MSU:

Last summer, researchers at Michigan State University reported that one in five Michigan adults, or about 1.7 million people, don’t want children and therefore are child-free. Although that number was surprisingly large to many data has now been confirmed in a follow-up study.

“We found that 20.9% of adults in Michigan do not want children, which closely matches our earlier estimate of 21.6%, and means that over 1.6 million people in Michigan are child-free,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, MSU professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Michigan is demographically similar to the United States as a whole, so this could mean 50 million to 60 million Americans are child-free.”

The new study published in PLOS ONE attempted to replicate the original study by using the same methods, but with a new sample of people. The researchers used data from a representative sample of 1,000 adults who completed MSU’s State of the State Survey, conducted by the university’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. To avoid any risk of cherry-picking results, the researchers preregistered the study by recording in advance exactly how the study would be conducted and what they expected to find.

“Many adults are child-free, and there do not seem to be differences by age, education or income,” said Zachary Neal, associate professor of psychology at MSU and co-author of the study. “However, being child-free is somewhat more common among adults who identify as male, white or who have always been single.”

Bilal Mahmood:

Charles Sylvester has been a special-education teacher for over 20 years in San Francisco Unified School District. He’s seen plenty of ups and downs during that time, but in 2023 he encountered a career first.

The district misreported his taxes. Thousands of dollars of payments were effectively missing.

In SFUSD, payroll is not as straightforward as the private sector.

Due to labor agreements, there are dozens of rules governing how staff can be paid. This creates a complex array of processes that need to be documented.

One problem: almost nothing is documented in SFUSD.

— Bilal Mahmood 馬百樂 (@bilalmahmood) May 6, 2023

Freddie DeBoer:

where men are far more comfortable being more educated and higher-income than their partners. (With many exceptions.) And you can imagine how this dynamic plays out in specific dating pools: as more hard-charging women flood a given dating market, while the number of eligible men drags behind because of increasing advantages for women in school and the workplace, fewer and fewer women are likely to find themselves with a partner they consider marriageable. To make matters worse, since this dynamic hands men an advantage in the romantic marketplace, they may put off partnering for the long term even further, playing the field for years more because it favors them, and in doing so making matters even worse for ambitious women.

Reeves cites data that suggests that something like 30% to 40% of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners, or otherwise up to their standards. We can certainly lament the degree to which dating markets still reflect the notion that men have to provide while women don’t – it’s a kind of regressive attitude far fewer people still explicitly hold than they once did – but that expectation remains a reality. And anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of men who want only to play video games and watch porn, even if they are employed. So career women are faced with a growing structural disadvantage of insufficient suitable partners, which is exacerbated as they age because of men’s continuing preference for younger women. (Another reality we may lament but can’t really deny.) My guess is that this dynamic falls heaviest on Black women, perversely, because they’ve been doing so well lately.

Jonathan Turley:

Over its almost 200 years of existence, Oberlin College has faced a civil war, an economic depression and pandemics. But until this year, it had never faced the likes of Kalinda Watson. Student editors on The Oberlin Review have risen up against the addition of Watson to the college ranks as an existential threat.

No, Watson is not a conservative or a Republican — groups that haven’t been welcome on campus for many years. Oberlin is ranked in the top three most liberal colleges in the country, and finding a conservative professor is about as likely as finding a licensed, practicing wizard.

No, Watson is far, far worse. She is a risk management expert.

The panic over the arrival of a risk management expert in this small college is that she may be working … wait for it … to lower the risk of lawsuits at the college. Oberlin, it appears, attracts lawsuits as much as liberals.

The students fear that she will create “risk aversion” that could chill future protests.

Indeed, some of us have written about Oberlin for years as a case study of why higher education is declining in America. The college has yielded to the mob in past controversies that have cost the school a fortune.

Eric Kaufman:

White progressives in America, as in Britain, avoid diverse neighborhoods and are more likely to leave diverse places than white conservatives. In effect, they don’t practice what they preach. These are the findings from large-scale quantitative research in the United States and Britain, recently published in my academic article, “White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice.”

Diversity is a core value for white progressives in America and other Western countries. Over 60 percent of them support increasing immigration. As the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg shows, they are the only major part of the population to feel warmer toward other racial groups than toward their own: they rate whites as more lazy and violent, and less intelligent, than blacks. Among white progressives, 87 percent say that having an “increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities” makes the U.S. a better place to live, while virtually none says that it makes the country worse.

You would think that aversion to one’s racial group would prompt white progressives to flee disproportionately white areas for more diverse ones. Surveys do show that white progressives are more likely than white conservatives to indicate that they want to live in diverse places. Studies that present Americans with showcards of stylized houses as a proxy for race —some colored white, some black, with the proportion of the latter varied—find that those with progressive racial attitudes say that they prefer more diverse places than conservatives. These findings have been replicated in Britain and the Netherlands.

But when the rubber hits the road, white liberal attitudes don’t translate into behavior.

Princetonians for free speech:

Princeton’s Awkward Similarities to Communist Romania

An edited excerpt from a video interview with Princeton Professor Sergiu Klainerman

“At Princeton today you see a penetration of diversity, equity and inclusion in every department and office of the university. They are a bit like the Party functionaries. Every organization [in Romania] no matter how small, had to have someone who represented the Party. They were activists, not interested in education or research or whatever they were supposed to be doing, they were activists and of course they had power.”

What does this mean for university life?  Klainerman’s answer goes well beyond the mandatory courses at Princeton on topics such as sexual harassment that he finds both “triggering” and insulting, and has so far resisted.  His main concern is corruption.

“There is an aspect of [what is happening] which I think people don’t talk enough about. Suppose you are a very bright minority kid. You come from a school which unfortunately, for whatever reasons, didn’t give you a very good education. But you are very bright and you really have aspiration and enthusiasm and you are accepted at Princeton, even though in principle you don’t have the credentials for Princeton. And you want to do mathematics.

“So suppose such a kid gets to Princeton and then he/she realizes that they just don’t have the background. They have to compete against winners of international Olympiads from China, Taiwan, Pakistan and Iran. They compete with people who are 5 – 7 years ahead of them. What do you think is going to happened? They’re going to feel dejected. They’re going to feel depressed. They feel they have no chance. And in the end, they give up. … I think it is a disservice to them, to be put in the position to have to compete in situations where they just simply don’t have the background to do well. You prepare them for failure. I’m not afraid to mention this, because I think it’s true.

The @UWSystem spends $15.9million tax dollars/year on leftwing DIVERSITY/EQUITY positions. That’s 227 employees w/full-time salaries for 13 campuses. That’s 17 DEI employees/campus making $70k/year on average. @MacIverWisc @wisconsin_now @DukePesta @SenRonJohnson @RepDaveMurphy pic.twitter.com/l6aY0FATGZ

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) May 5, 2023

Matt Taibbi:

Following the release of today’s article about news organizations junking the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” reader Ben O’Neill made a good observation that should have been in the piece. In the newly-found summary emailed by an Aspen Institute figure in September 2020, “Partnership for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere,” the section about “hack-and-dump” exercises asks [emphasis mine]: “What happens when fabricated documents are released alongside genuine (stolen) content? How can social feeds avoid serving as promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities?” 

First of all, this notion that there may be fabrications mixed in with real content is a suggestion that pops up somewhere in nearly every one of these leak stories, even if all the material proves to be real (old friend Malcolm Nance did the job in 2016 in suggesting the Podesta leaks were “riddled with forgeries”). More importantly however, that last line is a great example of what former cybersecurity official and Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz calls the “foreign-domestic switcheroo.” 

It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.” 

These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. It would likewise seem outrageous to suggest, as Stanford did, that journalists respond to a domestic threat by taking a step as drastic as eliminating intra-title competition, and “forming partnerships with other organizations to pool resources.” But if you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”

One other small note I left out for space reasons. The “Information Warfare Working Group” that produced the original paper by Janine Zacharia proposing the end of the “Pentagon Papers Principle” includes such anti-disinformation luminaries as Renee DiResta and Michael McFaul. In that summer of 2019, the working group also put out a paper by Dr. Amy Zegart, titled, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.” Her co-author? Michael Morell.

Dave Utbanski:

A California public school teacher said she was told to deceive “suspicious” parents about their children’s stated gender identities at school — and now she’s suing.

What are the details?

“It’s unfortunate that I have to go toe-to-toe and stand up against a community of people that I love,” teacher Elizabeth Mirabelli told Fox News. “I’ve been there for 25 years. This is a community of people I care about, people I’ve served for a long period of time. And so that gives me pause to have to stand up, but I felt that I had to make that choice.”

The cable network said attorneys for Mirabelli and fellow teacher Lori Ann West — both of whom taught for decades at Rincon Middle School in Escondido — filed a federal lawsuit last week against the school’s leadership, claiming they were effectively required to lie to parents whose children assumed different gender identities at school.

The open, explicit contempt the Dem Party has for every voter who isn’t blindly loyal to them is amazing to see.

This contempt is most often directed at the party’s disaffected “progressive” wing, because they know – thanks to Bernie and AOC – they have them on total lockdown: https://t.co/K8Lh8ym5xj

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 5, 2023

Javier Moscoso:

What does it mean to tell the story of this instrument? The history of the swing reveals how an object of disorientation became instrumentalised across the long arc of human culture, appearing in different territories and cultures throughout time. But this history is not just the story of an object. It’s also one of many untold histories of bodies in motion that seek to unveil forgotten, overlooked or concealed gestures – human history is not only populated with words and objects. The swing allows us to begin telling the long cultural story of moving back and forth through time and space.

Once we start looking, the swing appears in the most unexpected places. It shows up in ancient Greek swinging festivals, and cave paintings made in western India during the 5th century. It is illustrated in Chinese hand scrolls from the Song dynasty, from around the 11th and 12th centuries.It fills Hindustani and Punjabi paintings, such as Lady on a Swing in the Monsoon (1750-75), in which a woman joyously swings through the air, clothes fluttering behind her, as dark clouds grow in the distance. The swing also finds its way into the origin stories of the Persian Nowruz New Year celebrations, when people swung to mimic the way the legendary Shah Jamšīd rode his chariot through the air. It also turns up in Thailand’s Chakri dynasty in the 18th century, when a giant version was built by Rama I. And it is spread across the pages of Western literature and philosophy – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883-5), James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality(1905), and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938).

NEW: On May 12, I was going to speak on DEI at the Medical College of Wisconsin, alongside Sen. Ron Johnson and State Rep. Dave Murphy.

Last night, the president of the college announced he has “rescind the use” of the its facilities for the event, citing disruptions and safety. pic.twitter.com/bSgbBQvjUn

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) May 5, 2023

Laurel White:

Remote learning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely to negatively affect the high school graduation rates of students from lower-income households than their higher-income peers, according to a new UW–Madison study. 

The study, published in Educational Researcher, found a longer time in virtual or hybrid learning environments during the 2020–21 school year decreased overall high school completion rates and increased the gap in completion rates between economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard;

The encouragement comes as the union and the Madison Metropolitan School District disagree over a proposed wage increase in next year’s budget, among other items. Hundreds of MTI members and supporters showed up to the April School Board meeting, where the 2023-24 budget proposal was made public, to demand an 8% increase in base wages and smaller class sizes.

In a challenging budget cycle full of uncertaintyover what the state will provide, the district’s current proposal includes a 3.5% base wage increase.

Teacher Appreciation Week runs May 8-12 this year. Last year during Teacher Appreciation Week, MTI and the district officially exchanged proposals for base wage increases that were significantly far apart.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Richard Hamming:

Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I’m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago and Nebraska, and got his Ph.D. at Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. And that is, of course, where I met Dick – when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, and for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to join us. We were always happy to have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas and views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you. 

While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I’ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs and have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long to go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books and of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics and computers and coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output and the stature of Dick Hamming. 

I think I last met him – it must have been about ten years ago – at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, “There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.” Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don’t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk. 

THE TALK: “You and Your Research” by Dr. Ri

Sarah Belle Lin:

“A lot of kids are not aware of how to put a bank account together, balance a checkbook, or what an expense and revenue sheet is,” Comrie told amNewYork Metro. “These are critical things that need to be taught to all students so they can be aware of the challenges that they will all face as young adults.”

The initiative to bring financial literacy to New York middle and high schools has been discussed in the state legislature since 2009. 

“I’m disappointed that the State Department of Education hasn’t been embraced it,” Comrie said. “I expect that it will be embraced by more members [state legislators] this year.”

Peng, who teaches geometry and the math team at Stuyvesant High School, studied finance in college and was inspired to share the knowledge he learned about mortgages and student loans with students. He told amNewYork Metro that he had the idea in his mind, but just needed a push. That push came from a Stuyvesant student, Anisha Singhal, who penned an op-ed in January 2021 in the school newspaper called “Calculus Before Checkbooks?” Peng was convinced.

Singhal, who was finally able to enroll in the personal finance class after being waitlisted in the class’ first year, said her interest in financial literacy grew after she received her first paycheck. She didn’t think twice about the taxes and just assumed “this is why adults are always complaining.” But once she later found out from a family friend about tax refunds, she realized the importance of financial literacy.

Michael Anton:

Gaslighting getting you down? Feel like the regime has dialed the Megaphone up to, and past, eleven? You’re not crazy. It’s definitely happening and likely to get worse as our masters’ ability to cope with reality further worsens—or worse, they gain the complete and absolute control they seek. They’re both scornful and terrified of dissent, which explains why they incessantly shriek at us and lie to our faces.

So, to help you navigate the twitstorm, I present a guide to seven of the regime’s most common, oft-deployed lies. This is not meant to be comprehensive. I’m sure there are tactics they use that either I haven’t crystalized or that aren’t front-of-mind at the moment. I encourage others to expand the catalogue with their own observations. The better we can understand how they try to manipulate us, the better we can resist and counter it all.

Let’s start with the Unholy Trinity of ruling class horse manure. These first three are similar, but subtle differences determine the ways they’re used in differing circumstances.

Stanley Goldfarb:

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.

Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project(PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion.

Why are teachers going on strike?

OEA is going on strike to protest unfair labor practices of the school district, which union leaders say include negotiating in bad faith by coming to bargaining sessions unprepared and not making meaningful counter-proposals. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge against OUSD in March with the California Public Employee Relations Board, which oversees negotiations between public agencies and employees.

Jill Tucker:

Union officials have demanded a 23% raise for all members of the bargaining unit. District officials had offered up to a 22% raise, but not for all 3,000 educators. They have also tied a 10% retroactive raise to more instructional minutes for elementary school students.

The district’s offer also included paying 15% more for health benefits, in addition to required pensions costs equaling more than 19% of salaries.

On Wednesday, in a statement, district officials said all members of the union would get a 13% to 22% raise, as well as a one-time bonus and backpay.

Under the proposal, according to the district Wednesday, beginning teachers would get a $10,700 raise, plus $8,700 in back pay and one-time bonus. Veteran teachers would see an annual increase of $15,432, plus $11,600 in back pay and one-time bonus.

Other union members, including counselors, psychologists and nurses, would also get significant increases in salary.

More:

With few exceptions, schools across California saw significant declines in standardized test scores this year compared with pre-pandemic levels, with less than half of students proficient in reading and a third performing at grade level in math.

Allison Parshall:

If you want to trust a prediction, you need to understand how all the computations work. For example, in health care, you need to know if the model even applies to your patient. And it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. Sometimes models depend on variables in ways that you might not like if you knew what they were doing. For example, with the power company in New York, we gave them a model that depended on the number of neutral cables. They looked at it and said, “Neutral cables? That should not be in your model. There’s something wrong.” And of course there was a flaw in the database, and if we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, we would have had a serious problem. So it’s really useful to be able to see into the model so you can troubleshoot it.

When did you first get concerned about non-transparent AI models in medicine? 

My dad is a medical physicist. Several years ago, he was going to medical physics and radiology conferences. I remember calling him on my way to work, and he was saying, “You’re not going to believe this, but all the AI sessions are full. AI is taking over radiology.” Then my student Alina [Barnett] roped us into studying [AI models that examine] mammograms. Then I realized, OK, hold on. They’re not using interpretable models. They’re using just these black boxes; then they’re trying to explain their results. Maybe we should do something about this.

So we decided we would try to prove that you could construct interpretable models for mammography that did not lose accuracy over their black box counterparts. We just wanted to prove that it could be done.

Josh Blackman

In recent years, there has been a rise in law students heckling speakers. In 2018, I was shouted down at the CUNY Law School in New York. In 2022, Ilya Shapiro was shouted down at the law school formerly known as Hastings. And more recently, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit was shouted down at Stanford Law School.

We were protested for speaking on different topics, but there was a common thread: Students at each institution insisted that we were not welcome on campus; that our mere presence made them feel unsafe; and that our messages were not worth the pain and suffering we would cause. Thus, the students refused to let us speak.

Who is to blame for these protests? Of course, the students who heckled speakers, in clear violation of university policy, were at fault. But the blame goes much deeper. These students have been taught from the earliest age that harmful speech has no place in educational institutions. …

Universities and faculties in particular should take decisive action to prevent [DEI administrators] from subverting the core principles of academic inquiry. At this inflection point, I propose a five-course action plan.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The UW System spends about $13.6 million annually on 185 administrators related to DEI, with most of the positions concentrated at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, according to records first reported on by WisPolitics. The $13.6 million in salaries represents about 0.2% of the UW System’s $6.9 billion annual operating budget.

Vos called for eliminating funding for all of the DEI positions, saying the offices are a waste of public tax dollars and teach students to view the world entirely through the lens of race. He cited examples he has heard where people had to fill out DEI statements to apply for a UW job and students had to discuss white privilege at freshmen orientation.

“The university has gone from being an institute of higher education to an institute of indoctrination,” he said.

Vos said he met with UW System President Jay Rothman and chancellors to offer his ideas on how the UW System can make good on his request.

The UW System could, for example, internally reallocate the money funding DEI offices to other programs it is seeking funding for, such as nursing, engineering and other high-demand fields.

The community note here is significantly more accurate and provides readers with much better context than the Politifact fact-check. It’s a perfect example of why people feel media fact-checkers focus more on pushing spin than providing the facts and letting readers decide. https://t.co/ZsqcvrGLY0

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 4, 2023

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Cicero’s De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”) is a true classic – a text that many people own but few ever bother to read. Yet if you are interested in translation, you probably want to read the first few pages of Book One at the very least. Here Cicero discusses a few of the problems involved with writing a philosophical work in the Roman world; one of these is the Romans’ inferiority complex when it came to Classical Greek. He describes intellectuals who scorn to read philosophy in their native language, yet have no problem with Greek literary texts translated word-for-word (ad verbum e Graecis expressas) into Latin.

The discussion is interesting in part because Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day. He defends Latin as a language, and has a few positive-sounding things to say about the Latin literary tradition, even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature. But there seems to have been no point in sticking up for most contemporary translations of Greek books. Or was there? Cicero himself was a brilliant translator, particularly of Plato. He thought hard about the relationship between Latin and Greek. Perhaps, though, his contemporaries were less conscientious than he was. He didn’t just provide mechanical, literal-minded translations: he wanted the Greek Classics to sound like themselves when rendered into his own language. Then again, translators who succeed at this task are rare in every age.

Credit to @exjon for the chart.

It’s arguably better than the typical debt-to-GDP ratio, because it shows debt-to-revenue. GDP is more like GMV of a marketplace, whereas revenue is what the debt would actually get paid out of. https://t.co/WM2uG0KxcV

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

I don’t mind health authorities got so much wrong. COVID was a novel pandemic.

What is inexcusable is they banned dissent by pressuring Big Tech to remove any posts questioning their false decrees.

And only now are media figures like this CNN host willing to question them. https://t.co/XhVp1m5CAv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2023

The new data on students’ knowledge of history and civics is abysmal. There’s no other way to describe it. These are the lowest scores ever recorded:

➡️13% are proficient in U.S. history
➡️20% are proficient in civics pic.twitter.com/WzweyhVXsS

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 3, 2023

Rick Hess:

The “Nation’s Report Card” is out with new results on what our eighth-graders know about U.S. history and civics, and the results are grim. The National Assessment of Educational Progress today reported that this is the first time civics results declined significantly on the quarter-century-old exam. In history, the results continued a nearly decade-long decline.

The U.S. history test covers key figures, dates, and events, as well as student familiarity with key historical ideas and movements. The civics test gauges students’ knowledge, their ability to take or defend positions on political issues, and their understanding of democratic participation. The tests were administered in spring 2022, with a nationally representative sample of 8,000 eighth-graders who took the history test and 7,800 the civics exam.

Fritz François & Gbenga Ogedegbe

Such claims aren’t supported by evidence. The ranking methodology, as currently constructed, includes consideration of students’ Medical College Admission Test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, as well as other criteria. But medical schools have always been free to admit anyone they choose, regardless of their rankings. It’s true that diversity isn’t a criterion in the U.S. News methodology, but why should that stop schools from recruiting minority applicants or establishing a campus culture that encourages and values diversity? There is nothing in a thoughtful admissions process that explicitly prevents medical schools from assembling a student body based on anything other than academic performance, holistic reviews and interviews of candidates. …

What these schools are really saying is that meritocracy can’t coexist with diversity. This is a presumptuous—and dangerous—perpetuation of the negative stereotype that students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in medicine are of lesser quality or unable to compete.

Amy Schwabe:

Wauwatosa Catholic School will be closing its doors at the end of this school year, according to a letter sent to parents Friday by principal Nicolle Schroeder.

The school, at 1500 N. Wauwatosa Ave., has existed since 2011 as a partnership between two Wauwatosa Catholic churches, St. Bernard Parish and St. Pius X Parish.

In her letter, Schroeder laid out three reasons for the school’s closing: enrollment, demographics and finances.

The school projects only 110-120 students for the 2023-24 school year, rather than the 140 students that administrators had wanted. Father Paul Portland, the pastor of St. Pius X Parish, noted in a related letter to parishioners that this is down from 200 students pre-pandemic. Further, most grades are at 10 students or fewer, and there were only seven projected K3 students and five K4 students enrolled for coming school year, creating little hope that enrollment in the years ahead would grow.

An elementary school counselor should not have 3,432 pages of emails talking about gender.

And it should not cost me $2,559.75 to see them. pic.twitter.com/kFr8DdxkLl

— Nicole Solas Domestic Terrorist! (@Nicoletta0602) April 30, 2023

Vipul Shekhawat:

What makes GPT good for learning?

Let’s contrast GPT’s chat interface with static learning resources, like webpages or textbooks.

Interactive learning. The modern world is a complicated place, and it’s simply not possible to learn about everything to the utmost depth. All too often, I end up in a deep, dark Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about string theory when I just was curious about the basics of how something works.

Using GPT makes learning interactive. The main benefit is that the information it provides is tailored to the specific questions you have. By contrast, static learning resources have to make a best guess of what you’re trying to learn about, which is always subject to tensions of depth and breadth:

Scott Girard:

The work at La Follette, led by Findorff Project Engineer Courtney Cates, features a new gym, weight room and “athletics entry” space that includes concessions and a trophy case. That entry area will also feature pieces of the wood floor from the current spectator gym, which will be turned into classroom space, and will allow officials to more easily close off the rest of the building from those there to play or watch a game.

Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Frederick Hess:

The reason for this success isn’t hard to fathom. During the pandemic, mediocre remote learning, bureaucratic inertia, and school closures taught many parents that they couldn’t count on school districts when families needed them most. 

Parents were left hungry for alternatives, especially amidst bitter disagreements over masking and woke ideology. This was all immensely practical. It wasn’t about moral imperatives or market abstractions. It was about empowering families to put their kids in schools that address their needs, reflect their values, and do their job. And it came even as families continued to voice support for their local public schools. 

There are important lessons here, several of which I discuss at more length in The Great School Rethink. The biggest may be the simplest: Families can want more options and still like their local schools. 

Polling consistently shows that the lion’s share of parents say they’d grade their kids’ schools an A or a B. At the same time, last year, more than seven in ten endorsed education savings accounts, school vouchers, and charter schools.In short, parents tend to like both their child’s public school and school choice policies. They don’t see a tension between the two.

This is the right discussion to have.

I agree that “if we control spending and technology continues to bail us out” then everything is fine.

But (a) the establishment is blocking new technology and (b) it is not controlling spending. https://t.co/ccFdzdfnx0 pic.twitter.com/lADlTZlCaF

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

Bethan Stanton:

On Tuesday, Chegg’s shares plunged by half and the warning rattled other companies, with shares in London-listed Pearson falling 15 per cent, language-learning platform Duolingo down by 10 per cent and US-listed education company Udemy dropping by more than 5 per cent.

The stock moves come as businesses are grappling with the opportunity and threat posed by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, which produces highly sophisticated text outputs in response to short human prompts.

Chegg’s admission marks one of the first instances of a company acknowledging a hit to its finances as a direct result of advances in generative AI.

Big tech companies are racing to develop superior versions of the technology, with Google launching its ChatGPT competitor Bard in March. The previous month, shares in Google parent Alphabet plummeted after Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that included advanced new AI-driven features.

Kevin Carey:

Between 2000 and 2018, some 200 colleges and universities adopted similar policies. It was hardly a groundswell — there are about 2,300 public and private four-year colleges and universities in the US — but it cracked the door to a different future for standardized testing.

Covid-19 pushed that door wide open. The pandemic scrambled the logistics of test administration and caused most colleges to go “test-optional.” Covid had the same effect on mandatory admissions testing that it had on the practice of requiring white-collar workers to go to the office five days a week: It transformed a growing but not-yet-mainstream trend into a sudden sea change.

Kimberly Wethal:

Higher rates of chronic absenteeism are largely driving the increase, as about 98% of the district’s 2,231 at-risk students have been deemed “habitually truant,” defined as missing more than 10% of days in an academic year. The number of students considered habitually truant during the 2021-22 school year more than tripled from the year before, according to data presented to the Madison School Board Monday night.

Students in grades five through 12 are considered at risk by the state when they either have dropped out or can be classified in two or more categories considered detrimental to their education, including being:

• One or more years behind their peers in the number of high school credits earned.
• Two or more years behind in basic skill levels.
• Pregnant or a parent.
• An eighth-grader who scored below “basic” on state exams.
• Habitually truant.

The number of students in each category increased in 2021-22, with the exception of students who are pregnant or parenting, a number that’s fallen from 40 five years ago to just a handful now. About 1,714 students, or more than 10%, had fallen behind by two school years, an increase from 946 students in 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic. The number of eighth graders scoring low on state exams has doubled since then.

The number of at-risk students each year is based on data collected the year prior. In 2021-22, there were 14,980 students in grades five through 12 in the district.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS.

Josh Blackman:

To quote Justice Alito:

It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

There have been no actual allegations that judges assigned to the Amarillo or Wichita Falls divisions have engaged in any judicial misconduct. (And no, authorship of a law review article that a judge did not actually write does not actually matter.) These judges have not been mandamused or reassigned by the court of appeals. None of the progressive judges on the Fifth Circuit have, in dissent, charged these judges with malfeasance. And no bar complaints have been filed against the Texas Attorney General or other plaintiffs who have filed in these forums. DOJ has filed motions to transfer cases in these divisions. And, those motions have been denied. In doing so, these courts have rejected the premise of Schumer’s letter: that single-judge divisions undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Senator Schumer is, in effect, seeking reconsideration of what Judges Tipton, Kacsmaryk, and others have already ruled. The chief judge of a federal district cannot sit in judgment of another district judge in his district. That job belongs to the court of appeals alone.

David Blaska:

“The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats.Madison’s flagship campus has an entire administrative division devoted to the subject, headed by a deputy vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (salary $131,852 as of 2021), supported by a “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center,” a multi-cultural student center, and an Office of Inclusion Education. And that’s only at the top. Every school, every college — education, engineering, business, nursing, pharmacy, letters & science, veterinary medicine, law, and agriculture — has its own DEI bureaucrats. Don’t forget the athletics department!

Journal of Controversial Ideas:

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

Commentary.

Benjamin Lee:

Steven Spielberg has criticised the idea that older films should be re-edited to appease modern sensibilities.

Speaking at Time’s 100 Summit in New York City, the 76-year-old film-maker expressed regret over taking out guns from a later release of his 1982 sci-fi blockbuster ET: The Extra Terrestrial. In the 20th anniversary edition, agents saw their firearms replaced with walkie-talkies.

“That was a mistake,” he said on stage. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

In 2011, Spielberg had already explained that the guns would be returning for the 30th anniversary release, explaining that he was “disappointed” in himself.

Anna Hansen:

hen Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when the Urban League of Greater Madison held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Anna Hansen :

When Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald:

Wisconsin has a reading problem, especially for those whose home language is not mainstream English, which is the language of instruction, government and business.

Every year we have watched our literacy scores and state ranking suffer as other states pursue teacher training and education legislation. Illiteracy has multiple causes including poverty and other socioeconomic factors. But inadequate teacher preparation leading to poor classroom reading instruction is one of the most glaring but fixable conditions.

Many states have conducted extensive reviews of their educator preparation programs to ensure that they are aligned with modern reading research. In Wisconsin, an independent consultant (TPI-US) has been awarded a contract to conduct a statewide literacy “landscape analysis” in which all 13 of the University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs could voluntarily opt-in for a comprehensive review of early literacy instructional practices. Each institution would receive a “confidential no-cost assessment of reading coursework quality and how well course instructors model evidence-based early reading instructional practices” and “where appropriate, institutional reports will offer specific recommendations for improvement.”

The Department of Public Instruction will grant $50,000 to the institution on completion of its landscape analysis and another $50,000 on the adoption of a “program improvement plan.”

Wisconsin’s children and future educators deserve UW’s full participation.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald, Madison

Scott Girard:

This fall, the new three-story school off of Rimrock Road will house students currently attending Frank Allis Elementary School. That building will then be used for Nuestro Mundo Elementary School, MMSD’s dual-language immersion charter that currently leases a Monona school building.

The school’s soon-to-come opening is monumental for the south side, which hasn’t had an elementary school in the neighborhood before, leaving students in that area with long bus rides.

Those hundreds of Allis students will move from one of the district’s oldest facilities to its newest. It will feature plenty of natural light beyond the skylight, with floor-to-ceiling windows in a library on one corner of the building.

Morph123:

Either a horticulturalist/permaculturist or an industrial electrician.

Both are and will be required skills for the foreseeable future (next 200 years or so).

Knowing how to grow food and maintain a healthy environment is becoming a lost skill. “Grounding” has science now saying it’s a good thing for your blood, heart and brain (don’t have link on hand but when connected to ground scientists have found blood physically changes and can be seen in microscope).

Electricians are usually a licensed trade. This makes it more protected but also makes you more useful.

You can branch into engineering later if you wish, and you usually make for a better engineer cause you know a 630mm^2 cable doesn’t fit in a 20mm gland.

Substation automation based on IEC61850 is everywhere and more common. It consists of servers, gateways, IEDs (which also need programming), Ethernet, VLANS, switches etc. so you get a technology knowledge base you can relate to other areas of yours, or your friends and families life.

Do No Harm Medicine

The bill’s findings clearly state that “public medical institutions of higher education best serve the state when providing meritorious education and training that positions future healthcare professionals to serve all patients adequately and to the best of their ability.” Do No Harm could not agree more.

To ensure that happens, the bill includes several key provisions:

• No DEI Statements: Applicants for employment and admission cannot be required to submit DEI Statements, which medical schools increasingly use to weed out candidates who don’t toe the woke party line. This helps ensure that students and faculty are chosen by merit, not politics. And getting rid of these statements will create a more intellectually diverse campus environment where students and their teachers are open to exploring new research ideas.
• No DEI Spending: Medical schools are prohibited from using state funds for fees, dues, subscriptions, or travel relating to an organization that requires an individual to endorse or promote a divisive concept – i.e., that a certain race or sex is inherently superior to another or that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist. This ban covers essentially every medical association. This puts pressure on groups like the AMA and AAMC to drop their increasingly discriminatory demands. Most taxpayers don’t realize their hard-earned dollars fund woke national organizations that focus on progressive activism over patient outcomes.

There are even more victories in the bill, including welcoming campus speakers with differing views, banning discrimination against student groups based on their ideologies, requiring DEI officers to focus on workforce training and promote intellectual diversity, and notifying students and teachers of their rights, among others.

Wall Street Journal:

It’s no secret that Randi Weingarten opposes co-locating charter schools in buildings that have a district public school. But the president of the American Federation of Teachers sits on the board of University Prep Charter Schools—a charter run by the local teachers union. On Wednesday New York’s Department of Education approved University Prep Charter’s bid for a permanent co-location for its middle school with a district school and another charter school.

The backdrop points to the stunning hypocrisy. Under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York approved dozens of co-locations for the simple reason that this is usually the speediest way to get these charters up and running. The unions understand that too, which is why they fight it.

This year the unions have succeeded in pressuring Mayor Eric Adams to cancel three co-location proposals for Success Academy charter schools by ginning up opposition. Success Academy is one of the city’s best-performing charter networks. Now the unions have brought a lawsuit to void two other Success Academy co-locations that were already approved. Well over a third of the city’s 275 charters are co-located because that is where the unused space is.

Mark Sherman:

The Supreme Courtseemed likely Wednesday to give a 94-year-old Minneapolis woman another day in court to try to recoup some money after the county kept the entire $40,000 when it sold her condominium over a small unpaid tax bill.

The justices seemed in broad agreement with arguments by the lawyer for Geraldine Tyler that Hennepin County, Minnesota, violated the Constitution’s prohibition on the taking of private property without “just compensation.”

“At bottom, she’s saying the county took her property and made a profit on her surplus equity. It belongs to her,” Justice Clarence Thomas said.

Tyler, who now lives in an apartment building for older people, owed $2,300 in unpaid taxes, plus interest and penalties, when the county took title to the one-bedroom apartment in 2015. The county said she did nothing to hold onto her one-time residence. The apartment sold the next year.

Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch said the county’s position appeared to be that it could seize million-dollar properties over tiny tax bills. “So a $5 property tax, a million dollar property, good to go?” Gorsuch asked Neal Katyal, representing the county.

Wall Street Journal:

Gov. Ron De­San­tis is cred­ited with forc­ing a re­write of a new high-school AP class in African-Amer­i­can Stud­ies, af­ter Flor­ida balked at such les­son top­ics as “Black Queer Stud­ies.” Deny­ing pres­sure, the Col­lege Board said the re­vi­sions were ped­a­gog­i­cal: “This course has been shaped only by the in­put of ex­perts and long-stand­ing AP prin­ci­ples and prac­tices.”

Yet its own fac­ulty ad­vis­ers pri­vately cas­ti­gated this as dis­hon­est spin, ac­cord­ing to emails we ob­tained via open-records laws. “I have pa­tiently and qui­etly watched the ubiq­ui­tous in­ter­views and me­dia as­ser­tions that AP would not make changes at the be­hest of any group be­yond pro­fes­sors, teach­ers, and stu­dents,” wrote Nis­hani Fra­zier, a Uni­ver­sity of Kan­sas pro­fes­sor who sits on the AP course’s de­vel­op­ment com­mit­tee. “If this is so, which stu­dent, pro­fes­sor, or teacher sug­gested adding black con­ser­v­a­tives to the course over Com­ba­hee River Col­lec­tive?”

Cockburn:

Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose. Germany, Luxembourg and Austria are at 78 percent, and progressives’ favorite Scandinavian country, Sweden, sits at 76 percent. Even if you assume he meant “fully vaccinated” with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.

He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.” Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on. 

And that’s not all! Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed:

…..

“Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine”, he added, before defending the research as “not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world.” Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who “don’t like to be told what to do,” or the “independent scientists” — and rarely his own. 

Cockburn, more than anything else, would just like to see Fauci show — even if it’s feigned — some understanding of the concerns his critics bring to the table, some recognition of his own faults. That would require introspection, though, and despite all of his skills, that one is conspicuously lacking.

Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov:

Until a few months ago, we’d never heard of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a peer-reviewed publication whose aim is to promote “free inquiry on controversial topics.” Our research typically didn’t fit that description. We finally learned of the journal’s existence, however, when we tried to publish a commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit. Apparently, what was once anodyne and unobjectionable is now contentious and outré, even in the hard sciences.

Merit isn’t much in vogue anywhere these days. We’ve seen this in the trend among scientists to judge scientific research by its adherence to dominant progressive orthodoxies and in the growing reluctance of our institutions to hire and fund scientists based on their ability to propose and conduct exciting projects. Our intent was to defend established and effective practices of judging science based on its merit alone.

Elon Musk and Bill Maher discuss the Woke Mind Virus and free speech.

“I can’t emphasize this enough. We must protect free speech… the thing about censorship, for those who advocate for it, at some point that will be turned on you.”

The woke mind virus “has been going on for… pic.twitter.com/9UE9mXj0kQ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 29, 2023

Vinay Prasad:

Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted school reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed.

In the summer of 2020, Fauci was still opposed to schools.

In spring 2020, when DeSantis reopened Fauci went on multiple news outlets to sabotage those efforts

As for Randi, the most accurate comment was in this clip from a distressed parent, pls click link below to watch it (substack not embedding it well).

Joel Catkin:

But the Valley has slowly left the industrial battlefield — it has lost over 160,000 manufacturing positions over the past two decades. It bought into the idea that the unique genius of its financial and corporate culture would be enough for it to thrive and profit as production headed first to Japan, then China and, more recently, to other parts of North America.

This is a familiar story. Consider, for example, how British industry lost its edge: the Industrial Revolution created a new class of tycoons; then the tycoons’ sons sought a return to the aristocratic past, eschewing dirty factories for elegant postings in the City or a relaxed life in their country estates. More recently, Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.

To be clear, the Valley is not done as a major tech center. It still boasts a venture capital community, a remarkable concentration of engineering and other management talent, powerful universities and the headquarters of some of the biggest companies in the world. And it remains home to many of the tech giants that now exploit their monopolistic advantages. But that is not the same thing as being the place where the world looks for a vision of the future, as it once was. Even if the Valley still matters, it may no longer dominate the future as its denizens once assumed it would. Instead, it will face fierce competition for tech supremacy — from other countries, and other parts of this one.

This reflects two different phenomena: rising competition from other regions — and an internal rot that has infected the Valley. In its first few remarkable decades, the Valley was defined by its openness, its culture of competition and connection to the general economy. The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs were, foremost, industrialists. They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money.

Bret Devereaux:

This week we’re going to take a detour into understanding the structure of academia, in particular the different kinds of ‘professors’ and their academic ranks in the American system, with a particular focus on ‘non-tenure track’ faculty (which is to say, as we’ll see, ‘most teaching faculty.’) This is intended as the first in a series of posts mixed into the normal diet over the next few months looking at the structure of the modern American university from the inside. The fact is that while quite a lot of people go to college, few students acquire much of any sense of how their college or university is structured, and so there is a tendency for a lot of folks to believe they know how academia works who don’t, in the same way that most people who eat at fast food restaurants cannot, in fact, operate their kitchens.

My own experience of course has been as a student, then a graduate student (worker), then as adjunct faculty at three different Big State Universities. Less so in this post, but more so in later posts I’ll also be drawing on the experiences of my better half a bit, as she’s been an administrative staff member for several academic departments and one research program across two Big State Universities and so has a lot of visibility into the bureaucratic structures involved. As you might guess with that background, I am going to be particularly focused on Big State Universities, but I actually think that is good – compared to the Ivies or Small Liberal Arts Colleges, Big State Universities make up the largest single chunk of 4-year-degree institutions and indeed grant a simple majority of 4-year degrees, so the Big State University is by raw dint of numbers both the median and modal higher education experience for folks who achieve a four year degree.

We are in particular going to focus on non-tenure track (NTT) faculty for two reasons. First, because while NTT make up the simple majority of student-facing teaching faculty, universities go to considerable length to obscure this fact leaving many students incorrectly assuming their professors are largely tenure-track when at many institutions they may not be. And second because I’m a NTT faculty member (who, like most NTT, would like to be on the tenure track for reasons which will become obvious below) and I wanted to explain all of this in one permanent place in part so I can point back to it, in particular because while NTT faculty members are the most common they are also the least understood by the public.But we’ll still talk a little bit about the tenured ranks too.

Galina Hale, Tali Regev and Yona Rubinstein

We document appearance effects in the economics profession. Using unique data on PhD graduates from ten of the top economics departments in the United States we test whether more attractive individuals are more likely to succeed. We find robust evidence that appearance has predictive power for job outcomes and research productivity. Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.

Jason Gay:

Specifically, they’re talking about the Milwaukee superstar’s lengthy answer when asked after the game if he considered this Bucks season to be a “failure.”

Watch it if you can, it’s hard to do the full moment justice in print.

“Do you get a promotion every year, in your job?” Antetokounmpo answered, after a long pause in which he placed his head in his hands. “No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no. No? Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal, which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. You work towards a goal – it’s not a failure. It’s steps to success.”

“There’s always steps to it,” Antetokounmpo continued. “Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years [were] a failure? That’s what you’re telling me…why do you ask me that question? It’s the wrong question.”

“There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. And that’s what sports is about. You don’t always win. Some other people are going to win. And this year, somebody else is going to win. We’re going to come back next year and try to be better.”

.@cmsub
Ma’am: Did you know about this? Please comment. Did you provide a question to a Biden advance team? Did they provide this question to you? Was it your decision, or was it pushed on you? Is this standard practice? https://t.co/8eUZJVTzzy

— FoiaFan (@15poundstogo) April 26, 2023

Steven Lee Meyers:

China’s internet censorship is well known, but a report has quantified the extent of it, uncovering more than 66,000 rules controlling the content that is available to people using search engines.

The most diligent censor, by at least one measure, is Microsoft’s search engine Bing, the only foreign search engine operating in the country, according to the report, which was released on Wednesday by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group at the University of Toronto.

The findings suggested that China’s censorship apparatus had become not only more pervasive, but also more subtle. The search engines, including Bing, have created algorithms to “hard censor” searches deemed to be politically sensitive by providing no results or by limiting the results to selected sources, which are usually government agencies or state news organizations that follow the Communist Party’s line.

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Victor Davis Hanson:

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.

The incumbent president went into the 2020 election crippled by years of media-voiced lies about collusion. Given all that, did these miscreants learn anything the second time around?

No. They redoubled their efforts. This time, the new farce was “Russian disinformation,” even as the playbook of smearing remained the same.

Gabe Kaminsky:

CISA, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security that “works with partners to defend against today’s threats and collaborate to build a more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future,” has also come under fire for its efforts to fight purported disinformation. CISA teamed up from a research standpoint with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University in 2021 on a report finding that the government flagged roughly 4,800 posts to social media companies around the 2020 presidential election, with 35% being labeled, blocked, or removed in some way, the Intercept reported in October 2022. 

In addition, Republicans have raised concerns over how CISA’s advisory committee in June 2022 drafted a report calling on the agency to review “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio, and other online resources” while shaping the “information ecosystem.” CISA announced in a 2021 press release that its 23 committee members included Gadde, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, and JPMorgan’s Chief Information Officer Lori Beer.

BREAKING: The Whitnall School Board has fired its executive assistant for rigging the vote for Board President against the conservative candidate and delivering a win for the liberal. pic.twitter.com/83WROEPnka

— Dan O’Donnell (@DanODonnellShow) April 28, 2023

more:

The board consists of four conservative members and three liberals, yet Rodriguez read the results as four votes for liberal candidate Kevin Stachowiak and three for conservative Jason Craig. Conservative member Karen Mikolainis immediately challenged Rodriguez’s counting of the votes, noting that she had more ballots in her hand than members of the board.

“Those extra ones are in case of a tie,” Rodriguez responded.

Mikolainis demanded a voice vote, but liberal board member Quin Brunette rejected this and insisted on a second round of secret balloting. Rodriguez handed out seven more ballots and members again voted. Again, however, Rodriguez read the results as four votes for Stachowiak and three for Craig.

Later in the meeting, conservative members Mikolainis, Cassie Reiner, and Rachel Scherrer confirmed that they had in fact voted for Craig, and Craig confirmed afterwards that he voted for himself.

Daniel Mediavilla:

Exercise can boost your memory and thinking skills, says neurologist Scott McGinnis in a press release published by Harvard Medical School, where he works. David Jacobs, a professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota, agrees: “For generally healthy people, exercising regularly can enhance brain function over a lifetime — not just after a workout,” he writes in an article published by Scientific American. The list of researchers and health advocates who take the cognitive benefits of physical exercise for granted is long, and numerous studies appear to support this widely held belief.

But a few days ago, Dr. Daniel Sanabria Lucena (Bordeaux, France, 46 years old), a professor at the University of Granada and a researcher with the Mind, Brain and Behavior Center, published a review in the journal Nature Human Behaviorthat calls this belief into question. Sanabria’s team analyzed 109 studies, involving over 11,000 participants, that found exercise to have a positive effect on cognitive ability. The team discovered various problems with the studies’ methodologies, leading them to conclude that there is no difinitive evidence to support the claim that physical activity has a positive effect on brain performance.

Matt Orfalea and Matt Taibbi:

In a few cases, news organizations have already added editor’s notes as threads were released — we should commend Mother Jones for addingsuch updates to many of their articles which referenced Hamilton — which gave cause for optimism. Maybe we could convince other reporters and editors to make the corrections ahead of time. How big of a job could that be?

Too big, as it turned out. Once humorously obsessive Matt Orfalea got going on the project, he quickly fell into a funk. He started just by looking just for video clips of broadcast or cable outlets referencing Hamilton 68, and immediately started racking up ridiculous numbers. 

The first time he mentioned he was having a fit/time problem with the video, I was skeptical. Orf wasn’t counting print stories at first, and didn’t venture initially into other incidents beyond Ham68. It didn’t seem possible there could there be too many instances to compile on video. But there were. A large part of his logistical problem involved MSNBC, whose extravagant on-air warnings of Russian bots were fattening his compilation. “I thought, ‘If I could only do this without MSNBC, I could get this down to a manageable size,’” he said. 

That led to an idea of making a separate video that only chronicled MSNBC making Hamilton-inspired references to Russian bots. “I was relieved,” he said. “I thought, ‘This way, I might be able to make a video about everyone else.’”

Michael Whitlow:

The points system would be applied as follows: four points for winning a state title, three points for advancing to the championship game, two points for advancing to the state semifinals and one point for advancing to the state quarterfinal or sectional final. Teams also would receive one point for reaching Level 3 of 11-player football or Level 2 of 8-player football.

Programs that accumulate six or more points in the previous three seasons would be placed up a single division from their previous categorization. No program would be moved up more than one division per year.

Hacker news:

What a great but deeply buried feature.

Select text like “450g” and scroll right on the cut/copy/paste popup, and enjoy the conversions!

Tom Rees:

“Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through onto customers,” Pill said in an interview streamed Tuesday on the “Beyond Unprecedented” podcast.

Jim Geraghty:

This month, 50 percent of Americans said, “promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values” is more important, and 42 percent said, “encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds” is more important. Those numbers are barely changed from 2013, smack in the middle of the Obama years.

Wait, there’s more. When you break down the respondents by race, “traditional values” was picked by 51 percent of whites, 48 percent of blacks, and 51 percent of Hispanics. “Tolerance for different lifestyles” was selected by 40 percent of whites, 47 percent of blacks, and 44 percent of Hispanics. Whatever racial divisions America has, those three demographics see this choice roughly the same way.

You would think a poll result like this would encourage conservatives. But I suspect this poll result will be largely ignored because it doesn’t fit the narrative either for progressives who want to hear about culture-war triumphs, or folks on the right who on some level actually enjoy hearing about how decadent and depraved American society has become. Year by year, the loudest voices on the right have adopted a dystopian “this country is going to hell in a handbasket” vision; hearing that half the country wants to promote greater respect for traditional social and moral values might actually stir hope, confidence, optimism, and even unity, and lordy, we can’t have that, now can we?

As you would probably suspect, 74 percent of self-identified Republicans said “promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values” is more important, while 67 percent of self-identified Democrats said “encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds” is more important. Independents split, with 49 percent picking traditional values and 41 percent siding with greater tolerance. (I wonder how many cultural traditionalists stopped defining themselves as Republicans during the Trump era.)

Matt Taibbi:

That interview says it all, doesn’t it? 

Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.” 

This was before AOC decided to be the next Pelosi, instead of the next Sanders. The above sit-down on MSNBC shows the transformation. Having shed the mantle of an outsider who shook the old guard with online savvy, she appeared in soft light for a softball “interview,” by a literal Biden official (Inside With Jen Psaki is as close as you can get to a formal dissolution of the line between White House and media). In it, she seemed to argue for the outlaw of Fox News. “We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said, adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”

I was attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things. Every liberal morality play in the seventies, eighties and nineties featured a finger-wagging moralist who couldn’t stomach an obscene joke (Jerry Falwell, over a Hustler parody), “obscene” art (Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos), “objectionable” music (Tipper Gore, in the now-seems-tame record-labeling furor), or unpredictable humor (NBC, in its attempts to put Richard Pryor on tape delay for Saturday Night Live). Pryor’s favored writer Paul Mooney objected so much to all the hoops they had to jump through to be allowed on air, he ended up writing a parody “job interview” skit that sent SNL’s ratings soaring, though ironically it would probably never air today:

Scott Girard:

After the district’s insurance consultant, M3, received word from GHC in February about its premium increase, district officials and M3 worked with Quartz to see if there was a better solution. They were left with two options, according to the letter, neither of which raises the amount staff will pay for premiums this year:

• Continue to provide employees with GHC-SCW health insurance, with no rate increase for employees in the 2023-2024 school year, but a 16.2% increase to the district, effective July 1, 2023, for an extra $5.6 million in the budget

• Change insurance carriers to Quartz, effective July 1, 2023, with no rate increase for employees in the 2023-2024 school year, but a 13.1% increase to the district, effective July 1, 2023, for an extra $4.1 million in the budget

Scott Girard:

The one that stands out to Findorff Senior Project Manager Peter Saindon, who is overseeing the project, was a pack of cigarettes stuck in concrete from the original construction.

“I don’t know if the cigarettes (are) in it or not but just we’re looking at it like, ‘That had to have been 100 years old,’” Saindon said.

Another project leader noted how cool it is to see the different methodologies of construction through the years in one building.

The renovation team also found a box of handwritten high school transcripts from 80 years ago, which one of the assistant principals made sure was preserved, they said.

The European Union is now officially requiring expanded censorship by social media platforms, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook. On Tuesday, Europe’s top Internet regulator, Thierry Breton said that “19 online platforms and search engines have become systematically relevant…

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 27, 2023

The European Union is now officially requiring expanded censorship by social media platforms, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook. On Tuesday, Europe’s top Internet regulator, Thierry Breton said that “19 online platforms and search engines have become systematically relevant…

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 27, 2023

NOAA:

Since port and starboard never change, they are unambiguous references that are independent of a mariner’s orientation, and, thus, mariners use these nautical terms instead of left and right to avoid confusion. When looking forward, toward the bow of a ship, port and starboard refer to the left and right sides, respectively. 

In the early days of boating, before ships had rudders on their centerlines, boats were controlled using a steering oar. Most sailors were right handed, so the steering oar was placed over or through the right side of the stern. Sailors began calling the right side the steering side, which soon became “starboard” by combining two Old English words: stéor(meaning “steer”) and bord (meaning “the side of a boat”).

As the size of boats grew, so did the steering oar, making it much easier to tie a boat up to a dock on the side opposite the oar. This side became known as larboard, or “the loading side.” Over time, larboard—too easily confused with starboard—was replaced with port. After all, this was the side that faced the port, allowing supplies to be ported aboard by porters.

Bekah McNeel:

I took my first standardized test thirty years ago. I was in third grade at Seele Elementary in New Braunfels, and it was the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, or TAAS, test. Our teacher, Bunny Hollis—she and her cardigans were straight out of a heartwarming midcentury children’s novel—called for our attention one afternoon and briefed us on the upcoming exam with not a hair of her perfectly stationary coiffure askew. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I do remember the nonchalance. It was something to this effect: “There’s going to be a test tomorrow. Don’t worry about it; I’m your teacher, and I’m confident you know far more than you’ll need to know to pass. Please eat a big breakfast and don’t be late.”

And then we took the test, with no more novelty than the smell of new pencils. Standardized testing was nothing new—Texas started testing third, fifth, and ninth graders in 1980, and by 1993 we were on the third iteration of the exam. We’d had TABS, TEAMS, and now TAAS, and no one cared all that much about any of them or felt they were the truest measure of our nine-year-old academic capacity. Public confidence in the usefulness of the tests is still shaky—the Charles Butt Foundation surveyed parents and teachers in 2023 and found that 45 percent of public school parents and 81 percent of current and former public school teachers polled are not confident in the current test’s ability to measure student learning.

You’d never guess that if you visited a Texas elementary school at any point in the last two weeks.

I’ve been reporting on education in Texas since 2013, the second year of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test (which replaced the TAKS test, which replaced the TAAS test). On one of my first campus visits I saw fourth graders in T-shirts with a Star Wars–themed play on the STAAR acronym. I thought it was a little overkill. In San Antonio, testing coincides with Fiesta season, so I assumed that some of the STAAR-themed decorations were unique to our papel picado–clad city. It turns out they are not unique, nor are they the most ebullient celebration of the standardized tests. Scrolling through social media this week, I saw posts from across the state. Marching bands and celebrity guests at pep rallies, reality TV–themed contests, special dress days, and more, all dedicated to the STAAR test.

Michael Shellenberger

The United Nations is training people worldwide to demand censorship by social media platforms of their fellow citizens for “potentially harmful content.” At least one U.S.-government funded group, The Atlantic Council, is involved.

Our discovery of this shocking news comes on the same day that Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center announced its hiring of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden to oversee its advocacy of censorship at a global level. 

Arden and her allies have used the 2019 Christchurch mosque killing of 51 people to demand greater censorship by social media platforms of disfavored speech. 

“Ardern is known globally as a dedicated and effective leader in pursuing greater online platform accountability and content moderation standards through the Christchurch Call,” wrote Harvard, “a community of over 120 governments, online service providers, and civil society organizations…” (emphasis added).

Back at the U.N., its program is called “Social Media 4 Peace.” It is a pilot program for pro-censorship activists based in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Colombia, Indonesia, and Kenya. It is sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

It held its first online meetings for censorship workers in Kenya and Colombia this week and last.

The U.N. effort emphasizes research and “monitoring.” But, as in the U.S., the explicit goal is to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored voices.

And the U.N. censors are going further than U.S. censors did. Some even demand censorship of “negative comments about public figures’ appearances.” Others require the power to censor “slang” that social media platforms might miss.

Jonathan Turley:

Students who came to the university with that assurance are now being told that some views are simply too harmful to be heard.

It may be a familiar moment for Van Fleet from her own experience in the Cultural Revolution. In February 1957, Mao issued a surprising speech titled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” in which he encouraged intellectual debate and criticism.

Intellectuals were leery and did not come forward, prompting Mao to take measures to induce their speech. When some then criticized party orthodoxy or corruption, Mao had the speech retroactively changed and cracked down on dissenters as spreading harmful thoughts.

Mao rounded up the intellectuals and told citizens that the government would only allow the ‘fragrant flowers’ of healthy debate while pulling out the ‘poisonous weeds’ of noxious capitalism. What is noteworthy is how close the rhetoric of Mao is to that of many anti-free speech advocates today on our campuses.

Mao declared “words and actions should help to unite, not divide, the people of our various nationalities; They should be beneficial, not harmful, to socialist construction; They should help to consolidate, not weaken, the people’s democratic dictatorship; They should help to consolidate, not weaken, democratic centralism.”

Sara Randazzo:

Las Vegas high-school English teacher Laura Jeanne Penrod initially thought the grading changes at her school district made sense. Under the overhaul, students are given more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines, in recognition of challenges some children have outside school. 

Soon after the system was introduced, however, Ms. Penrod said her 11th-grade honors students realized the new rules minimized the importance of homework to their final grades, leading many to forgo the brainstorming and rough drafts required ahead of writing a persuasive essay. Some didn’t turn in the essay at all, knowing they could redo it later.

digilol:

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University made its platforms inaccessible to its students by enforcing proprietary and privacy-compromising 2FA methods. The students demanded open standards and free software.

Noah Smith:

The results were highly disappointing — Black and Latino kids’ math skills did not improve, and the achievement gap widened, thanks to richer White and Asian families hiring private tutors to teach their kids algebra.

This incident — whose results are sad but entirely predictable — highlights how some Americans think we can increase equity in math education by simply teaching less math. But this doesn’t make the world more equal — rich kids have the private resources to learn on their own, while poor kids need the state to teach them. Paring back the role of the state is rarely a recipe for equity. 

But there’s probably a wider consequence of this type of shenanigan as well. At a time when America is desperately trying to re-shore strategic industries like semiconductors, we need a broad workforce with basic numeracyeven more than usual. The more we refuse to teach our kids math — not the well-prepared upper crust, but the broad middle of the distribution — the more we’ll be dependent on immigration to run the fabs. And while immigration is great, I don’t have infinite confidence in our government’s willingness to open the gates. We need to train our own people too.

Which means we need to get more serious about broad-based math education. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about why the fights over meritocracy vs. equity ignore the larger imperative of broad-based numeracy and technical competence. Here is that post, which I think is more relevant than ever.

ietf:

This document describes technical mechanisms employed in network censorship that regimes around the world use for blocking or impairing Internet traffic. It aims to make designers, implementers, and users of Internet protocols aware of the properties exploited and mechanisms used for censoring end-user access to information. This document makes no suggestions on individual protocol considerations, and is purely informational, intended as a reference. This document is a product of the Privacy Enhancement and Assessment Research Group (PEARG) in the IRTF.

Stephen Council;

A group of contracted YouTube workers based in Austin, Texas, voted to ratify a bargaining unit Wednesday afternoon, in an election historic for creating a union to bargain with a tech company and its contractor together as joint employers. 

The unionization vote passed 41-0. The National Labor Relations Board representative counting the ballots said 49 workers were eligible to vote.

The employees work for the subcontractor Cognizant on content operations for Google’s YouTube Music, resolving bugs and completing other tasks to ensure the streaming service runs smoothly. Google continues to argue that Cognizant is the workers’ sole employer and says the Mountain View-based tech giant should not be forced to negotiate with the workers.

Held via mail-in ballot, the election creates a bargaining unit with the Alphabet Workers Union— an organization affiliated with the Communications Workers of America that, until now, has represented only one office of unionized Google workers, a contracted Fiber retail shop in Missouri. Those workers opted to drop Google from their petition.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 district use Google (YouTube) services, including Madison.

Michael Shellenberger

Ever since journalist Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress on April 10, critics of the Twitter Files have claimed that we were making a big deal about nothing. We were being paranoid, they said, to imagine that the U.S. government was involved in spying on ordinary Americans and demanding censorship. The various groups involved in what we called the Censorship Industrial Complex were merely “flagging” problematic posts for social media companies, said our critics. The platforms were by no means required to act on it. 

Yet act on it, they did. As I noted in our video about CIA Fellow Renee DiResta, who oversaw the Censorship Industrial Complex’s effort to censor disfavored speech and disfavored users in 2020 and 2021, the social media companies responded to 75% of flagged posts and acted on one-third of them. 

And now, new information has come to light that the censorship activists are trying to spy on and censor even supposedly encrypted text messages through apps like What’s App, Signal, and Telegram.

“There is currently no easy way to discover potentially problematic content on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted platforms at scale,” lamented censorship advocates in a January 2022 Omidyar Foundation report. “One potential solution is to make use of misinformation ‘tiplines’ to identify potentially misleading or otherwise problematic content… On WhatsApp, a tipline would be a phone number to which WhatsApp users can forward potential misinformation they see to have it fact-checked.”

Jennifer Lynch:

The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.

Geofence warrants, which we have written aboutextensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify allusers or devices located in a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement. 

In the Meza case, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputies were investigating a homicide and had video footage suggesting the suspects followed the victim from one location to another before committing the crime. To try to identify the unknown suspects, they sought a warrant that would force Google to turn over identifying information for every device with a Google account that was within any of six locations over a five hour window. The warrant covered time periods where people were likely to be in sensitive places, like their homes, or driving along busy streets. In total, police requested data for geographic area equivalent to about 24 football fields (five to six city blocks), which included large apartment buildings, churches, barber shops, nail salons, medical centers, restaurants, a public library, and a union headquarters.

Google, through its My Maps platform, has shut down a series of invaluable maps (including @5urpher‘s) that contained hundreds of thousands of data points on events in the war in Ukraine, with some data going back to 2014l. Just completely illogical for why they’d do this. https://t.co/rZSNyE3nlM

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) April 25, 2023

The Economist:

AMERICA’s WAR on drugs has been a disaster. More than a million Americans have died of overdoses since the government started counting in 1999. No wonder a growing number of states are interested in trying something different. Nine of them are contemplating decriminalising the possession of a small amount of drugs. This newspaper has long championed more liberal laws, but before rushing ahead, reform-minded states—in America and beyond—would do well to consider the experience of Oregon, the only American state so far to enact decriminalisation. It has had a rocky start.

Removing criminal penalties for possessing some drugs makes sense. It can reduce prison numbers and the perils of addiction. Portugal decriminalised the possession of drugs for personal use in 2001. In subsequent years overdose deaths and HIV rates fell, and public drug markets disappeared.

Jason Gay:

Is there a debate sillier than the one over “participation trophies”? Like an out-of-shape benchwarmer, our intermittent national bicker over the appropriate reasons to award hardware to young athletes has wheezed its way back onto the playing field.

This time the arena is North Carolina, where a trio of state politicians have introduced legislation to enact a statewide ban on youth sports awards “based solely on participation.”

Public time and money well spent, that’s for sure. If there’s one thing that constituents want from their elected officials, it’s a heavy regulatory hand in the youth sports trophy industry.

Should this North Carolina bill become law, I would urge its three sponsors to spend the coming months traversing the Tar Heel state in a minivan full of sweat socks and fast food wrappers, popping in unannounced on Little League games, lacrosse contests and 7-on-7 flag football, making sure no child is awarded a shimmering figurine for anything less than a stellar athletic achievement.

FIRE:

Today, two students represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued their Michigan school district for viewpoint discrimination after they were forbidden from wearing apparel critical of President Joe Biden.

“Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,” said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “Whether it’s a Biden sticker, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirt, or gay pride T-shirt, schools can’t pick and choose which political beliefs students can express.”

In Feb. 2022, two Tri County Middle School students wore sweatshirts to school with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a political slogan critical of President Biden with origins in a more profane chant. Even though the political slogan is widely used — multiple members of Congress used it during floor speeches — an assistant principal and a teacher ordered the boys to remove the sweatshirts. However, administrators allowed students to wear apparel with other political messages, including gay-pride-themed hoodies.

The incident is part of a pattern of political favoritism by the school district. When the school district relaxed the dress code for field day, a school administrator ordered a student to stop wearing a Trump flag as a cape, but permitted other students to wear gay pride flags in the same manner.

Tom Huddleston:

Soon, artificial intelligence could help teach your kids and improve their grades.

That’s according to billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who says AI chatbots are on track to help children learn to read and hone their writing skills in 18 months time.

“The AI’s will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could,” Gates said in a keynote talk on Tuesday at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego.

AI chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have developed rapidly over the past several months, and can now compete with human-level intelligence on certain standardized tests. That growth has sparked both excitement over the technology’s potential and debate over the possible negative consequences.

Ari Kauffman:

In the 23 City Schools of Baltimore, zero students are proficient in grade-level math. The Baltimore Teachers Union, unsurprisingly, is among the nation’s most influential and a top AFT ally. They partner in hurting children.

Weingarten and her totalitarians love to talk about supposed “racism,”; but if her union cared about black Americans’ lives — instead of collecting massive salariesand funding Democrats — rather than political grandstanding, they would do something since the district is majority black.

They also might do something about the fact that 40 miles down the road in the Washington D.C. public school system, only 9% of black 3rd-12th graders counted as proficient in math last year.

Why doesn’t the Washington Post or NPR care that despite the massive amount of money the nation’s capital’s residents spend per pupil, their public school teachers cannot get 1 of 10 black students proficient in math? That’s not “economic inequality”; that’s a true scandal.

It’s not much better for other groups.

Only 17% of D.C.’s Hispanic students are proficient in math. And in English, only 20% of black students and about a third of Hispanic students count as proficient.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Peachy Keenan:

What should have been a conversation about why Jacob Blake was not in jail and why rioters were allowed to burn down half of the city became, instead, incredibly, a story about a racist white kid who terrorized the noble protestors with his AR-15.

Pride Cometh

In response to the horrific shooting in nearby Nashville, what did the Franklin, Tennessee city council decide to vote on last week?

Hosting a new Pride parade through the center of town! Franklin is a quiet, idyllic little town just south of where the Covenant school shooting took place, and according to friends who fled California for new, more peaceful lives there, no one wants or needs more Pride in town.

But the mayor surrendered, naturally, and bent the knee to the trans activists, perhaps in fear they would wreak even more vengeance against a local school. He voted to break the tie and allow the upcoming parade. 

A friend in Franklin sent me this: “​​What isn’t being reported is that businesses and companies spoke out against the parade. There has been a small gay festival outside town the last two years, and it was not well attended, and very small. This is just an outside activist push. The majority of the city is pretty upset. They were upset last year when there were drag performances in town. The city is being targeted, but there is no desire among the populace for this. [The Pride parade people] wanted the whole downtown this year.” 

And that’s exactly what they’re going to get.

Audrey Hale, you did not die in vain!

How did @DrJillStein get on Twitter’s creepy “inferred Russians” list – a.k.a. is_russian? Read the new #TwitterFiles thread by @0rf: https://t.co/6eWOhYX33z

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 26, 2023

Now It Can Be Said, Masking Edition:

“From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent.”

– Anthony Fauci https://t.co/DVNeyt5oKB

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) April 25, 2023

📖HUGE Wisconsin reading update📖

A bill’s coming that will do bold, Mississippi-style reforms to save Wisconsin’s kids!

But some pieces aren’t funded, colleges have no compliance consequences, and low-scoring 3rd graders can pass.

Do you think that it’ll work?

Videos below! pic.twitter.com/gmJtmNsoHK

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) April 25, 2023

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Olivia Herken:

The district is also forecasting the loss of 219 students in its three-year rolling average, which is used to calculate the revenue limit, and it expects a loss of about 531 students in its third-Friday enrollment count in the fall.

And like many school districts across the state, Madison is turning to federal, one-time COVID-19 relief funds to pad its budget.

The district plans to use $42.3 million in ESSER III funds for next year’s spending. Just over 110 full-time equivalent positions will be funded with one-time dollars next year because of funding shortages, which will add to the continued shortfalls in future budgets.

The Economist:

The term refers to a loose constellation of ideas that have changed how educated, left-leaning folk view the world. It says all disparities between racial groups are proof of structural racism; that norms of free speech, individualism and universalism are camouflage for discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of privilege are dismantled. The conventional wisdom says that woke ideas began in the social-science departments of American universities, migrated to the country’s newspapers and spread elsewhere.

This was always a partial story. The godfathers of woke ideas, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, philosophers who argued all social relations were really about power, were based largely in France. Mr Rozado’s new paper takes things further. He analyses 98m news articles, tracking words such as “transphobic”, “racist” and “sexist”. The phenomenon, it seems, did not begin in America (see chart). Countries such as Australia, Canada and Sweden in fact led the charge.

This is Bowling Green’s diversity statement rubric.

Notice the conspicuous attempt to acknowledge viewpoint diversity (“diverse ideologies or perspectives”).

Unconvincing. As with any DEI statement requirement, the door for ideological policing is wide open. pic.twitter.com/YaWyHZaQwp

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) April 18, 2023

Removing algebra and dumbing down public schools to win political points results in worse outcomes

Virtue signal policies like removing honors classes and algebra result in a bigger achievement gap than before https://t.co/xrTYTUWIJg pic.twitter.com/vrLVE2Njp6

— Garry Tan 陈嘉兴 (@garrytan) April 24, 2023

Related: Madison, one size fits all – English 10 and the effort to eliminate honors classes.