The wheels of justice have been said to turn slowly. And few things move quickly here in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of 12,000 people with no movie theater and a quaint commercial district that’s shuttered on Sunday. But when a deadline on a school desegregation suit—originally filed in 1965—came and went last month with opposing sides still unable to agree on a resolution, some locals admitted frustration.
More proof, if proof were needed, of the privacy-stripping power of metadata. A multi-year crowdsourced study, conducted by Stanford scientists and published this week, underlines how much information can be inferred from basic phone logs cross-referenced with other public datasets.
High school valedictorians are on the verge of becoming a thing of the past in Wake County as school leaders cut down on what they call unhealthy competition among top-achieving students.
The Wake County school board unanimously gave initial approval Tuesday to a policy that would bar high school principals from naming valedictorians and salutatorians – titles which go to the two seniors with the highest grade-point averages – after 2018. Starting in 2019, high schools would begin using a new system that recognizes seniors with Latin titles such as cum laude if they have a weighted GPA of at least 3.75.
Despite the large increases in federal aid since the 1960s, public school academic performance has ultimately not improved. While scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have improved for some groups and younger ages, math and reading scores for 17-year-olds—essentially, the school system’s “final products”—have been stagnant. In addition, America’s performance on international exams has remained mediocre, yet we spend more per-pupil on K-12 education than almost any other country.6 Federal funding and top-down rules are not the way to create a high-quality K-12 education system in America.
Congress should phase out federal funding for K-12 education and end all related regulations. Policymakers need to recognize that federal aid is ultimately funded by the taxpayers who live in the 50 states, and thus provides no free lunch. Indeed, the states just get money back with strings attached, while losing billions of dollars from wasteful bureaucracy. There is no compelling policy reason, nor constitutional authority, for the federal government to be involved in K-12 education. In the long run, America’s schools would be better off without it.
Indeed, spending more does not seem to improve academic outcomes. Madison spends more than $17K per student annually, despite long term, disastrous reading results. Via Chris Edwards.
link. useful.
Certainly, Chris’s points are borne out by the opt-out activity in New York and New Jersey, where the biggest fans of test refusal live in wealthy suburbs and are financially and educationally invested in local control of their high-performing and exclusionary school districts. Yesterday Jonathan Chait described the “emerging alliance between teacher unions” — stalwart standard-bearers of, well, no standards or standardized assessments — and Republicans, both of whom share “cultural distrust” and fierce defense of local control.
Here Chait refers to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s opposition to an Obama Administration proposal to shift more federal aid to poor students and expand efforts to address the disproportionate number of inexperienced teachers in poor, minority districts, a result of current teacher tenure laws and contracts:
Related, on Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results: “When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before”.
Amid all the grim news about the skyrocketing price of a college education, here’s something to celebrate: Colleges are asking students to shoulder less of the costs.
In the 2015-2016 school year, the discounts on tuition that private colleges gave to students in the form of scholarships and grants hit a record high, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) annual report.
Last school year, private colleges gave freshman an average tuition discount of 49%, and all undergrads an average discount of 43% off the published price of tuition.
At the same time, the percentage of students who received some discount on tuition and fees—88%—remained relatively steady, the NACUBO report says.
Doling Out DiscountsSuch discounting is nothing new. Rather, it is a continuation of a long trend of private colleges lowering prices to boost enrollment. Ten years ago, the average tuition discount was 34%, according to NACUBO.
“list prices” continue to rise….
Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.
A 9-year-old girl struck by an errant bullet on Milwaukee’s north side about a week after asking if police could keep her safe died Monday afternoon, according to the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s office.
Za’layia Jenkins was pronounced dead at 5 p.m., according to a medical examiner’s official.
Za’layia was struck by a bullet that pierced a wall of her home in the 1500 block of W. Meinecke Ave. as she watched television shortly before 8:30 p.m. May 5, according to Milwaukee police.
“Studies in the United States are very expensive, blocking the way for many individuals to receive an education, find a well-paid job, and live the American dream,” according to a statement from 42 Tuesday.
U.S. tech companies have long complained that there aren’t enough qualified American workers to fill the industry’s job gaps. Companies from Alphabet Inc., to Facebook Inc. to Uber Technologies Inc. are fighting to hire software engineers with the right mix of personality, culture and coding chops. Niel’s school aims to help give more students the opportunity to get a debt-free education in highly desirable skills — “based solely on their talent and motivation,” according to the statement, rather than financial status or education degree.
Mathematics is one of the several ways we communicate, allowing us to grapple with the complex patterns abundant in the universe. If I state that “The number of non-isomorphic groups of order 16 is 14,” then that means something to most mathematicians. It may mean more to some; in particular, those who study groups, or group theorists.
entry Dear Homeowner: If You’re Paying $260,000 in Property Taxes Over 20 Years, What Exactly Do You “Own”?, I questioned the consequences of high property taxes. Some readers wondered if I was saying all property taxes should be abolished. The short answer is no–what I was questioning is local government reliance on property taxes to the point that owning a home no longer makes financial sense because the property taxes consume any appreciation other than the transitory “wealth” generated by a housing bubble.
Madison residents have long paid high property taxes, despite long term disastrous reading results.
As submarines go, the USS Macaroni doesn’t look like much: a series of plastic pipes and rubbery mesh, propelled by two small thrusters and a hand-held circuit board.
But the underwater robot represents months of work by three tech-minded middle-schoolers from Milwaukee Montessori School.
The trio bested more than 50 middle-school teams in the U.S. Navy’s SeaPerch Robotic Submarine regional competition. Now, theirs is the youngest of four Wisconsin teams headed to the national competition Friday in Baton Rouge, La.
“This was the first time our school’s ever done it,” said 12-year-old Owen Ledger of Germantown, the team’s go-to-guy for the mathematical equations needed to calculate such things as buoyancy and water density.
“We were just trying it out,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this.”
Ledger and teammates Xander Salick and Samantha Stahl put their ROV — for Remotely Operated Vehicle — through its paces recently at their top-secret training center. (A friend of a friend’s apartment complex swimming pool.)
American Inst. of Mathematics:
A team of more than 80 mathematicians from 12 countries is charting the terrain of rich, new mathematical worlds, and sharing their discoveries on the Web. The mathematical universe is filled with both familiar and exotic items, many of which are being made available for the first time. The “L-functions and Modular Forms Database (www.LMFDB.org),” abbreviated LMFDB, is an intricate catalog of mathematical objects and the connections between them. Making those relationships visible has been made possible largely by the coordinated efforts of a group of researchers developing new algorithms and performing calculations on an extensive network of computers. The project provides a new tool for several branches of mathematics, physics, and computer science.
academics have made what some experts believe is a breakthrough in random number generation that could have longstanding implications for cryptography and computer security. David Zuckerman, a computer science professor, and Eshan Chattopadhyay, a graduate student, published a paper in March that will be presented in June at the Symposium on Theory of Computing. The paper describes how the academics devised a method for the generation of high quality random numbers. The work is theoretical, but Zuckerman said down the road it could lead to a number of practical advances in cryptography, scientific polling, and the study of other complex environments such as the climate.
Xavier Niel’s new project is an ambitious coding university in Silicon Valley called 42. But the trick is that it’s nothing like other universities out there. 42 is free, doesn’t care about your SAT and wants to educate 10,000 students within the next 5 years.
This isn’t Niel’s first try at building a coding school. 42 has been doing well in France. The French businessman started 42 in 2013, and there are already 2,500 students learning to code right now in Paris. But what makes 42 different?
back, the heavy-equipment manufacturer JCB held a job fair in the glass foyer of its sprawling headquarters near here, but when a throng of prospective employees learned the next step would be drug testing, an alarming thing happened: About half of them left.
That story still circulates within the business community of this historic port city. But the problem has gotten worse.
That said, the U.S. probably also ought to be spending less on infrastructure. Not overall, but on something like a per-mile basis. Broad international cost comparisons across all kinds of infrastructure don’t seem to be available, but there is a growing body of evidence on one particular infrastructure area that matters a lot to me as a New York City commuter: subways and other rail systems. And it shows that U.S. construction costs are among the world’s highest.
Transportation blogger Alon Levy has probably done the most to raise awareness of this, with five years of posts documenting the cost differences. And last year, Tracy Gordon of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and David Schleicher of Yale Law School examined 144 planned and finished rail projects in 44 countries and found that the four most expensive on a per-kilometer basis (and six of the top 12) were in the U.S.
To put these numbers in global perspective, New York’s Second Avenue Subway will cost roughly eight times more than Tokyo’s Koto Waterfront line and 36 times more than Madrid’s Metrosur tunnels on a per-kilometer, purchasing power parity (PPP) basis.
Why is this? It’s actually pretty hard to answer. Here’s Levy, writing in November 2014:
I try to avoid giving explanations for these patterns of construction costs. If I knew for certain what caused them, I would not be blogging; I would be forming a consultancy and teaching New York and other high-cost cities how to build subways for less than $100 million per kilometer.
Still, others have been willing to offer explanations. In a 2012 Bloomberg View piece, New York land-use and transit writer Stephen Smith blamed over-reliance on outside consultants, overly ambitious station architecture and a legal system that favors contractors over the agencies paying them to build things. Gordon and Schleicher agreed that the legal system may be an issue, but for other reasons:
For years, people have constructed cairns, a human-made stack of stones, as landmarks, monuments or tributes. These days, hikers will add a rock to a cairn as they reach a summit of a mountain or a turning point on a trail. The longer one sits across from Khalid Halim in Reboot’s San Francisco office, the more one realizes his sofa is a modern day cairn. Instead of stones, well-known tech leaders, angels and VCs have dropped their guard there—along with their stories, ambitions and fears. It marks the start of many technologists’ inflection points.
American colleges and universities are feeling the entrepreneurial spirit. The number of formal programs (majors, minors, certificates) in entrepreneurship is well over 500, quintupled in the past thirty years according to a Kauffman Foundation report. Entrepreneurship courses for students and faculty numbers top 5,000, taught on more than 2,500 campuses — up from only 250 courses in 1975. In 2013, roughly 400,000 US students took courses related to entrepreneurship taught by 9,000 different faculty members.
The following year nearly a quarter of all incoming college freshmen declared they “wanted to be entrepreneurs” of some kind. Meanwhile, faculty hiring and tenure decisions at research universities are increasingly based on professors’ entrepreneurial ability to generate revenue streams.
First up was crusading lady-savior Nick Kristof, who weighed in this past Sunday with an anguished thumbsucker on the alleged plague of “liberal intolerance” in the American university. Kristof here joins the great trolling chorus of liberal critics of alleged PC trespasses against the spirit of free inquiry. And like those heroes of responsible discourse, he adduces virtually no evidence that any grim show-trial system of intellectual conformity has seized control of the U.S. academy. Yes, he talks with conservative professors who complain of a broad culture of sinister left-leaning groupthink—and yes, they compare themselves to oppressed minorities and other marginalized population. “I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950” confesses one conservative faculty member in a study cited by Kristof—the sort of thing you hear from someone who actually has no idea what it meant to be gay in Mississippi in the 1950s.
arlez-vous francais? If you answered yes, then you’re well on your way to enjoying the many benefits of bilingualism. Speaking both English and French, for example, can enrich your cultural experiences in multilingual destinations like Belgium, Morocco, or Egypt, and broaden your access to books, music, and films.
But the benefits of speaking another language aren’t limited to just cultural perks. “Studies have shown that bilingual individuals consistently outperform their monolingual counterparts on tasks involving executive control,” says Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive psychologist at York University. In other words, speaking more than one language can improve your ability to pay attention, plan, solve problems, or switch between tasks (like making sure you don’t miss your freeway exit while attending to your kids in the back seat). You may think it’s just higher intelligence that underlies these benefits, but evidence suggests otherwise. A 2014 study, for example, showed that those who learned a second language, in youth or adulthood, had better executive functions than those who didn’t, even after accounting for childhood IQ.
State Rep. Dale Kooyenga on Tuesday called the dismal performance of some Milwaukee Public Schools “a humanitarian issue” and defended the turnaround district he helped to create as one way to address their shortcomings.
“We cannot accept the status quo; we need to be open to change,” the Brookfield Republican told Milwaukee teachers union Executive Director Lauren Baker in a wide-ranging debate at the Marquette University Law School. “I know you disagree, but I believe this will help MPS do better.”
Baker said the “takeover district,” as she called it, could divert as much as $41 million from MPS over the next five years. In addition, she said, all of the reforms Kooyenga envisions, including intensive wrap-around services for students, could take place without usurping control from Milwaukee’s democratically elected school board.
Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
Linguistic purism in the English language is the belief that words of native origin should be used instead of foreign-derived ones (which are mainly Latinate and Greek). “Native” (inborn) can mean “Anglo-Saxon” (Engelsaxish) or it can be widened to include all Germanic (Theedish) words. In its mild form, it merely means using existing native words instead of foreign-derived ones (such as using begin instead of commence). In its more extreme form, it involves reviving native words that are no longer widely used (such as ettle for intend) and/or coining new words from Germanic roots (such as wordstock for vocabulary). The resulting language is sometimes called Anglish (coined by the author and humorist Paul Jennings), Roots English (referring to the idea that it is a “return to the roots” of English), among other names. The mild form is often advocated as part of Plain English, but the more extreme form has been and continues to be a fringe movement.
Girls outperformed boys on a national test of technology and engineering literacy that the federal government administered for the first time in 2014, according to results made public Tuesday.
Among eighth-grade students in public and private schools, 45 percent of girls and 42 percent of boys scored proficient on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Overall, 43 percent of all students were proficient.
The test was designed to measure students’ abilities in areas such as understanding technological principles, designing solutions and communicating and collaborating. Girls were particularly strong in the latter.
Columbia’s marketing won me over. I came to Columbia because I did not want to choose between the close interaction with faculty of liberal arts colleges and the world-class scholars of top research universities. Columbia College promised it all—not just some of the best scholarship in the world, but also the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with faculty right away through the Core Curriculum.
But the reality of my experience was quite different.
In eight semesters of the signature Core classes, I was taught by a tenure-track faculty member just once. As an American history major, a significant number of my classes were taught by adjunct and visiting professors. Columbia was slow to hire tenure-track replacements for the legends I came to Columbia to study under.
A few days after dropping off her youngest child at college, Andrea got a phone call. The wounds in her daughter’s mouth from a recent wisdom-tooth surgery had gone septic. Andrea drove there immediately, located an oral surgeon in town, booked a room at the university hotel, and put her daughter to bed to recover. The next morning, Andrea went to her daughter’s classes, taking notes on her behalf. It was important to Andrea, a professor, and her husband, an MBA, that their daughter head into the first semester of college without missing a beat: A future dental career required four years of a stellar undergraduate academic record.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter’s new university specifically for its Greek life, big-time sports, and array of not particularly challenging majors. She and her husband, a CFO of a major Fortune 500 company, were intent on giving their daughter the ideal social experience in college. But when she got there, she seemed not to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who “didn’t ever want to go out [and] meet people”—and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates. Alexis also shipped bags of designer clothes to help her child fit in with affluent sorority members.
The white working class is a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead.
Or if it’s not fully zombified yet, its members are all too busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a progressive. That is, if they’re not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they probably are.
At least that’s what the Democratic Party wants you to believe.
Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won the 93.7 percent white state of West Virginia with ease, beating Clinton among men and women, young and old. The week prior, he cruised to victory in Indiana, despite no longer apparently being a serious contender for the nomination.
Leftists were ecstatic: a socialist winning over middle America!
Mainstream observers were less enthused. In fact, they were quick to dismiss Bernie’s victory on this very basis. They saw an old, infirm, and irrelevant group thwarting their desired coalition of what Michael Lind calls business-friendly “urban cosmopolitanism.”
Janel Hawkins recalls the situation when she became principal of Carver Academy in 2012: “There was so much wrong that I didn’t know where to start.”
Carver, a kindergarten through eighth grade school at 1900 N. 1st St., was one of the most difficult schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system. It had been that way for many years, going back to when it was called Palmer School.
Now, Hawkins says, Carver is “a very different place.” There is no question that the educational environment at Carver is much better — more orderly, more focused, more energetic.
Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen calls for a paradigm shift in the way we think about education, moving away from instrumentalism to the cultivation of civic and social engagement. I find the notion of citizenship as “co-creating” and “world-building” compelling, and I have seen the most profound manifestations of this idea inside a state prison in Massachusetts, where I taught creative writing and literature to a group of men serving life sentences.
In the current discourse around prison education, the efficacy of enrichment programs is often determined by recidivism post-release employment rates: Does the former fall and the latter rise? As the Massachusetts Division of Inmate Training and Education puts it, the purpose of these programs “is to provide comprehensive academic and occupational (vocational training) programs and services that will assist offenders in becoming more productive citizens upon release.” But one of every nine individuals in U.S. prisons is serving a life sentence, almost a third of whom—about 50,000 people—have no possibility of parole. What of those who will never be released? My experience has taught me that we need a different framework for thinking about the role of education in incarcerated spaces, just as Allen suggests that we need a shift in how we think of education more broadly.
As I said in my post yesterday, I think that this directive of the Obama administration on transgender students in public school bathrooms is likely to anger a lot of people (even many liberal Democrats) about federal government intrusion into local control of education. The GOP has the opportunity to exploit that anger and emphasize that they favor localities regaining the upper hand in decisions involving the education of children. Whether it be Trump or other down-ticket GOP candidates, this is an issue that I think could resonate, and it is not tied to specific things such as what bathrooms transgender students will use or the curriculum of Common Core. It has to do with whether the federal government will further take over an important societal function—the education of children—that has traditionally been something over which parents and communities have wanted to exercise a great deal of control.
Michael Bloomberg and Charles Koch:
During college commencement season, it is traditional for speakers to offer words of advice to the graduating class. But this year the two of us—who don’t see eye to eye on every issue—believe that the most urgent advice we can offer is actually to college presidents, boards, administrators and faculty.
Our advice is this: Stop stifling free speech and coddling intolerance for controversial ideas, which are crucial to a college education—as well as to human happiness and progress.
Not getting your child vaccinated is dangerous and dumb, and the Ontario government wants to educate the parents who think otherwise. It introduced legislation this week that, if passed, would require parents to attend an educational session before they’re allowed to get a vaccine exemption for their child.
A “local public health unit” would run the educational sessions; exactly what they’d involve still needs to be determined. The government says “public health units and other stakeholders” would be involved in deciding what they look like.
Besides being named Minnesota Teacher of the Year on Sunday, Abdul Wright scored two firsts.
Wright, who teaches eighth-grade language arts at the Best Academy in Minneapolis, is the first black male to win the honor, and also the first charter-school teacher so honored.
“I know that I have an opportunity to give young people who come from across this country, especially African-American people, a model of excellence to aspire to,” Wright told the gathering at the Radisson Blu hotel at Mall of America in Bloomington. “I know I will represent every educator in this room and every parent in this room. I want you to know that I will be deserving of this award.”
As his name was announced, Wright stood and had the other finalists come in for a group hug.
“Everyone in this room is deserving of this award,” he said. “We come from a diverse group of backgrounds, and we all have our own experiences. And to know that so many people who come from all over the state have one thing in common, and that’s to make our students rock stars.”
With the President’s recent #CSforall initiative and an increasing focus on STEM, all signs point to the need to establish standards and best practices for teaching computer science to young children. The consensus in the industry is that the best way to introduce computer science and computational thinking to young children is through visual programming languages. Get rid of painstaking syntax to give kids flexibility and control of software at a young age.
Teachers pack their items outside of Everest College, in City of Industry, California, one of the shuttered Corinthian Colleges.
Last year, I met fifteen former students and graduates of Corinthian Colleges who had taken a remarkable action to protest the collection of their student debt. Corinthian, a for-profit institution that was, at the time, facing a financial meltdown and several lawsuits over alleged fraud in its recruitment process, had recently started shutting down or selling off its campuses. The students, calling themselves the Corinthian Fifteen, had organized a “debt strike,” refusing to repay their student loans even at the risk of going into default. Their argument was that the Department of Education shouldn’t collect on loans that students were misled into incurring, especially since they earned a degree that was all but worthless or, in some cases, found that their college had shut down before they could graduate.
Related: connected math and the math forum audio/video.
When asked to list their biggest concerns, nearly two out of three respondents cited identity theft, while nearly half brought up credit card or banking fraud. About one in five listed data collection by the government.
The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.
looking at a globe close up is a wonderful thing. Interacting with a round replica of our world gives an entirely different sensation to say looking at Google maps and even a physical atlas doesn’t really give the true geographical sense of our planet. Two dimensional maps, often relying on the Mercator Projection, can show Greenland to be the size of all of Africa when it’s really more like Mexico. It takes a globe to really see that Texas may be the largest state in the continental U.S. but Australia’s largest state is three times its size. Or that the entire eastern seaboard of America fits quite comfortably into Kazakhstan.
For Peter Bellerby, a passion for globes has quite unexpectedly turned into a successful business—his company is one of the world’s only remaining traditional globe makers. “I think everyone has some sort of soft spot for globes,” he explains. “Maps are wonderful but globes are tangible and tell so much more of a story.”
At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival premiere of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, director Woody Allen was asked about aging. He replied with his characteristic, straight-faced pessimism. “I find it a lousy deal. There is no advantage in getting older. I’m 74 now. You don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser … Your back hurts more, you get more indigestion … It’s a bad business, getting old. I’d advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.”
Creaking bones and bad digestion notwithstanding, is that really the only face of aging? Turns out, it’s not. At least for the fortunate few, old age may not be Woody Allenesque; instead old age is when they become compassionate and wise. Yes, wise.
Of course, some may consider the prose stylings of Charles Dickens a bit overwrought and irrelevant to contemporary life. (If you believe this “scientific evaluation,” he writes no better than the dark and stormy posturings of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, because statistics never lie.) If you’re not a huge fan, you might say that Charles Dickens gives you the creeps… and you would be right, because he was the first to coin the expression, in David Copperfield (1849): “She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps.’” The truth is, Dickens was something of a linguistic revolutionary in his day and his influence on the English language can still be seen today. Other common expressions we use today, such as to “clap eyes” on someone, “butter-fingers,” “slow-coach,” and even “fairy story” were all things Dickens said first.
Swedish colleges and universities are free. Yep. Totally free.
But students there still end up with a lot of debt. The average at the beginning of 2013 was roughly 124,000 Swedish krona ($19,000). Sure, the average US student was carrying about 30% more, at $24,800.
Legal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by 890 U.S. college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent.
But the students’ claims may be derailed by a dispute over whether they should file their cases individually, rather than as a group.
Hundreds of U.S. college students and alumni in 21 states joined the original lawsuit filed in January by the four Berkeley students. On April 29, another 180 filed a separate lawsuit making the same claim: that Google’s Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes.
Conversing with my colleagues during our weekly management meeting is always a bit exasperating. Their marathons, mountain bike challenges and adventure races put my weekend activity of pruning roses to shame. The insult to injury is that these activities always take place in some exotic location. Think of a beach, desert or some God forsaken area in the wild. It was during one of these sessions that it struck me that I needed a constructive hobby.
It is self-evident to people that know me that a sport related hobby will not cut muster with me. The closest I come to exercise is ambling down the escalator to have lunch with a colleague. So where to start? I had to first figure out what my “thing” is. This is far easier said than done. I always imagined myself as an Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. What could be better than exploring an ancient cave, blowing dust off some ancient tablet and deciphering messages that were hidden for thousands of years? Throw in a bi-plane, a gorgeous girl, a couple of Nazi thugs and you have yourself a great hobby. As an example consider a cryptic statement like “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν”.
The challenge is to hit 9000 dead-on.
I was surprised. My nephew is in Year 8 and punches above his weight in maths. I have seen him rattle off multi-digit addition problems with maddening accuracy. Why had the solution eluded him?
I scribbled away, beginning with trial and error before turning my focus to the Ones column. That already narrows the choices, because the four digits in this column must add up to 10. Regardless of how I rearrange the four numbers, the final digits must comprise 4,4,1,1 or 3,3,3,1 or 4,3,2,1. I continued down this path, hoping to systematically arrive at the solution. It was exhausting work and I could see why my nephew was struggling — there is no obvious combination that works, and there are a lot of possibilities to burn through.
Almost 20 percent of Americans 65 and older are now working, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the most older people with a job since the early 1960s, before the U.S. enacted Medicare.
Our current controversies over free speech on campus actually represent the second set of battles in a culture war that erupted in the U.S. during the late 1980s and that subsided by the mid-1990s — its cessation probably due to the emergence of the World Wide Web as a vast, new forum for dissenting ideas. The openness of the web scattered and partly dissipated the hostile energies that had been building and raging in the mainstream media about political correctness for nearly a decade. However, those problems have stubbornly returned, because they were never fully or honestly addressed by university administrations or faculty the first time around. Now a new generation of college students, born in the 1990s and never exposed to open public debate over free speech, has brought its own assumptions and expectations to the conflict.
As a veteran of more than four decades of college teaching, almost entirely at art schools, my primary disappointment is with American faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom failed from the start to acknowledge the seriousness of political correctness as an academic issue and who passively permitted a swollen campus bureaucracy, empowered by intrusive federal regulation, to usurp the faculty’s historic responsibility and prerogative to shape the educational mission and to protect the free flow of ideas. The end result, I believe, is a violation of the free speech rights of students as well as faculty.
What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American Revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness — when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them.
What I have just sketched is the political psychobiography of the past 45 years of American university life. My premises, based on my own college experience at the dawn of the counterculture, are those of the radical Free Speech Movement that erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in the Fall of 1964, my first semester at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Berkeley protests were led by a New York-born Italian-American, Mario Savio, who had worked the prior summer in a voter-registration drive for disenfranchised African-Americans in Mississippi, where he and two colleagues were physically attacked for their activities. When Savio tried to raise money at Berkeley for a prominent unit of the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was stopped by the university because of its official ban on political activity on campus.
The uprising at Berkeley climaxed in Savio’s fiery speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, where he denounced the university administration. Of the 4000 protestors in Sproul Plaza, 800 were arrested. That demonstration embodied the essence of 1960s activism: it challenged, rebuked, and curtailed authority in the pursuit of freedom and equality; it did not demand, as happens too often today, that authority be expanded to create special protections for groups reductively defined as weak or vulnerable or to create buffers to spare sensitive young feelings from offense. The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more.
IN 1979, in a short book called “The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class,” the sociologist Alvin Gouldner took up a question then being vigorously debated by social analysts: Did the student movements of the 1960s signal that the highly educated were on their way to becoming a major political force in American society?
Dr. Gouldner’s answer was yes. As a man of the left, he had mixed feelings about this development, since he thought the intelligentsia might be tempted to put its own interests ahead of the marginalized groups for whom it often claimed to speak.
Today, with an ideological gap widening along educational lines in the United States, Dr. Gouldner’s arguments are worth revisiting. Now that so many people go to college, Americans with bachelor’s degrees no longer constitute an educational elite. But the most highly educated Americans — those who have attended graduate or professional school — are starting to come together as a political bloc.
To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor’s overworked teaching staff.
But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot.
Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson’s true identity to students until after they’d turned in their final exams.
Students were amazed. “I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!” wrote one in the class’s online forum. “Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!” said another.
The percentage of families earning middle-class incomes fell in nearly nine out of 10 major metro areas across the country between 2000 and 2014, according to new research by the Pew Research Center. The study defined middle-class households as those making between two-thirds and twice the national median income. That was roughly $42,000 to $125,000 a year for a family of three in 2014, though adjustments were also made for the cost of living in different areas.
Our ruling class’s forceful exaltation of the persons, proclivities, and symbols by which it defines itself, along with its pretense that its preferences trump reality, defeat themselves by their absurdity. That absurdity stems from its members’ conceit about who they are.
Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media, backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. They end by demanding that we substitute their will for what our very senses tell us is reality—because they please to be who they are.
There is a sense in which the ruling icons of political correctness—lesser Americans are racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and infested by pathologies for which they must make amends—are petty partisanship meant to squeeze the last drops of voter participation out of the Democratic Party’s habitual constituencies. But our Progressive rulers’ partisanship is more. It is identity politics waged as war.
Ignoring the irony, Obama described what the war is about by accusing Americans unlike himself (and the progressives to whom he was speaking) of being inferior because of their “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Specifically, he said, they “cling to guns or religion.” Hence, pursuing identity war requires breaking the American people’s grip on their sense of worth, on their very connection to reality. That is why, over decades, our Progressive ruling class has penalized Americans who say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, re-written schoolbooks, etc.
NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course “Men in Literature.”
Editor’s note. The following is a fairly lengthy (3,300-word) essay introducing a new case of bias against a faculty member. Professor Dennis Gouws is a tenured professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts who has run afoul of college authorities who in 2014 abruptly began to find fault with his teaching a long-established course, “Men in Literature.” In 2016, they cancelled his course, culminating a long campaign of petty hostility against him because of his scholarly and professional interest in “biological maleness.”
We present this case in detail because it exemplifies a development in the campus culture wars that has not yet come into focus for many observers. The Gouws affair shows the intensification of efforts by campus feminists to use bureaucratic authority to enforce their ideological preferences on the faculty as a whole.
Professor Gouws is an academic engaged in teaching his courses, expressing his opinions through ordinary channels, and advocating for open debate over his ideas. He is not someone who was spoiling for a fight, but his department, his dean, his provost, and his president decided that his views were impermissible. This is his story.
* * *
The attempt to marginalize, discredit, and silence the views of faculty members who dissent from the current campus orthodoxies never stops. It happens at large universities and at small colleges. It happens in the sciences and in the humanities. It happens on big public issues that everyone cares about and on small matters that could hardly muster a quorum on a rainy afternoon.
It happens explicitly at some colleges and universities that wear their leftist commitments to “social justice” openly, like armbands, and it happens implicitly at other colleges and universities that try to maintain the pretense of intellectual openness while crushing dissenting views behind closed doors.
Put all the pieces together, and the picture of the faculty side of contemporary higher education is pretty grim. Faculty members, no matter their private views, know that the price of open dissent is very high. It doesn’t really matter whether a faculty member has tenure. There are plenty of levers besides the threat of job loss. Course assignments. Teaching loads. Promotions. Salary increases. Sabbatical leaves. Petty harassment. Departmental ostracism.
Google’s “knowledge panels” materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:
Betty White is 94 years old.
The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.
Taipei is the capital of — ahem — the “small island nation” of Taiwan.
If you’ve ever Googled a person, place or thing — which, survey suggests, you almost definitely have — then you’ve encountered these aggressive, bold-faced modules, one of Google’s many bids for your fleeting attention. Since their quiet, casual introduction in 2012, knowledge panels and other sorts of “rich answers” have mushroomed across Google, appearing atop the results on roughly one-third of its 100 billion monthly searches, not only in response to simple, numerical queries like “Betty White age,” but also to more complex, nuanced questions like “capital of Israel” or “D.C.’s best restaurant.”
To Google, that’s proof of its semantic search technology; to Googlers, it’s a convenience that saves them a few clicks. But to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it’s a looming public literacy threat — one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook’s trending topics are curated by humans.
“It undermines people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions,” said Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher who studies knowledge production online. “And that is something I think we really need to study and process as a society.”
In Dr. Yu Huiju’s office at Xin Hua Hospital, there are no chairs for her patients. It’s a trick that she picked up from other doctors working in one of Shanghai’s biggest pediatrics departments, she told Sixth Tone.
“People come with so many questions that if I give them a chair, they keep raising one question after another,” she said. “But I can’t afford the time.”
In one morning, Yu will typically see around 36 patients, without allowing herself so much as a sip of water or a trip to the bathroom. This kind of heavy workload is very common for doctors in China.
While in the U.S. there are fewer than 700 children for each doctor, in China there’s one pediatrician for every 2,300 children, and the ratio is growing worse.
Between 2010 and 2015, the number of pediatricians in China dropped from 105,000 to 100,000, and earlier this year the central government estimated that 200,000 more doctors are needed to solve the current staffing shortage. With an expected baby boom on the way as a result of the recent implementation of the two-child policy, China’s child-doctor shortage could become even more pronounced.
Once accepted, students focus on techniques that will prepare them for college and beyond such as organization, writing, reading and self-advocacy. The program also takes students on college campus tours and works to place them in paid summer internships.
Johnson said Thursday that donors have given $1.4 million in scholarships for the students.
“This celebration is about you,” he told the students. “The community is here to support you and we’ll support you throughout your journey. You will persist and succeed.”
The keynote speaker was Gloria Ladson-Billings, UW-Madison’s Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education. Her speech was delivered using several phrases millennial youth today use such as “turn up,” “stay woke,” and “take several seats.” She advised students to “turn up” for class by showing up on time and taking their studies seriously.
Even for the skeptics among us, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this anniversary: 75 years ago – at the height of the Second World War – a 31-year-old German civil engineer called Konrad Zuse presented the Z3. It was the first programmable, automatic digital computer – and was widely viewed as the child of a family of machines we take for granted today, from desktop computers and mobile devices to the massive data centers controlling the world.
Compared to the phones and pads we carry in our pockets, however, the Z3 was huge. It was a cluster of glass-fronted wooden cabinets and wiring looms.
And its use was not intended for gaming or social networking on trams and in school yards, but for the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing-flutter.
It’s a common adage in Silicon Valley that 90% of startups ultimately fail. To understand why that’s the case, a pair of researchers meticulously pored over 193 blog posts—startup postmortems, if you will—written by founders examining what went wrong.
It was a heartwrenching experience for Kerry Jones, an employees at data-marketing firm Fractl, to be involved in the project. “It’s extremely emotional, and I think it’s really obvious how much of their lives most people sink into their companies,” she says. (Here’s one sample from Zirtual founder Maren Kate: “I cry for all the employees we hurt. I cry for all the clients we infuriated. And I cry for the investors we let down.”)
There are, of course, limitations to this data set. For starters, there are fewer than 200 posts in it, and they all were written by founders willing to share their stories—or the portions of their stories that they were willing to reveal, anyway. “There isn’t some outside entity that went in and evaluated this company,” Jones notes. “That’s something important to keep in mind.”
Teach for America‘s Education for Justice pilot, which trained would-be teachers in social justice and cultural competency, has been canceled, writes Stephen Sawchuk in Ed Week. College students took courses for a year to prepare to teach in low-income, minority communities.
TFA is cutting 150 positions, including its national diversity office, notes Sawchuk. “Still, this is somewhat surprising news. After all, the pilot was one that TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard announced in 2014 to great fanfare.”
After nearly a year of E4J, Kailee Lewis, a future TFA corps member, believes telling teachers they’ll show low-income students “what’s possible when they work hard and dream big” is a false and dangerous lie.
ew Jersey may be the Garden State, but don’t think you’ll find any country bumpkins in Newark, the state’s largest city with a school district that enrolls 44,000 children. Every Newarkian knows that mayors, city councilmen, and ward operators control municipal elections, including the three seats up this year for the nine-member School Advisory Board (SAB). Consequently, voter-turnout rates on school board candidate election days typically hover at a sparse 7 percent; residents know it’s not their vote that truly matters.
But the April 19th school board election three weeks ago was different because “an army of charter parents” found their voice — and started speaking as one.
Comparing Madison’s daycare and early childhood education programs with Madison’s public schools would not be apples-to-apples. But the quality of care available to Madison’s young children appears to stand in stark contrast to the quality of education those children later receive in Madison’s public schools.
Everyone knows about the district’s racial achievement gaps, but quality overall is also solidly mediocre, according to the most recent state report card and other state-reported metrics, including test scores.
Despite this, Madison administrators and School Board members have long resisted spending tax dollars to educate Madison students at schools they don’t directly control
Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results and a focus on adult employment.
Once, when I asked my friend from a small tribe in Burma how they would say “breakfast” there, she told me that they didn’t have a word for it because they only ate twice a day–lunch and dinner. I happen to have a lot of friends who speak English as their second language and that made me realize that a language has a lot to do with its culture’s uniqueness. Because of that there are some untranslatable words.
The report by Pew Research Center found that the share of the middle class fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas examined from 2000 to 2014, including major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which saw a relatively sharp drop in its middle class.
For many areas, a big culprit in the declining middle was the falloff in manufacturing jobs during that 14-year period, when factories shed about 5 million workers from their payrolls nationally.
“The 10 metropolitan areas with the greatest losses in economic status from 2000 to 2014 have one thing in common — a greater than average reliance on manufacturing,” the Pew report said, referring to places such as Detroit; Rockford, Ill.; Springfield, Ohio; and the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area in North Carolina.
The converging trends of falling state investment, rising tuition, and stagnant incomes has finally pushed higher education out of the grasp of low- and middle-income Americans, even at community colleges, a new report contends.
College is less affordable now, when adjusted for inflation, than it was before the economic downturn, student financial aid no longer is enough to fill the gap, and low- and middle-income families already are having trouble making ends meet just to cover living expenses, the report said.
visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge that can be used by anyone in order to dramatically improve the discoverability of research results.
We are going to provide a large-scale system of open, interactive and interlinked knowledge maps spanning all fields of research. Around these maps, we will develop a space for collective knowledge organisation and exploration, connecting researchers, students, librarians, journalists, practitioners and citizens.
motivated people into teaching is a struggle in many countries. Low pay is often blamed, especially when it is combined with long working hours. The difficulties of teacher recruitment, one argument goes, is why pupils in some countries do so poorly in school. But data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest that—at least for educational outcomes—neither hours nor pay matters much. Japanese and South Korean pupils are neck-and-neck near the top of the PISA rankings of 15-year-olds’ literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge. Their teachers are paid about the same, but put in vastly different hours: a whopping 54 hours per week in Japan, compared with 37 in South Korea. Pupils in Estonia, which has the lowest-paid teachers in the group, do better than those in the Netherlands, where teachers’ salaries are five times as high and hours just the same. Even when GDP per person is taken into account the Netherlands is unusually generous to teachers, and Estonia unusually stingy.
PBS Newshour:
At the direction of the Legislature, the UW System recently created the new Office of Educational Opportunity to oversee the creation of charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee without oversight from local school districts. How do you react to that?
I’m opposed to the concept. I find it objectionable that the state has allowed one person to essentially make decisions that our local community can make through school boards and allow that person to authorize who can operate a school that’s not accountable to the public but has a call on our resources. I find that offensive. It’s repugnant that they think it’s acceptable policy when I think most people in Madison would say it’s unacceptable policy.
The best defense is a good offense and having our public schools be the best public schools we can is certainly one of the strong directions that we need to emphasize. We’re fortunate to have really good schools in Madison but I think we need to do even more to bring in staff voices and parent voices into the schools to have the public own them even more. If we see proposals coming in for non-public charter entities, we can actively organize an opposition to those sorts of things if we’re concerned as a city that we don’t want to have our public dollars controlled by non-public entities without any oversight.
There have been mixed reactions to the district’s new Behavior Education Plan. What have union members said about the BEP?
Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.
Men are less likely than women to go to university, those who do are more likely to drop out and those who complete their course are less likely to get a good degree, according to a thinktank report.
Universities are being urged to set themselves targets to recruit more male students amid growing alarm about the widening gender gap in higher education.
One of the report’s authors said the underachievement of men in higher education was a national scandal and called on universities to focus funding for widening participation on young men.
The West Virginia Board of Education has approved alternative teacher certification programs for Kanawha and seven other counties, including a McDowell County program that will begin to bring Teach For America’s services to the state.
At the board’s meeting Wednesday, members also heard criticism from school administrators about their plans to start giving entire schools and counties A-F grades; approved significantly amending a construction and renovation plan at the Romney Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to drop the cost from $45.5 million to $16.5 million; returned control over personnel issues to the local school board in Gilmer County, one of the state’s last two takeover counties; and approved a plan for Kanawha’s St. Albans High to reduce student instructional time in order to incorporate 30 minutes of teacher collaboration into each school day.
Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited — and then disinvited — to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech.
Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author of a very insightful book titled Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
In short, Jason Riley’s views on race are different from the views that prevail on most college campuses. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. But that was before academia — and the education system in general — became virtually a monopoly of the political left.
For seniors graduating from the University of Michigan this month, employers have been lining up since the fall to offer interviews and boast of their companies’ benefits. Recruiters would ask when their competitors were coming, said Geni Harclerode, the university’s assistant director of employer development, and then they’d say: “Well, we want to come the week before.”“This has been one of our largest seasons of hiring,” she said. “The job market has been very good.”
The outlook for many high school graduates is more challenging, as Vynny Brown can attest. Now 20, he graduated two years ago from Waller High School in Texas, and has been working for nearly a year at Pappasito’s Cantina in Houston, part of a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants. He earns $7.25 an hour filling takeout orders or $2.13 an hour plus tips as a server, which rarely adds up to more than the minimum, he said. He would like to apply to be a manager, but those jobs require some college experience.
“That is something I don’t have,” said Mr. Brown, who says he cannot afford to go to college now. “It’s the biggest struggle I’ve had.”
That’s a quotation from a blogger’s review of my book, Kook. A response to the risky, and sometimes illegal, activities the characters get up to. Set in a world of die-hard Cornish surfers, Kook is about a young guy (Sam) falling for a girl who is, in every way, trouble. Jade is obsessed with riding the biggest wave she can find, as soon as she can find it. Whether she’s ready to or not. And that’s only part of what Jade and her crew get up to. It’s not just the surfing. It’s fighting, raves, drinking, getting into trouble with the police.
While I normally cast a skeptical eye on fashionable trends in American education, count me among those who fully support the “gap year” between high school and college. Already a growing phenomenon, its popularity will surely increase following the announcement that Malia Obama will delay her inaugural semester at Harvard until the fall of 2017. As the New York Times noted earlier this week, a bevy of research and anecdotal evidence suggests that gap-year students arrive on campus better prepared—academically, socially, and emotionally—than their non-gap-year classmates. University administrators have thus become some of the biggest advocates for postponing enrollment.
What they don’t seem to appreciate is that the gap-year trend represents a subtle indictment of their institutions. After all, if people believe that a gap year will accelerate students’ maturation, help them cultivate practical and/or vocational skills, make them more sophisticated, or give them (in the words of journalist Susan Greenberg) “a newfound sense of purpose and perspective,” the implication is that colleges will fall short in each of these areas. For that matter, the gap year raises important questions about why so many people are attending college in the first place.
The simplest political question posed by the ongoing Katehi crisis is, “Can state government trust the University of California to clean its own house?” The non-firing of Linda Katehi says, “No.” It’s hard to imagine a better targeted confirmation of UC’s reputation in Sacramento for poor management. If we didn’t have the Katehi Affair, Jerry Brown would have had to invent it.
Yes she deserves due process, yes women chancellors deserve it as much as male chancellors do, and yes the campus view should be decisive rather than UCOP’s. But UC’s bureaucracy should have prevented the chancellor’s “mistakes” before they happened, or an internal investigation should have caught them before the Sacramento Bee did, or President Napolitano should have completed her investigation before she tried to fire Chancellor Katehi, or she should have succeeded in firing her on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence she already had. None of these things happened.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom inverviews Tom Mullaney
EFF WASSERSTROM: When we spoke at Microsoft, you stressed that many things about China’s current place in the IT world fly in the face of past conventional wisdom about characters and alphabets. What exactly did you have in mind?
TOM MULLANEY: When it comes to technologies of communication and the Chinese language, we live in a time that hardly anyone could have anticipated at the dawn of the 20th century. Not only are Chinese characters still with us — they are one of the fastest, most widespread, and successful languages of the digital age. More than ever before, Chinese is a world script, and China is an IT giant. This would shock the many people who, for the past two centuries, assumed that such an outcome was conceivable only if China got rid of character-based writing and went the route of wholesale alphabetization — which it did not. This outcome was not supposed to have been possible — and yet here we are. What did we miss?
You argued at Microsoft that once we get to computers, any notion that using Chinese characters rather than letters is a disadvantage gets exploded. Would you elaborate on this — and, for those who haven’t followed these issues, say a little about the long history of claims that using characters inevitably impedes adopting new technologies ?
This is a really important question, and one that comes up a lot when I give lectures and do consultations at tech companies like Google and Microsoft. In the Q&A to my Google Tech talk back in 2011 — “A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley” — we spent a good two hours on this, in fact. This is also a major inspiration for the computing and conference this weekend at Stanford (Shift CTRL: New Perspectives on Computing and New Media).
Ever since the mass manufacture of typewriters began in the U.S. in the 19th century, engineers and entrepreneurs imagined a day when this new technology would conquer the Chinese language and open up a vast new market to Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and more — just the way it had other languages and markets in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.
It never did (for reasons I explain in my new book coming out soon from MIT Press), and yet the fantasy didn’t die. It was renewed in the age of computing and, by the 1990s, seemed to many to have come true: computers throughout China began to look “just like ours,” even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which today is ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world.
In the Western world, people began to assume that the Latin alphabet had finally “conquered” Chinese — just like they assumed it always would. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Mizzou’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, Ellen De Graffenreid, received a disheartening email last fall at the pinnacle of the crisis on campus. A disgruntled parent wrote to the university’s Board of Curators, describing how her son, a sophomore, considered transferring out, while their two high-school-aged children “have all but eliminated Mizzou from their college list.”
WATCH: Exclusive: Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up a landmine in the desert
Someone had forwarded the note to the university’s Department of Marketing and Communications, adding: “I’m sure you already know this but you have a PR nightmare on your hands.” De Graffenreid, in turn, forwarded it to the college’s leadership, adding the letter from a parent was “pretty representative of the middle of the road people we are losing.”
New correspondence reviewed by Heat Street and National Review depicts the cataclysmic backlash against the University of Missouri as its administrators grappled with demands from rowdy protestors, a hunger-striking grad student, and a boycotting football team. The protests ultimately toppled both the president and the chancellor.
Just before the UW-Milwaukee professors’ meeting Tuesday, Walker’s office issued a scathing statement deriding the no-confidence votes and faculty tenure.
“Some faculty bodies … appear more interested in protecting outdated ‘job for life’ tenure than about helping students get the best education possible,” Walker said. “The university should not be about protecting the interests of the faculty, but about delivering value and excellence to Wisconsin.”
The governor’s rebuke of faculty illustrates an important limit to their symbolic resolutions: While Cross may be unpopular enough among many professors to prompt no-confidence votes, he still has the backing of the Board of Regents that controls his job, and both he and the Regents have support among Republicans lawmake
Over my 25 years as a teacher turned university professor and administrator, I have watched countless numbers of students enter and leave college – most are well prepared to harness the realities of life after leaving the college cocoon while others are less well equipped. Freshmen arrive on college campuses with different levels of academic preparation; different aptitudes and proclivities; and different goals and agendas for their first substantial attempt at making it on their own. Parents, while you still have some modicum of influence over your children’s decision-making, please:
Do all you can to ensure that they do not pursue fields of study that offer very few prospects for gainful employment after graduation. Even if your children decide during their college matriculation to apply to graduate school, they need to pursue undergraduate majors that will yield solid prospects for employment. Graduate school plans change, and you want to avoid their boomeranging back to your house. I have seen, for example, a scant few nursing, engineering, mathematics or science education, accounting, and finance majors without multiple job offers after graduation. I have seen tons of psychology, sociology, English (and I was one!), and political science majors end their university matriculation jobless. The goal must not be singularly focused on getting accepted into college; the goal is graduating from college prepared for the next stage of life. Therefore, post-graduation planning must start with the admissions process, not as an afterthought while sending out graduation invitations.
More than 100 school districts have spent $138 million above their state-imposed revenue limits without voter approval since 2009, according to an analysis from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Since that year, school districts have been able to spend above their revenue caps without first going to voters if the money is being used for projects that are intended to improve energy efficiency in the district. In all, 147 school districts have used the exception.
According to the report, school districts rarely took advantage of the exception until 2012 — after Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers tightened revenue limits for districts.
MIT:
An international group of mathematicians at MIT and other institutions has released a new online resource that provides detailed maps of previously uncharted mathematical terrain.
Steven Starr reached into the back of his hallway closet and fished out the old camera, a gift nearly 50 years ago from the man he says molested him.“It’s like a talisman or a grim reminder,’’ he said, holding the dusty Minolta Autocord in his Los Angeles apartment. Not that he could ever forget what he alleges happened to him when he was 11 at the Fessenden School.
In 1968, he was a lonely sixth-grader from Long Island when he met James Dallmann, a Harvard graduate who taught geography at the all-boys private school in West Newton and was an avid photographer.
Third-grader Andrew Calabrese carries his backpack everywhere he goes at his San Diego-area school. His backpack isn’t just filled with books, it is carrying his robotic pancreas.
The device, long considered the Holy Grail of Type 1 diabetes technology, wasn’t constructed by a medical-device company. It hasn’t been approved by regulators.
It was put together by his father.
Jason Calabrese, a software engineer, followed instructions that had been shared online to hack an old insulin pump so it could automatically dose the hormone in response to his son’s blood-sugar levels. Mr. Calabrese got the approval of Andrew’s doctor for his son to take the home-built device to school.
The Calabreses aren’t alone. More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. The systems—known in the industry as artificial pancreases or closed loop systems—have been studied for decades, but improvements to sensor technology for real-time glucose monitoring have made them possible.
On Friday, Harvard University announced its plan to ban students from being in final clubs, fraternities or sororities while at the same time holding leadership positions in official campus organizations, such as the student newspaper or sports teams. The move came after months of heated discussion over the role of such clubs in the Harvard social scene and concerns about sexual assault and gender discrimination.
But at least some of the clubs are putting up a fight. And even in the absence of threatened lawsuits, the school faces challenges just implementing its new rules.
An advisory group of faculty, students and administrators will develop procedures for putting the rules in place, with further details of who is in that group being released in coming months, according to spokeswoman Rachael Dane.
Here are 10 tips on how to do good in school and also get good grades in school.
Know what you are good at, and what you are not good at
Find every single thing you’re good at first, then everything you are not so good at and what you aren’t necessarily the best in. Put both on a big sheet of paper and stick it in your room somewhere where you can see it every day. Once you see your weaknesses every day, psychologically, you will start to try and get rid of them.
Before publishing this article, the editors of Nature asked me to declare any competing interests. This is routine practice with most journals and is intended to address the serious issue of bias in research. The problem is that after competing interests are disclosed in published research, almost nothing is done with them.
Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi are undergraduate sophomore students at the University of Washington (UW) studying Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and Business Administration, respectively. The two met their freshman year and connected over a shared interest in invention and problem solving.
Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:
College bound high school students can now learn from one of the best sources in the country. The Concord Review is offering a two-week intensive expository writing workshops, led by a Harvard Ph.D. historian. The workshop will be held on the campus of Regis College, just west of Boston in Weston, Massachusetts.
Thirty percent of students published in The Concord Review have been admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale, and many have gone to other Ivy League colleges, and 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.”
132 of the TCR authors have gone to Harvard—11%.
The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only journal in the world for the academic history papers of secondary students, now with 1,198 essays (average length 7,400 words) by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.
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.
The instructor for the course holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Harvard University, and has advised many Harvard undergraduates on their honors theses.
The course is full for this Summer, and includes students from Korea and China, as well as from across the United States. Students are welcome to join the waitlist at tcr.org/summer.
I continue my exploration of the scores for the bubble quiz that have been registered on the NewsHour website, now numbering more than 50,000.
If you want your child to grow up clueless about mainstream white America, what are the zip codes that have the best track record?
And the winner is… zip code 10023.
To answer that question, I used the 50,464 cases with a score on the bubble quiz and the zip code where the person lived at age 10 that were available as of yesterday morning when I started this exercise. I asked my statistical software to calculate the median bubble score for every zip code represented in those 50,464 cases. Since I couldn’t make any judgments about zip codes that were represented by just a few people, I chose 10 as the lower limit of scores that I would examine more closely. There’s still a lot of room for oddball results with a sample size of 10, but this procedure gave me a useful starting point for examining patterns.
The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers, and, worse still, polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page.
Perhaps our attitude to the net has changed because we now see how bad it is for knowledge. Or perhaps the net has so utterly transformed knowledge that we don’t recognize knowledge when we see it.
For philosopher Michael P. Lynch, our fears are warranted — the internet is a wrong turn in the history of knowledge. “Information technology,” Professor Lynch argues in his new book, The Internet of Us, “while expanding our ability to know in one way, is actually impeding our ability to know in other, more complex ways.” He pursues his argument with commendable seriousness, clarity, and attunement to historical context — and yet he misses where knowledge actually lives on the net, focusing instead on just one aspect of the phenomenon of knowledge. He is far from alone in this.
Free lectures, admission to athletic games and concerts, even shuttles to Trader Joe’s are some of the perks that neighbors of Princeton University get from New Jersey’s only Ivy League school.
A growing number of residents, though, resent the gestures. Riding a national wave of discontent with nonprofit institutions, they’re suing to challenge the tax-exempt status of Princeton, whose $22.7 billion endowment makes it the fourth-richest U.S. university. The outcome could cut homeowners’ annual property taxes, averaging $17,699, by a third. It also could end the freebies that make Princeton a cushy oasis while other New Jersey towns, burdened by high public-worker costs and flat state aid, struggle to maintain basic services.
“As if being 1984 weren’t enough.” Thomas Pynchon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, marked the unnerving year with an honest question about seemingly dystopian technology: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” The Association of American Publishers records that by 1984, between 40 and 50 percent of American authors were using word processors. It had been a quarter-century since novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in which he saw intellectual life split into “literary” and “scientific” halves. Pynchon posited that the division no longer held true; it obscured the reality about the way things were going. “Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors,” he wrote. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.”
The literary history of the early years of word processing—the late 1960s through the mid-’80s—forms the subject of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s new book, Track Changes. The year 1984 was a key moment for writers deciding whether to upgrade their writing tools. That year, the novelist Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer—itself named for the error message it spat up so often; and Gore Vidal grumped that word processing was “erasing” literature. He grumped in vain. By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)
One day last week at 9.29am I hunched nervously over my keyboard and prepared to do battle with an entity called Emma. We were each primed to write about the official UK employment data at 9.30am and file our stories to my editor. I was sure Emma would be quicker than me, but I really hoped I would be better.
Her creator, a start-up called Stealth, calls her an “autonomous artificial intelligence” designed to deliver professional services such as research and analysis. Since it is fashionable to predict that AI will supplant white-collar workers including journalists, I wanted to put it to the test.Emma was indeed quick: she filed in 12 minutes to my 35. Her copy was also better than I expected. Her facts were right and she even included relevant context such as the possibility of Brexit (although she was of the dubious opinion that it would be a “tailwind” for the UK economy). But to my relief, she lacked the most important journalistic skill of all: the ability to distinguish the newsworthy from the dull. While she correctly pointed out the jobless rate was unchanged, she overlooked that the number of jobseekers had risen for the first time in almost a year.
Adults often make snap judgments about babies. First impressions lead us to assign them personalities, such as fearful, active or easy to please, and with good reason. Fifty years of evidence shows that babies begin life with traits that set the stage for how they interact with the world—and how the world reacts to them.
That might be one reason why siblings can have such wildly different takes on their own families. Once a mother has assessed her child as shy or fussy, she tends to tailor her behavior to that baby’s personality.
But what if babies make hard and fast judgments about us, too? Just because they can’t say much doesn’t mean they don’t have strong opinions. New research shows that babies are astute observers of the emotional tenor of adult interactions and censor their own behavior accordingly. Published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, the study shows that infants who get a glimpse of a stranger involved in an angry exchange with another stranger will then act more tentatively during play.
A couple of weeks ago, Means outlined a plan in which an unknown number of schools (maybe three?) would be designated to be part of the new program — and the agency that would run them would be MPS itself, with oversight from an independent school operator.
The teachers would be MPS employees, the money to run the schools (at the charter school funding rate, which is about $2,000 less than what MPS itself gets) would go to MPS and the schools would go back to being regular MPS schools in five years if performance improved.
There are ideas for programs at the schools raised in Means’ proposal, which generally are in-line with the “community schools” initiative that MPS itself is trying to grow. This involves extending more services to students and their families, while making changes to academic programs.
I spoke to many of the key players last week. Just about everyone is edgy and uncertain what’s going to happen next.
Related: “an emphasis on adult employment“.
But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.
I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.
Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.
Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.
In the wake of a report released last month that revealed the lack of ethnic and political diversity among Yale Law School professors, the law school community has begun a conversation about why that gap exists, and how to address it.
The report, which was written by a committee of faculty and students over the past year and disseminated in March, addresses diversity and inclusion within law school students and the faculty body. According to the report, although the law school’s faculty diversity levels are comparable to those of peer institutions, students still have concerns about racial, gender and political diversity among professors. After the release of the report, law students interviewed by the News voiced concerns about the lack of specificity in the section on faculty diversity, as compared to the section on student diversity. While the student section offered concrete suggestions for improvement, the section on faculty simply urged the administration to reconsider its approach to faculty diversity “more systematically” than it has in the past.Law school administrators highlighted steps they have already taken steps to improve faculty diversity, such as extending offers to the most diverse slate of faculty in recent memory for next year, and soliciting funding from the University’s new $50 million faculty diversity initiative.
“[The lack of specificity in the faculty diversity section] is both intentional and inevitable,” said James Forman LAW ’92, a law professor and one of the co-chairs for the committee. “It is the faculty that makes the decision about who to hire. All [we] can do is to raise consciousness, put pressure and make sure the faculty understands that the issue is important. I don’t think you will ever be in a scenario where you find much more concrete information than what we got in the report.”
Timothy Martin & Melissa Korn:
Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: Make the wealthiest universities pay for it.
Elite U.S. schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups. State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits—or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.
“College costs have outpaced health-care inflation, and at the same time, there’s this benefit for endowments,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, complaining in an interview about the funds’ tax-free status. “I don’t want to assert a conclusion, but let’s put this in the ‘I’m just saying’ category.”
Mr. Roskam and two other Republican congressional leaders have asked 56 private colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion—including Harvard University, Yale University and Stanford University—for detailed information about their holdings and policies for rewarding large donors with naming rights.
teaching, Lisa Hilsenteger dutifully practised fire drills and mock school lockdowns.
But there was no rehearsal for commandeering a bus full of her young students through a burning city.
“There’s nothing more terrifying than to be in a crisis and not have your children with you,” said Hilsenteger, now out of harm’s way in Athabasca.
As a wildfire encroached on Fort McMurray Tuesday afternoon, Hilsenteger, the principal of Father Turcotte Elementary School, greeted busloads of children arriving from three evacuated Catholic schools in the city. Most families picked their children up from their school, or from Father Turcotte, but when downtown Fort McMurray was evacuated at 4 p.m., 15 children remained.
Julian Ring and Madeline Stocker:
Over the next three weeks, 177 faculty and staff must decide whether or not they want to take the College up on its offer to retire early in exchange for a relatively hefty severance package.The deal, which administrators are projecting will save the College between $1.5–3.5 million per year, is known as a voluntary severance incentive package and is the first step in the administration’s long-term plan to cut spending while slowing the rate of tuition increase.
The payout is relatively straightforward. If a qualifying faculty or staff member — one who is at least 52 years of age, has held their position for 10 years or more and for whom the combination of age and service is a minimum of 75 years — chooses to take the deal, the College will pay the retiree one year’s salary and waive health insurance premiums for the first year after retirement.
“The places I’m familiar with that have done it have found that it’s really been a win-win,” College President Marvin Krislov said. “It’s helped people retire in a way that preserves their dignity and gives them some extra money, and it helps the institution in that it allows for predictability.”
Related: “An emphasis on adult employment“.
To coincide with our 600th anniversary, Cambridge University Library has released a free downloadable iPad app that allows readers to leaf through the pages of texts that changed the world, including those by Newton and Darwin, and the Bible that sparked the printing revolution in the West.
Words that Changed the World brings together six revolutionary books from the collections of Cambridge University Library and offers readers the opportunity to leaf through the pages as if they were holding the books themselves. See the minds of great thinkers develop the theories and concepts which form the foundation of the modern world.
These unique copies of world-changing books were previously only accessible to visitors to the Library: we are now freeing them to be studied across the world as we celebrate the 600th anniversary of our foundation. Images showing these books from cover to cover give the experience of handing these priceless works, while experts discuss specific points of interest via videos to enable the reader to further understand the texts.
