Rohith Salim:

I am excited to announce the launch of The Crypto University [www.thecryptouniversity.io] — an online school to learn about all things crypto & blockchain.

My buddy Ryan (Ryan Chadha) and I have been looking closely at the crypto space (and no —not just Bitcoin) for quite some time now and we are fascinated by the potential some of these cryptos have to solving the inefficiencies that exist in industries such as accounting, real estate and finance.

What is equally fascinating (and slightly frightening) is the sheer number of people putting money into the crypto space without completely understanding what exactly they are putting money into.

Rachel Cohen:

Let’s talk a little about “human capital.” What does that mean?

Malcolm Harris: Generally speaking, human capital is the skills, abilities, talents, accomplishments, and resumes that go with you when you work. It refers to the relationship between workers and owners. What some people get wrong is thinking that we own our human capital, and that we can sell it. That’s not true. We don’t own ours, and nobody is legally allowed to own human capital—[i.e. slaves]—anymore.

You say that kids today take fewer risks, and it’s partly a result of parents adopting a “risk elimination” approach to childrearing.

Through various means, we’re forcing or compelling kids to take fewer risks. Children are living increasingly conservative lives, especially compared to the immediately preceding generations. And some people talk about it like millennials are wusses, scaredy-cats, we need our mommies—stuff like that—but that’s all irrelevant because children do not raise themselves or define the world in which they come to be. In other words, we have to look for the sources of that risk-averse behavior with practices elsewhere.

Mai Ngoc Chau:

Vietnam is deploying a 10,000-member military cyber warfare unit to combat what the government sees as a growing threat of “wrongful views” proliferating on the internet, according to local media.

Force 47 has worked pro-actively against distorted information, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Nguyen Trong Nghia, deputy head of the general politics department under the Vietnam People’s Military. The disclosure of the unit comes as the Communist government pressures YouTube Inc. and Facebook Inc. to remove videos and accounts seen damaging the reputations of leaders or promoting anti-party views.

Telegram:

“In light of a history of declined enrollment is some classes, (Wachter) put forth a very reasonable and appropriate plan to focus the University’s resources on better aligning to the needs of northern Wisconsin,” UW System President Ray Cross said. “She has maintained a robust program array that closely resembles those of her peer institutions and remains dedicated to the success of her students.”

UW System Board of Regents President John Robert Behling said that the board “has full confidence in Chancellor Wachter and she deserves credit for her leadership. Eliminating or suspending programs with low enrollment can be difficult and controversial, but Chancellor Wachter has made the right decision for the University.”

The Faculty Senate vote came at the end of a week in which the Superior City Council narrowly rejected a resolution calling on university administration and the UW System to rescind the program suspensions, and in which the Douglas County Board passed a resolution to “encourage the UWS administration to put a hold on all suspended major and minor programs until such time that the administration, the faculty and students can meet in accordance with the governance policy in a public forum as it has been done with prior issues.”

Abigail Geiger:

Pew Research Center studies a wide array of topics both in the U.S. and around the world, and every year we are struck by particular findings. Sometimes they mark a new milestone in public opinion; other times a sudden about-face. From an increase in Americans living without a spouse or partner to the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency, here are 17 findings that stood out to us in 2017:

1Partisan divides dwarf demographic differences on key political values. The average gap between the views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents across 10 political values has increased from 15 percentage points in 1994 to 36 points today. Two decades ago, the average partisan differences on these items were only slightly wider than differences by religious attendance or educational attainment, and about as wide as differences across racial lines. Today, the partisan gaps far exceed differences across other key demographics.

Nick Gillespie:

Historian and entrepreneur Thaddeus Russell has a bone to pick with American higher education. It’s not simply that maverick opinions that stray from a liberal-progressive orthodoxy get squashed in classroom discussions and tenure decisions. Russell says the federal Department of Education effectively manages an accreditation system that controls the number and character of elite institutions by insisting that “serious” colleges and universities have dorms, dining halls, and a whole host of things completely unrelated to higher learning.

As the founder and proprietor of the online Renegade University, the fight is both personal and practical for Russell, whose 2010 book, A Renegade History of the United States, offers up one of the most original and provocative readings of the American experience. “People who operate on the fringes of society,” says Russell, “who have operated against social norms…have opened spaces that were later occupied by the mainstream and established things that we now take for granted.” In his telling, it’s not august statesmen and high-minded citizens but the pushers, prostitutes, and outliers who have enabled the radical lifestyle, cultural, and political freedoms we take for granted.

Max Rust, Scott Calvert and Shibani Mahtani:

Murder in America is deeply local.

Homicides in the U.S. rose about 9% last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and more than one-third of the increase was concentrated in neighborhoods where just one-third of Chicago residents live. Meanwhile, improvements in areas where 30% of Los Angeles residents live accounted for one quarter of the 13% drop in U.S. murders between 2002 and 2014.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed the locations of thousands of homicides in four cities: Chicago and Baltimore, where violence has risen to or near 1990s levels in the past two years; and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where meaningful declines in violence have been sustained since the 1990s.

Terry Teachout:

So what’s the scoop on this conductor guy?” a friend once asked after I took her to an orchestral concert, the first one she had ever seen. “Do they really need him, or is he just there for show?” Her question was a good one. Anyone who has witnessed a performance by the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra knows that a couple of dozen classical musicians can give a shapely, polished performance of a symphony by Haydn or Mozart without a conductor. Any well-drilled symphony orchestra can do the same thing.

Wall Street Journal:

After nationalizing student lending, the Obama Administration sought to reduce the government’s $1.3 trillion loan portfolio by allowing disgruntled borrowers to discharge their debt. Last week Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ended this fraud against taxpayers.

After driving Corinthian Colleges out of business in 2014, the Education Department implemented a haphazard process to forgive loans of students who claimed to have been ripped off by the defunct for-profit. Tens of thousands of claims poured in, overwhelming department staff.

The backlog of claims ballooned after predatory regulators forced the closure of ITT Technical Institute in 2016. Liberal groups urged the Obama Administration to forgive loans of borrowers who had attended other for-profits, spurring the department to initiate a “borrower defense” rule-making to allow students who purported misrepresentations by their colleges to discharge their loans. The midnight rule, finalized last November, authorized the Education Department to discharge debts on a class-wide basis—for instance, all borrowers who had attended a certain college within the last five years.

The Obama Administration approved roughly 15,000 claims between June 25, 2015 and January 1, 2017. During President Obama’s final three weeks in office, the department hurried out 16,000 approvals. No claims were denied. The total taxpayer tab for discharges: $450 million.

Obama officials left a backlog of 48,000 claims, many of which were flagged for rejection. But the Education Department had not developed a process for denying claims or a system to prevent fraud—to wit, borrowers who alleged misrepresentations by colleges despite suffering no apparent injury.

Susan Jung:

“They have played an important role in health, adding healing properties to medicines, and they have been used to give scent to perfumes. A study of Ayurvedic practices in India gives an understanding of how spices can work for the well-being of the body. Such beliefs and practices are becom­ing widely accepted in Western society’s search for a healthy diet and sense of wellness.”

But, she admits, the use of spices was slow to catch on in Australia.

“Until recent times, Australian cooking in general has had very little to do with spice. In the formative years of white settlement in this country, diet and eating habits were entirely inappropri­ate to resources, climate and lifestyle.”

Linkedin:

The job market in the U.S. is brimming right now with fresh and exciting opportunities for professionals in a range of emerging roles.

New types of jobs means new potential for workers at all levels, especially for those looking to change careers. Overall, job growth in the next decade is expected to outstrip growth during the previous decade, creating 11.5 million jobs by 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even further, it’s estimated that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately hold jobs that don’t yet exist.

To help find those up-and-coming roles and to better understand what skills are needed to succeed, we analyzed LinkedIn data from the last five years, as well as some survey data, to identify which jobs and skills are on the rise, what they’re replacing, and what these trends indicate about the jobs market in the years to come.

Here’s what we found:

James Grossman:

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding a 2.8% decrease the year before that. The drop is most pronounced at large research universities and prestigious liberal arts colleges.

This is unfortunate — not just for those colleges, but for our economy and polity.

Of course it’s not just history. Students also are slighting other humanities disciplines including philosophy, literature, linguistics and languages. Overall, the core humanities disciplines constituted only 6.1% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2014, the lowest proportion since systematic data collection on college majors began in 1948.

Conventional wisdom offers its usual facile answers for these trends: Students (sometimes pressured by parents paying the tuition) choose fields more likely to yield high-paying employment right after graduation—something “useful,” like business (19% of diplomas), or technology-oriented. History looks like a bad bet.

Politicians both draw on those simplicities and perpetuate them—from President Barack Obama’s dig against the value of an art history degree to Sen. Marco Rubio’s comment that welders earn more than philosophers. Governors oppose public spending on “useless” college majors. History, like its humanistic brethren, might prepare our young people to be citizens, but it supposedly does not prepare workers—at least not well paid ones.

The diminished prospects for attorneys in recent years extends this logic, as the history major has long been considered among the best preparation for law school. The other conventional career path for history majors is teaching, but that too is suffering weak demand due to pressure on public school budgets.

A historian, however, would know that it is essential to look beyond such simplistic logic. Yes, in the first few years after graduation, STEM and business majors have more obvious job prospects—especially in engineering and computer science. And in our recession-scarred economic context, of course students are concerned with landing that first job.

Over the long run, however, graduates in history and other humanities disciplines do well financially. Rubio would be surprised to learn that after 15 years, those philosophy majors have more lucrative careers than college graduates with business degrees. History majors’ mid-career salaries are on par with those holding business bachelor’s degrees. Notably these salary findings exclude those who went on to attain a law or other graduate degree.

The utility of disciplines that prepare critical thinkers escapes personnel offices, pundits and politicians (some of whom perhaps would prefer that colleges graduate more followers and fewer leaders). But it shouldn’t. Labor markets in the United States and other countries are unstable and unpredictable. In this environment—especially given the expectation of career changes—the most useful degrees are those that can open multiple doors, and those that prepare one to learn rather than do some specific thing.

All liberal arts degrees demand that kind of learning, as well as the oft-invoked virtues of critical thinking and clear communication skills. History students, in particular, sift through substantial amounts of information, organize it, and make sense of it. In the process they learn how to infer what drives and motivates human behavior from elections to social movements to board rooms.

Employers interested in recruiting future managers should understand (and many do) that historical thinking prepares one for leadership because history is about change— envisioning it, planning for it, making it last. In an election season we are reminded regularly that success often goes to whoever can articulate the most compelling narrative. History majors learn to do that.

Everything has a history. To think historically is to recognize that all problems, all situations, all institutions exist in contexts that must be understood before informed decisions can be made. No entity—corporate, government, nonprofit—can afford not to have a historian at the table. We need more history majors, not fewer.

James Grossman is the executive director of the American Historical Assn. @JimGrossmanAHA

Via Will Fitzhugh (The Concord Review).

“The dialogue now taking place was not about the literature curriculum but about English teachers being required to teach historical documents—and without context, if they followed guidelines from the standards writers on ‘close reading.’…. As high school history teacher Craig Thurtell states: “This approach [close reading] also permits the allocation of historical texts to English teachers, most of whom are untrained in the study of history, and leads to history standards [Common Core’s literacy standards for history] that neglect the distinctiveness of the discipline.”

Historians Want to Put Events in Context. Common Core Doesn’t.

That’s a Problem.

Sandra Stotsky:

For an October 2017 conference sponsored by an affiliate of the California Association of Teachers of English, I was invited to give an informal talk on a chapter in my book, The Death and Resurrection of a Coherent Literature Curriculum. Chapter 8 centered on how English teachers could create coherent sequences of informational and literary texts to address civic literacy.

I presented initial remarks on Chapter 8 and then asked for questions. But instead of questions about Chapter 8, the concerns were mostly about the requirement in Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards for English teachers to teach Founding documents. In particular, one teacher expressed at length the problems she was facing in teaching “The Declaration of Independence.” She wanted to know why English teachers were compelled to teach historical documents. Her academic background was not in history, and she was not the only one in the audience upset about this requirement. But something had happened.

The dialogue now taking place was not about the literature curriculum but about English teachers being required to teach historical documents—and without context, if they followed guidelines from the standards writers on “close reading.” The dialogue also touched on the “literacy” standards that content teachers were to address in order to teach reading and writing in their classes.

Why were “literacy” standards for other subjects in Common Core’s ELA document and what had researchers found on English teachers teaching “informational” texts (required by Common Core’s ELA standards) and on content teachers teaching reading and writing (required by Common Core’s “literacy” standards)? I sympathized with both English teachers who didn’t feel comfortable teaching foundational historical documents and history teachers who had presumably studied the context for documents now being taught by their English colleagues. Common Core’s ELA document makes clear that the motivation for these standards and requirements was the standards writers’ concern about the low reading skills of many American students graduating from high school.

As a response to teachers’ concerns at this conference, this essay first clarifies how the K-12 study of history ever got tangled up in Common Core’s ELA standards. It then explains why reading in a history class is not like reading in a literature class.

The story begins with the rationale for the contents of a document titled, “Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.” The bulk of the 66-page document is on English language arts standards. But the last seven pages provide “literacy” standards for the other subjects in grades 6-12. The introduction to the whole document justifies Common Core’s literacy standards on the grounds that college readiness means being able to read, write, and speak in all subject areas. That is the basis for entangling the study of history in the final version of Common Core’s ELA document.

The attempt to make English teachers responsible for teaching high school students how to read history, science, and mathematics textbooks relaxed after critics made it clear that English teachers could not possibly teach students how to read textbooks in other disciplines. Their criticism was supported by the common sense argument that teachers can’t teach students to read texts on a subject they don’t understand themselves, as well as by the total lack of evidence that English teachers can effectively teach reading strategies appropriate to other disciplines and thereby improve students’ knowledge in that discipline.

Via Will Fitzhugh (The Concord Review).

Stephen J. Blumberg, Ph.D., and Julian V. Luke :

Preliminary results from the January–June 2017 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one-half of American homes (52.5%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the first half of 2017—an increase of 3.2 percentage points since the first half of 2016. Nearly three-quarters of all adults aged 25-34 were living in wireless-only households; more than two-thirds (70.7%) of adults renting their homes were living in wireless-only households. This report presents the most up-to-date estimates available from the federal government concerning the size and characteristics of this population.

Claire Lehmann:

Thank you for taking the time to talk to Quillette Professor Haier. You’ve spent forty years studying intelligence and have compiled your knowledge into a new book accessible to the general reader called The Neuroscience of Intelligence, which looks fascinating from its précis.

Firstly, can you tell us how you became interested in intelligence research, and how you came about studying intelligence through neuroimaging?

When I started graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1971, I was interested in social psychology and personality theories. That year Professor Julian Stanley was starting the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth. I worked on his first talent search passing out pencils for 12 and 13 year old kids taking the SAT-Math exam [a standardized test used for college admission in the US]. The kids had been nominated by their math teachers as the best students in their class. Many of these kids scored as high on this test as college freshman at Hopkins. How they got this special math talent was a fundamental question and it certainly looked like something that came “naturally” since they had not yet had many math courses in school. This started my interest in individual differences in mental abilities, and intelligence was the most interesting and controversial mental ability.

Emeritus Professor Richard Haier

It was after grad school during my first job at the National Institute of Mental Health that I learned more about genetics and how to study the brain with EEG. All these threads came together when I moved to Brown University and started my own lab to study intelligence. In the 1980s, the first neuroimaging with positron emission tomography (PET) became available and I joined my former NIMH colleagues who had moved to UC Irvine and acquired a PET scanner. I used my access to the scanner to study intelligence and brain function, including a study of math reasoning in college men and women, bringing me full circle back to the Hopkins study. Over the next 30 years, neuroimaging developed further with MRI and other technologies that I used to follow the intelligence data even deeper into the brain.

Bryan Caplan:

I just read your article in Atlantic magazine and was blown away by the brutal honesty displayed there, especially coming from someone whose career depends on the very system being criticized. I taught philosophy at several public and private colleges and universities in the 70s, and I chose to leave the field in 1980 because of the degradation in education that was taking place even then. I often said that, in my experience, out of a class of thirty students only about five would normally possess the minimum requirements for a college student: the ability to read and write with competence, and a modicum of intellectual curiosity.

I clearly remember two moments that crystallized for me my decision to leave teaching.

Appalled and shocked by the illiteracy displayed in my students’ papers, I once began a class (comprised of freshmen through seniors) by writing on the board three words: cats, cat’s, cats’. I then asked if anyone could explain the difference. About ten seconds elapsed before one (very brave) student raised her hand, began “I think …” and then proceeded to explain the difference correctly. I said, “This is third grade stuff. Why do most of you not know it?”

Several said they were never taught it. I then asked, “Didn’t your high school teachers correct this sort of thing on your papers?” to which several responded, “We never had to write any papers in high school.”

“What did you do in English class?” I asked. Answers: Listened to records, watched videos, talked about movies and current events.

Second crystallizing event. I had a young man in my Intro to Philosophy class who got so little right on his mid-term exam that it was hard to believe, even more so because he attended class, stayed awake, and seemed to take notes. So I asked him to come in to see me. I asked to see his notes, and they seemed to be hitting the main points. I was stumped.

Alabama:

In May of 2014 the school board authorized the purchase of 300+acres for the new Thompson High School complex.

Planned for a 2000-2200 student capacity the new school is conveniently located within a mile of the existing high school which was built in 1986 for a maximum of 800 students but now serves nearly 1900.

The new complex located between Thompson Road and Kent Dairy Road feels set apart in a field of dreams.

open culture:

The map above visualizes the languages of Europe (at least those deemed diplomatically important enough to be taught at the FSI), coloring them according the average time commitment they require of an English speaker. In pink, we have the English-speaking countries. The red countries speak Category I languages, those most closely related to English and thus learnable in 575 to 600 hours of study: the traditional high-school foreign languages of Spanish and French, for instance, or the less commonly taught but just about as easily learnable Portuguese and Italian. If you’d like a little more challenge, why not try your hand at German, whose 750 hours of study puts it in Category II — quite literally, a category of its own?

Steve Eder:

For eight weeks every fall, Indian Ladder Farms, a fifth-generation family operation near Albany, kicks into peak season.

The farm sells homemade apples pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts. Schoolchildren arrive by the bus load to learn about growing apples. And as customers pick fruit from trees, workers fill bins with apples, destined for the farm’s shop and grocery stores.

This fall, amid the rush of commerce — the apple harvest season accounts for about half of Indian Ladder’s annual revenue — federal investigators showed up. They wanted to check the farm’s compliance with migrant labor rules and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets pay and other requirements for workers.

Charlie Savage:

alling the Trump administration’s position “disingenuous” and “troubling,” a federal judge on Saturday ordered the Pentagon to permit a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union to meet with a United States citizen who has been imprisoned in military custody for three months after being deemed an enemy combatant.

In a novel case pitting the individual rights of citizens against government wartime powers, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia also ordered the Pentagon not to monitor that conversation — and told it not to transfer the man, who is being held in Iraq, until the A.C.L.U. conveys his wishes to her.

A Syrian militia captured the American citizen in mid-September and turned him over to American forces as someone suspected of fighting for the Islamic State. The government has refused to identify the man, but officials familiar with the matter have said he is a dual citizen of the United States and Saudi Arabia who was born on American soil to visiting Saudi parents and raised in Saudi Arabia.

Related: Droning American citizens.

Wenxin Fan and Natasha Khan:

Schoolchildren in a bucolic region in western China famed for steam trains and jasmine flowers thought little of it when police interrupted classes and asked all the boys to spit into small plastic boxes.

They weren’t told why, according to the accounts of several children involved. From kindergartens through high schools, hundreds of male students were ordered to give enough saliva so that a filter paper inside each box turned from pink to white. The change indicated that the sample was sufficient for forensic scientists to extract the boys’ DNA, or unique genetic fingerprint. It would also identify biological traits common to blood relatives of each child.

The police in Qianwei County say their plan worked. They hoped the operation would offer clues to the unsolved murder of two shopkeepers nine years before, and soon they celebrated the murderer’s capture in state media.

An added bonus: The police collected a lot more names they could add to the world’s biggest DNA database, an essential part of China’s high-tech security blanket being unfurled across the country as Beijing seeks to better monitor its 1.4 billion citizens.

Nationwide, police have a goal of almost doubling China’s current DNA trove to 100 million records by 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of documents from police departments across China. To get there, they need to gather almost as many records each year as are in the entire national database the U.S. has built over two decades.

Julian Sanchez:

Back in the 1980s, the late philosopher Robert Nozick wrote an essay asking: “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Happily, the question as Nozick framed it is somewhat less relevant today, as Western intellectuals have increasingly accepted the superiority of someform of market economy to full-blown socialist planning. But a variant form remains: Why do intellectuals seem so disproportionately attracted to “progressive” political views and government-centric means of remedying social ills?

For those of us who tend to favor a relatively small and limited government, and prefer that social problems be addressed by private and voluntary mechanisms, it should be a source of some discomfort that these views find so little favor among some of the most highly educated and intelligent sectors of the population—the “elites” of popular conservative demonology. One simple explanation for this pattern, after all, would be that left wing political views are disproportionately attractive to the highly educated and intelligent because they’re best supported by logic and evidence. Following Aumann’s agreement theorem, this would imply that libertarians should regard the disagreement of large numbers of well-informed people who are at least as intelligent as we are as prima facie evidence that our views are in error, and revise them accordingly.

Stephane Kasriel:

I contemplate the future of work on a daily basis in both my professional and personal life. As a father of four children from four to 14 years old, and as a citizen of the world, I care about our future.

As CEO of freelancing website Upwork, I am witnessing firsthand not only the immense changes within our industry, but also the speed at which they are occurring. At the World Economic Forum, where I co-chair the Council on the Future of Work, Gender and Education, we have heated discussions on the future impact of artificial intelligence on work and our responsibilities to help manage the change. We see that as the workforce evolves, we must finally break free from the industrial-era habits of the past to ensure a more productive and equitable future.

Drawing on both on my experiences during 2017, and insightful books I’ve read, here are my four predictions for the future of work:

1. AI and robotics will create more jobs, not mass unemployment — as long as we responsibly guide innovation

Eric Freeman and David Gelernter:

The U.S. is about to spend a small fortune on teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. The White House has promised $200 million a year to expand K-12 computer-science education. Several large tech firms have pledged another $300 million to the effort. That’s a good investment in theory, but the American education system is in no position to make the most of it.

The last time the U.S. made a serious change to science and math teaching was the 1960s. The Soviets had shocked the world in 1957 by launching…

Rajeev Syal and Rowena Mason:

Universities could face fines for failing to uphold free speech if their student unions do not give a platform to speakers such as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell, the higher education minister has said.

Jo Johnson said some student campaigners were trying to stifle debate as he confirmed plans to allow the newly created Office for Students (OfS) to fine or suspend institutions that fail to protect freedom of speech on campuses.

The government’s Boxing Day announcement does not name universities or student campaigners that have suppressed free speech and follows a similar one in October.

But speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Johnson suggested fines could be one of the punishments used to deal with “no platforming” of campaigners with controversial views.

Asked about cases where students had tried to deny speaking slots to Tatchell, a gay rights campaigner, and Greer, a feminist writer, over their views on transgender issues, he said: “The Office for Students will have a range of remedies at its disposal which do include fines at the more extreme end of the spectrum. I think it is important that we look at the cases mentioned.

“These are speakers who have been potentially banned or harried under no-platforming or safe spaces decisions. On all reasonable definitions, they are advocates of openness and liberal values and should be welcomed on our campuses.”

Alvin Powell:

Graduate students across the nation dodged a financial bullet Wednesday, even as dozens of prominent universities took a hit in the form of a new tax on university endowments and other investment income. The tax will weaken financial aid, faculty and research initiatives, and other institutional programs that support students, professors, and medical and scientific studies.

Harvard President Drew Faust, who worked against the graduate and endowment taxes, warned that the new endowment tax represents an unprecedented attack on the tax-exempt status of nonprofits and charities because it taxes, for the first time, income for such an institution’s core mission — in this case, education.

The endowment tax is included in the $1.5 trillion tax package passed by the U.S. House and Senate, which was billed as a massive tax cut for the country, but whose earlier versions included increased taxes on higher education to help pay for cuts to corporate and income taxes. Among the most controversial aspects were provisions that would have taxed as income free tuition provided to graduate students and removed the ability to deduct student loan interest from income taxes.

In response to an outpouring of protest from university presidents, graduate students, and some lawmakers, the final version dropped those measures but nonetheless retained the 1.4 percent tax on net investment income for institutions whose investment assets are greater than $500,000 per student.

Ruth Simon and Coulter Jones:

Danielle Baker wanted a $324,000 loan last year to expand the peanut-processing business she ran from the family farm. She had a longstanding relationship with the Roxobel branch of Southern Bank, and she thought Southern would help fund the peanut operation she had spun off, too.

But that branch—the town’s only bank—closed in 2014. A Southern banker based in Ahoskie, 19 miles away, said Bakers’ Southern Traditions Peanuts Inc. was too small and specialized, she says. A PNC bank branch also turned her down.

“If you are not a big company with tons of assets and a big bank account,” Ms. Baker says, “they just overlook you.”

Stephen Cass:

Electronics enthusiasts like being able to make things themselves. In IEEE Spectrum’s Hands On column, we’ve detailed how readers can make their own solder reflow ovens, conductive ink, and synthetic aperture radars. But making DIY integrated circuits seemed impossibly out of reach. After all, building a modern fab is astronomically expensive: For example, in 2017 Intel announced it was investing US $7 billion to complete a facility for making chips with 7-nanometer-scale features. But Sam Zeloof was not deterred. This 17-year-old high school student has started making chips in his garage, albeit with technology that’s a few steps back along the curve of Moore’s Law.

Zeloof says he has been working on his garage fab, located in his home near Flemington, N.J., for about a year. He began thinking about how to make chips as his “way of trying to learn what’s going on inside semiconductors and transistors. I started reading old books and old patents because the newer books explain processes that require very expensive equipment.”

A key moment came when Zeloof found Jeri Ellsworth’s YouTube channel, where she demonstrated how she had made some home-brew silicon transistors a few years ago. “After I saw [Ellsworth’s] videos I started to make a plan of how I could actually start to do this.”

BBC:

The first time Lance Fusarelli set foot on a university campus, he felt surrounded by people who seemed to know more than him – about society, social graces and “everything that was different”.

He attributes these differences to his upbringing. While he didn’t grow up poor, it was in a working-class town in a small rural area in Avella, Pennsylvania. He was the first in his family to go to university – his mother got pregnant and had to drop out of school, while his father went to work in a coal mine in his mid-teens. He lived in an environment where few stayed in education beyond high school.

It worked out well for him. Fusarelli is now highly educated and a professor and director of graduate programmes at North Carolina State University. Occasionally he’s reminded of how he felt in those early days, when a colleague innocently corrected his imperfect grammar. “He wasn’t being mean, we were good friends, he just grew up in a different environment,” he says. “Sometimes I will not always talk like an academic. I tend to use more colourful language.”

While Fusarelli has risen through the ranks of academia despite his background, his experiences have highlighted the social divide that can exist in education. For those who are less educated due to their disadvantaged background, they face a subtle but pervasive bias. A new report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology named the term “educationism” and for the first time found clear evidence for what Fusarelli and many others have long suspected: educated people are implicitly biased against the less educated. And this has unfortunate, unintended consequences that often stem from the gap between the rich and poor.

Lydia Denworth:

When David Liu first heard about a strain of mouse from his colleague Zheng-Yi Chen, he got excited. The mice carry a gene, TMC1, with a mutation that leads to deafness over time, giving them the name Beethoven mice. Their mutation matches one in humans that produces the same effect. The mutation is dominant; if it is present, hearing loss is certain.

Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute, works with the noted CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which targets and changes precise stretches of DNA. In the Beethoven mouse, he saw an ideal testing ground for the new gene editing technology, bringing hope that it might accomplish something new: improve hearing by disrupting a single genetic mutation. Other forms of gene modification add copies of genes, but are ineffectual if a dominant mutation remains.

In a paper published Dec. 20 in Nature, Liu, who is also a professor at Harvard University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Chen, a hearing biologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and professor of otolaryngology at Harvard, along with colleagues, report that the idea worked. The mice treated showed improved hair cell survival and hearing thresholds, and were startled by loud noises while untreated mice weren’t. “To our knowledge, this is the first time that genome editing has been used to correct hearing loss in an animal model of human genetic deafness,” Liu says. “There is a lot of work to do to translate these results into patients, but there is some proof of principle here.”

Victor Davis Davis:

Rarely has such a naturally rich and scenic region become so mismanaged by so many creative and well-intentioned people.

In California, Yuletide rush hours are apparently the perfect time for state workers to shut down major freeways to make long-overdue repairs to the ancient pavement. Last week, I saw thousands of cars stuck in a road construction zone that was juxtaposed with a huge concrete (but only quarter-built) high-speed-rail overpass nearby.

Stephanie Mencimer:

Update 12/20/17: US District Court Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial on Wednesday in the prosecution of Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and Montana militiaman Ryan Payne, saying that the government had willfully withheld evidence from defense lawyers that was potentially helpful to their case, in violation of legal rules. Navarro set a new trial date of February 26, but that could change at a hearing scheduled for January if she decides the government’s conduct is so egregious that the charges should be dismissed entirely.

On the November day when the trial of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy was supposed to start in Las Vegas, I met a man outside the courtroom named Doug Knowles. A Bundy supporter who had been covering the proceedings for a conservative website, Knowles confidently assured me, “This case is never going to get to a jury.”

I thought he was overly optimistic. After all, on its face, the government’s case seems like a slam dunk. Much of what the Bundys and the other defendants did was captured on video. The photos of protesters pointing semi-automatic weapons in the direction of federal officers are damning. The government has thousands of emails and Facebook messages from the Bundys and others implicating them in the effort to recruit armed gunmen to face down federal officers. At least one of the original defendants in the case has taken a plea deal in which he agreed to help the prosecution.

Barely a month later, though, Knowles’ prediction seems prescient. The government’s case against Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and Montana militiaman Ryan Payne over their participation in the armed standoff near Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, is in shambles. A federal judge, Gloria Navarro, could declare a mistrial as early as Wednesday based on allegations that the prosecution has failed to turn over critical evidence to the defense in a timely fashion. If that happens, it would mark the fourth time in the past year and a half that the Justice Department has put the Bundys and their supporters on trial

Royal Statistical Society::

The Royal Statistical Society has published a wickedly difficult Christmas quiz to entertain puzzle fans over the festive break for the past 24 years, and this year’s challenge, set by Dr Tim Paulden, may well be one of the toughest yet. Cracking the 13 problems below will require a blend of general knowledge, logic, and lateral thinking, but as usual no specialist mathematical knowledge is needed.

Two helpful tips for budding solvers:

· You may make use of any tools or resources you wish to help solve the problems, including books, internet search engines, computer programs and so on.

· You may find some of the question titles helpful. For full credit, these titles should be briefly explained within your answers.

The entrant, or team of entrants, with the most marks wins a one-year subscription to the society’s magazine, Significance. Explanations of answers are required for full marks.

Answers should be sent by email with Christmas Quiz 2017 in the subject line to RSSQuiz@rss.org.uk by 1800 GMT on 7 January 2018.

Christmas.

Outside America:

Cities have been offering homeless people free bus tickets to relocate elsewhere for at least three decades. In recent years, homeless relocation programs have become more common, sprouting up in new cities across the country and costing the public millions of dollars.

But until now there has never been a systematic, nationwide assessment of the consequences. Where are these people being moved to? What impact are these programs having on the cities that send and the cities that receive them? And what happens to these homeless people after they reach their destination?

In an 18-month investigation, the Guardian has conducted the first detailed analysis of America’s homeless relocation programs, compiling a database of around 34,240 journeys and analyzing their effect on cities and people.

Mark Epstein:

‘A monopoly on the means of communication,” Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote in “Leviathan,” their 1975 novel, “may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of ‘monopoly in the means of production.’ ” Bear that in mind when you hear this next statistic: In 2017 Google and Facebook have accounted for 84% of all digital advertising outside China, including 96% of its growth, according to an industry forecast this month from Zenith, Magna and GroupM.

Those figures should create more than the typical economic concerns about market concentration. Specifically, the tech duopoly’s dominance threatens the marketplace of ideas. Beyond advertising, Google and Facebook control how millions of people find their news. Americans are far likelier, collectively, to encounter articles via search engines and social media than on a news site’s home page.

Google is used for nearly 90% of online searches in the U.S. A Pew survey this summer found that the four most popular social-media sites for getting news are Facebook, YouTube (owned by Google), Twitter (which has a Google partnership), and Instagram (owned by Facebook). No more than 5% of Americans use another social-media platform to get news.

Esther Fung and Yaryna Serkez:

The rise of online retail and changing consumer preferences have hammered U.S. shopping malls since their heyday in the 1990s. Many of these former engines of commerce and centers of community life are now mere skeletons as they fight for their lives.

Related: Madison School Board approves plan spend taxpayer dollars on land acquisition.

Debra Saunders:

Navarro’s decision apparently was a reflection on federal officials. It follows release of a memo by BLM investigator Larry Wooten that described “a widespread pattern of bad judgment, lack of discipline, incredible bias, unprofessionalism and misconduct, as well as likely policy, ethical and legal violations among senior and supervisory staff” in the BLM’s Office of Law Enforcement and Security.

Wooten wrote that he had seen “excessive force,” described officers grinding Bundy’s son Dave’s face in gravel and opined that federal officials were intent on commanding “the most intrusive, oppressive, large scale and militaristic cattle impound possible.”

In an apparently partisan reference that used a term Hillary Clinton designated for Trump supporters, Wooten wrote that a federal prosecutor said, “Let’s get these ‘shall we say Deplorables.’”
(Likewise FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked on Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, shared texts in which they called Trump a “loathsome human.” Mueller removed Strzok after he learned of the texts.)
Wooten also wrote that the Bundy case “closely mirrors” the circumstances behind the trial of former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.
In 2008, federal prosecutors indicted Stevens, a Republican senator, for failing to report that an oil contractor had paid for renovations on his Alaska cabin. A jury convicted Stevens, who then lost a re-election bid.
Only later did the case fall apart after a Department of Justice probe found prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence. Attorney General Eric Holder, who inherited the case after President Barack Obama won the White House, asked the courts to throw out the conviction.

Wooten is no fan of Cliven Bundy who, he wrote, instead of “properly using the court system or other avenues to properly address his grievances, he chose an illegal, uncivilized and dangerous strategy in which a tragedy was narrowly and thankfully avoided.”

Kalyn Belsha:

About 15,000 students from the city’s predominantly poor and African-American schools transferred out of CPS over the past eight academic years, yet remained in Illinois, according to an examination of tens of thousands of state transfer records. About one-third enrolled in school districts that are both majority poor and majority black.

The Reporter observed this trend continue in northwest Indiana. A public records request to East Chicago public schools, for example, revealed nearly 400 African-American CPS students had transferred into the district since 2010. The overall number of Chicago transfers to northwest Indiana schools is likely much higher, but record-keeping inconsistencies make it difficult to determine precise numbers.

Often, the receiving school districts in Illinois and northwest Indiana were chronically underfunded. Research shows poor black students in Illinois perform worse academically in such districts compared with Chicago.

Janice Jackson, the district’s interim CEO, recalls talking to a West Side principal who was “baffled” when students transferred to lesser-quality schools outside the city. The issue needs to be studied more, she said.

“It’s not one thing that drives any of this,” says Jackson.

Michael J. Petrilli :

Regular readers know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the topic of screen time. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, or the years our kids spent in a Waldorf pre-school, but I can’t help feeling a little guilty about letting my boys watch stupid Disney TV shows or play mindless video games when I could be engaging them in healthier pursuits. I stand in awe at my friends who have gone years—years—without allowing their children to watch a drop of television. It’s nothing but board games and arts-and-crafts at their homes. Incredible!

I don’t have that kind of discipline. And, as I’ve argued before, I’m not even sure a mass-media ban is what’s best for children. Everything in moderation, right?

So let me admit that the Petrilli family will be enjoying some screen time this winter vacation. Here are some great things you can watch with your kids that allow everyone to relax and will keep everybody learning to boot.

Lucy Kellaway:

My favourite party of the season — almost my only party — was with my fellow middle-aged teaching novices, who have spent the past four months in assorted London secondary schools. Everyone looked a bit different. Thinner. Tougher. But also, I fancied, a bit younger. Given how tired we all were, this might seem surprising. Possibly, being surrounded by the young (the teachers) and the even younger (the pupils) rubs off on one. More likely, this is proof of what all the studies say: that learning new things later in life is not only the best way of fending off Alzheimer’s, but it also keeps us young.

“It’s been an incredible journey,” one of them said, as he drank his warm prosecco from a plastic cup. Then he gave me a defiant look: he knows how I feel about the “J” word. Starting again as a trainee teacher is lots of things. It is tiring. Exciting. Humiliating. Exhilarating. Rejuvenating. Relentless. It is fabulous to have made it through to the Christmas holiday. But it isn’t a journey.

Alas, no one in my new world appears to agree with me. There seem to be even more spurious journeys in schools than in business — education itself is now supposed to be one. I listened to a maths professor give an otherwise impressive lecture last week which she spoiled by saying it was the job of every maths teacher to take children “on a mathematical journey”.

Amber Walker:

To measure literacy, MEP compared students’ performance on the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening, or PALS, an assessment of students’ familiarity with literacy fundamentals like letter recognition, spelling and sound awareness.

On average, 4K students scored higher on PALS than 53 percent of their peers who did not enroll in 4K. Students of color, students from low-income families and students of non-college educated parents also benefited from 4K enrollment when compared to their peers of similar backgrounds. On average, the PALS scores of African-American and Latino students enrolled in 4K were higher than 58 percent of their peers of the same background who did not enroll in 4K.

Low-income 4K students also scored better on PALS than 58 percent of their peers from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

The study found no appreciable difference in PALS performance for students enrolled in an MMSD school-based 4K program versus an MMSD early childhood center.

MEP’s study also compared MMSD’s 4K student performance to children enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools’ 4K program. MPS was chosen as a peer district because of its urban setting, large size and diverse student body.

On average, Milwaukee 4K students outscored their non-4K peers on the PALS assessment 76 percent of the time, far ahead of Madison’s 52 percent average. The report did not conclude why the gap between MMSD and MPS student performance is so large but mentioned that MPS only offers full-day 4K, while MMSD students attend half-day programs.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Much more on 4K, here.

Toni Airaksinen :

In a list of six possible consequences of trigger warnings, he argues that they “foster a culture where student fragility is promoted over the development of resilience,” and can “encourage students to avoid intense literary moments that they may perceive as too powerful.”

Trigger warnings could also “handicap English teachers by censoring or casting certain literary moments as taboo,” and cripple “artistic freedom by arbitrarily sanctioning what is and what is not appropriate for class discussion and student experience,” he notes.

Reflections on functioning in a Trigger Happy America.

Zigor Aldama:

The lifts rising to Yitu Technology’s headquarters have no buttons. The pass cards of the staff and visitors stepping into the elevators that service floors 23 and 25 of a newly built sky­scraper in Shanghai’s Hongqiao business district are read automatically – no swipe required – and each passenger is deposited at their specified floor.

The only way to beat the system and alight at a different floor is to wait for someone who does have access and jump out alongside them. Or, if this were a sci-fi thriller, you’d set off the fire alarms and take the stairs while everyone else was evacuating. But even in that scenario you’d be caught: Yitu’s cameras record everyone coming into the building and tracks them inside. An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm recognises faces and plots the movement of their owners on maps of each floor.

Zigor Aldama:

The email came barely two months before Christmas, in 2007. My editor wanted an article about manufacturing in China. Products being sold around the world were made in the country and he wanted to prick the conscience of consumers before the festive season shopping orgy began – so the focus was to be on labour conditions and the quality of products. Especially toys.

There was no better place to start than in Yiwu, the Zhejiang province manufacturing powerhouse and a favourite low-cost market for retailers. Christmas goods were already halfway to tinsel-dressed shelves across the globe, but Valentine’s Day would be next, so the factories were still hard at it. Stuffed hearts bearing the words “I love you” in all imaginable languages – albeit with spelling mistakes here and there – filled the first factory I managed to sneak into.

Lauren Etter , Vernon Silver , and Sarah Frier :

By all accounts, Facebook has been an indispensable tool of civic engagement, with candidates and elected officials from mayor to prime minister using the platform to communicate directly with their constituents, and with grassroots groups like Black Lives Matter relying on it to organize. The company says it offers the same tools and services to all candidates and governments regardless of political affiliation, and even to civil society groups that may have a lesser voice. Facebook says it provides advice on how best to use its tools, not strategic advice about what to say.

“We’re proud to work with the thousands of elected officials around the world who use Facebook as a way to communicate directly with their constituents, interact with voters, and hear about the issues important in their community,” Harbath said in an emailed statement.

She said the company is investing in artificial intelligence and other ways to better police hate speech and threats. “We take our responsibility to prevent abuse of our platform extremely seriously,” Harbath said. “We know there are ways we can do better, and are constantly working to improve.”

Power and social media converge by design at Facebook. The company has long worked to crush its smaller rival, Twitter, in a race to be the platform of choice for the world’s so-called influencers, whether politicians, cricket stars or Kardashians. Their posts will, in theory, draw followers to Facebook more frequently, resulting in higher traffic for advertisers and better data about what attracts users.

Politicians running for office can be lucrative ad buyers. For those who spend enough, Facebook offers customized services to help them build effective campaigns, the same way it would Unilever NV or Coca-Cola Co. ahead of a product launch.

While Facebook declined to give the size of its politics unit, one executive said it can expand to include hundreds during the peak of an election, drawing in people from the company’s legal, information security and policy teams.

Tyler Durden:

Illinois is drowning under a mountain of debt, unpaid bills and underfunded pension liabilities and it’s largest city, Chicago, is suffering from a staggering outbreak of violent crime not seen since gang wars engulfed major cities from LA to New York in the mid-90’s.

Here is just a small taste of some of our posts on Illinois’ challenges:

Illinois Pension Funding Ratio Sinks To 37.6% As Unfunded Liabilities Surge To $130 Billion
Illinois Unpaid Vendor Backlog Hits A New Record At Over $16 Billion

The State Of Illinois Is “Past The Point Of No Return”

“What The Hell Is Going On In Chicago” And Other Highlights From Trump’s Speech To FBI Grads

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that the Prairie State lost a net 33,700 residents in fiscal year 2017, according to the Census Bureau. Also not surprising is the fact that the mass exodus from Illinois was the largest of any state in the country with lower taxed, lower cost of living states like Texas and Florida posting the biggest gains.

Miranda Green:

Britain’s universities are enduring a moment of intense scrutiny even as they enjoy something of a boom. Brexit looms, threatening their long run of global success; middle-class rage at tuition fees for domestic undergraduates has become a potent electoral force; and lack of social mobility, partly caused by an education system that replicates rather than disrupts privilege, is an acknowledged national disaster.

Into this complicated picture strides David Willetts, higher education minister during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and now chairman of the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank specialising in inequality. “I love universities,” he declares in the first line of A University Education, a book that (mostly) eschews political memoir in favour of history, analysis and argument. And he goes on to prove it, lavishing the sector with his attention to every detail and exploring almost every angle, from the birth of Oxford and Cambridge in the late Middle Ages through to the current challenges of globalisation and new technology.

Readers with a taste for the erudite anecdote will be delighted — if you are looking for a justification for the current market in higher education, how about the example set by the first students in 11th-century Bologna choosing which tutors’ wisdom to buy with their fees?

Amber Walker:

Gloria Reyes, deputy mayor for the city of Madison, announced Wednesday that she will challenge Madison School Board vice president Anna Moffit for Seat 1 on the board.

Since 2014, Reyes has served as the mayor’s liaison to several city agencies including the Department of Civil Rights, the Madison Police and Fire departments and the city attorney’s office. Reyes also represents the mayor on the city of Madison’s education committee.

Reyes said her work in city government and law enforcement makes her a strong candidate for Madison School Board.

It is great to see competitive races for our $20k/student taxpayer supported school district.

Peter Cook:

I couldn’t agree with him more and that’s why it’s been disappointing to see how Wilson and other DCPS officials have responded to revelations that administrators at Ballou High School handed out diplomas to scores of students who hadn’t met the district’s graduation requirements.

As noted in a previous post, when WAMU reporter Kate McGee first confronted Wilson with evidence that Ballou teachers and administrators had ignored excessive absences and changed students’ grades to make them eligible to graduate, he abruptly ended the interview. Subsequent DCPS statements on the unfolding scandal sought to minimize the issue, as if the unethical conduct at Ballou was no big deal.

But after McGee’s investigation ended up on NPR’s All Things Considered, DCPS could no longer ignore the problem. Over the past two weeks, Supt. Wilson has launched an internal investigation into the allegations and reassigned Ballou’s principal, Yetunde Reeves.

Ethan Chiel:

It’s very appealing, for the drama alone, to imagine some as-yet-unknown company driving Facebook into Myspace-like obscurity, or Alphabet being broken up, or whatever scenario for the demise of one of Silicon Valley’s five dominant companies you prefer to imagine. Not just appealing but natural to do so: We have in living memory at least a dozen examples of large and successful tech companies just failing, or becoming shadows of their former selves: Myspace is a ghost town owned by Time Inc. AltaVista and Friendster are long dead. Even Yahoo! and AOL, while still technically around, have become part of whatever Verizon-owned, centaurlike creation Oath can claim to be.

This recent history of “creative destruction” is important to Silicon Valley not just for its narrative neatness — Davids that become Goliaths, only to get toppled by new Davids — but for the protective shield it provides. Why be worried about Google’s power (or Facebook’s, or Amazon’s), when they’re each a bad decision against a more nimble competitor away from irrelevance? Surely Facebook can be Facebook’d, just as Myspace was? Surely Google will someday be disrupted?

Eli Stokols:

In his 2016 survey for Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, 42% of younger Americans said they support capitalism, and only 19% identified themselves as capitalists. While this was a new question in his survey, the low percentage of young people embracing capitalism surprised him. He had come here, in part, to better understand why.

“Maybe it had to do with the ‘American Dream,’ and how capitalism was correlated with it, but a lot of young people don’t believe in it anymore,” said Ana Garcia, a junior at the Elon event. “We don’t trust capitalism because we don’t see ourselves getting ahead.”

Largely because of such millennials, generally those born in the 1980s and 1990s, socialism has moved from being a taboo because of its associations with the Cold War to something that has found rising appeal among those polled by Harvard and in other surveys that compared different generations.

Chris Stewart:

Here comes a shocker, not everyone is on board.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council have slammed the program because they say it doesn’t “meet the needs of all students,” and “elected officials should provide stable funding for public schools and include educators in developing solutions instead of fragmented approaches that siphon more from public schools to fund private [programs]”

AllLivesMatter (except black gifted lives, of course) and public education funding is not for individual children, but for the people who make a living on the backs of children.

There is such a dishonest foundation to that argument. No program address the “needs of all students,” and families are wise to seek programs that work for the specific needs of their children. And, yes, the government has a compelling reason to fund the development of each child to their potential.

Having traveled to Wisconsin last week and having talked to people on the ground, I can tell you there is zero shame in the white “progressives” there. They would allow black and brown kids to perish before shifting their ideology a single notch to the right. I’ll write more on that soon.

2006 (!) Madison: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT! :

Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Amber Walker:

Before she started teaching at Madison’s Black Hawk Middle School this year, Deidre Green developed an attribute all teachers need: eyes in the back of her head. She got them working as managing editor of the Simpson Street Free Press.

“From my desk in the back of the room, I could watch the entire newsroom and pay attention to everything,” she said. “I could notice if a kid was up and walking around, not on task. Now, as a classroom teacher …having that keen sense of what is happening with all of my kids is something that I’m used to.”

For 25 years, staff at the Simpson Street Free Press have refined what works to help kids become successful students, maintaining an innovative spirit in both education and journalism. They ground their work in academic outcomes, cultivating a pipeline where students write, learn to edit and sometimes return to work or volunteer as adults. In addition, they have adapted to changing demographics in Dane County and shrinking resources for print journalists.

Much more on the Simpson Street Free Press here.

Megan Thielking:

Evan Jones was excited when he signed up for a contemporary art class at community college. Then the professor announced the course would focus heavily on class participation.

“That was the first class that I dropped,” he said.

Jones’s persistent, severe anxiety has shadowed him for years. He’s struggled to pipe up in class and to make friends. His anxiety was so acute, he left high school; after getting his GED, he has bounced around, taking classes at three colleges over the past five years. He blamed himself every time he dropped a class.

“I’ve never really found the right place for me,” he said.

Then he found a program that promised to do what every other school had failed at: support him as a whole person, not just try to push him through credit after credit.

For the past three years, Boston University has offered one of the few programs in the nation dedicated to teaching students who have had to leave college the coping skills that will give them a shot at getting back into school or work while managing severe anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health conditions.

Laura Waxmann:

A Silicon Valley-based education reform nonprofit promising to tackle the achievement gap in San Francisco’s public schools by empowering parents has drawn the ire of district leaders and advocates, who criticize the group for its track record of advocating for charter schools.

Citing student achievement data obtained from the California Department of Education, a report published in October by the San Jose-based Innovate Public Schools called out the San Francisco Unified School District for being “one of the worst districts in the state for low-income African American and Latino students.”

Josh Chin and Clément Bürge :

This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth.

Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera.

China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country.

Sara Randazzo:

This year, you can get into a top law school without taking the LSAT.

Some of the nation’s law schools—including at Harvard University and Georgetown University—are letting applicants take the Graduate Record Examination instead of the Law School Admission Test. The schools say they are changing in part to attract students from a wider variety of backgrounds, particularly with science, engineering and math experience.

Both tests, of course, are tough, but the LSAT holds a particular place as a grueling rite of passage. The GRE relies more on knowledge that can be memorized, as college-entrance tests do, than the skills-based LSAT that test-prep instructors say is like learning how to play a sport or instrument.

The legal industry is notoriously slow to change. Some lawyers predict the broadening acceptance of the GRE, which is used for admission to a range of programs—from masters’ in engineering and Ph.D.s in philosophy to M.B.A.s—will lead to law students who aren’t committed. Others say schools are accepting the test to game closely followed law-school rankings that take average LSAT scores into consideration, or to keep tuition income flowing.

John Myles White:

Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be made clear. This post tries to remedy that situation by making it clear that all three concepts arise as specific parameterizations of a more general problem.

To do so, I’ll need to introduce one non-standard definition that may trouble some readers. In order to simplify my exposition, let’s all agree to assume that 00=0. In particular, we’ll want to assume that |0|0=0, even though |ϵ|0=1 for all ϵ>0. This definition is non-standard, but it greatly simplifies what follows and emphasizes the conceptual unity of modes, medians and means.

Karen Rivedal:

“One thing I would never do is look at just one site (and then make a purchase offer),” Burke said. “It feels very strange to me, especially if this is $2 million out of the general fund, that we have not looked at other options.”

According to board documents, the site was selected by staff because it “best meets the criteria for an optimal school site, including road access from three sides. … Architects at PRA, a leader in K-12 projects, found the parcel very satisfactory as a future school site.”

Madison has a long spent more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student despite tolerating long-term, disastrous reading results

Better Explained:

Most ideas aren’t inherently confusing, but their technical description can be (e.g., reading sheet music vs. hearing the song.)

My learning strategy is to find what actually helps when learning a concept, and do more of it. Not the stodgy description in the textbook — what made it click for you?

The checklist of what I need is ADEPT: Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain-English Definition, and Technical Definition.

Here’s a few reasons I like the colorized equations so much:

Jonathan Haidt :

What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart. To understand why, I have found it helpful to think about an idea from cosmology called “the fine-tuned universe.” There are around 20 fundamental constants in physics—things like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the charge of an electron. In the weird world of cosmology, these are constants throughout our universe, but it is thought that some of them could be set to different values in other universes. As physicists have begun to understand our universe, they have noticed that many of these physical constants seem to be set just right to allow matter to condense and life to get started.

For a few of these constants, if they were just one or two percent higher or lower, matter would have never condensed after the big bang. There would have been no stars, no planets, no life. As Stephen Hawking put it, “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email, The Concord Review:

The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.

The Boston Globe has been publishing for 145 years and the hints that it may have to fold have distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 15 pages or so, called “All-Scholastics,” on notable public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.

Today the latest Winter “All-Scholastics” section arrived, with the latest “Ten Moments to Remember” in HS sports and with reports on the best athletes and coaches in Boys’ Basketball, Girls’ Basketball, Volleyball, Golf, Football (3 pages), Field Hockey, Boys’ Cross County, Girls’ Cross Country. The Preps and Swimming parts consolidate celebration of boys’ and girls’ accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).

Each section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 31 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 “Prep” athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn’t see any “Prep” coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two “Athletes of the Year” identified, and all the coaches are “Coaches of the Year” in their sport.

There may be, at the same time, some high school “Students of the Year” in English, math, Mandarin, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, AP biology, and the like. There may also be high school “Teachers of the Year” in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, the most well-known paper in the “Athens of America” (Boston).

It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter “All-Scholastics” section today are also first-rate high school students of math, English, science, history, literature, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all cases, also be excellent teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.

When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph read, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr.: Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice. If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.

The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.

If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, but I never see any attention and recognition for the academic efforts and accomplishments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no many how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe (and I am sure it is not alone in this) cares about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, by the evidence, that they do not.

The Concord Review

Will Flanders (PDF)::

When considering the shortcomings of Wisconsin’s K-12 education system, policymakers tend to focus on its failure to meet the needs of poor and minority students. This focus is important—Wisconsin is held back by struggling rural and urban public schools and has the largest African American to white achievement gap in the country. But, gifted and talented students, especially low-income ones, are underserved in many parts of the state and at risk of being left behind the rest of the country and world.

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer financed school districts.

Related: TAG Complaint and English 10.

Merics:

The Social Credit System“ is designed to monitor and rate citizens and companies in China and to guide their behavior. „It is a wide-reaching project that touches on almost all aspects of everyday life,“ the authors Mareike Ohlberg, Bertram Lang and Shazeda Ahmed write in the new MERICS China Monitor „Central Planning, local experiments: the complex implementation of China’s Social Credit System“.

The authors analyze the current stage of the system’s implementation and they describe how it will likely function in practice. Their analysis is based on government publiations, discussions in media and social networks, as well as pilot projects.

Molly Beck:

Children living in low-income households who are considered to be advanced learners will be eligible to receive a taxpayer-funded scholarship to use to pay for education expenses under a new program proposed by three lawmakers this week.

The scholarship program would provide $1,000 to families with “gifted and talented” students who are already eligible to receive free or reduced-price school lunches, which means the household’s annual income is at or below $45,510 annually for a family of four.

The program is proposed by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, Rep. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee — lawmakers who have historically been strong supporters of private school voucher and charter schools — and will be open to 2,000 families beginning in the 2018-19 school year, if the bill passes and is signed by Gov. Scott Walker.

“These scholarships will provide students in families with low incomes the ability to access a wide range of educational opportunities that they may currently not have the resources to participate in,” the lawmakers wrote in a memo seeking support from other lawmakers.

“Who knows how many scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, and community leaders we are missing out on because their family can’t afford additional educational opportunities,” Darling said in a statement.

Jack Moore:

In the future you’ll get fired by a computer! How fun!

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and really the entire way technology has taken over every aspect of our lives, algorithms are now all around us. This has led to one of the biggest fears for our future: automation. It’s the question that has plagued politicians who are constantly wanting to show voters that they will bring or give more jobs to people. How do you bring back jobs if computer algorithms are making it so entire sectors of the work force will be replaced with robots? Self-driving cars, will replace Uber, Lyft, taxi, and truck drivers. Fast food restaurants will become more self-serve. Delivery people will begin being replaced by drones. If you are a person in pretty much any workforce this should scare you. But, one thing you can take comfort in? The algorithms aren’t just coming for your jobs, they’re also coming for your boss’s job.

The Wall Street Journal has the story today about the growing responsibilities that are being given to the automated workforce. Put simply, the robots are getting promotions.

Rebecca Mead:

One of the most celebrated educational experiments in history was performed by James Mill, the British historian, on his eldest son, John Stuart Mill, who was born outside London in 1806. John began learning Greek when he was three, and read Herodotus and other historians and philosophers before commencing Latin, at the age of seven. By the time he was twelve, he was widely read in history and had studied experimental science, mathematics, philosophy, and economics. James Mill’s pedagogical approach reflected the influence of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarian philosophy, and was intended to discover whether a child of unexceptional intellectual capacities could, through rigorous exposure, learn material that was typically acquired in adulthood, if at all. The answer, according to the research subject, was yes. “I started, I may fairly say, with a quarter of a century over my contemporaries,” J. S. Mill wrote in his 1873 “Autobiography.”

Mill’s remarkable upbringing is cited by Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy Charter School network, in her own autobiography, “The Education of Eva Moskowitz,” which was published in September. The book recounts Moskowitz’s learning curve, from her youth in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan—where she was brought up by leftist intellectuals and attended public school—to her time on the New York City Council, where she developed a reputation for courting controversy while chairing the Education Committee, to her founding of the Success Academy, the city’s largest charter-school network. She is now the reliable scourge of the public-education establishment in New York City and, outside its borders, a favorite of the national education-reform movement.
Success Academy began in 2006, with a single elementary school in Harlem, and now has forty-six schools, in every borough except Staten Island. The overwhelming majority of the students are black or Latino, and in most of the schools at least two-thirds of them come from poor families. More than fifteen thousand children are enrolled, from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Students hardly follow Mill’s curriculum—there is no Greek or Latin in kindergarten, or even in later grades. But the schools do well by the favored metric of twenty-first-century public education: they get consistently high scores on standardized tests administered by the State of New York. In the most recent available results, ninety-five per cent of Success Academy students achieved proficiency in math, and eighty-four per cent in English Language Arts; citywide, the respective rates were thirty-six and thirty-eight per cent. This spring, Success Academy was awarded the Broad Prize, a quarter-million-dollar grant given to charter-school organizations, particularly those serving low-income student populations, that have delivered consistently high performances on standardized tests. Moskowitz has said that, within a decade, she hopes to be running a hundred schools. This year, a Success high school, on Thirty-third Street, will produce the network’s first graduating class: seventeen students. This pioneering class originated with a cohort of seventy-three first graders.
As a charter school, Success Academy is required to admit children by lottery. But prominent critics, such as Diane Ravitch, the historian and public-education advocate, have alleged that Success Academy essentially weeds out students, by maintaining unreasonably high expectations of behavior and academic achievement. Similarly, critics claim that the program reduces class size by not accepting new students beyond fourth grade, whereas zoned public schools must accept all comers. To Moskowitz’s detractors, Success’s celebration of standardized test-taking—students attend “Slam the Exam” rallies—is a cynical capitulation to a bureaucratic mode of learning. Success Academy has attracted large donations—in the past two years, the hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson has given forty-five million dollars to the group—and Moskowitz’s opponents say that such gifts erode the principle that a quality education should be provided by the government. Last fall, Donald Trump summoned Moskowitz, who is a Democrat, shortly after he was elected President. Although she declined to be considered as his Education Secretary, she was widely criticized for agreeing to the meeting, including by members of her own staff, who noted that Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail had stoked fear in the kind of families served by Success Academy schools.

Madison has long supported non diverse K-12 governance, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student and tolerating disastrous reading results.

Blake Harper:

According to The Telegraph, the harsher rule means students will not be allowed to look at their phones at all during school hours, including during lunch, and between classes. Blanquer pointed to the many, many studies that have indicated that screentime is dangerous for young kids and that schools must do their part to help kids not become addicted to their phone.

Given the number of young kids who now own phones, it may be difficult to completely ban kids from ever having their phones at school. This becomes especially tricky when parents are concerned about their child’s safety and feel a phone is the best way to contact them in an emergency. However, Blanquer says that he is open to making changes if a phone proves to be necessary for educational or safety purposes.

Annysa Johnson:

Students and parents at Arrowhead High School are pushing back against a new web-filtering service the school is putting in place, calling it an invasion of privacy and an attempt to micromanage students’ lives online.

One of the chief gripes, for the kids at least, is that the parents now can opt to get a weekly accounting of all the websites they visit during the school day. The filters will run not only on all school-owned devices but also student-owned devices if they are connected to the school’s Wi-Fi.

But that, experts suggest, might be the least of their worries.

Security and privacy advocates have raised concerns about the capacity of such providers to collect vast amounts of information about students that may be stored for years and could be hacked or co-opted for unintended purposes if not adequately protected.

Michael Hobbes:

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

What’s a millennial anyway?
Unless otherwise noted, we mean anyone born between 1982 and 2004
We’ve all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. We still haven’t learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention “millennial” to anyone over 40 and the word “entitlement” will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

Emma Best:

A new FOIA release shows the FBI Director’s Office responded to FOIA requests for known files on deceased FBI officials by presenting options that seemingly included a law enforcement investigation/proceeding against the requesters, with one email calling the requests “SUSPICIOUS.” While the emails are heavily redacted to conceal the identities of the FBI officials involved in the discussions, the Bureau repeatedly left personal information of the different FOIA requesters unredacted, despite having clear guidelines and no privacy waivers.

The FBI’s Dead List, which compiles a list of FBI files on subjects the Bureau knows to be dead, can be a wonderful resource for FOIA requesters. The list confirms the existence of specific FBI files as well as the subject’s death, removing the need to provide separate proof of death in order to avoid unnecessary redactions. The FBI has recently begun claiming that they can’t locate the updated copy of the file, a claim that the Department of Justice has upheld on appeal. The most recently released copy of the Dead List identified approximately 7,000 deceased FBI officials on whom the Bureau maintained files. Due to the obvious public interest in these files, they were requested.

India McKinney:

The next two weeks will be a flurry of activity in Congress. Before they can leave for the holidays, our government must—at minimum—pass at least one bill to keep the government running and also decide what to do about a controversial NSA spying authority called Section 702. Some legislators want to reauthorize Section 702, without meaningful reform, by attaching it to must-pass spending legislation. This is a terrible idea. The legislative process surrounding Section 702 already lacks necessary transparency and deliberation.

The new legislative stratagem gets complicated very quickly. Here’s what you need to know.

Background

On December 8th, Congress passed a temporary funding bill, or a “Continuing Resolution” (CR) to keep the government running until December 22. To prevent a government shutdown, Congress must either pass another CR by the new deadline, or ideally, finish writing the final funding bill for the rest of Fiscal Year 2018. This final funding bill is known as “the omnibus.”

Debbie Weingarten:

It is dark in the workshop, but what light there is streams in patches through the windows. Cobwebs coat the wrenches, the cans of spray paint and the rungs of an old wooden chair where Matt Peters used to sit. A stereo plays country music, left on by the renter who now uses the shop.

“It smells so good in here,” I say. “Like …”

“Men, working,” finishes Ginnie Peters.

We inhale. “Yes.”

Ginnie pauses at the desk where she found her husband Matt’s letter on the night he died.

“My dearest love,” it began, and continued for pages. “I have torment in my head.”

On the morning of his last day, 12 May 2011, Matt stood in the kitchen of their farmhouse.

“I can’t think,” he told Ginnie. “I feel paralyzed.”

It was planting season, and stress was high. Matt worried about the weather and worked around the clock to get his crop in the ground on time. He hadn’t slept in three nights and was struggling to make decisions.

“I remember thinking ‘I wish I could pick you up and put you in the car like you do with a child,’” Ginnie says. “And then I remember thinking … and take you where? Who can help me with this? I felt so alone.”

Ni Dandan:

Yuan Honglin’s career as one of China’s foremost homeschooling advocates began when his daughter’s kindergarten teacher said 3-year-old Xiaoyi didn’t interact much with the other children, and might need psychological care. Feeling both shocked and skeptical, Yuan decided to take his daughter out of school and teach her himself.

Afraid that being away from her peers would only exacerbate his daughter’s anxiety, Yuan organized free home-based classes that other children could join. Now, 14 years later, the classes have evolved into a small but popular school, and his daughter is an outgoing and confident 18-year-old. “The great educator Confucius proposed that we should teach according to a student’s abilities,” Yuan, who holds a Ph.D. in history, tells Sixth Tone. “But in the official education system in this country, the same teaching method is strictly replicated for all students. As a father, I should strive to offer the most suitable education for my children.”

Frederick M. Hess & Max C. Eden :

Last week, a new analysis of Philadelphia public schools found that the district’s move to reform school discipline by embracing “restorative justice” had led to a raft of unfortunate results. The decision to eliminate suspensions for classroom “conduct” led to skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement. Truancy had been steadily declining, but increased sharply after the new policy was adopted. Compared with other Pennsylvania school districts and after controlling for demographics, the district’s math and reading achievement declined substantially after the adoption of the new policy. And, ironically, students were actually suspended more often, because even as suspensions for minor offenses fell, suspensions for major offenses rose.

The progressive education wonks who championed Philadelphia’s school-discipline reforms were remarkably unbothered by these alarming results. They didn’t even really challenge the data. Instead, they asserted that the reforms could work and should work. Education Week ran a story titled, “In Discipline Debate, Two Groups Draw Different Conclusions About the Same District.” See, a second group of researchers, from the University of Pennsylvania, had taken a qualitative look at Philadelphia’s schools. The takeaway there for EdWeek readers was that it is “possible for the district to see improvements” because the disciplinary changes showed hints of promise in schools that were “wealthier and more white.”

Jason Schwartz:

With greater scrutiny on media accuracy than ever, The New York Times has added a new, never-before-heard-of position to its D.C. bureau: fact-checker.

“Given how much copy we’re moving these days, given how intense the atmosphere is, we’re just doubling down on making sure everything is as airtight as it can be,” said Peter Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent. “It’s probably long overdue.”

Molly Beck:

The state’s largest teachers union has blasted a new proposal from three lawmakers to give grants to advanced learners who live in low-income households, saying the proposal is another way to send public money to private education providers.

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, on Friday blasted a bill proposed this week by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, Rep. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee, to give $1,000 grants to 2,000 low-income students in public, charter and private schools who are considered to be “gifted and talented.” Brey said the bill lacks measures of accountability and does not specify where funding will come from.

Sara Fischer:

A new study from Ghostery, an anti-tracking tool, shows that an overwhelming majority (79%) of websites globally are tracking visitors’ data — with 10% of these sites actually sending user data to 10 companies or more.

Why it matters: Trackers can collect and sell visitor data in ways that aren’t always obvious to consumers. Too many trackers can also slow down website load times. As the trade war for data intensifies, companies that collect the most data through trackers will become the biggest targets of data privacy reform.

Michael Hobbes:

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

What’s a millennial anyway?

Unless otherwise noted, we mean anyone born between 1982 and 2004

We’ve all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. We still haven’t learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention “millennial” to anyone over 40 and the word “entitlement” will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

The tax burden continues to grow. Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite long term, disastrous reafing results.

Ernesto:

In some countries they’ve actively helped write copyright law. Elsewhere, U.S. authorities provide concrete suggestions for improvement, including in Sweden.

After The Pirate Bay was raided for the first time, more than ten years ago, the media highlighted that the U.S. Government and Hollywood pulled strings behind the scenes. However, little was known about what this actually entailed.

Today we can provide more context, thanks to a Freedom of Information request that was sent to the U.S. Department of State. While the events happened a decade ago, they show how action against The Pirate Bay was discussed at the highest political level.

The trail starts with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005. This is roughly six months before the Pirate Bay raid, which eventually resulted in criminal convictions for four men connected to the site.

Mara Hvistendahl :

In 2015, when Lazarus Liu moved home to China after studying logistics in the United Kingdom for three years, he quickly noticed that something had changed: Everyone paid for everything with their phones. At McDonald’s, the convenience store, even at mom-and-pop restaurants, his friends in Shanghai used mobile payments. Cash, Liu could see, had been largely replaced by two smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat Pay. One day, at a vegetable market, he watched a woman his mother’s age pull out her phone to pay for her groceries. He decided to sign up.

To get an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell phone number and scan his national ID card. He did so reflexively. Alipay had built a reputation for reliability, and compared to going to a bank managed with slothlike indifference and zero attention to customer service, signing up for Alipay was almost fun. With just a few clicks he was in. Alipay’s slogan summed up the experience: “Trust makes it simple.”

Alipay turned out to be so convenient that Liu began using it multiple times a day, starting first thing in the morning, when he ordered breakfast through a food delivery app. He realized that he could pay for parking through Alipay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s license and license plate numbers, as well as the engine number of his Audi. He started making his car insurance payments with the app. He booked doctors’ appointments there, skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese hospitals are famous. He added friends in Alipay’s built-in social network. When Liu went on vacation with his fiancée (now his wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants and bought trinkets with Alipay. He stored whatever money was left over, which wasn’t much once the vacation and car were paid for, in an Alipay money market account. He could have paid his electricity, gas, and internet bills in Alipay’s City Service section. Like many young Chinese who had become enamored of the mobile payment services offered by Alipay and WeChat, Liu stopped bringing his wallet when he left the house.

Sara Carter:

A controversial NSA surveillance program used to monitor foreigners was also being used by the FBI as ‘backdoor’ to gain warrantless access to American communications, according to numerous former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials with knowledge of the program.

The whistleblowers, who recently disclosed the program’s process to Congressional oversight committees, say concern over the warrantless surveillance mounted when it was disclosed earlier this year that Obama officials had accessed and unmasked communications of members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign, allegedly without clear justification.

The process, known as ‘reverse targeting,’ occurs when intelligence and law enforcement officials use a foreign person as a legal pretense for their intended target, an American citizen, the officials stated. The program, as it exists, failed to prevent terror attacks and in many cases made incorrect connections between a foreign target and an innocent American, they stated.

Von Susanne Vieth-Entus:

The schools have no choice but to have the lesson taught. Thus, of the 6300 teachers who teach German, only 2600 have studied the subject. In mathematics, there are only 1365 out of 5400. Even more blatant is the difference in the natural sciences: here come to 5300 teachers used only 900, who teach “professionally”.

The devastating finding is not due to the current crossover problem. Because the newcomers made in the school year 2015/16, from which the numbers come, only a fraction of the primary school staff. In addition, the extent of the shortage of subject teachers has hardly changed in the last five years – which also applies to the weak results of computation and writing in Berlin. The combination of both was the reason why the education of the Berlin elementary school teachers was reformed : German and mathematics have been compulsory studies since 2014/15.

Translation.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI):

Changes to the administrative rule that governs educator licensing, PI 34, are the result of significant input from a diverse set of stakeholders throughout the state. The changes also implement new statutory language related to licensure as a result of the most recent biennial budget (2017 Wisconsin Act 59). The proposed rule changes are meant to make the licensing process more understandable and increase flexibility, while maintaining high-quality staff in Wisconsin schools. Key aspects of the proposed rule are:

Related: relaxing Wisconsin’s weak teacher licendong requirements.

Roberto Ciccarelli:

Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He is known for his pioneering research on “digital labor,” refuting the apocalyptic common-sense notion that is proclaiming the end of work as such because of automation.

“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labor,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labor that is necessary to make the algorithms work.“

In Italy there has been a lot of discussion about the firing of two IKEA workers, Marica in Corsico and Claudio in Bari. They were fired because their lives could not fit into the algorithm that governs the workforce. Have we gone back to the 19th century?

The capitalism of digital platforms makes labor discipline more rigid, as it imposes seemingly “scientific” measurements and evaluations, which can resemble the old industrial manufacturing. The key difference is that the workers, in exchange for their submission to this discipline, are not getting the social safety and the political representation that they obtained before in exchange for their subordination. This new Taylorism has all the disadvantages and none of the old benefits. The workers are caught within a contradiction in terms: subordinate and precarious at the same time.

Vice:

VICE News spent nine months collecting data on both fatal and nonfatal police shootings from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States. For every person shot and killed by cops in these departments from 2010 through 2016, we found, police shot at two more people who survived. We also found that 20 percent of the people cops fired on were unarmed.

Pat Schneider:

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, joined Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana to introduce legislation Wednesday aiming to help students understand the financial implications of their student loan debt.

The Empowering Student Borrowers Act would require colleges to send a letter to students every year detailing each student’s total loan debt, projected monthly repayment amounts, and the estimated interest rate for each loan. The bill would also require the Department of Education to develop best practices for colleges and universities to teach financial literacy skills and provide information on student borrowing

Kim Wilsher:

The French government is to ban students from using mobile phones in the country’s primary, junior and middle schools.

Children will be allowed to bring their phones to school, but not allowed to get them out at any time until they leave, even during breaks.

A proposed ban was included in Emmanuel Macron’s successful presidential election campaign this year.

Jean-Michel Blanquer, the French education minister, said the measure would come into effect from the start of the next school year in September 2018. It will apply to all pupils from the time they start school at age of six – up to about 15 when they start secondary school.

Josh Mitchell:

The number of Americans severely behind on payments on federal student loans reached roughly 4.6 million in the third quarter, a doubling from four years ago, despite a historically long stretch of U.S. job creation and steady economic growth.

In the third quarter alone, the count of such defaulted borrowers—defined by the government as those who haven’t made a payment in at least a year—grew by nearly 274,000, according to Education Department data released Tuesday.

The total number of defaulted borrowers represents about 22% of the Americans who were required to be paying down their federal student loans as of Sept. 30. That figure has increased from 17% four years earlier.

The money they owe is becoming a bigger share of total outstanding student debt in repayment. Defaulted student loans totaled $84 billion at the end of the quarter, or 13% of the roughly $631 billion that borrowers were required to be paying down.

Max Zahn:

On an assignment in August, freelance journalist Jeff Bachner had no trouble driving onto Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He parked his car and started taking photos.

Soon after, a college security officer said he was trespassing and put him in handcuffs. The officer, Corporal Maurizio Gambino, took Bachner to a campus security office, Bachner said in a statement to the New York Press Photographers Association, or NYPPA.

ICYMI: “She identified herself as a reporter. He then walked behind her and punched her in the side of the head”

The officer then re-cuffed him to a railing over his head, and ignored his pleas to loosen the handcuffs, Bachner said in the statement, the contents of which were confirmed by NYPPA Vice President Todd Maisel. When Bachner began to gasp for breath and complain of numb fingers, officers called a medic. They eventually released Bachner without charge.

Four days after the detention of Bachner, on August 16, campus security at Bronx Community College handcuffed freelance journalist J.B. Nicholas and issued him a summons for trespassing as he interviewed students about Confederate statues on campus. The charges were later dismissed.

Molly Beck:

Kitchens said the formula could be improved for school districts with declining enrollment, increasing enrollment and small, rural school districts with spending levels capped at below $10,000 per student. Olsen also funding for open enrollment and charter and private voucher schools also could be examined.

“Over the years we’ve continually changed little pieces of the formula and often times it’s just to affect a problem in one or two school districts, but too many times when you fix one problem in one place it causes a problem somewhere else,” he said, adding he wants to start with a blank slate and go “in any direction that the evidence leads us.”

But he also noted Wisconsin’s school funding formula is well-regarded “so it may well be in the end we decide to stick with the basic framework and build around that.”

In Wisconsin, school districts are funded through local property taxes, state aid and federal funding. Schools receive the largest amount of their state funding through a general fund that distributes money through a formula that gives more to districts with more students with challenges, including those who live in poverty. Districts also receive money from several funding streams including through a certain amount per pupil, currently set at $450 per student.

Rather interesting to see the $10,000 per student mentioned in the article.

Madison spends far more, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Patti Zarling:

According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, leaders at Ohio’s Oberlin College are struggling to close a multi-million dollar budget deficit following a dip in enrollment this year.

The liberal college’s newspaper, The Oberlin Review, published a letter written by two faculty members criticizing a salary freeze. The letter, published Friday, said faculty found it depressing that neither the college board nor administrators could come up with a better way to address the revenue shortfall other than by eliminated raises.

The salary freeze is the latest in a string of moves by Oberlin to close the structural budget gap. The school relies too much on gifts, and not enough on tuition, room and board, according to a letter posted by Chris Canavan, the chair of the Oberlin Board of Trustees.

In the K-12 world, Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Ally Marotti:

Starting this spring, more Chicago Public Schools students will have a new language to learn: the one spoken by iPhone apps and Apple’s iOS operating system.

The tech giant is teaming up with the city to get its coding curriculum into more CPS classrooms and into the City Colleges of Chicago, and area companies and nonprofits are joining in by offering internships and mentoring opportunities.

The free curriculum is part of Apple’s year-old Everyone Can Code program and teaches the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s programming language, Swift.

“We hope we eventually get coding required in all public schools in America, not only for a year but for every year,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. “It’s a progression, just like English is, just like mathematics and other kinds of courses that are viewed as foundational.”

Apple developed its own coding language because it wanted something as easy to learn as its products are to use, Cook said. “We wanted it to be something that you could begin learning on but you could then, through the course of time, write the most powerful applications imaginable.”

While the students will learn just one programming language, those in the coding world say that learning one is the starting point for learning more. Swift has fueled the creation of apps such as Airbnb, Yelp and Venmo.

Brian Stanley:

Here you go @annswin and @castillodavidca some better thinking and data on this topic of enrollment which is and has always been the issue.

In 1970 OUSD has 63,000 students and today it serves about 36,000. In 1970 it had about 90 schools and today it has about 86.

Madison has long spent more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, despite long standing, disastrous reading results.

Evelyn Lamb:

Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (12-sided polygons with all angles and sides the same) and 12 decagons (10-sided), with 28 little gaps in the shape of equilateral triangles. There’s just one problem. This figure should be impossible. That set of polygons won’t meet at the vertices. The shape can’t close up.

Kaplan’s model works only because of the wiggle room you get when you assemble it with paper. The sides can warp a little bit, almost imperceptibly. “The fudge factor that arises just from working in the real world with paper means that things that ought to be impossible actually aren’t,” says Kaplan, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Richard Vedder and Justin Strehle:

Republicans inserted many provisions in their House and Senate tax reform bills that have inflamed the higher education establishment, including a proposed excise tax on endowments exceeding $250,000 per student at private schools. Although only about 70 schools are affected that collectively enroll under 10 percent of the students attending four-year American universities, from some rhetoric of university leaders you would think that the very foundation of American higher education has been dramatically impaired.

Now Universities Have Detractors

There are two good reasons why the endowment tax makes sense to some politicians. First, public attitudes toward universities have distinctly soured in recent years. What the public perceives as outrageous student behavior, feckless university leadership, and excessive tuition fees has combined with a growing hostility by Republican lawmakers angered over the large political donations and public criticism that academics have made attempting to oust them from office. Lawmakers are growing tired of feeding the mouths that bite them. Revenues raised by taxing colleges can modestly help fund other tax reductions that lawmakers want to make, which are probably economically beneficial to the well over 90 percent of the population living outside the Ivory Towers of Academia.

Leslie Hook:

When Susan Fowler joined Uber in late 2015, the company looked like an unstoppable juggernaut. It was expanding rapidly around the world and becoming the most valuable start-up of all time. For software engineers like Ms Fowler, there was exciting work to be done on the app that was changing transportation. Employees at San Francisco’s hottest company proudly wore their Uber sweatshirts around town.

But two years later, those sweatshirts are no longer visible and Uber is in crisis. Beset by one setback after another, the company has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the hard-driving tech world. In large part, that shift is due to Ms Fowler.

In February she published a blog about her time at Uber that lifted the lid on a company that was out of control. Ms Fowler described the sexual harassment she experienced, including her boss propositioning her for sex on the first day she joined his team. The human resources department turned a blind eye to her complaints, saying he was a “high performer”. When she wrote about this and other incidents, her post quickly went viral. Ms Fowler had pulled on a thread that would lead to a great unravelling.

In the process, the 26-year-old from rural Arizona who had to teach herself at the local library to get into university, found herself at the centre of three of the most important trends of the year. Her description of the reality of working at Uber generated a crisis that has raised questions about the very viability of the company. They also formed an early part of the growing backlash against the power and influence of the Big Tech companies.

Maya Wang $$:

Apple CEO Tim Cook looks forward to a “common future in cyberspace” with China, he told the Chinese government’s World Internet Conference earlier this month. This was an embarrassing gesture toward a state that aggressively censors the internet and envisions a dystopian future online.

The experience of lawyer Li Xiaolin may give a taste of what that future looks like. During a 2016 work trip inside China, he tried to use his national identity card to purchase a plane ticket. To his surprise, the online system rejected it,…

Peter Cook:

Now, guess who put up the money for this research?

It just so happens that there might be a reason why this research is so misleading: it was largely funded by the teachers unions.

As I’ve documented previously, AFT and NEA have been heavily promoting community schools as an alternative to charter schools over the past few years, in part, because they dovetail with their “poverty trumps education” argument (i.e., you can’t hold schools and teachers accountable for the achievement of low-income children) and would require a massive increase in education funding to scale out.

Kate Smith:

That’s the motto of Wake Forest University, where President Nathan Hatch came in first in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s new ranking of compensation for heads of U.S. colleges. In 2015, the latest year for which data are available, he earned $4 million.

Hatch is one of 58 college presidents with total compensation of more than $1 million, up from 39 in 2014 and 32 in 2013, according to the Chronicle’s calculations. Average total compensation for school heads serving the full year was $569,932, up 9 percent from 2014’s average. The data were drawn from federal tax filings for 500 private, nonprofit schools.

“It certainly raises eyebrows,” said Dan Bauman, a data reporter for the Chronicle. “It’s unusually high.”