, Wikipedia editors were there to help you understand what happened in 2016 and then some. Without further ado, here is 2016 as seen through the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia, both for the full year and by month.

As might be expected, politics features heavily—given the vote on ‘Brexit’, which seems likely to end in the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, and the United States’ presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Four of the top five most-edited articles related to the American election.

A number of celebrities, politicians, and household names passed away, like David Bowie, Prince, politician Jo Cox, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, boxer Muhammad Ali, and singer Christina Grimmie. All showed up in either the full list of most-edited by year/by month breakdowns, but are dwarfed by the article on deaths in 2016. Similar to last year, it was by far the most-edited of the year.[1]

Anthony Gockowski:

An extended legal battle between the University of Arkansas and one its law professors has come to a close after the school agreed to let him study the effects of race-based admissions policies.

Campus Reform initially reported in November 2015 that law professor Robert Steinbuch was provided with heavily redacted data in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request he had filed with his school seeking to obtain an internal spreadsheet the law school maintains to conduct analyses of admissions.

“What are we to make of these dramatic differences between my snapshot and the administration’s?” Tweet This

However, when Steinbuch’s FOIA request was returned, he was surprised to learn that the school had redacted information about race, LSAT scores, and undergraduate GPA, telling Campus Reform at the time that “they took out essentially all of the relevant information.”

Steinbuch later sued the school’s administration on the grounds that it had violated the state’s FOIA statute, simultaneously alleging that he had also faced retaliation from two fellow professors in an effort to discourage his research, which they complained could be “distressing” to students.

Center for digital democracy:

Personal health wearable devices that consumers are using to monitor their heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels raise new privacy and security risks, according to a report released today by researchers at American University and the Center for Digital Democracy. Watches, fitness bands, and so-called “smart” clothing, linked to apps and mobile devices, are part of a growing “connected-health” system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health. But while consumers may think that federal laws will protect their personal health information collected by wearables, the report found that the weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system fails to provide adequate safeguards. The report, Health Wearable Devices in the Big Data Era: Ensuring Privacy, Security, and Consumer Protection, provides an overview and analysis of the major features, key players, and trends that are shaping the new consumer-wearable and connected-health marketplace.

Laura Kusisto:

The volatile housing market of the past 15 years is widening the divide between pricey urban and coastal areas and more affordable inland regions, creating large swaths of winners and losers based largely on geography.

Average U.S. home prices rose 5.6% in the 12 months through October, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which covers some of the U.S.’s largest metropolitan areas.

Lily Werlinich:

Katrin Schultheiss, the chair of the history department, said faculty made the changes to the requirements largely due to enrollment pressures. She said by becoming more flexible and more responsive to students’ interests, the department hopes to recruit students who might not have decided to major in history otherwise.

“I think the main gain for students is that they have a great deal more flexibility than they had before, and they can adapt it to whatever their plans are for the future,” Schultheiss said. “Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.”

The history department had 153 majors in 2011, but enrollment has dropped significantly since then: Only 72 undergraduate students majored in history in 2015 and 83 students majored in 2016, according to GW’s institutional research office.

Scott Jaschik:

Billy Willson finished his first (and his last) semester at Kansas State University this week — and in so doing has set off a debate there and beyond on the value of college and of general education in particular.

In a Facebook post, he announced that he was dropping out, despite having earned a 4.0 grade point average. He said that he would start his own business and learn more from that experience than anything he could hope to achieve at Kansas State or any college. He ran a photo of himself giving the finger to Kansas State, although he’s since said he really wants to be doing that to all of higher education.

Many Inside Higher Ed readers will likely find his comments insulting and ill informed, and some faculty members and students at K-State have pointed out that he wrote some things that are factually questionable. But Willson is attracting many fans online as his Facebook post has gone viral — and trashing course requirements and general education seems to be a big part of Willson’s appeal.

Jeff Guo:

Asian Americans seem to offer proof that minorities can prosper — and even leapfrog whites — if they work hard and jump through the right hoops. For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanics.

But why do typical Asian American households outearn typical white households? Like many statistics showing an Asian American advantage, this fact proves illusory upon closer examination. A common explanation is that Asian Americans are better educated. While that’s true, there’s another factor that can completely account for the income gap between Asians and whites.

Tom Dotan and Reed Albergotti:

Be careful what you say around your Amazon Echo. Your words may be recorded and used against you in court.

In what may be the first case of its kind, police investigating a murder in Bentonville, Arkansas, issued a warrant to Amazon.com to turn over audio and other records from an Echo. The device in question belongs to James Andrew Bates, who was charged earlier this year with first-degree murder. The victim, Victor Collins, was found dead in Mr. Bates’ hot tub one Sunday morning in November of last year.

The Takeaway
Internet of Things devices that are always listening are emerging as a new tool for police, raising the prospect of more battles between tech companies and law enforcement. In this case, Arkansas detectives got a search warrant for an Amazon Echo in the house where a man was murdered late last year.

According to court records, Amazon twice declined to hand over information the Echo transmitted to its servers. The company did hand over Mr. Bates’ account information and purchase history. Police also said they took the device and extracted data off it, the records show. Amazon did not respond to questions about the case or how it responded to the search warrant.

Mr. Bates pleaded not guilty in April and is out on bail. The case is due to go to trial in early 2017, according to Mr. Bates’ defense attorney. Police referred questions to the prosecutor’s office, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Greg Miller:

It’s been a good year for map lovers. Whether you’re into old maps, new maps, or new ways of interacting with old maps, there was much to cheer about in 2016.

Lots of great historical maps became more accessible this year. One of the world’s great private map collections is now open to the public at Stanford University. The Central Intelligence Agency, which isn’t exactly known for sharing, released a slew of historical maps to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Cartography Center. Here at All Over the Map, we were excited to publish a few maps that haven’t been readily available online, including secret Japanese military maps and a map used in 1783 at the Treaty of Paris to negotiate the borders of the brand-new United States of America.

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the innovative and beautifully designed maps being made these days. And thanks to the proliferation of digital cartography tools, lots of non-cartographers are making maps now too. This year, scientists mapped the rise of “megaregions”—clusters of interconnected cities—and documented the increasingly fragmented areas of Earth that can’t be reached by road. Journalists got into the act too, making sophisticated and attractive maps to examine everything from the presidential election to the aerial surveillance of U.S. cities.

Charles Kupfer:

Sometimes a pop culture class becomes an extramural joke, such as the “Zombie Studies” courses that were all the rage a few years ago. And sometimes an American Studies professor decides to use the classroom for “social activism” where the idea is to substitute studying with protesting.

I might chuckle if I weren’t employed and mentally invested in the field, and if I did not have residual respect for the open-minded, pragmatic approaches which marked American Studies for the first decades of its existence. But sadly, for the last generation, American Studies—beset by a nagging awareness that making interdisciplinarity the norm when studying culture became mission accomplished at least 20 years ago—has scooted pell-mell towards politicization in a misbegotten effort to remain relevant.

The result today is an academic sub-specialty wedded to a tightly-corseted belief that the United States represents the locus of sin (racism, sexism, colonialism, and the like) in the modern world, and that any study of America should restrict itself to call-outs and condemnations. American Studies now serves chiefly as validation system for academicians who know their findings in advance: racism, sexism, and imperialism.

Increasingly, the field is hostile to scholars who don’t want to use it just to berate American traditions and signal their imagined virtue.

Share

Becky Vevea

“There’s 41 of you here, and 41 minds have to be completely locked into what we’re doing in order for us to get that sound,” teacher Kelsey Tortorice tells her students at UIC College Prep, a campus of the Noble Street Network of Charter Schools in Chicago.

A new study by the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University revealed music instruction, and studying music in general, changes the teenage brain, so long as students participate for at least two years.

The researchers found that studying music alters teen brains in a way that makes them better able to focus and process sound — a development that’s particularly important for learning.

Sheila Bair:

Donald J. Trump has made bold and provocative campaign promises on taxes, trade, immigration and infrastructure. These pledges are all in service of bolstering our economic future. While we hope these initiatives will help our economic prospects, there is one important measure missing from the debate. And it could have an even more immediate and direct impact on economic growth: student debt relief.

Student debt now stands at $1.3 trillion. More than half of student borrowers are unable to repay their loans according to the original terms. In a well-intended but poorly executed effort to make college broadly accessible, the government has lent freely to students, with little attention to whether they can repay those loans. The result is millions of young people with debt they cannot afford.

Susan Svrlugo:

More than 1,500 people have had genetic testing done at West Chester University, part of a campuswide DNA Discussion Project. Anita Foeman, a professor of communication studies at the public university in Pennsylvania, hoped to use the project to build connections among people. Students in a freshman honors class took the test this fall, and many were surprised when the results upended their self-identity.

Urban Dictionary:

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines…

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on…

Eugene Volokh:

1. Last week, the University of Oregon made clear to its faculty: If you say things about race, sexual orientation, sex, religion and so on that enough people find offensive, you could get suspended (and, following the logic of the analysis) even fired. This can happen even to tenured faculty members; even more clearly, it can happen to anyone else. It’s not limited to personal insults. It’s not limited to deliberate racism or bigotry.

This time it involved someone making herself up as a black man at a costume party (as it happens, doing so in order to try to send an antiracist message). But according to the university’s logic, a faculty member could be disciplined for displaying the Mohammed cartoons, if it caused enough of a furor. Or a faculty member could be disciplined for suggesting that homosexuality may be immoral or dangerous. Or for stating that biological males who view themselves as female should be viewed as men, not as women. Or for suggesting that there are, on average, biological differences in temperament or talents between men and women.

g, The State University of New York:

Who is this class for: We are thrilled to make this course available for anybody who is interested in learning how to evaluate the quality of news and journalism in order to judge the reliability of information and make informed judgment. It is an online version of the News Literacy curriculum developed at Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Hong Kong. More than 15,000 university students in ten countries have taken it over the last ten years. We have been constantly updating our course material by incorporating the impact of the growing popularity of smart phones and social media services around the world. We hope you enjoy the course!

Rebecca Rosen:

The Ambition Interviews began as a project between two friends, Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace, who had attended Northwestern University in the early ’90s. What had happened, they wondered, to all of their brilliant, hard-working friends from their college days? Had life come together as they had hoped? They reached out to 37 other members of their sorority’s graduating class, and those conversations became the foundation of the essays we now present.

We recommend starting with Hana’s introduction essay, which details the project, and from there the essays—listed here—can be read in any order.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

Thanks to American Educator for E.D. Hirsch’s new article on the necessity of a coherent curriculum in the elementary grades. Everything he writes on this is sensible and of the greatest value.

But why oh why is the effort of the student always left out? I was a much
better teacher with a student who paid attention in class and did the
homework, and a much less effective teacher with a student who did
not pay attention in class and did not do the homework.

Yet, for some reason, the student has no place in our
discussions of teacher effectiveness, school reform, etc.

Imagine discussing the performance of a football team and never mentioning
what any of the players did on the field, or their degree of attention to the coach,
and their own preparedness for the part they played in games.

Yet from the way we discuss reform in education, there must be the assumption
that students have no part to play in their schooling.

This makes no sense at all. What could be the reason for it?

The Concord Review.

Doug Erickson:

Each partner is asked to make a commitment of at least one year and to make a contribution of some sort, whether human, financial or material, Bartzen said. A financial donation is not a requirement for participation, she said.

Partners provide many things, such as tutors, mentors, in-kind donations, guest speakers, lunch buddies and off-site space for occasional school-related functions.

“The small things are just as important as the big things,” Bartzen said. “It really is all about developing long-term relationships. If a financial piece is possible, that’s wonderful, but a donation of the size given by Great Lakes is not the norm.”

For more information on adopting a school or donating to the foundation, go to fmps.org.

Chris Rickert:

If I were Santa Claus, my Christmas gifts to Republican state Rep. Dave Murphy and Republican state Sen. Steve Nass would be vouchers to enroll in the UW-Madison class “The Problem of Whiteness.”

According to a course description, it offers the chance to wonder “what it really means to be white” and asks: “Since white supremacy was created by white people, is it not white folks who have the greatest responsibility to eradicate it?”

For the professor teaching the class and other identity politics-obsessed UW faculty, I’d provide bus tickets to some struggling rural hamlets in Murphy’s and Nass’ districts, where if whiteness is a problem, pretty much everybody is problematic — even if the real problems have less to do with race than with garden-variety social dysfunction and lack of income.

Maybe then conservative legislators would stop measuring academia according to their politics, and ivory tower academics would stop conflating teaching with pontification.

Ted Chiang:

Catching crumbs from the table
JACEY
It has been 25 years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehensibility of humans?

No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language.

Without DNT, humans could not fully grasp earlier developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.

Oliver Burkeman:

The eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann. Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital blight that was colonising more and more of their hours, squeezing out time for more important work, or for having a life. And Mann, a rising star of the “personal productivity” movement, seemed like he might have found the answer.

He called his system “Inbox Zero”, and the basic idea was simple enough. Most of us get into bad habits with email: we check our messages every few minutes, read them and feel vaguely stressed about them, but take little or no action, so they pile up into an even more stress-inducing heap. Instead, Mann advised his audience that day at Google’s Silicon Valley campus, every time you visit your inbox, you should systematically “process to zero”. Clarify the action each message requires – a reply, an entry on your to-do list, or just filing it away. Perform that action. Repeat until no emails remain. Then close your inbox, and get on with living.

Josh Blackman:

Nancy Shurtz, a tenured professor at the University of Oregon Law School, wore black face to a halloween party. Her costume, which also included a white lab coat and stethoscope, was meant as some sort of social commentary about the book “Black Man in a White Coat.” Nearly two dozen of Shurtz’s colleagues called on her to resign. Shurtz was suspended with pay, pending an investigation. That investigation came to a close on November 30.

Yesterday, the Provost of the University of Oregon released a statement, along with a redacted version of the investigative report, explaining why Shurtz can be disciplined consistent with the First Amendment and principles of academic freedom. Here is the Provost’s summary:

Annysa Johnson:

“Persistence.”

It was the final page of the PowerPoint presentation, and all eyes were on Kimberly Easley.

For the better part of an hour, student advisers Easley and Tre’Quan Martin had run a class of mostly ninth-graders through a primer highlighting much of what they’ll need to do over the next four years to graduate, get into college and succeed there.

Get good grades. Take part in extracurricular activities. Volunteer. Save money. Research colleges and career paths. Fill out the FAFSA. Pursue every scholarship possible.

You could see, for a teenager, how it could all be overwhelming. And then they landed on that final page: “Persistence.”

“That is probably the most important thing we want you to walk away with, because without that you really can’t achieve anything,” said Easley, a first-generation college graduate who weathered her own challenges — poverty, an absentee father, a drug-using mother — en route to a master’s degree from Alverno College.

“I could have used (that as) my crutch … for not going to college and not being successful,” Easley said.

Eyder Peralta:

When he was in prison, Lorenzo Palma strongly suspected he was an American citizen. He had spent his whole life in the United States, and he knew his grandfather was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1914.

Palma had served five years for an assault conviction and was about to be released on parole, but immigration officials had stopped his release because they wanted to deport him. They said he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

So in the summer of 2014, Palma found himself among dozens of inmates about to face an immigration judge in Huntsville, Texas. “They would sit us by groups of 10 and they would start deporting left and right,” he said.

A far cry from the Apostle Paul, who declared his Roman citizenship when he was about to be beaten (Acts 22)

Nick Statt:

The US Customs and Border Protection has started demanding that foreign travelers hand over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media account information upon entering the country, according to a report from Politico. The new policy follows a proposal laid out back in June and applies only to those travelers who enter the US temporarily without a visa through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, process. The goal, the government says, is to “identify potential threats,” a spokesperson tells Politico.

ACTIVISTS FEAR THE POLICY COULD BE A THREAT TO HUMAN RIGHTS
The new policy went into effect on Tuesday, and the request is currently “optional.” It asks foreign travelers to “enter information associated with your online presence,” and offers a drop-down menu allowing participants to enter in account names for most major social networks, including LinkedIn and even Google+.

aljazeera:

Saada governorate, the most heavily bombed region in Yemen, has the world’s highest stunting rates among children, affecting eight out of 10 in some areas, it said.

Stunting – where a child is short for their age – is another sign of chronic malnourishment and has irreversible consequences for both physical health and cognitive function.

Other governorates – Hodeida, Taiz, Hajjah and Lahej – were also badly affected after 20 months of war, UNICEF said.

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 layering of basic shapes, they seem like distant precursors to Minimalism and its concerns.

Jamnitzer sometimes sketches solids in sculptural positioning — a shape upon a pedestal — enhancing an understanding of the three-dimensional form in space. The resulting manipulations are often so varied it can be hard to discern from which Platonic solid they originated. This is Jamnitzer’s point: to show that all matter might be constituted by these primary shapes. Although our understanding of the essence of matter has changed, interestingly, the underlying concept of building blocks has not. All matter is constituted of molecules made of atoms, adding up to their own kind of minimal, molecular geometry.

John Baez

Information geometry is the study of ‘stochastic manifolds’, which are spaces where each point is a hypothesis about some state of affairs. This subject, usually considered a branch of statistics, has important applications to machine learning and somewhat unexpected connections to evolutionary biology. To learn this subject, I’m writing a series of articles on it. You can navigate forwards and back through these using the blue arrows. And by clicking the links that say “on Azimuth”, you can see blog entries containing these articles. Those let you read comments about my articles—and also make comments or ask questions of your own!

Mike Gordon:

Margaret Kocaj has one more semester before she earns her degree from Charlotte School of Law.

Now she doesn’t know whether she will get a diploma or even if she has a school.

On Monday, Kocaj and CSL’s 700 other students at the for-profit school learned that the Department of Education will cut off millions of dollars in student loans and other financial assistance on Dec. 31. That’s money that most of the students need to continue their classes.

The government’s reason: a “substantial and persistent” failure by Charlotte School of Law to meet admission and curriculum standards while intentionally misleading current and prospective students about the extent of its problems.

Chris Kirkham:

Almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in 2015, the largest percentage since 1940, according to an analysis of census data by real estate tracker Trulia.

Despite a rebounding economy and recent job growth, the share of those between the ages of 18 and 34 doubling up with parents or other family members has been rising since 2005. Back then, before the start of the last recession, roughly one out of three were living with family.

The trend runs counter to that of previous economic cycles, when after a recession-related spike, the number of younger Americans living with relatives declined as the economy improved.

The mind unleashed:

“Now that I’ve finished my first semester I think it’s safe to say… FUCK COLLEGE. Now before all you of you go batshit crazy… I have a few points to make.

1. Yes I have dropped out after finishing my first semester (with a 4.0 GPA). And it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Not because I am averse to learning, but actually the exact opposite.

2. YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will see it some day. Heck you may have already seen it if you’ve been through college. You are being put thousands into debt to learn things you will never even use. Wasting 4 years of your life to be stuck at a paycheck that grows slower than the rate of inflation. Paying $200 for a $6 textbook. Being taught by teacher’s who have never done what they’re teaching. Average income has increased 5x over the last 40 years while cost of college has increased 18x. You’re spending thousands of dollars to learn information you won’t ever even use just to get a piece of paper. I once even had an engineer tell me “I learned more in my first 30 days working than in my 5 years of college.” What does that tell you about this system? There are about a million more ways you’re being scammed into this.. just watch the video i’m gonna comment if you want to see more.

Charles Murray:

Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.

Dear Virginia Tech community,

Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”

Fred Smith

Game begins with the San Fernando Valley Patriots, a small public policy group that sought 501(c)4 tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. A routine matter taking only a few months for most non-profit organizations, the Patriots’ application was delayed as they were required to meet a series of demands for supporting information. The Obama administration, it turns out, was displeased with right-of-center groups’ opposition to its initiatives, and that attitude worked its way down to federal agencies.

For many years, commercial speech has been regulated to prevent fraud, but the newer goal of regulating political speech was a harder climb. Courts, in particular, protected political speech for much of the nation’s early history. Still, given the growing distrust of big businesses, campaign finance laws gained political momentum. As Strassel notes, some free speech advocates came to favor disclosure of advocacy organizations’ donor information. After all, what could be wrong with “transparency?”

Republicans were slow to recognize the threat posed by such mandates, though it has been clear for more than half-a-century. In one of the key court cases, Alabama officials, irate over the NAACP’s role in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, demanded the state chapter disclose its membership and donors. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this attack as a violation of the rights to privacy and free association.

Oliver Cameron:

You may have seen this incredible video from NVIDIA, one of our Nanodegreepartners, which highlights their efforts of teaching a car how to drive using only cameras and deep learning. The second challenge for the Udacity Self-Driving Car initiative is to replicate these results using a convolutional neural network that you design and build! End-to-end solutions like this, where a single network takes raw input (camera imagery) and produces a direct steering command, are considered the holy-grail of current autonomous vehicle technology.
 
 The top scoring network (measured by how close the steering angles generated were to a human) for Challenge #2 was built by the amazing Ilya Edrenkin, a Senior Researcher at Yandex. He generously wrote an iPython Notebook explaining how his neural network was constructed, and I thought it needed to be shared with the world. Enjoy!

Jared Bernstein & Ben Spielberg:

DeVos and other ideological enemies of teachers unions may well try to block that vision. But as most education policy gets hashed out at the local level, they will hopefully fail. The desire for cross-sector collaboration with a goal of promoting equity for all students is growing, and fostering that growth will deliver a big win for our children.

Choice schools often spend substantially less per student than traditional, no choice schools.

Explanatory Colombo M, et al. Rev Philos Psychol. 2016.

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.

Mack Morris:

Fortunately, educational reforms that expand choices and opportunities for families look to be a top issue during the upcoming Texas legislative session, and most promising of all is legislation creating education savings accounts.

These accounts would give parents more control over how they spend their education tax dollars so that they can choose education options that best fit their child’s needs.

Five states have already adopted education savings account programs, with Arizona, Florida, and Nevada having the most robust programs.

The Texas program, as suggested by former Arlington state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, would most closely follow the Nevada model.

Dave Umhoefer and Sarah Hauer:

But the steep decline in the number of teacher candidates started before Act 10’s passage, it follows a national trend, and Wisconsin is faring better than its neighbors, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examination found.

Experts say root causes of the drop include tougher training and licensure requirements and tight school district budgets at a time when high student-loan debt and an improved economy are sending graduates into other fields.

Act 10’s chief contribution to the continuing trend: a cloud of pessimism hanging over the much-changed profession.

Oconomowoc thought differently regarding teacher time and compensation.

Peter Wong:

Oregon’s public-pension contribution rate has an 80 percent likelihood of exceeding 30 percent of payroll within the next few years, according to an analysis presented to the system’s governing board.

The projection was offered by Milliman, the firm that does the actuarial work for the Public Employees Retirement System, as the agency and lawmakers consider how they can deal with rising costs.

Those increased payroll costs will mean less money available for other government services, or potentially higher taxes.

The PERS board and agency staff say that policy changes are up to the Legislature, but through Milliman, they can analyze potential effects of various proposals. Milliman has offered such reports already.

A legislative work group has reviewed proposals for the 2017 session, which gets down to business starting Feb. 6.

The base rate set by the board for employer contributions the 2017-19 budget cycle is already at 20.8 percent. Although none of Oregon’s more than 900 government employers pays that rate, it is an indicator of upward trends – more than 3 percentage points greater than the current rate.

Actual rates paid by employers hinge on the mix of employees hired before and after August 2003 – when lawmakers made pension benefits less generous for future workers – and the employer’s proportion of public safety employees, who qualify for greater benefits.

thekidshouldseethis.com:

Every day, we move and operate within systems of power that other people have constructed. But we’re often uncomfortable talking about power. Why? Eric Liu describes the six sources of power and explains how understan…

William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

Craig Timberg:

Consumer advocates have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission charging that Google violated user privacy through a policy change that gives the company more leeway to build profiles of people as they browse the Web and use Google services.
 
 The complaint, submitted Thursday by Consumer Watchdog and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, alleges that Google acted in a “highly deceptive manner” in changing its privacy policy in June to allow the merging of data collected by various services owned by the company, such as Google Maps, Google search and the DoubleClick online advertising service. The result, the groups say, allows for the gathering of more comprehensive information on most people who use the Web.

Bill Ruthhart, Hal Dardick and Jeff Coen:

Political strategist David Plouffe also knew to use one of Emanuel’s personal accounts when he lobbied the mayor on behalf of Uber in November 2015. A deal was in place for Uber to operate at Chicago airports, but Plouffe emailed about an extra fee to be imposed by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority and about signage that needed to be placed on Uber vehicles doing pickups at O’Hare International Airport and Midway International Airport.

“Sure this comes as much of a surprise to you as us, since there was an agreement in place,” wrote Plouffe, campaign manager in 2008 for President Barack Obama, for whom Emanuel worked for as chief of staff.

Emanuel directed Plouffe, Uber’s vice president of policy and strategy, to email two staffers, since he was out of the country. “Impossible for me to address from China.”

The messages also showed Emanuel communicating with a wide array of power brokers both in business and politics.

Childtrends:

There is a troubling trend that researchers have identified again and again – low-income parents, especially single mothers, have higher rates of depression and depressive symptoms than their higher-income counterparts. A new Child Trends’ study found that more than half of a group of low-income mothers in Maryland felt down, depressed, or hopeless in the past year and almost a third had those feelings combined with a lack of interest or pleasure in doing things

Steve Sailer

A) A rabbi checked out the potentially Jewish names for PSAT semifinalists in 2012 (see my Taki’s Magazine column “The East Rises in the West”) and came up with a range of 81 to 125 Jewish surnames, or 4 to 6 percent out of 1,950. I have to believe that this is way down from the percent of Jewish National Merit semifinalists in California in the 1970s. Has California’s Jewish community shrunk just in relative terms, or in absolute terms (Portland, here we come?). Has marrying shiksas diluted the gene pool? Do Jewish kids try less hard now? But they seemed to be pretty heavy dope smokers at Beverly Hills H.S. in 1975? Or have Asians raised the test scores at the high end?

B) My Taki column is on PSAT semifinalists in California in 2011, but I found on College Confidential an analysis of the 2010 California semifinalists, and if you can’t trust anonymous posters on College Confidential, whom can you trust?

Paul Carron:

“This is potentially a cataclysmic event for legal education. The Department of Education’s reasoning could easily be extended to other law schools,” Paul Caron, an associate dean and professor at Pepperdine School of Law, wrote in an email to the ABA Journal. “Hopefully, today’s action by the DOE will finally cause law schools to confront the existential crisis facing legal education,” says Caron, who writes at Tax Law Prof Blog.

Miranda Green:

Snowflake

(Noun) A derogatory term for someone deemed too emotionally vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own, particularly in universities and other forums once known for robust debate

The riotous parties and occasional deep thought that were traditionally part of student life have, according to those who throw the insult “snowflake” at an entire generation, given way to whingeing about points of view deemed offensive.

Where once students might have placed a pilfered traffic cone over the head of a historical statue, they now campaign to excise the names of founders and benefactors from their institutions and to disinvite lecturers on contentious subjects.

The censorious trend prompted pungent attacks on oversensitive millennials. This, by the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, catches the flavour: “Oh, little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something . . . you snivelling little weak-ass narcissists?”

Like all powerful weapons, calling someone a snowflake has been adapted for general use. It is even co-opted by the other side. President-elect Donald Trump was called “the most special snowflake of them all” for protesting that the theatre should be a “safe place” after his running mate Mike Pence was booed at the musical Hamilton.

Jillian Kay Melchior

Last week, members of the University of Minnesota football team threatened to boycott the team’s bowl game because 10 of their teammates were suspended for an alleged sexual assault even though a police investigation into the claims yielded no charges.

The coach of the team now says he knew his job was on the line when, against the wishes of his administration, he threw his support behind his players who feared their teammates’ constitutional rights were being violated.

“I want everybody to understand, the boycott was around the due process, period,” coach Tracy Claeys told reporters this weekend.

In an interview with WCOO Radio the same day, Claeys recounted talking to his team “all about the different fallouts. One was that we might not be able to play in the bowl game. Two is that we knew there was going to be a group who took the stance that we were being pro-sexual assault, which we’re not. And then I told them there’s a great chance I could lose my job over this.”

Jorin Burkhart:

The University of Kentucky is warning faculty that it can take action against them for alleged wrongdoing without a formal hearing – as long as their tenure isn’t involved.

A spokesperson for the administration told The College Fix that its punishment of Prof. Buck Ryan – for a murky but nonsexual incident with a student – is permissible under a recent federal court ruling.

Ryan claimed in a Lexington Herald-Leader op-ed this weekend that he was punished for singing a Beach Boys song to a group of Chinese students because its lyrics were judged “sexual in nature” by the administration.

Although the China trip during which the incident took place was more than a year ago, the case only surfaced Friday.

Kate Hardiman:

UCLA student Jacqueline Alvarez told The College Fix as much in a recent telephone interview, standing behind an op-ed she wrote in the Daily Bruin campus newspaper detailing the same.

She described the conference not only as an “oppression Olympics” but also “a safe space gone wrong” in her opinion article.

Ralph Washington, president of UC Student Association, which organized and hosted the conference, confirmed there were “tensions” at the mid-November gathering, and that its schedule was altered.

“The Students of Color Conference is always a space when tensions get a little high,” he said in a phone interview with The College Fix. “This mirrors that nature of our lived experiences. But this year there was a lot of harm thrown around to the various organizers, and some people came into the conference without understanding what the theme of the conference was. There are constructive things that we can do to prevent this happening in the future.”

“I think that sometimes in conferences schedules are changed to meet a more pressing need. It isn’t a problem when those who are organizing the conference change things around to meet the needs of participants,” Washington said.

Erin Hinrichs:

When Rashad Turner stepped down from his leadership role with Black Lives Matter in the city of St. Paul in early September, he pinned his decision on a single point of contention: National leadership of both BLM and the NAACP had recently called for a moratorium on charter schools, a move that he, fundamentally, didn’t agree with.

A strong supporter of charter schools and education reform, he told media he felt the movement had been “hijacked.” He could no longer be affiliated with a cause, he explained, that was prioritizing an attack on charters — many of which are successfully serving marginalized students — over an attack on the root causes of the achievement gap, such as the disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions of children of color in local schools.

Anna Phillips and Sonali Kohli:

When Horace Mann Middle School principal Orlando Johnson thinks about the eighth-graders he sent off to high school last year, he worries about how they will fare.

Only about 1% of Horace Mann students in that grade and the ones below it tested at grade level in math. At the end of the year, the eighth-grade math teacher was dismissed for ineffective teaching. Sixth- and seventh-graders, meanwhile, were learning math from long-term substitutes.

Related: credit for non Madison School District courses.

Laura Waters:

Plenty, according to members of the “Save Camden High School” cadre, who have rebranded themselves under the New Jersey Communities United banner and are planning a confrontation tonight at the Camden Board of Education meeting. Instead of following Sheriff Wilson’s example of placing children’s academic needs on top, this group has decided a years-old, dead-end debate will be its issue du jour, even if it’s to the detriment of students. More broadly, the group’s members represent a microcosm of those who masquerade as social justice warriors while placing adult-centric politics over systemic school improvement.

Eight years ago the Star Ledger described the debilitated state of the “Castle on the Hill”: “emergency scaffolding protects students entering and leaving the school from pieces of plaster and masonry falling off the decaying high school. A new chain-link fence keeps pedestrians clear of other portions of the wall, and broken windows dot the three-story facade.” More recent problems–as shown in the school district’s own video– include cracked steps, crumbling infrastructure, leaking pipes, “indoor vegetation growth,” and an ancient boiler that has required over a million dollars in chewing gum and bailing wire.

Related: “an emphasis on adult employment“.

Anatoly Kurmanaev:

CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuela is taking nearly half the country’s bank notes out of circulation beginning Wednesday, threatening to ruin the holidays season for Venezuelans already suffering from dire cash shortages, hyperinflation and an economic meltdown.

The country’s largest bill, worth 100 bolivars or just 3 U.S. cents on the black market, is to become illegal, in a move designed to combat contraband along Venezuela’s borders, the government said.

President Nicolás Maduro said outlawing the notes would destroy what he claims are Colombian smuggling mafias that hoard bolivars to buy price-controlled food and gasoline in Venezuela, which is then resold at a markup. Mr. Maduro said Monday night he was closing the Colombian border until Thursday night to prevent stacks of bolivars from making it back to the country.

Nico Savidge:

“The state has a lot of different priorities when it comes to funding things,” Murphy said. “Is funding a course that’s about ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ … a high priority? I’ve got a feeling it’s not.”

School officials defended the course on Monday after Nass, a frequent critic of the university, derided it in an email to Republican legislators.

“The course title refers to the challenge of understanding white identity and non-white identity across the globe,” the university wrote in a statement Monday night. It is not mandatory, and “will benefit students who are interested in developing a deeper understanding of race issues,” officials said.

But the controversy escalated Tuesday when Murphy also drew attention to tweets from the course’s instructor, professor Damon Sajnani, in a news release.

In one tweet, posted the night last July when five police officers were killed by a gunman in Dallas, Sajnani included a photo of news coverage of the shooting and wrote, “Is the uprising finally starting? Is this style of protest gonna go viral?”

Hildreth, John Angus D.; Anderson, Cameron:

All too commonly, we see groups of leaders fail to accomplish their stated goals when working together—legislators who cannot agree on a bill, heads of state who cannot draft meaningful environmental policy, or boards of trustees who make disastrous decisions for their school. The current research examines whether groups of leaders fail as often as they do in part because of the power each leader is accustomed to possessing among his or her constituents. In multiple studies we found that high power individuals, when working together in groups, performed worse than did other groups: individuals randomly assigned power in an initial task were less creative when they then worked together in groups on a subsequent task (Studies 1A and 4). Individuals with higher power who worked together in groups were also less likely to reach agreement on a difficult negotiation task, whether these groups comprised actual executives from an extant organization (Study 2) or participants randomly assigned power in the laboratory (Study 3). Mediation analyses suggest that groups of high power individuals performed worse because they fought over their relative status in the group, were less focused on the task, and shared information with each other less effectively. However, high power individuals were more effective when working on tasks that required less coordination: they were more creative (Studies 1B and 4) and persisted longer on a difficult task than other groups. Therefore, group processes are the key problem for groups of high power individuals when they work together.

Lee Petersen

Decades of distinct market knowledge ended up devalued and then simply disappeared, rolled up into a singular corporate branding and buying approach. But the forces of finance pushed for chain-wide savings ahead of doing something that might have helped the category: Staying closer than ever to shoppers. In effect, Macy’s stopped doing the one thing it was good at doing better than anyone else — something that might have saved it from obsolescence during tough times, from recessions to Amazon’s looming dominance in e-commerce.

The embrace of such a top-down strategy destroyed a once effective bottom-up buying and merchandising approach that was not only capable of meeting the unique market needs of local shoppers, but thrilling and delighting them as well. You might argue that Federated had Big Data before Big Data was a thing: It just wasn’t the kind of data visible at the corporate level. It was Big Data disaggregated — data inside the minds of experienced employees, the kind of local market knowledge a top-down buying process doesn’t really have. Corporate buyers might go on some store visits to flyover country, but a few field visits would never replace local knowledge gained from years of being on the sales floor.

Josh Mitchell

In the year through September 2015, about 114,000 Americans age 50 and older had their Social Security benefits reduced to offset defaulted student loans. That figure—which includes 38,000 people age 65 or older—has risen 440% since 2002.

The report highlights the growing number of baby boomers who are entering retirement with student debt, many of them in default on loans from decades ago. About 4 in 10 borrowers whose Social Security checks were garnished have held the debt for at least 20 years, the report said. Most of the borrowers took out the loans to pay for their own educations, though a big share borrowed to help pay for their children’s schooling.

A world-class history quarterly, The Concord Review, holds a writing workshop for high school students.

Sudbury, Massachusetts—December 13, 2016

———

College bound high school students can now learn from one of the best sources in the country. The Concord Review [tcr.org] is offering several two-week intensive expository writing workshops. The workshops will be held on the campus of Regis College, just west of Boston in Weston, Massachusetts and—for the first time—in Seoul, South Korea.

This will be the fourth year of their Summer Program writing and research workshops, but they are greatly expanded over previous years. There will be two sessions in Boston, in early and late June with 24 seats in each session. Each session runs for two weeks, and includes both boarding students and day students.

“We had such strong response last year when we announced the course, and such positive feedback after the sessions, that we felt expanding the program was the right thing to do.” said Steven Lee, Summer Program Manager for TCR. “Several students told us they wished the program lasted longer!”

“As a former History teacher, I know the challenges for students doing longer research papers in most classrooms.” said Will Fitzhugh, TCR’s Founder and Editor in Chief. “But many students are fully capable of this level of work. The pages of TCR are full of examples. And students are hungry for instruction on how to improve. We are pleased to provide advanced instruction for motivated young scholars.

The sessions are led by History and expository writing instructors with advanced degrees in their topics. Some are former TCR authors. “I select the instructors with an eye toward very strong academic credentials coupled with an appreciation for secondary students and for the study of History.” says Fitzhugh.

During the program, students attend interactive group classes, have individual meetings with the instructors, attend a question-and-answer session with past authors, work in research and writing sessions, visit historical sites, see documentaries on various topics in history, and read past Concord Review essays.

“Steven has ensured that we have not only a strong academic program, but good venues for the classes and good activities.” Hours of instruction and study are balanced with trips to historical sites and other activities. “Steven has done an excellent job as Manager of the Summer Program,” said Fitzhugh. “He shares my interest in highest-quality education and providing opportunities for students to excel in academic writing.” He has also provided a critical link in connecting with interest from students in Asia, and has established the first international TCR Summer Program session to be held this year in Seoul, South Korea.

“There is a great deal of interest in Korea, China, and elsewhere outside the U.S. in the kind of English-language, advanced-writing TCR celebrates.” said Lee. “We are very excited to make this move. We had several students in last year’s session from Korea and we expect that this will make participation easier for more scholars.”

The venue for the Boston sessions is Regis College. Boarding students will stay in the dormitories, and join day students in Regis classrooms, library, and dining hall.

“The Concord Review provides a splendid forum for the best student work in history.” says Diane Ravitch, Senior Scholar at New York University. “It deserves the support of everyone in the country who cares about improving the study of history in the schools.” Other supporters include noted Historians Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. and David McCullough, and Dean of Admissions at Harvard College, William Fitzsimmons.

“We are fortunate that we have always had a large number of supporters who admire the work of our authors, and believe in our mission.” said Fitzhugh. “Now we can directly help young scholars develop their potential. It’s very gratifying.”

The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only journal in the world for the academic history papers of secondary students, now with 1,219 essays [average length 7,400 words] by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.

About forty percent of students published in The Concord Review have been admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale, and many have gone to other highly selective colleges—MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Caltech, and so forth. The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has written: “We have been very happy to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by a number of our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admission decisions…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

Students who work on research papers during the TCR Summer Program are not guaranteed to be published in the journal, but the work they will do gives them an advantage in preparation for expository writing in college over their peers who do not have such practice.

There are very few opportunities for high school students to work on serious term papers in history. Most of the emphasis is on STEM and personal writing, and usually high school teachers have so many students that they cannot possibly find the time to advise students on a 5,000-word history paper. A national study, commissioned by The Concord Review, found that a very large majority of high school teachers do not assign term papers, and colleges only ask for the 500-word personal essay. As a result almost all of our high school graduates arrive in college never having written a serious research paper. This is the reason so many colleges, even Harvard and Stanford, now require a writing course for all their first-year students.

There are currently seats available in all sessions, but last year’s course filled up quickly, so Lee recommends that students register as soon as possible. “I had a great time working this year with the amazingly bright and hard-working students our program attracts. I’m really looking forward to the 2017 sessions!”

========================

Via a kind reader:

Professor sells ‘George Bush is the real terrorist’ t-shirts

Elizabeth Harrington –

The University of Wisconsin is offering a course this spring on the “Problem of Whiteness,” which is taught by a radical assistant professor who believes America is a terrorist state.

The course will cover institutional racism and “what it means to be #woke.”

Damon Sajnani, an assistant professor in UW-Madison’s African Cultural Studies department, is teaching the course.

“Have you ever wondered what it really means to be white?” the course description states. “If you’re like most people, the answer is probably ‘no.’ But here is your chance!”

“In Frantz Fanon’s famous White Skin Black Mask (1952), his chapter ‘Look, a Negro!’ interrogated the meaning and experience of coming to know oneself as Black under the constant scrutiny of the white gaze,” the course description continues. “It is an experience concomitant with W.E.B. Du Bois’s observation that under systemic racism, even well-meaning whites are constantly asking, in one way or another, ‘what is it like to be a problem?’ But, Like Richard Wright’s quote above, philosopher George Yancy’s book, Look, a White! (2010), turns the question around, and rightly returns ‘the problem of whiteness’ to white people. After all, since white supremacy was created by white people, is it not white folks who have the greatest responsibility to eradicate it? Our class begins here.”

The course is part of “Critical Whiteness Studies,” and will attempt to offer solutions to the “problem of whiteness.”

“We will come together with our socially ascribed identities of Black, white, mixed and other and, with the problem properly in its place we will ask ourselves and our allies, what are we going to do with it?”

“Critical Whiteness Studies aims to understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description reads. “Our class will break away from the standard US-centric frame, and consider how whiteness is constructed globally, with particular attention to paradigmatic cases like South Africa.”

The class will also cover how white people “consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism and how this not only devastates communities of color but also perpetuates the oppression of most white folks along the lines of class and gender.”

“In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.’”

Sajnani also teaches a course on “Global Hip Hop and Social Justice.”

Aside from his assistant professor role at UW-Madison, Sajnani runs “Justus League Records,” a political rap group that calls for revolution. He calls it the “The Dope Poet Society,” so-called “Hip Hop revolutionaries in the struggle to save the world!”

Justus League sells t-shirts that read “George Bush is the real terrorist.” Sajnani has written anti-capitalist pieces arguing that America is a “global terrorist.”

In the article “Jay-Z is 1%, Not HipHop,” Sajnani criticizes the rapper for being too pro-America and identifying with “an oligarchy whose interests are antithetical to Black liberation.”

“America is the reigning, though waning, seat of capitalist imperialism,” he writes. “Among other things, it is an enslaver of Africans, exterminator of aboriginals, environmental devastator, global terrorist, captain of neo-colonialism and chief beneficiary of these crimes.”

“To be pro-American does not mean that you support Americans, but that you buy into the propaganda that allows the richest Americans to collude with the richest global elites elsewhere, to the detriment of the world’s people including the majority of Americans,” Sajnani continues. “American culture is the set of beliefs, practices and ways of living that support America as such.”

Sajnani calls Jay-Z and President Barack Obama “mouthpieces for imperialism.”

“Don’t get it twisted, the struggle continues,” he concludes.

Sajnani changed his profile picture on Facebook to Fidel Castro the day after the Communist dictator’s death. The picture reads, “Keep it classy mi gente. Rest in freedom to the REAL most interesting man in the world.”

He also posted a picture of a 1950s-esque American family serving turkey for Thanksgiving with the words “Genocide, terrorism, small pox, colonization, torture” written in blood over it.

Request for comment from the university was not immediately returned.

Source: University Offering Course on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’

Bloomberg:

Mi’s goal was to deliver not the cheapest way to study, but rather the most efficient way to learn for the time and money invested. She knew Chinese parents would pay if they saw their children actually learning, rather than wasting time with poor teachers or programs. Most parents have a single offspring because of the country’s one-child policy, they value education and they want their child to be able to work beyond China.

Mi brought in Lane Litz, who had worked in three countries on how children learn second languages, to lead development of a standardized curriculum so the company would have control over what was taught. The team worked on easy-to-use software that would allow students in China to learn from native English speakers a half world away with real-time audio and video links.

Bruce Schneier

A paper published in the December 2004 issue of the SIGCSE Bulletin, “Cryptanalysis of some encryption/cipher schemes using related key attack,” by Khawaja Amer Hayat, Umar Waqar Anis, and S. Tauseef-ur-Rehman, is the same as a paper that John Kelsey, David Wagner, and I published in 1997.

It’s clearly plagiarism. Sentences have been reworded or summarized a bit and many typos have been introduced, but otherwise it’s the same paper. It’s copied, with the same section, paragraph, and sentence structure — right down to the same mathematical variable names. It has the same quirks in the way references are cited. And so on.

We wrote two papers on the topic; this is the second. They don’t list either of our papers in their bibliography. They do have a lurking reference to “[KSW96]” (the first of our two papers) in the body of their introduction and design principles, presumably copied from our text; but a full citation for “[KSW96]” isn’t in their bibliography. Perhaps they were worried that one of the referees would read the papers listed in their bibliography, and notice the plagiarism.

Jack Dolan

Proponents sold the measure in 1999 with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers. The state employees’ pension fund, they said, would grow fast enough to pay the bill in full.

They were off — by billions of dollars — and taxpayers will bear the consequences for decades to come.

This year, state employee pensions will cost taxpayers $5.4 billion, according to the Department of Finance. That’s more than the state will spend on environmental protection, fighting wildfires and the emergency response to the drought combined.

And it’s more than 30 times what the state paid for retirement benefits in 2000, before the effects of the new pension law, SB 400, had kicked in, according to data from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Jack Dolan

Proponents sold the measure in 1999 with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers. The state employees’ pension fund, they said, would grow fast enough to pay the bill in full.

They were off — by billions of dollars — and taxpayers will bear the consequences for decades to come.

This year, state employee pensions will cost taxpayers $5.4 billion, according to the Department of Finance. That’s more than the state will spend on environmental protection, fighting wildfires and the emergency response to the drought combined.

And it’s more than 30 times what the state paid for retirement benefits in 2000, before the effects of the new pension law, SB 400, had kicked in, according to data from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.