UNC.EDU

63% are female, 37% are male

The spear of lugh:

Articulating ideas and reality has always been complex but at least words and swords were geographically in the same place. The striking example is how french “départements” (administrative subdivision of French state) were defined under Napoleon’s ruling: it is the set of places that can be reached from the “chef-lieu” (main city) with less than 1 day by horse ride. Now that a tweet can be read instantaneously at the other part of the globe, we see that the “horse ride” condition makes little sense. Now a new question arises: how do you enforce a smart contract (very much an idea) in Kabul when it is overrun by Talibans?

There is an inherent elegance in the “freedom convoys” (in Canada, the US, France etc.) we are experiencing now. This movement unmasks the power that be in an unstoppable way. This movement forces politicians to denounce out loud their own previous decisions. Irony is not lost on anyone when hearing Canada’s premier Trudeau explaining that hindering freedom of movement is detrimental to everyone. No kidding sunshine! Doesn’t it remind you something? Even more ironic were the effort of various police forces to block convoys to avoid the convoys to block. You see there is blocking and blocking. There are good and bad blockers you know…

Janice Goldwater:

In a 2016 analysis as part of the five-year Turnaway Study… UCSF researchers… found that one week after being denied an abortion due to a late-term pregnancy just 14 percent of 171 study participants reported plans to place the baby for adoption or considered it as an option. Only nine percent of those who went on to give birth – 15 women — actually placed their newborns for adoption…. 

In interviews with researchers, Turnaway participants gave several reasons for deciding to parent, including finding relatives were more willing to help than they anticipated and the bond they felt with their infants after birth. Lastly, they said they would feel guilty if they chose adoption “either because they believed adoption was an abjuration of responsibility, or because they believed it meant they’d have no ongoing knowledge of their child,” the report summarized. 

Those who chose adoption expressed strong satisfaction with their decisions, but follow-up interviews “revealed mixed emotions,” the report said. The 2016 analysis concluded: “Political promotion of adoption as an alternative to abortion is likely not grounded in the reality of women’s decision making.”…

Choose life.

Commentary.

David Perry:

Tech is just a tool or a plaything for him like any other. But we were promised more than that — we were promised a future in which technology would mediate between my disabled son and an ableist world. Instead, what is available to my son is driven more by arbitrary systems than by his needs and his personality. 

My son’s most significant needs relate to speech. By the time he was three, it was clear he was not going to predominantly use verbal speech, though he was learning to communicate in a wide variety of ways. His speech therapist at the time quickly sent us to a world-class facility to assess the best way for him to use tech to talk. At the time, Nico’s healthcare and education costs were covered by the “early intervention” programs in Illinois — statewide systems funded by federal, state, and local dollars intended to help children under three years of age meet “developmental milestones.” 

We tried a wide variety of devices, but because he had the manual dexterity to operate the simplest one, that’s the one the state would pay for. Within a few weeks after having it prescribed, we had a plastic box where you could literally cut and paste pieces of paper with words and pictures on it, and then use your voice to record sounds that then my son could press to play out loud. It was over a foot long. It cost over $3,000. 

There were much better, and much more expensive, dedicated speech devices on the market, many of which are in fact a marvel of engineering, and do not require exhausted parents to do arts and crafts. But what we needed, we thought, was a speech app; they were just becoming available on mobile platforms like iPads. We wanted Proloquo2go, one of a number of programs that can reproduce words or phrases by selecting from an infinitely customizable menu. It cost $250, which we didn’t have, and needed to be on an iPad, which we also couldn’t afford. The price would have been much lower than our state-funded arts and crafts box, but at the time the system wouldn’t pay for medical programs on non-medical devices. We ultimately got both the tablet and the app thanks to a donor.

Zachary Crockett:

In 1960, the median family brought in $5,620 ($2.70/hr), or ~$55.5k per year adjusted for inflation. Today’s median family earns considerably more, at $84k per year, or $40.38/hr.

But when it comes to traditional family outings, the purchasing power of that income has declined.

For each of these examples, we’ll calculate the cost for a family of four (two parents and two kids).

History:

After Vespasian became Roman Emperor in 69 A.D., his Flavian Dynasty— which included his sons, Titus and Domitian—launched a vast building program to restore Rome, which had been ravaged by fire, plague and civil war. During the Flavian Dynasty’s 27-year reign, it renovated buildings, statues and monuments throughout the city. In 70 A.D., Vespasian ordered the construction of the new amphitheater in the city center, funded with the spoils from the Roman siege of Jerusalem during the First Jewish-Roman War. The Colosseum, dedicated 10 years later, served as a dramatic political symbol of the city’s resurgence. 

It was also an innovative architectural and engineering wonder, the largest and most complex permanent amphitheater of the ancient world. Made primarily of concrete, 3.5 million cubic feet of travertine, and similar amounts of marble, stone and timber, the Colosseum rose to 157 feet (roughly the height of a 15-story building), with capacity for an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 people. 

“The Colosseum…was part of an entire complex of buildings that Vespasian and his sons were building throughout Rome as part of a bigger program to erase [their predecessor] Nero’s mark on the city—and to champion their own achievements,” says Nathan Elkins, deputy director of the American Numismatic Society and author of Monument to Dynasty and Death: The Story of Rome’s Colosseum and the Emperors Who Built It. At its dedication, Titus presided over 100 days of games, which included gladiatorial combat and animal entertainments.

It’s amazing how badly institutional media is performing but they do nothing but blame others for their troubles. HT @CrashAgneta https://t.co/Gj4S3MaQgG

— Davos Bro Balding 大老板 (@BaldingsWorld) July 18, 2022

Audrey Unverferth and Evita Duffy

Many of the conference speakers argued that the government should regulate the algorithms of social media platforms, which would effectively diminish the reach of people and ideas they don’t like. Meanwhile, none of them entertained the idea that a large portion of the country might just be justified in distrusting the narratives of woke academics, dishonest journalists, and criminal government officials and agencies. 

Our team recognizes the stakes: if Ressa and her friends successfully entrench themselves as information gate-keepers, genuine truth-seeking will be forced underground or stopped completely. We can’t let them get away with this power grab.

We Respectfully Posed Tough Questions

Unlike our leftist peers at the University of Buffalo (who this week forced a conservative speaker to be escorted out by police from his campus lecture), Chicago Thinker student journalists respectfully posed hard-hitting but genuine questions. 

On Wednesday, Senior Editor Daniel Schmidt asked The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum about the corporate-media and Big-Tech suppression of the New York Post story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, zeroing in on Applebaum’s rejection of the laptop’s importance. 

“Now, of course, we know a few weeks ago The New York Times confirmed that the [laptop] content is real. Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation?” asked Schmidt. “And what can we learn from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?”

Applebaum dismissed the laptop story, explaining, “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, [it’s] totally irrelevant. I mean it’s not whether it’s disinformation — I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting.” Moderator David Axelrod quickly jumped in, ending the discussion.

Sergey Karaganov:

Confrontation is narrowing the room for political freedom, and I am concerned about that. I am reiterating in most of my writings and public appearances that we should preserve freedom of thinking and intellectual discussion, which is still much wider than in many other countries. We do not have the cancel culture or impose the deafening political correctness. I am concerned about the freedom of thought in the future. But I am even more concerned about the growing probability of a global thermonuclear conflict ending the history of humanity. We are living through a prolonged Cuban missile crisis. And I do not see people of the caliber of Kennedy and his entourage on the other side. I do not know whether we have responsible interlocutors. But we are looking for them.

I am sympathetic toward my compatriots who will have less possibilities to continue normal lives due to Western sanctions, aimed at inflicting of as much pain on normal Russians as possible in hope that they would revolt. The effect is predictably opposite. But there is one bright spot in the generally sad picture. Belligerent Western policies, which are almost welcome, are cleaning our society, our elites, of the remains of pro-Western elements, compradors and “useful idiots.” So, “Make my day.” I love Clint Eastwood movies. But, of course, we are not closing ourselves to European culture. Moreover, I suspect that with cancel culture now on the rise in the West, we could remain one of the few places that will preserve the treasure of the European, Western culture and spiritual values.

Zeyi Yang:

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It’s nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost.

This is what happened in June to a Chinese novelist writing under the alias Mitu. She had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of “spying on and locking my draft,” citing the presence of illegal content. 

The news blew up on social media on July 11 after a few prominent influencer accounts belatedly picked it up. It became the top trending topic on Weibo that day, with users questioning whether WPS is infringing on their privacy. Since then, The Economic Observer, a Chinese publication, has reported that several other online novelists have had their drafts locked for unclear reasons in the past. 

Mitu’s complaint triggered a social media discussion in China about censorship and tech platform responsibility. It has also highlighted the tension between Chinese users’ increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies’ obligation to censor on behalf of the government. “This is a case where perhaps we are seeing that these two things indeed might collide,” says Tom Nunlist, an analyst on China’s cyber and data policy at the Beijing-based research group Trivium China 

While Mitu’s document has been saved online and was previously shared with an editor in 2021, she says she had been the only person editing it this year, when it was suddenly locked. “The content is all clean and can even be published on a [literature] website, but WPS decided it should be locked. Who gave it the right to look into users’ private documents and decide what to do with them arbitrarily?” she wrote.

Related: Google Censorship.

Rhonda Foxx:

Some education experts and parents fear the “summer slide” may be more troublesome due to the lasting impacts the pandemic has had on learning.

For students at One City Schools, the learning doesn’t stop.

Students at One City Schools eagerly don pajamas for spirit week in July because for them, it’s a regular day of class.

Kaleem Caire, founder and CEO of One City Schools said, “We really asked our parents what type of school do you want and having something for their children to do during the summer was important.”

Even the students seem to enjoy going to school in the summer.

Caydence, a 3rd grader said, “My favorite thing is about school is like that, like we stay all year to get like smart.”

Brandyn, a 2nd grader said, “My favorite subject is recess. Why? Because I get to play basketball, and play with my friends.”

IFS:

“School boards across the country should take note. Rules for public comments must respect the First Amendment rights of speakers. If you are limiting which opinions may be shared, you’ll be held liable for violating First Amendment rights,” said Alan Gura, Vice President for Litigation at the Institute for Free Speech.

A federal court ruled in November that several Pennsbury policies governing speech at school board meetings were unconstitutional. Those policies, modeled after a template recommended by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA), allowed the meeting’s presiding officer to stop speakers whose comments were deemed “personally directed,” “personal attacks,” “abusive,” “verbally abusive,” “irrelevant,” “disruptive,” “offensive,” “inappropriate,” or “otherwise inappropriate.” After an evidentiary hearing in Philadelphia, Judge Gene Pratter found ample evidence that the Board selectively enforced the rules to stifle criticism of its actions and members.

The plaintiffs in the case were censored for attempting to criticize district policies, including efforts to promote contested ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Marshall was once interrupted mere seconds into speaking because the solicitor objected to his use of the term “critical race theory” to describe the district’s initiatives. Critics of the board were cut off for addressing their comments to board members, while other speakers were permitted to directly praise board members and school employees.

“Rules for public comment periods are meant to maintain time limits and protect each speaker’s right to be heard, not police which viewpoints are expressed. Pennsbury’s rules were so vague and subjective that the board could effectively shut down any speech they didn’t like, and that’s exactly what they did,” said Del Kolde, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech.

After the injunction was issued, Pennsbury abolished one of the two policies challenged in the lawsuit and rewrote the other to comply with the First Amendment. The court also ruled against a board requirement that speakers publicly announce their home address before beginning their remarks. According to a spokesperson for the PSBA, the model policy was put under review after the court’s ruling.

Musa al-Gharbi

One would be forgiven for believing this was an essay riffing on the recent ‘Grievance Studies’ hoax. In fact, the term (victim studies), and the debate surrounding these lines of research, long predated Pluckrose, Boghossian and Lindsay’s stunt. This particular passage is from Richard Rorty’s 1998 classic Achieving Our Country (published roughly 20 years prior to the ‘Sokal Squared’ affair).  

Similarly, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s 2014 paper “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” was met with great fanfare (and expanded into a book, The Rise of Victimhood Culture, in 2018) — in large part because it ostensibly explained the sudden surge of student protests in the months that preceded (and the years that followed) its publication, as well as the new language and strategies that seemed to define these demonstrations.

Yet well before these transformations in student protests, others had identified a change in both the valence and salience of victimhood in American culture more broadly. For instance, in 1992 conservative author Charles Skyes wrote an entire book lamenting how the United States was becoming, in his words, a “nation of victims.” In 2009, two sociologists (Fassin & Rechtman) chronicled the emergence of what Campbell & Manning would later describe as ‘victimhood culture’ in The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood.

Here is their story in a nutshell:

Elizabeth Troutman:

“This government entity believes that it can shut a citizen out of public life entirely if he challenges them, their decisions, or their authority,” Randazza told the Free Beacon. “It shouldn’t matter what he’s advocating for. If you can’t advocate your position before the government without being told you’re now locked out of public life, because you challenged us, well, that’s not what freedom is.”

In the recording McBreairty played at the April board meeting, Miller justified pornographic excerpts of a library book in the Hampden High School library, saying, “If you were to read it in the context of the whole book, it would have a different meaning.” The board cited the incident to justify the criminal trespass notice, but no official policy against playing a video or recording during a school board meeting exists, the lawsuit states. Randazza said the board tried to add limitations to its policies to stop McBreairty from criticizing the library books.

The library at the district’s Reeds Brook Middle School offers The Other Boy, a book about a 12-year-old boy who was born a girl and tries to conceal that he is transgender when his family moves towns; Middle School’s A Drag: You Better Werk, the story of a young gay entrepreneur who starts his own junior talent agency with a 13-year-old aspiring drag queen as his first client; and Rick, a book about a boy who joins a “Rainbow Spectrum club, where kids of many genders and identities can express themselves.” It also offers It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book About Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, which McBreairty read at a different school board meeting.

Hannah Cox:

A new Gallup Poll shows that only 28% of Americans hold a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in our public school system, and given the state of that system, one can only assume those people work for teachers’ unions.

This is the second lowest percentage since Gallup first started tracking the issue in the 1970s, and it isn’t hard to understand why. The failings of our government school system were put on full display during COVID as schools shut down and the classroom moved to Zoom. 

Parents were, often for the first time, presentedwith the materials their kids were actually being taught and many realized just how much time their kid wasted on a day-to-day basis.

Couple that with the egregious actions of the teachers’ unions—unions that leech off the taxpayers’ dime like a fat tick—who worked to unnecessarily keep schools shut down or enforced ridiculous COVID protocols despite parents’ wishes. They basically held the education system hostage for two years and left us with the bill—which was bound to anger anyone paying even passing attention to the situation.

And this is just the backlash against the policies found in public schools over the past two years, it doesn’t even touch on the abysmal testing resultsand outcomes for those who go through government schools.

MacIver:

Claim 1: Tony Evers has Taken Wisconsin Schools into the Top 10 in the U.S.

The ad repeats a brag Evers has been making for months.  The top 10 ranking issued by US News, shows Wisconsin’s rank improved 10 places since the 2018 list.  Evers has been taking credit for the improvement although the current ranking uses data largely from the years when Scott Walker was governor, and the lower 2018 ranking was after nearly a decade of Evers’ leadership as DPI Superintendent.

First, let’s start with the obvious. K12 student achievement numbers are trending the wrong way in Wisconsin and the most recent proficiency scores were abysmal.

Despite $2.6 billion additional federal dollars to prevent learning loss and to keep our kids on track academically, Fs increased dramatically during COVID. School funding increases every year – the most recent budget sends $2.5 billion more state aid to K12 schools than the 2015-17 budget, yet more than two-thirds of our children are not proficient in math or English language arts.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

NBC News:

A major set of red flags in the poll for Democrats and teacher unions was a series of questions that look like they were ripped from DeSantis’s Friday speech on “critical race theory” and teaching kids about sexuality and gender identity. While the survey didn’t mention DeSantis by name, it tested education messages he popularized nationally — more so than Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who won in a Democratic-leaning state last year on a parental-rights education platform that was far less provocative than DeSantis’.

One poll question found that voters, by a 32 percentage-point margin, said they were more likely to vote for candidates who believe public schools should focus less on teaching race and more on core subjects. By 27 points, they said schools should be banned from teaching sexual orientation and gender identity to kids in kindergarten through third grade. By 28 points, they said transgender athletes should be banned from competing in girls’ sports.

The same poll suggests DeSantis has been smart about where to draw the line. Most voters said they would be less likely to back candidates who want to prosecute teachers for instructing students on critical race theory and gender identity. The same goes for candidates who want books removed from school libraries, although DeSantis on Friday bashed some books as being too sexualized, and some Florida schools are banning books.

“DeSantis has been reasonably shrewd in choosing his culture war initiatives, avoiding toxic ideas like criminally prosecuting teachers,” Guy Molyneux, one of the pollsters who conducted the survey, said in an email to NBC News.

“BUT, going forward I think he will struggle to distinguish his approach from general Republican efforts to enflame political wars in school systems, which voters really don’t want,” Molyneux said. “And [the Supreme Court’s abortion] decision, with Clarence Thomas openly threatening same-sex marriage, has made it much harder for DeSantis to avoid being lumped in with a party that wants to turn back the clock on rights that Americans now take for granted.”

Emma Camp:

Seeing an opportunity, Reges wrote his own land acknowledgment. He wrote, “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

Administrators quickly retaliated, calling the statement “offensive” and arguing that it would create a “toxic environment.” Administrators removed the land acknowledgment from the syllabus posted on Reges’ course website. When Reges replaced the new file with his original syllabus, university officials “set the file protection so that I could not change it [back].” Administrators also created an alternative “shadow” section of his course, taught by another professor using recorded lectures. Approximately 30 percent of Reges’ students switched into this alternative section.

Astounding numbers just dropped from the San Francisco Board of Education.

See “ready for high school” vs “chronically absent” and graduation rate. pic.twitter.com/ezYn2aK9zU

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) July 19, 2022

PDF filing:

Amicus brief of Asian American Coalition for Education explains how Harvard admissions office manipulates impersonal “Personal rating” to discriminate against Asian American applicants. Contrast with in-person alumni interviewer ratings is striking.

Wesley Yang:

The summer program where I’m currently teaching enrolls about seventy students between the ages of six and twelve. Classes are technically open to any child in the district, but only a few parents actually sign their children up themselves; instead, the vast majority of kids are registered for the program by a teacher who was concerned with their academic performance the previous year. Parents can choose to accept or reject the enrollment, but the acceptance rate is something like 90% – it’s free, after all, and plenty of these parents are already looking for a safe place to send their children while they work during the day.

This “enroll first, ask questions later” approach removes many of the obstacles that keep struggling students from engaging with other summer programs, many of which have complicated application processes and require children to meet certain academic standards. However, it also means many families aren’t particularly invested in the program itself and, as a consequence, both parent and student engagement is lower than it might otherwise be.

Early on, an administrator confessed that this sort of setup could lead to “attendance issues,” which I took to mean some kids showing up late or even skipping class once in a while. Nine of the eleven students in my grade level were absent the first day. The next day, it was ten. By the end of the week, I had one student consistently attending and a few who had been officially withdrawn by their parents – but there were still eight children on my roster who were technically enrolled while having never once shown up.

Sarah O’Connor:

The survey contained six questions about loneliness at school such as “I feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school” and “I feel lonely at school”. In a sample of 1mn teenagers, school loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Nearly twice as many teenagers felt high levels of loneliness in 2018 than in 2012. The researchers found that school loneliness was higher when more students had access to smartphones and used the internet more hours per weekday. If the internet makes young people feel lonely, it’s no wonder the pandemic made them lonelier still.

Loneliness is bad for your health: researchers have found connections between chronic loneliness and heart disease, dementia, depression and anxiety. It can also change your perception of the world around you. One UK study asked young people about the friendliness of their neighbourhoods: it found that lonely youngsters ranked their neighbourhoods as worse than their non-lonely siblings.

If anyone is in a social recession, it is the young. As well as helping them to catch up with missed school work, we should think urgently about how to help them feel more connected to each other — crucially, in ways that don’t involve their phones.

Megan McArdle:

Yet outside those circles, Bridges’s answers don’t really sound so convincing. In most of America, “Does a late-term fetus have value?” is a softball. And when Hawley leaped in to ask whether women are the ones who give birth — a question few Americans today would struggle with — she resorted to extended question-begging. That might be fine for a Berkeley classroom. But it just won’t do for a political debate in which the majority of voters disagree with you.

Anyone who has ever tried to convince anyone of anything should be able to see that Bridges’s approach was counterproductive. Why, then, did so many articles and tweets cheer the way she “SHUT DOWN” Hawley?

Because there is one place that snickering, eye-rolling and so forth are very effective: within an insular group, where they help delineate the lines of acceptable belief. A sufficiently incredulous “Are you suggesting … ?” effectively signals a silent corollary: “… because if you are, we’ll shun you.” It tells people that this topic is not up for discussion.

Within progressive institutions, “that’s transphobic” is another such signal, and it works … within progressive institutions. In fact, it works too well; it leaves them unprepared to argue with outsiders.

When I was reporting on the story of transgender college swimmer Lia Thomas, I noticed a curious disconnect. If you read newspapers, watched television or listened to academic experts, you might have thought that most people supported Thomas, with some dissent from a few reactionaries or jealous competitors. Yet the overwhelming majority of people I actually spoke to thought it was unfairfor her to compete in women’s events, even though most of them were liberals who would never dream of voting Republican.

Adam Taylor

Requejo said that even before the pandemic, coverage rates of vaccination for DTP had stagnated in part because of rapidly increasing population numbers in key countries. “There are some regions, like Africa, where you have an increasing birth cohort. So 85 percent coverage in 2008 is X number of people, but its X plus a couple of million more that you need to deliver just to maintain that level,” Requejo said.

The U.N. Population Division estimated Monday that the world’s population will reach 8 billion later this year. Some of the countries expected to see their population increase dramatically, such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, already have millions of unvaccinated children. Both are expected to see their population grow by well over 100 million by 2050.

Freddie deBoer:

We can express the static nature of relative educational outcomes quantitatively, in a variety of ways. The simplest is to observe that by far the most consistently effective predictor of future academic performance is prior performance. This paper summarizes the reality simply:

The present study shows that individual differences in educational achievement are highly stable across the years of compulsory schooling from primary through secondary school. Children who do well at the beginning of primary school also tend to do well at the end of compulsory education for much the same reasons.

This is the finding of all such research. At essentially any point along a given student’s educational journey you can take their outcomes relative to peers and enjoy strong predictive ability about their performance at later stages. (Past performance predicts future performance so well that it seems most education researchers don’t seem to think of it as a predictor at all.) If you’d like to go short-term, student performance in third grade predicts student performance in fifth grade very well, as you would imagine. If you prefer long-term, academic skills assessed the summer after kindergarten offer useful predictive information about academic outcomes throughout K-12 schooling and even into college. Similarly, third-grade reading group, a very coarsely gradated predictor, provides useful information about how well a student will be doing at the end of high school. The kids in the top reading group at age 8 are probably going to college. The kids in the bottom reading group probably aren’t. This offends people’s sense of freedom and justice, but it is the reality in which we live.

There’s even evidence that as students age the stability of their relative performance grows over time. In reading comprehension specifically, for example, “the strength of the relation between Reading Comprehension from grade to grade tended to increase over time.”

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

WILL:

The News: Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge William Hue issued a summary judgment decision that holds the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (WIDOC) violated state law and the state constitution when the agency barred Catholic clergy from ministering in-person to the spiritual needs of inmates under a COVID-19 visitor policy. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the Wisconsin Department of Corrections in May 2021 on behalf of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee seeking invalidation of the visitor policy. That policy, in effect for over a year, contained no exceptions for vaccinated clergy or instances where religious services could not be conducted virtually, yet WIDOC simultaneously granted institutional access to lawyers, public officials, and members of the press, among many others.

Judge Hue wrote, in part, “Religious interests (guaranteed by the Wisconsin Constitution) and the privilege to clergy (granted by the Wisconsin Legislature through statute) were not given consideration by [WIDOC] in denying them access to state correctional institutions for over 450 days. [WIDOC’s] acts in that regard were not tailored narrowly to meet competing state interests and [the Archdiocese’s] rights. They were not tailored at all.”

Sean Hollister:

“This revelation is particularly troubling given that the company has previously admitted to having no policies that restrict how law enforcement can use Ring users’ footage, no data security requirements for law enforcement entities that have users’ footage, and no policies that prohibit law enforcement officers from keeping Ring users’ footage forever,” he told The Intercept.

Melissa Korn:

A University of Washington computer science professor is suing his school, claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights as he faces punishment for his take on a university statement that the campus is located on Native American land, the latest clash over speech rights for college faculty.

Stuart Reges, who has taught at the university since 2004, claims in the suit that administrators are discriminating against him because of his viewpoint challenging Native Americans’ historic ownership of the land, and are using an unconstitutionally broad speech policy to pursue disciplinary action against him.

The university in 2020 included on a list of best practices for diversity a suggestion that faculty add a “land acknowledgment” to their course syllabi and offered recommended language: “The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.”

Jeffrey Tucker:

So it was all a sleight-of-hand: she was staying home; it’s just that she has several homes! This is how the power elite comply, one supposes. 

The BBC then quoted her defense, which echo the pain experienced by hundreds of millions: 

“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”

Indeed. However, she was the major voice for the better part of 2020 for requiring exactly that. No one should blame her for wanting to get together with family; that she worked so hard for so long to prevent others from doing so is what is at issue. 

The press piled on and she announced that she would be leaving her post and not seeking a position at the Biden White House. Trump tweeted that she will be missed. It was the final discrediting – or should have been – of a person that many in the White House and many around the country had come to see as an obvious fanatic and fake, a person whose influence wrecked the liberties and health of an entire country.

More:

In what may be the most damning quote of the entire US response to Covid, in one paragraph, Birx tells us that she’d always intended “two weeks to slow the spread” as a lie and immediately wanted those two weeks extended, despite having no data to show why that was necessary.

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.

This is one of several quotes in which Birx refers to “our version” of a lockdown, though she never makes it clear what the original “version” of a lockdown is. As a matter of fact, though Birx spends hundreds of pages boasting about her scorched-earth crusade for lockdowns across America, she never once explains why she wanted this or why she felt it was a good idea, other than some brief asides about China’s supposed success using social distancing during SARS-1.

Birx’s apparent plan to almost singlehandedly destroy the world’s primary democratic superpower is going swimmingly until she meets the book’s leading antagonist: Dr. Scott Atlas. To Birx’s disgust, Atlas takes a strong stand for all the things she loathes most—things like human rights, democratic governance, and, most of all, freedom.

Scott Jaschik

The College Board will no longer make public data on race and the scores of those who take Advanced Placement exams.

The change was first noted by Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, who wrote on Twitter that the change was “the most 1984-esque example of College Board-speak I’ve seen in a while” because the College Board says “withholding data is now called ‘streamlined reporting.’”

Jaslee Carayol, director of communications at the College Board, said the data are available to some. “AP provides demographic data to schools, districts, and state departments of education. Schools and districts have already received their AP data for the 2022 AP Exam Administration and, later this month, AP data will be delivered to state departments of education. Researchers who would like access to AP data can make requests via online form,” she said.

The data from 2018 show that Asian students excelled on the exams in biology, calculus (advanced), computer science, English language and composition, and U.S. history.

Francois Balloux:

A common misunderstanding is that “the science” is a set of absolute, immutable, indisputable and verifiable facts. Rather, science is a messy process eventually converging towards the truth in a process of trial and error.

Many scientific publications are false – because they relied on inadequate data or analyses, but more often the results are just false-positives, picking up a statistically significant association when they shouldn’t. Indeed, each time a statistical test is performed, there is a small chance it will pick up a pattern even when there is none. Such false-positive findings are particularly likely to arise in studies with small sample sizes, as those are inherently noisier.

The problem is made worse because studies reporting positive findings are more likely to be written up and publicised. (Those failing to detect a statistically significant effect often tend to remain unpublished.) Publications reporting false-positive results are also more common among the first studies, a pattern known as the “winner’s curse”.

There have been several instances during the pandemic where the first studies pointed to results that could not be replicated by other, often larger, studies. One example was the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Several early studies on a small number of patients reported promising results, which led many to believe that it was a miracle cure for Covid-19. It was only once data from large clinical trials became available that ivermectin could be confidently ruled out as a useful drug against the virus.

More recently, a preprint reported that current Omicron lineages in circulation (BA.1.12, BA.4 and BA.5) may have reverted to a level of virulence comparable to the previous Delta variant, mostly on the basis of experimental infections in hamsters. Those early results caused considerable alarm but could not be replicated in other hamster experiments. They were also at variance with the massive body of real-world evidence from many countries showing no increase in hospitalisation or death rates for infections caused by current strains in circulation.

Of the myriad doomsday Covid-19 variants that have been anticipated on the basis of early and often poor evidence, few did in fact sweep the world. Though some did: the Alpha and Delta variants were both more transmissible and associated with higher hospitalisation and death rates than any lineage in circulation before them. And the Omicron variant spread globally very rapidly, mainly because it could largely bypass existing population immunity conferred by vaccines and prior infections, but luckily, its severity lies well below that of the early pandemic lineages and any subsequent variant.

I remember chuckling a bit when politicians would confidently state that they were/are “following the science”.….

Ethan Ennals:

Infectious diseases expert and former presidential Covid adviser Dr Deborah Birx told The Mail on Sunday that coronavirus ‘came out of the box ready to infect’ when it emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2020. 

The adviser said most viruses take months or years to become highly infectious to humans. But, Dr Birx said, Covid ‘was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived’.

She said that meant Covid was either an ‘abnormal thing of nature’ or that Chinese scientists were ‘working on coronavirus vaccines’ and became infected.

‘It happens, labs aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, we make mistakes and there can be contamination,’ she said.

🧵 Covidian reckoning (1/13)

Hate to break it to everyone:

Covid mandates, destruction of education and anti-child policies aren’t going to flip Cali or NY red; they wont make much of a difference in the polls.

— Sai Medi (@Saikmedi) July 17, 2022

But this time I promise it’s real, guys pic.twitter.com/38zlo1iaU6

— BowTiedRanger (@BowTiedRanger) July 17, 2022

NASA, ESA and CSA:

During the six-month commissioning period of JWST, the mission team worked with dedication and focus to prepare the observatory for science operations. A key part of commissioning activities was characterizing the on-orbit performance of the observatory. This document summarizes those results, drawn from many activities and analyses over the past six months.

The design and architecture of JWST, and pre-launch predicted performance, are described elsewhere. This document summarizes what was actually delivered, and how the actual performance differs from pre-launch expectations. We summarize in turn the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system. Further details will appear in a planned series of papers in a PASP special issue on JWST.

The key outcome of six months of commissioning is this: JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. JWST was envisioned “to enable fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems” (Gardner et al. 2006) — we now know with certainty that it will. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.

Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected. The optics are better aligned, the point spread function is sharper with higher encircled energy, and the optical performance is more time-stable than requirements. The fine guidance system points the observatory several times more accurately and precisely than required. The mirrors are cleaner than requirements, which translates into lower-than-expected levels of near-infrared stray light, meaning that the <5 μm sky background will be darker for JWST than expected. The science instruments have generally higher total system throughput than pre-launch expectations. Detector noise properties are similar to ground tests, albeit with higher rates of cosmic rays, as expected in deep space. Collectively, these factors translate into substantially better sensitivity for most instrument modes than was assumed in the exposure time calculator for Cycle 1 observation planning, in many cases by tens of percent. In most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. In addition, JWST has enough propellant onboard to last at least 20 years.

Matt Taibbi:

Biden’s descent was obvious six years ago. Following the candidate in places like Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire, I listened to traveling press joke about his general lack of awareness and discuss new precautions his aides seemed to be taking to prevent him engaging audience members at events. Biden at the time was earning negative headlines for doing things like jamming a forefinger into the sternum of a black activist named Tracye Redd in Waterloo, Iowa, one of several such incidents just on that trip. 

My former editor at Rolling Stone John Hendrickson, a genial, patient person whom I like a great deal, insisted from afar that Biden’s problems were due to continuing difficulties with a childhood stutter, something John had also overcome. He went on to write a piece for the Atlantic called “Joe Biden’s Stutter, and Mine” that became a viral phenomenon, abetting a common explanation for Biden’s stump behavior: he was dealing with a disability. The Times added op-eds from heroes like airline pilot Captain “Sully” Sullenberger with titles like, “Like Joe Biden, I Once Stuttered, Too. I Dare You to Mock Me.”

But I’d covered a much sharper Biden in 2008 and felt that even if the drain of overcoming a stutter had some effect, the problems were cognitive, not speech-related. He struggled to remember where he was and veered constantly into inappropriateness, challenging people physically, telling crazy-ass stories, and angering instantly. He’d move to inch-close face range of undecideds like Cedar Rapids resident Jaimee Warbasse and grab her hand (“we’re talking minutes,” she said) before saying, “If I haven’t swayed you today, then I can’t.” I called the mental health professionals who were all too happy to diagnose Donald Trump from afar for a story about the effort to remove Trump under the 25th amendment, and all declined to discuss Biden even off the record for “ethical” reasons. 

This week, all that changed. Add stories like “Biden Promised to Stay Above the Fray, but Democrats Want a Fighter” and Michelle Goldberg’s “Joe Biden is Too Old to Be President Again,” and what we’ve got is a newspaper that catches real history spasmodically and often years late, but has the accuracy of an atomic clock when it comes to recording the shifting attitudes of elite opinion. 

Whether through Emily Bazelon’s Times Magazine piece “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” or Michael Powell’s “A Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women,” or even the Editorial Board argument from late May, “The War in Ukraine is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready,” the Times has become a place where the public often learns about key facts, pressing international controversies, or trends in American thought only once these have been deemed suitable for public consumption by an unseen higher audience. An all time effort in this direction was “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues,” in whichthe paper allowed some of its better reporters to quietly confirm a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop two years after keeping more or less mum as the story was tabbed Russian disinformation.

HHS.gov

On Saturday, the United States will transition the 10-digit National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to 988 – an easy-to-remember three-digit number for 24/7 crisis care. The lifeline, which also links to the Veterans Crisis Line, follows a three-year joint effort by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to put crisis care more in reach for people in need. This initiative is part of President Biden’s comprehensive strategy to address our nation’s mental health crisis, and is identified by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra as a top priority at HHS. Since January 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration has made unprecedented investments to support the 988 transition, investing $432 million to scale crisis center capacity and ensure all Americans have access to help during mental health crises.

Matt Tabby:

After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans.”

FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative. 

To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children.”

The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

We get asked all the time, “What school board policies can my parent group support or propose that are positive?”

Check out this list of Model School Board Policies from the @WILawLiberty to get ideas for your school board! https://t.co/R98avmfeHE

— Parents Defending Education (@DefendingEd) July 15, 2022

Wall Street Journal:

Virginia Republicans hope that lab schools will replicate the success of charters, which face an unusual barrier in the state. The Virginia constitution requires each new charter to gain sign-off from the local school board, most of which are politically aligned with the unions. The fast-growing state had a mere seven charter schools in 2021, serving about 1,300 students out of more than 1.2 million.

Laying the foundation for non-union schools is in keeping with Mr. Youngkin’s campaign promise to grant more options and control to parents. Debates over Covid restrictions and critical-race theory helped push education to the forefront of last year’s gubernatorial election, with dissatisfied parents driving an unexpected GOP vote surge.

Public pressure has enabled a breakthrough. Former Gov. Bob McDonnell, who led the state from 2010 to 2013, tried to work around the edges of charter-school restrictions but failed to get lab-school funding through a Democratic Senate. The Governor before Mr. Youngkin, Democrat Ralph Northam, opposed the idea, with his education secretary calling lab schools “an underhanded way of getting to charter schools.” But this year, after his election victory in November, Gov. Youngkin was able to win support from 32 of 40 state Senators.

Proposals for lab schools are already open. “We’ve already had universities and school boards come to me,” Gov. Youngkin said at the signing ceremony. The $100 million in the budget will provide “start-up capital” for at least five new schools, along with grants for entities planning to open them. George Mason University has discussed with neighboring public-school and community-college systems opening one of the first lab schools, according to Virginia radio station VPM.

Myron Ebell & Steven Milloy:

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

Dan Klein:

That is from The Constitution of Liberty, specifically, the epilogue. Now it’s proven that Hayek was right and the others wrong.

There is a lot of talk about how ‘big data’ is going to make miracles and answer big questions. When a lot of interpretation and judgment is involved in utilizing the data, the touting of ‘big data’ is hooey.

When interpretation and judgment are simple and straightforward, however, big data are powerful. The Google Ngram Viewer is simply counting and percentages. There is no statistical manipulation on my part. Because we can speak so plainly of the data, we say “the data speak for themselves.” Here again is the slide from above:

Jack Cashill:

The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did notattend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate, while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party, and tried to pass it off as his own.

The Michael Dukakis campaign caught the theft, and the media, still in their journalism phase, went digging for more purloined pearls of Biden wisdom. They were not hard to find. Under pressure, Biden had to confess that he had plagiarized a paper while in law school — the Syracuse University Law School, that is — and he was out of the presidential race even before the corn stalks withered in Iowa.

As Biden learned the hard way, a Syracuse University affiliation offers no immunity to the plagiarism bug. Harvard’s does. Yale’s does. And Princeton’s will likely do the same. But even the Ivy schools require the individual to boost his/her/their natural Ivy immunity with renewable doses of progressive toxins.

No Ivy Leaguer has done more to earn his immunity than “History’s Attack Dog,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse. In addition to his more prosaic tasks at Princeton, Kruse has assumed the responsibility of patrolling the daily news. “Online,” observes Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators.” It is the skewering that has netted Kruse his 502,000 followers on Twitter.

In May 2017, Kruse took particular pleasure in slicing and dicing former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke set himself up for the kill by announcing his likely appointment as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. As a conservative and an African American, he made a tempting target for leftists eager to show Blacks the consequences of thinking for themselves.

Andrew Kaczynski of CNN’s KFile took the first stab at Clarke’s reputation, accusing him of having “plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security.” This was a low blow. A police officer by profession, Clarke never pretended to be a scholar. In fact, he didn’t graduate from college until he was 43 and only then through a continuing education program. The mistakes he made on the thesis were amateurish, the sort one routinely sees on papers at this level. Still, compared to Dr. Jill Biden’s botch of a doctoral dissertation, Clarke’s thesis was downright Aristotelian.

Compelled to review the two cases, then-Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan and then-Harvard President Larry Summers dithered for months before finally declaring the offenses of their legal luminaries “inadvertent.” At this level, “inadvertent” was no worthier an excuse for Tribe and Ogletree than it had been for Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Nonetheless, it provided cover enough to allow the media to look the other way. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: ‘Roots,’ ‘Dreams,’ and the Unequal Punishment of Fraud)

Additional notes.

Related: Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments: “Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.”

Scott Girard:

Derrick Holt, teaching Digital Music Media & Production at the Cherokee Middle School site this summer, wants his students to understand they don’t have to wait to work on their artistry.

“The basic thing is I hope they figure out whether or not they like this stuff,” Holt said. “You don’t have to decide you want to be a rapper or a producer, just have your hands on some professional equipment that’s used in studios and (realize), ‘Oh, this is fun,’ or ‘I’m actually good.’”

Colin Carroll:

That is exactly right. And you can see that more clearly when Rufo’s correct quote is put into full context. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust. I think that the public schools have done a remarkable job at doing just that, specifically, the public school teachers unions. They shut down the schools for more than a year.” 

And if you look at the polling, confidence in public schools has been decreasing for decades, long before Rufo became an activist. According to Gallup, in 1973, 61% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats had confidence in public schools. By 2000, those numbers had fallen to 33% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats. 

The COVID lockdowns, in particular, have done even more damage to trust in public schools, at least among Republicans. In 2019, just 28% of Republicans had confidence in public schools. Today, that number has fallen to 14%. Meanwhile, Democrats’ confidence in public schools has risen through COVID from 30% in 2019 to 43% today. 

Separately, Pew has found that the vast majority of people, 62%, believe that the government gave “too little priority” to “meeting the educational needs of K-12 students.”

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

Dylan Pahman and Alexander William Salter:

It would be one thing if inflation were unforeseeable, but it isn’t. The Federal Reserve flooded the market with money for years and supported the market for government debt. Politicians ran record deficits as the Fed happily purchased bonds. The result was an unprecedented money-supply increase, to almost $22 trillion today from about $15.5 trillion in March 2020—far outpacing the market’s need for liquidity. Policy makers kept the money flowing despite clear warning signs. The Russian invasion of Ukraine contributed to inflation, but not nearly as much as America’s own fiscal and monetary profligacy.

Even if policy makers had the best of intentions, the exigencies of the moment don’t justify yoking the underprivileged to the burden of fading purchasing power. The engineers of today’s inflation violated the biblical commandment to maintain a stable currency. Those in authority are supposed to protect “the least of these” from exploitation. Instead, they made the economically insecure even more vulnerable.

Rich Cohen:

From ages 6 to 12, I spent eight weeks every summer at Menominee, an all-boys camp in Eagle River, Wis. I was taught archery at Menominee, how to shoot a rifle, roll a kayak, cross the lake on a single water ski, bus a table, operate a Lazy-susan, tell a ghost story, make a bed with hospital corners and mark a trail, but those are not the only things I learned. In the manner of a public school or army base, what I learned was usually not what was being taught. I learned how to form an alliance, survive a bully, win a fight against a stronger person, spark a softball rally, sneak off the grounds and into Eagle River taverns without leaving a trace, gamble, chew tobacco, throw a knife, dismember a daddy long legs, barter and bluff.

Those who spent summers there come from towns across the country and world, but we all grew up at Menominee. We loved it, and that’s why we cried at the banquet held the last night of every summer, tears streaming as we sang, “Fill a stein, sing a song, to the camp I love.” It’s why we did not merely try to defeat but to demolish the kids from our archrival, Kawaga, at the midseason Olympiad. Mike Dunleavy Jr., who went on to play basketball at Duke, had been a Menominee standout in those games. When a “kid from Menominee” introduced himself to Dunleavy on the floor amid the celebration that followed Duke’s 2000 NCAA championship, Dunleavy, turning serious, asked, “Did we beat Kawaga?”

Stanley Kurtz:

The first problem with PolitiFact’s argument is that it misstates the meaning of the relevant language of the bill. That language doesn’t “prevent” the education secretary from imposing curricula; rather, it merely states that the bill shall not be interpreted to authorize such action (a much weaker proviso). Although it’s an issue for another day, plenty of folks argue that education secretaries have been disregarding similarly weak constraints for decades.

But even if PolitiFact had correctly described the bill, the argument would be a non sequitur. DeSantis never claimed that Biden’s education secretary would formally “impose” curricula on the states. On the contrary, DeSantis said that CSDA would allow Biden to “buy off” states with grant money “if” they teach CRT.

Inavate

The published paper, entitled ‘Quantifying the Effects of Working in VR for One Week’ found “concerning levels
of simulator sickness, below average usability ratings and two participants dropped out on the first day using VR, due to migraine, nausea and anxiety.”

The study found that, as expected, VR results in significantly worse ratings across most measures. Each test subject scored their VR working experience versus working in a physical environment, many felt their task load had increased, on average by 35%. Frustration was by 42%, the ‘negative affect’ was up 11%, and anxiety rose by 19%. Mental wellbeing decreased by 20%., eye strain rose 48%, and VR ranked 36% lower on usability. Participants self-rated workflow went down by 14% and their perceived productivity dropped by 16%.

“Nevertheless, there is some indication that participants gradually overcame negative first impressions and initial discomfort. Overall, this study helps lay the groundwork for subsequent research, by clearly highlighting current shortcomings and
identifying opportunities for improving the experience of working in VR.”

Jonathan Allen:

“But then you want to turn to areas that are more important” such as funding and fundamental instruction.

That explains the two-step thrust-and-parry messaging American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will outline Thursday morning during her union’s convention in Boston.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

Whatever one thinks of the legal rationale on which Dobbs was based, the entire point, and result, was the Supreme Court effectively stripped itself of jurisdiction over abortion, shifting it to the states.

This letter is bizarre. This is what conservatives long demanded: https://t.co/1KCl6MFCVU

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 15, 2022

Will Flanders:

In the latest example of doubling down on bad policies, the Biden administration is currently seeking to restore Obama-era federal guidance that had severe consequences for student safety. According to recent reports, the policies under consideration would investigate schools based on their rates of discipline of students with disabilities and those from racial minority backgrounds. In the past, these investigations have led to the threats of federal lawsuits against school districts, and mandated a focus on reducing the rates of suspension for disabled and minority students.  

All of these policies are based on the woke narrative surrounding “disparate impacts.” Under this theory, even a policy that, on its face, is entirely race-neutral, is adjudged to be racist if it affects individuals from different races or backgrounds at different rates. This narrative has come to the forefront not only in education, but also in policing with countless headlinesnoting that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates for a wide variety of crimes.  

What is not allowed to be discussed is whether this is a result of true racism, or of differences in behavior that are correlated along race lines. Even though it is politically incorrect, most of the evidence points to the latter. The reality is that on objective measures where there is little or no possibility of racial bias, racial disparities still exist in the rates of anti-social behavior. 

For instance, research has found that African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to report having been in a fight at school, and more likely to face mandatory discipline where there is little room for discretion on the part of teachers and principals. There are many explanations for why this could be the case. The most likely is differences in poverty among white and minority students, which correlates very well with student discipline disparities. Indeed, extensive researchhas found that poverty rates are predictive of misbehavior regardless of student race. But whatever the reason, ignoring misbehavior is likely to lead to greater harm to the students it is designed to protect.

Scott Girard:

Planning the trips is plenty of work, but in picking locations, Anderson acknowledged a bit of selfishness, as she’s “just going through my bucket list right now.”

She learned in her time working for an airline how to find “really cheap ways to experience really amazing things.”

The group works with EF Education First, which organizes educational trips around the world. That takes some of the planning and stress off Anderson. She first saw how well this collaboration could work when 34 people traveled to 10 cities across Europe for 15 days for $5,000 in 2018.

“It was amazing,” she said. “I could absolutely not do this without a tour.”

The organization came in handy this year with COVID, as the “COVID care promise” covered hotels, meals and changes to their trip home. Knorr also said the benefits of a local tour guide made it so that someone with Anderson’s travel experience was a bonus rather than a requirement, allowing the trip to continue for those who weren’t sick or required to quarantine.

Lola Fadulu:

Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs — one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx — with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

“Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

One of the most predictive political metrics in the US is how much formal education one is plagued with.

In the new NYT/Harris poll showing Biden with 33% approval (😬), only 20% of those with no HS approve of Biden, compared to 55% of those with graduate degrees: the Dem base. pic.twitter.com/9I2z1lbRHa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

Marty Makary:

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.) 

The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”

Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.  

The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.

Nowhere has this problem been clearer—or the stakes higher—than on official public health policy regarding children and Covid. 

First, they demanded that young children be masked in schools. On this score, the agencies were wrong. Compelling studies later found schools that masked children had no different rates of transmission. And for social and linguistic development, children need to see the faces of others. 

Next came school closures. The agencies were wrong—and catastrophically so. Poor and minority children suffered learning loss with an 11-point drop in math scores alone and a 20% drop in math pass rates. There are dozens of statistics of this kind.

College of St. Joseph:

The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build.

Joanne Jacobs:

Kelly Smith opened a seven-student pod in his Arizona home in 2018, writes Eden. “By partnering with an online charter school,” Smith’s Prenda created tuition-free microschools that combine to “self-paced Chromebook lessons and group problem-based learning.” It became a big hit during the pandemic.

However, many parents want “less time on laptops, more time with pen and paper, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and a focus on reading great books,” writes Eden.

Ben Cohen:

‘I used to get paid money,’ says Buchholz High School math coach Will Frazer, a former Wall Street bond trader. ‘Now we get trophies

Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.

It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.

Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.

The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”

Stephen Moore and Jon Decker:

Based on our survey of the top 68 officials in the Biden administration, starting with the president himself, and including cabinet members, regulatory officials, and White House advisers, this study finds:

62% of Biden appointees who deal with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy and finance have virtually no business experience.

Only one in eight has extensive business experience.

Average business experience of Biden appointees is only 2.4 years.

Median years of business experience is zero.

The vast majority of the Biden economic/commerce team members are professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, lobbyists, or government employees.

We also compared the Biden administration’s business experience to President Trump’s cabinet officials during his last year in office. We found that the average Trump cabinet member had 13 years of business experience, and the median years of experience was 8. A breakdown of this analysis is available on our website.

Quanta:

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of quantum mechanics could efficiently break a large number into its prime factors — a task so difficult for a classical computer that it forms the basis for much of today’s internet security.

A surge of optimism followed. Perhaps, researchers thought, we’ll be able to invent quantum algorithms that can solve a huge range of different problems.

But progress stalled. “It’s been a bit of a bummer trajectory,” said Ryan O’Donnellof Carnegie Mellon University. “People were like, ‘This is amazing, I’m sure we’re going to get all sorts of other amazing algorithms.’ Nope.” Scientists discovered dramatic speedups only for a single, narrow class of problems from within a standard set called NP, meaning they had efficiently verifiable solutions — such as factoring.

Neeraj Sood, Shannon Heick, Josh Stevenson, Tracy Høeg;

There is still considerable debate about whether mask mandates in the K-12 schools limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in children attending school. Randomized data about the effectiveness of mask mandates in children is still entirely lacking. Our study took advantage of a unique natural experiment of two adjacent K-12 school districts in Fargo, North Dakota, one which had a mask mandate and one which did not in the fall of the 2021-2022 academic year. In the winter, both districts adopted a masks-optional policy allowing for a partial crossover study design. We observed no significant difference between student case rates while the districts had differing masking policies (IRR 0.99; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.07) nor while they had the same mask policies (IRR 1.04; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.16). The IRRs across the two periods were also not significantly different (p = 0.40). Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.

Becky Dernbach:

I’ve been reporting on Hassan’s journey since she became the first Somali American to win the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award, in 2020. Over that time, I visited her classroom, spoke with her students, and talked to school parents and fellow teachers. All of them praised Hassan’s teaching methods, her uncanny ability to connect with children, and the representation she brought to their schools. In the classroom, at award ceremonies, and even at a school board protest, I’ve observed how much Hassan means to her students—and how much they mean to her.

“We’ve got children all across Minnesota that believe that they can do anything because of your example, and for that I am incredibly grateful,” Gov. Tim Walz told Hassan in a speech at the following year’s Minnesota Teacher of the Year ceremony.

But more recently, the joy Hassan had once found in the classroom was fading, she told me. She dreaded going to work. She felt like she was becoming less of herself.

John Schuppe:

In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

“People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression,” said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old’s attorneys. “Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they’re looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy.”

Allysia Finley:

There are many lessons to be gleaned from the U.S. pandemic response. House Democrats don’t care to study them.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis last month issued a deeply partisan report demonizing doctors who purportedly espoused “a dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy.” The report took aim at the Trump administration’s embrace of the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, in which epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) advocated protecting the elderly and vulnerable while allowing schools and businesses to reopen. This wasn’t a strategy to infect masses of people on purpose. The goal was to minimize deaths and social and economic harm until the country reached herd immunity through infection or vaccination.

The Great Barrington strategy of “focused protection” helped minimize the pandemic’s collateral damage until vaccines became available. The Biden administration then undertook a strategy of herd immunity via vaccination. But when this strategy failed, it doubled down with vaccine mandates.

One of the most predictive political metrics in the US is how much formal education one is plagued with.

In the new NYT/Harris poll showing Biden with 33% approval (😬), only 20% of those with no HS approve of Biden, compared to 55% of those with graduate degrees: the Dem base. pic.twitter.com/9I2z1lbRHa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

Sofia Garcia:

The paper outlines a statistical model meant to “explain how a difference in variability could naturally evolve between two sexes of the same species,” a direct reference to the GMVH. The paper relied on strict biological assumptions, such as the idea that genes encoding for variability would be expressed in only in one of the two sexes, that one sex would be more selective than the other, and that the same allele could result both in unusually high and unusually low expressions of a trait. Former Harvard President Larry Summers used the GVMH in a 2005 speech to justify the lack of women in tenured positions in science and engineering.

Both the paper itself and its two retractions have garnered a great deal of media interest since early September 2018. Accomplished mathematicians and computational biologistshave commented on both the paper itself and how it relates to online academic publishing. Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker have made public comments in support of the paper, with Pinker framing the controversy as an example of academic suppression.

The paper was first accepted for publication in TheMathematical Intelligencer’s Viewpoint column, a section discussing any topic of mathematical interest from readers of the journal.

While blacklisting the maker of Pegasus, the US Govt of course acquired its incomparably invasive software: can extract all contents of phones without your clicking on a link, turning your phone into a tracking/recording device. CIA has it. FBI debated using it *domestically*. pic.twitter.com/fspKZFhKdB

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

Daniel Wu:

Flower had the opportunity to experience China more closely than most. He studied Chinese philosophy and history at the University of Virginia and moved to the southwestern province of Sichuan to conduct a three-year study in 1991. In 2003, he gave up a tenured position at the University of North Carolina to teach Chinese history at the D.C. private school Sidwell Friends, where he and his wife Pam Leonard developed a China fieldwork program that brought high school students to study in rural China.

In 2012, Flower and Leonard moved their program to Yunnan, a province on the southwestern reaches of the Chinese countryside bordering Myanmar. There, on a trip to a remote village named Cizhong on the edge of the province in 2015, Flower found Zhang and the house he’d eventually bring to the United States.

The idea that started as a joke over tea seemed feasible — Zhang, who was being relocated by the local government, was happy to sell his house to save it from demolition — and the educational opportunities were too exciting to pass up.

“It would be a text,” Flower said. “Like bringing an incredibly interesting book.”

The journey back to the United States was long and painstaking. Flower and a team of craftsmen returned to Cizhong in 2017 to document the house’s design and carefully pry its beams and floorboards apart. It took months to truck the pieces across China to the eastern port of Tianjin and then ship them to Baltimore. Flower did it at his own expense.

Rafael Medoff:

In a successful lawsuit, it was proven that the Internal Revenue Service under Barack Obama discriminated against Z-Street, a Zionist organization that disagreed with the President’s views regarding Israel. For the American Jewish community, it’s a reminder of a disturbing episode that took place during the Holocaust era.

The Jewish target of U.S. government wrath in the 1940s was the Bergson Group, a political action committee led by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), a Zionist emissary from Palestine. The group used newspaper advertisements, rallies, and lobbying to press the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from the Nazis.

To put it mildly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unhappy about those protests. One senior White House aide reported that FDR was “much displeased” when the Bergson Group brought 400 rabbis to Washington to plead for rescue. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told Bergson himself that the President was “very upset” about one of the group’s newspaper ads, which FDR felt was “hitting below the belt” because it accused him of turning a blind eye to the Nazi massacres.

The State Department, too, was annoyed by Bergson’s campaign for rescue. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long privately complained that the group’s newspaper ads “made it very difficult for the Department.” Long’s deputy, Robert Alexander, absurdly claimed that the slogan used in one Bergson ad, “Action–Not Pity,” had actually been invented by the Nazis as part of a conspiracy to embarrass the Allies.

Beginning in 1942, the Roosevelt administration sent the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service after Bergson. They were looking for evidence of criminal activity, but their motivation was political. An internal FBI memo I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act bluntly explained why U.S. government action against Bergson: “This man has been in the hair of [Secretary of State] Cordell Hull.”

Governor Doug Ducey:

“In Arizona, we fund students, not systems, because we know one size does not fit all students,” said House Majority Leader Ben Toma. “It was my privilege to sponsor the most expansive school choice law in the nation, opening Empowerment Scholarship Account eligibility to all school-age children without restriction. I appreciate Governor Ducey for his strong support to help Arizona become the first state with a truly universal ESA program, delivering educational freedom to more than 1.1 million students.”

Peter Biello:

Researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech have developed a tool that redraws school attendance boundaries to both reduce racial segregation and travel times.

Researchers surveyed parents’ preferences on class size and school travel time. Overall, when looking at elementary school districts across the country, researchers found they could achieve a 12% decrease in segregation by moving one in five students to a new school and also reduce overall travel time. 

Nabeel Gillani led the project at MIT. He said results vary by district. 

“Certainly there’s the technology piece here, but we know fundamentally this is not a technology problem: It’s a social problem, i’s a political problem,” he said. “So we wanted to see if we could use technology now in ways to get more people involved, get more voices involved in the mix, and share more of what they think of these boundaries.”

Gillani says researchers chose to focus on elementary schools because the benefits of integration can start earlier.

“The way early learning experiences shape children and the impact those have later in life … was definitely a consideration,” he said.

Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah:

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.

Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflationand a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.

Michael Shellenberger:

Organic farm advocates said they wanted what’s best for the 22 million people of the island nation off the coast of India. What went wrong?

NPR this morning: "this is a victory for democracy in Sri Lanka" https://t.co/wqhVck7iaP

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 13, 2022

.@AlexBerenson reports, “Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time.” https://t.co/R61V4sxRO1 Since Twitter has relented, it would be great for @AlexBerenson to write a roundup of the exact tweets which Twitter now admits were fine. pic.twitter.com/iilPD4TmEO

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 9, 2022

Drewry:

Drewry’s composite World Container Index decreased marginally by 0.2% to $7,050.94 per 40ft container this week.

Note the price mismatch from <-> to China.

Inflation-adjusted current education spending per student in Iowa:

1970: $5,881
1980: $7,886
1990: $9,228
2000: $10,764
2010: $12,777
2019: $13,410

128% real increase since 1970.https://t.co/KQGL9ClNL6

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) July 10, 2022

BREAKING: Parents in Tennessee have filed a lawsuit against Williamson County Schools, alleging that the district’s curriculum teaches children they are “inherently racist and oppressive” based on their skin color and violates the state’s anti-critical race theory law. pic.twitter.com/J2d3ZVeZhp

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 11, 2022

Amy Cutler:

In response, Kaitlin Harrier, the Senior Education Policy Advisor to the Governor, wrote:

“Signing this bill into law furthers Governor Ducey’s pro-education policies by giving schools the flexibility to establish their own locally designed school leadership preparation programs and will allow those without a bachelor’s degree to start training to become a teacher while also completing their degree. This flexibility will help strengthen the teacher talent pipeline, provide the opportunity for more Arizonans to become teachers, and allow for locally driven solutions.”

Garcia said this changes the credentialing requirements for public schools. In addition, it brings it in line with charter schools. There is a website you can go to check if your child’s teacher is certified by the state. You can find more information at OACIS – Arizona Department of Education (azed.gov).

Alex McKenna:

After a trip to the Delaware Supreme Court, the University of Delaware has until July 22 to prove that its vast collection of then-U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s papers are immune from a Freedom of Information Act request made by Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Mary Johnston ordered the university to submit evidence that archives Biden gave the school in 2012 are not subject to a public records request and consequently public access.

The order came after the Delaware Supreme Court overturned a previous Superior Court decision that held that the papers were not subject to FOIA and therefore not open to public access.

In a recent email to The College Fix, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said there is “significant public interest in the materials.”

“In my experience, politicians hide documents because they have something to hide,” he said.

Angela Yang:

Internships are often a springboard to full-time jobs, yet high living costs have some students questioning whether they can afford to take summer roles in certain locations.

Many companies are paying interns in order to compete for talent and ensure opportunities don’t go solely to those who can afford to work for little or no compensation. Yet some students and employers say stipends and wages don’t go as far as they did a year ago, and soaring rents from New York to Seattle also have changed students’ calculations as to where they’re able to take internships.

Debbie Girma, a rising third-year law student at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, has worked as a legal intern and political canvasser in recent years. Ms. Girma, who ultimately wants to do nonprofit or civil rights work on the East Coast, is interning this summer at a private law firm in Dallas, because it pays more than the $12 an hour many public-defender summer roles offer. Plus, the cost of living in Texas is relatively low.

Casey Schwartz:

More specifically, according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication.

Antidepressants continue to be the most commonly prescribed of these medications in the United States, and their use has become only more widespread since the pandemic began, with an 8.7 percent rate of increase from 2019 to 2021, compared with 7.9 percent from 2017 to 2019, according to Express Scripts.

IQVIA, a global health technology and clinical research firm, found that in 2021, a total of 337,054,544 prescriptions were written for antidepressants in the United States through the course of the year, representing a steady annual increase since 2017, when that number had been 313,665,918.

But for some age groups, that change has been more pronounced. Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers included in the Express Scripts data (which consists of roughly 19 million people.) For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019.

One 13-year-old rising eighth grader in Colorado currently takes the antidepressant Paxil and the stimulant Adderall. (She also takes melatonin, a nonprescription supplement, to help her sleep.)

CDC link.

Andrew Van Dam:

With Leah Boustan, now of Princeton University, Abramitzky is helping to change the way we look at American immigrants during a 14-year effort to follow Americans across generations by linking together their records in one of humanity’s greatest data troves: old decennial census files.

Seventy-two years after each census, the government releases every sheet of data collected by enumerators in a single, magnificent data dump. But for decades, that was more or less the end of it. Piles of magnificent data dumps sat slowly decaying in government warehouses and data centers.

It took pioneering researchers such as Northwestern University’s Joseph Ferrie years of tedious searching to link even a couple thousand people across multiple censuses in the 678 million records now available.

Within a few years of that phone call, the high data priesthood at IPUMS at the University of Minnesota would make much of that historical census data freely available to scholars online. Today, hundreds of millions of records at IPUMS can be credited to genealogy sources such as Ancestry — a for-profit Utah organization that was purchased in 2020 for $4.7 billion by private-equity behemoth Blackstone — and FamilySearch, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that relies heavily on volunteer efforts to decipher old records.

Ancestry alone has more than 30 billion records in its database, including contributions from its almost 3.8 million subscribers. Using the genealogy data, the economists could soon follow generations of immigrants from the Ellis Island era as they assimilated (or didn’t) and prospered (or didn’t).

“Our work would not be possible if not for the volunteers that digitized this data,” Abramitzky said.

Alex Tabarrok:

A very nice paper in Management Science by Kini, Shen, Shenoy and Subramanian finds that labor unions reduce product quality. Two strengths of the paper. First, the authors have relatively objective measures of product quality from thousands of product recalls mandated by the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering many different industries. Second the authors use 3 different methods. First, they find that unionized firms are more likely to have recalls than non-unionized firms (a simple difference in means subject to many potential cofounds but I still like to see the raw data), second they find that in a panel model with industry and year fixed effects and other controls that firms which are more unionized have a greater frequency of product recalls. Finally they find that firms where the union just barely won the vote are more likely to have subsequent product recalls than firms for which the union just barely lost the vote–a regression discontinuity study.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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:

Despite enrollment dropping over the past five years districtwide, especially during the pandemic, the full-time equivalent (or FTE) staff positions dedicated to those areas have not dropped at the same rate.

In student services, for example, the 2017-18 school year featured 105.78 students per staff member in positions including psychologist, social worker, nurse and behavior education assistant. Last year, that was down to 98.1.

Similarly, the special education student-to-staff ratio dropped from 46.33 to 35.53.

Yet the ratios reflected here are determined by the district’s annual budget. Given the staff shortages plaguing education and MMSD in recent years, especially following the onset of the pandemic, the number of students per staffer is likely higher.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY:

This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

Sunlight Policy New Jersey:

After three years of no information on New Jersey’s most powerful special interest, the IRS finally released the NJEA’s 2019 990, which revealed the multi-million-dollar going-away present for Richardson. As executive director from 2013 to 2019, Richardson was paid a total of $5.8 million, or $968,000 a year. By comparison, the average New Jersey teacher made $76,000 in 2019.

But Richardson was not alone. The NJEA’s top ten leadership was paid a record $7.7 million in 2019, with six of the top ten getting record compensation and six becoming New Jersey one-percenters.

ALL OF THIS WAS PAID FOR BY TEACHERS’ HIGHEST-IN-THE-NATION DUES.

If teachers knew their hard-earned salaries were making their leadership multi-millionaires, they would be outraged. If New Jersey citizens knew their hard-earned tax dollars were making taxpayer-funded multi-millionaires, they would be outraged.

Ann Althouse:

But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.'”

Valerie Strauss:

At the reception last week, held at a Cool Springs conference center in Tennessee, Arnn made comments while addressing an audience from a lectern and while sitting on the stage next to Lee on a stage. Here’s a sample:

• “Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.”
• “If you read a book called ‘Abolition of Man’ by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. … My wife is English, and she is a gardener, big-time. And she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need. Because if you give them what they need, they will grow.”
• “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement. … They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
• “Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.”

Educators and other Tennesseans said they were angry at Arnn for making the comments and at Lee for failing to defend his state’s teachers and teacher preparation programs. Claude Pressnell Jr., president of Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, tweeted: “This is incredibly disturbing. Dr. Larry Arnn’s demeaning portrayal of Tennessee’s Ed prep programs and professors is uninformed and offensive. I’m disappointed that @GovBillLee is not on record with Dr. Arnn defending the integrity of Tennessee’s education programs.”

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

Tunku Varadarajan:

If you’re looking for proof that teachers unions don’t care about the interests of schoolchildren, you can find it in the impoverished Bronx neighborhood of Soundview. A school building on Beach Avenue has been shuttered for almost a decade, and the United Federation of Teachers is suing to keep it closed.

On Aug. 22, a new charter high school, Vertex Academies, will begin classes here. In the local school district, only 7% of students who enter ninth grade are ready for college four years later. For black students, the figure is 4%. The new school promises to deliver “a high-quality education to 150 minority students from low-income backgrounds” in its first year, says founding principal Joyanet Mangual.

Vertex will use the premises of the defunct Blessed Sacrament School, where Sonia Sotomayor was valedictorian in 1968. When the school shut down in 2013, the justice declared herself “heartbroken.” Her mother had scrimped and saved to send her there: “She watched what happened to my cousins in public school, and worried if we went there, we might not get out,” Justice Sotomayor told the New York Times.

Ann Althouse:

There are lots of comments at that link. The one with the most up-votes is: “The things that are going on are barely distinguishable from grooming.”
The part about prostitution as a “rewarding job” was about a post at a website, Bish, “an online guide to sex and relationships for children aged over 14,” written by Justin Hancock, who “teaches sex education in schools and provides teacher training on sex education.”

Sara Fischer:

Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news has plummeted to an all-time low, according to the latest annual Gallup survey of trust in U.S. institutions.

Why it matters: The erosion of trust in media is one of the most significant signs of deepening polarization in America. 

• Political party affiliation has become the primary driver of opinions about the media’s trustworthiness, as Gallup has noted.
• A 2021 poll from Pew Research Center found that Republicans are far less likely to trust media sources that are considered “mainstream.”

Andrew Van Damm:

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.

This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years. The data includes extensive information about almost half a million recipients in the 2010-to-2018 period alone.

1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Dan Barry:

But they were also chastened. They hadn’t attended the town meeting. They hadn’t fulfilled their democratic obligation. They hadn’t kept informed about the Free State movement. To some observers, they had gotten what they deserved.

“I was practically kicking myself in the ass for not being there,” Mr. Spiker said. “I guess I assumed our town would take care of it.”

The moment revealed a democracy mired in indifference. Turnout at town meetings has been low for years. The town’s websites are barely rudimentary, with school board minutes posted online sporadically. The select board’s minutes are found at the town hall — open three afternoons a week — or the general store, beside chocolate bars being sold to benefit the local humane society.

From this muddle of anger, confusion and regret, though, a movement was born. It came to be known as We Stand Up for Croydon Students.

Evaluating the utility and effectiveness of ongoing k-12 tax and spending practices is rare….

Calling the proposed budget a “ransom,” he moved to cut it by more than half — to $800,000. He argued that taxes for education had climbed while student achievement had not, and that based in part on the much lower tuition for some local private schools, about $10,000 for each of the town’s 80 or so students was sufficient — though well short of, say, the nearly $18,000 that public schools in nearby Newport charged for pupils from Croydon.

Kyle Stokes:

In 2007, leaders of LAUSD and the district’s teachers union agreed to create the first of what they called “pilot schools.” Pilot schools would be semi-autonomous campuses that would have greater freedom over their own budgets and academic programs.

At the time, UCLA had already been working with the union, district and local advocacy organizations to explore launching a community school of its own. In the nascent pilot program — and on the soon-to-be-rebuilt site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown — the school’s planners saw an opening.

Karen Hunter Quartz, the UCLA Center for Community Schooling director, led the team that submitted the first proposal for what became its Koreatown school in 2007. That proposal was inspired by trips to visit small schools on the East Coast.

“The concept was really, ‘How can we design schools differently to promote these small, nurturing communities?’” said Hunter Quartz. “So based on that experience and the pilot school experience and the building of new buildings in L.A., this was a great opportunity to create that here.”

In 2009, UCLA Community School opened its doors along with five other pilot schools on the RFK Community Schools campus on Wilshire Boulevard.

From its inception, Hunter Quartz envisioned a school that embodied many of the core tenets of the community schools movement — including the elements now known as the “four pillars” of community schooling.

Today, schools that want a share of California’s multi-billion dollar community school grant program will also have to agree to embrace a number of reforms, including these four pillars.

Ian Miller:

But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates.

The Study Design

The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. 

You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, and this study could very well be his most important contribution yet.

Their detailed examination of North Dakota has created more advanced academic level research similar to the data comparisons that myself and many others have shared.

The introduction explains the methodology and goals:

Keeping schools and preschools open when other countries closed them was an extremely difficult decision. In March 2020 the criticism against me was harsh for not closing down schools and preschools, but I was – and still am – convinced that it was the right decision. https://t.co/AzM5RHu5gY

— Anna Ekström (@Anna_Ekstrom) July 9, 2022

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

Amanda Ripley

And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?

Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men. It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?

George Will

These kids today “are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands.”

In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.

Jeffrey Flier:

In principle, leadership roles in academic institutions perfectly position incumbents to be public intellectuals, robustly engaging with educational, scientific and political issues of the day from their distinguished perches atop the academic pyramid. Unfortunately, anyone holding this view would be severely mistaken.

Academic leaders, such as university presidents and deans, can issue anodyne pronouncements on various matters as long as these safely align with the views prevailing in their communities. Most do so with regularity, occasionally edging a wee bit from the centre lane. But when academic leaders engage in intellectual discourse by expressing views that diverge from prevailing opinion, the ensuing reactions – even when expressed only by a vocal minority – can easily disrupt their ability to fulfil their primary duties. Such disruption, if severe enough, can even end their leadership tenure. Just ask former Harvard president Larry Summers, the reaction to whose provocative speech on potential explanations for the dearth of women at the highest levels of mathematics and engineering led to his having to step down.

Two major factors account for this state of affairs. The first is in the realm of the practical. Leadership jobs are complex and demanding, requiring full-time effort to manage the areas for which the leader is ultimately accountable. These include choosing among competing academic goals, addressing faculty, answering student and alumni concerns, managing facilities and budgets, devising and refining numerous policies, and, of course, leading fundraising efforts. At best, offering public opinions is seen as a frill – surely not essential but perhaps nice to do if time permits.

Amanda Fortini:

“Professors taught what they wished, and students graduated when (or if) they wanted — only about 55 of the 1,200 or so students who attended Black Mountain in its 24-year existence attained a formal degree — as long as they passed two sets of exams, one roughly at the halfway point and the other before the end of their tenure, whenever they decided that was. The hierarchy, too, was minimal, with students and most faculty living in the same building and taking their meals together. There were none of the ‘usual distinctions… between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it.’ Students often performed chores as part of the ‘work program’; afternoons were left free for activities outdoors, which might have included chopping wood, clearing pasture and planting, tending or harvesting crops…. By all accounts, the manual labor was not only fun but gave students a meaningful sense of contributing to the day-to-day maintenance of the college. It was also a great leveler. ‘You might be John Cage or Merce Cunningham… But you’re still going to have a job to do on campus.’

Ann Althouse notes:

As the podcast goes on, Kramer uses the term “popular constitutionalism,” which has to do with judging “by what resonates with us, what makes sense, what kind of society do we want to have” and “not just blindly following popular desires.” What does that mean? What’s the difference between “popular desires” and what “resonates… makes sense… [and] we want to have”? I suspect the answer is elitism. Look at Kramer’s stress on “leadership”:

It involves leadership. If you read Madison’s original stuff, he had an important role for leadership. But it wasn’t leadershiptells the subjects what to do and what they should believe. It’s that we engage in an ongoing active conversation where the role of leadership is to lead towards some sort of better vision. You offer that vision, and you try and persuade, and if you do, the country follows you…. So that’s what political leaders are supposed to do…. The ability of leadership to exercise leadershipis really impaired. The media system has been fragmented. Deference to leadership is down…

And then it’s back to vision: 

So it’s a little hard to see how it emerges, but the idea is that you get competing political visions of what the country should be that are themselves coherent and normatively attractive that are presented and people vote. I mean, Ronald Reagan did that, right. It’s not that we haven’t had visions. He had a vision, and he sold it…. 

But the liberals don’t have a vision. They need a leader with a vision to animate them, but “we’re kind of between, betwixt and between uniting visions.”

and:

That’s 75,000 to 180,000 per year. Rosenberg doesn’t seem to notice that to emphasize the number of new babies is to say, implicitly, that during the reign of Roe, that’s the number, per year, that were quietly and invisibly kept from our presence.

More: Andrew Yang on abortion.

Allison Prang:

Ms. Viazovska took home the Fields Medal for her work on the sphere-packing problem in eight and 24 dimensions, the university said. The problem—how densely one can pack a space with identical spheres—used to only be solved for three dimensions or less, it said.

“In doing so, she resolved a question that had stumped mathematicians for more than four centuries: how to pack spheres—such as oranges stacked in a pyramid—as close together as possible,” EPFL said. The university added that Ms. Viazovska’s proof, which drew on other areas of math, was considered by experts to be “particularly elegant and original.”

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and he lagged the state’s GOP Congressmen by 63,547. Split tickets by Republicans more than explain why Mr. Trump fell short. Drop boxes were an unlawful delivery method, but if real Wisconsinites put real ballots into them, as instructed by local officials, that isn’t “fraud.” Judges are unlikely to throw out legitimate votes after the fact.

That’s actually what happened in Wisconsin. Mr. Trump didn’t raise hell about the state’s voting procedures until after he lost. Then he asked courts to invalidate 28.4% of the votes in Milwaukee County, on the basis of challenged practices that took place statewide. That case failed. The drop box lawsuit decided Friday was filed in 2021 by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. If Mr. Trump was so opposed to drop boxes, why didn’t he bring a claim earlier in 2020, when the WEC memos were issued?

Former Attorney General Bill Barr told a podcast recentlythat Mr. Trump was duly warned to get solid lawyers working to defend business-as-usual voting processes. 

“One of his aides went in and said, look, you need to set up a fund of $20-30 million in escrow, because lawyers don’t trust you to pay their bills, and you need to get a top-flight firm in here,” Mr. Barr said. “He ignored that advice. He did not have a legal team prepared to go and fight around the country. So a lot of these, bending of the playing field, were his own fault.”

James Somers:

For instance I never learned that a man named Oswald Avery, in the 1940s, puzzled over two cultures of Streptococcus bacteria. One had a rough texture when grown in a dish; the other was smooth, and glistened. Avery noticed that when he mixed the smooth strain with the rough strain, every generation after was smooth, too. Heredity in a dish. What made it work? This was one of the most exciting mysteries of the time—in fact of all time.

Most experts thought that protein was somehow responsible, that traits were encoded soupily, via differing concentrations of chemicals. Avery suspected a role for nucleic acid. So, he did an experiment, one we could have replicated on our benches in school. Using just a centrifuge, water, detergent, and acid, he purified nucleic acid from his smooth strep culture. Precipitated with alcohol, it became fibrous. He added a tiny bit of it to the rough culture, and lo, that culture became smooth in the following generations. This fibrous stuff, then, was “the transforming principle”—the long-sought agent of heredity. Avery’s experiment set off a frenzy of work that, a decade later, ended in the discovery of the double helix.

In his “Mathematician’s Lament,” Paul Lockhart describes how school cheapens mathematics by robbing us of the questions. We’re not just asked, hey, how much of the triangle takes up the box?