Pamela Cotant:

In addition to signs about the Welcoming Schools efforts at Lowell, some books including “The Great Big Book of Families” and “Jacob’s New Dress” were set out on a table at the picnic. Mindy Trudell, social worker at Lowell and a Welcoming Schools facilitator, also offered rainbow-colored sprinkles to those getting a dish of ice cream at a station next to the Welcoming Schools display.

Sunny McDaniel, who was attending the picnic with her husband, Sam, and their first-grade daughter, Lulu, appreciated the Welcoming Schools display — although she would have liked even more literature examples.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

Seamus O’Mahony:

Phrenology was the bizarre belief that one could determine personality and intellectual ability by examination of the contours of the skull. The idea had a remarkable hold on the public imagination in the nineteenth century, but eventually died out, mainly because it had no plausible biological basis and because it was used to give a bogus scientific credibility to racism. The contemporary equivalent of phrenology is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). “Functional” MRI differs from standard MRI scanning by mapping the differential rate of oxygen consumption in different parts of the brain: this is thought to measure metabolic, and hence, neuronal activity. Functional MRI scans display impressive colour changes which reflect these differences in oxygen consumption. If an area of the brain “lights up” during a specific activity, it is assumed that this activity “takes place” in that location. Academic psychologists, who had hitherto been low in the pecking order of neuroscience, thought fMRI might give them scientific credibility, and even recognition by the general public.

The sociologist Scott Vrecko listed fMRI-based neurobiological accounts of altruism, borderline personality disorder, criminal behaviour, decision-making, fear, gut feelings, hope, impulsivity, judgement, love, motivation, neuroticism, problem gambling, racial bias, suicide, trust, violence, wisdom and zeal. “Neurobollocks”− as this new phrenology came to be labelled by its detractors − has infiltrated economics, criminology, theology, literary criticism, education, sociology and politics: the American writer Matthew Crawford described fMRI as “a fast-acting solvent of the critical faculties”. Many cautious, reticent neuroscientists, however, are painfully aware of its limitations. The neuroscientist David Poeppel observed that “we still don’t understand how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line”.

biztimes:

According to a story posted on BizTimes.com, GPS Education Partners has partnered with local manufacturers to provide high school juniors and seniors with work-based education programs, in which students take courses on-site at the businesses, called “education centers,” and apply those lessons on the manufacturing floor. The non-profit is based in Brookfield, Wis., and launched in 2000.

The organization has grown from just 5 students at Waukesha, Wis.-based Generac Power Systems Inc. in its initial year to now having served 500 students, in partnership with 100 businesses.

Now, as worker shortages persist and a growing number of schools look to bolster their career and technical education offerings, GPS is expanding its reach with a new service model.

The organization is beginning to provide consulting services to schools as they launch their own apprenticeship education programs — a hybrid of the traditional GPS education center model.

Alexandra Stevenson:

A Chinese billionaire living in virtual exile in New York, Guo Wengui has riled China’s leaders with his sometimes outlandish tales of deep corruption among family members of top Communist Party officials.

On Saturday, his tales proved too much for one of his favorite platforms for broadcasting those accusations: Facebook.

The social media network said it had blocked a profile under Mr. Guo’s name and taken down another page associated with him. Facebook said the content on both pages had included someone else’s personal identifiable information, which violates its terms of service.

Facebook investigated the accounts after receiving a complaint, according to a spokeswoman.

“We want people to feel free to share and connect on Facebook, as well as to feel safe, so we don’t allow people to publish the personal information of others without their consent,” the spokeswoman, Charlene Chian, said. She declined to say who had complained.

Mr. Guo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The profile under Mr. Guo’s name was not verified.

The move comes at a sensitive time for both the Chinese government and Facebook.

Alex Usher:

The first is that top Chinese universities are really quite wealthy, and comparable in financial muscle to some top US institutions. The largest institution, Tsinghua University, had annual expenditures of RMB 13.7 billion in 2016, which translates to about US$3.57B at purchasing power parity, making it larger in raw terms than both MIT ($3.34 billion in 2014) and Yale ($3.36 billion). The next largest institution, Peking University, had 2016 expenditures of roughly $2.45 billion, which puts it roughly in the same category as CalTech and Washington University in St. Louis. Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the two next biggest, have expenditures of $2.3 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively. Fudan, in fifth place, has expenditures equal to US$1.5 billion, which is roughly equivalent to Princeton.

Robby Soave:

Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss her school choice agenda. Students in the audience interrupted her several times; some even held up a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist.”

The irony, of course, is twofold. One, the subject of DeVos’s Harvard address—school choice—is a policy that offers low-income students of color a respite from the hopelessness of the failing traditional public school systems in many cities. Two, DeVos’s recent major policy accomplishment was rescinding the Obama administration’s infamous Title IX “dear colleague” letter, a move that will restore a modicum of fairness to campus sexual harassment trials—trials that disproportionately disadvantage male students of color.

This makes DeVos a “white supremacist”? Please.

Regardless of what liberal activist groups like the NAACP think of them, school choice reforms have a proven track record of providing opportunities for poor and minority children that are often—not always, mind you, but often—better than the alternative. Charter schools are despised by the left because they threaten one of the Democratic Party’s most influential bases of power: teachers unions.

Sam Biddle:

We’ve arrived at the sad, dumb point in history at which the only thing less surprising than acts of mass violence are the ways in which our planet’s mega information distributors muck everything up with ensuing frauds, hoaxes, and confusion. The problem is thoroughly identified: Facebook, Google, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter have the quality control of a yard sale and the scale of a 100,000 Walmarts. But despite all our railing and shaming, these companies have a major disincentive to reform: money.
 
 In the wake of yet another American massacre, this time in Las Vegas, media scrutiny is aimed once more at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, for the same old reasons. The sites, time after time, and this time once more, served up algorithmic links to websites peddling deliberate lies and bottom-feeder misinformation. These companies provided an untold mass of online users with falsehoods posing as news resources, as is completely normal now and only noteworthy because it was pegged to a heinous national tragedy. The discussion will now swing from “This is bad” to “What can be done?”, and we can expect all the typically empty pro forma reassurance from Silicon Valley public relations offices. Don’t expect much more.

Mark Sommerhauser:

The UW Board of Regents, mirroring what Republican state lawmakers describe as a push to safeguard free speech on college campuses, is poised to vote on whether students should be expelled if they repeatedly disrupt “the expressive rights of others.”

The proposal is part of a resolution the board will consider at its Friday meeting at UW-Stout in Menomonie, according to the agenda.

It would add to the state’s administrative code a proposal that Republican state Rep. Jesse Kremer of Kewaskum wants to write into state law. Kremer’s bill passed the state Assembly in June but has not yet come to a Senate vote.

The resolution calls for University of Wisconsin System institutions to suspend students who twice disrupt free expression. If students are found to have done so three times, they would be expelled.

The resolution also says “it is not the proper role of UW System institutions to take any action as an institution to require students or staff to express a particular view on a public policy issue.”

The policy reaffirms the System’s commitment to free speech but states students and other members of the “university community” may not obstruct or interfere with the freedom of others to “express views they reject or even loathe.”

The First Amendment.

Amber Walker:

Shorewood Hills Principal Anu Ebbe said a commitment to high expectations in the classroom and relationship building with students contribute to the school’s academic outcomes.

“When we look at our school-wide data around reading and mathematics we’ve shown consistent growth every year for every category of student. We have closed the gap for our English language learners and our African-American students in reading and math,” Ebbe said. “We are constantly looking at our data and saying ‘What is the next level of professional development and learning that needs to happen so we can ensure all our kids are growing?’ The staff is incredibly open to taking risks and trying new things. It is an amazing place.”

Ebbe said students, staff and families watched United States Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ announcement, delivered via YouTube, at the school on Thursday.

Ebbe said the Shorewood community tries to create a school culture that acknowledges and respects students for who they are and takes pride in its diverse student body.

Julian Baggini:

From time to time, not very often, it looks as though the world has given philosophy a job to do. Now is such a moment. At last, a big abstract noun – truth – is at the heart of a cultural crisis and philosophers can be called in to sort it out.

Send them back. Philosophers’ problems with truth are not the same as the world’s. The post-truth debate cannot be readily fixed by a better theory. Most of the time, people are clear enough what makes something true. To use Alfred Tarski’s famous example from the 1930s, “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. If that sounds obvious, that’s the point. A statement is true if and only if it corresponds to a state of affairs or event that obtains in the world.

David Wahlberg:

The state had 66,496 births last year, a rate of 61.3 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to the state Department of Health Services. That’s down from 72,757 births and a rate of 64.5 in 2007.

Nationally, the rate dipped to 62.0 last year, a record low, with 3.9 million births.

There were 4.1 million fewer babies born from 2008 to 2016 than expected based on previous birth rates, according to Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

At an average of 1.85 births per woman, Wisconsin and the United States are below the “replacement level” of 2.1 births per woman, the level at which a generation can replace itself, Egan-Robertson said.

That could cause problems in the workforce and the economy in future years, along with challenges to programs such as Social Security, he said. However, immigration offsets slow native population growth in the U.S. more than in places like Japan and parts of Europe, so the concerns aren’t as great here.

John Banville:

For those of us elders who went to school under the old dispensation, nothing was more surely calculated to make us detest the essay form than that stout textbook of English prose forced on us as part of the general memory test that in those days passed for education.

The piece from that ponderous compendium everyone remembers is Charles Lamb’s A Dissertation upon Roast Pig – children are always interested in food – but how many years had to pass before it dawned on us that the likes of William Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson were surpassingly fine writers?

For Dillon, essays and essayists achieve ‘a combination of exactitude and evasion that seems to me to define what writing ought to be’

Stevenson and Hazlitt were masters of the essay form, but it is a question, of course, as to whether the essay is a form at all. Brian Dillon, in this wonderful, subtle and deceptively fragmentary little book, quotes Michael Hamburger from the dissident side: the essay “has no form: it is a game that creates its own rules”. Dillon himself is more affirmative, though ambiguously so; for him, essays and essayists achieve “a combination of exactitude and evasion that seems to me to define what writing ought to be”.

Sarabeth Berman:

The village had such a large, congested school because, in surrounding villages, the schools had been closed. For two decades, the number of children in the countryside had been dropping because of the one-child policy and urban migration, so the government had shuttered empty schools and created overstuffed campuses like the one at Shao Jie. Kids travelled a long way, and lived at home only on the weekends.

Throughout China, the scene on a Friday afternoon is much the same: country roads are speckled with small children walking home, usually met by aunts or grandparents since their parents have left the countryside in search of work. For most of the children in the courtyard that evening, Shao Jie would be the only school they had ever attended and would ever know. Some doubtless succumbed to financial pressures and went to work before ninth grade. Those who remained face another obstacle: the zhongkao, a high-stakes test that determines if you are part of the lucky group that continues on to what the U.S. would call high school (the Chinese word for it translates as “upper-middle school”). Growing up in rural China, a child has just a 5% chance of going to college.

There is, of course, another side of China’s education system. The most celebrated, privileged and cutting-edge schools are in Beijing, Shanghai and other booming coastal cities. A few months after my visit to Shao Jie, Shanghai schools stunned the world in 2010 when they topped the charts on a global exam known as PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment. PISA rankings compare the performance of 15-year-olds in 65 countries in math, reading and science. In the United States, the news of Shanghai’s success was reported with a tone of anxiety – the sense that a rising generation of Chinese youth would be better equipped than their American counterparts to navigate the shoals of the global economy. In a speech about education, President Obama called the rising performance of students in other countries “our generation’s Sputnik moment.” To Americans, Shanghai suddenly sounded forbiddingly impressive: every news story seemed accompanied by a photo of diligent students, seated in neat rows, wearing crisp uniforms. Occasionally, when I returned to the US, and told people that I worked on improving education in China, they asked why I was helping America’s rival “beat us.”

Locally, Madison has Long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

Jean Marié Laskas:

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.

The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. “Iron Mike,” legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to…pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

College Fix

In contrast to two thirds of Senate Democrats, who denounced Education Secretary Betsy DeVos* for rescinding previous Title IX guidance that gave short shrift to due process, two thirds of Democratic voters believe students accused of “crimes” should receive “the same civil liberties protections” in campus proceedings as they do in courts.

The YouGov survey commissioned by the Bucknell University Institute for Public Policy was conducted in mid-summer, before Education Secretary Betsy DeVos* announced three weeks ago the guidance would be rescinded and released interim guidance last week.

Alan Borsuk:

Where I really worry is the remaining portion of kids, those whose scores are described as “below basic.” In the language of the state Department of Public Instruction, that means a student “demonstrates minimal understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge and skills for their grade level that are associated with college content-readiness.” In other words, they’re really not good at these things and, frankly, probably have futures to match.

Depending on how you slice the data, the “below basic” kids come to 20% to 40% of students statewide. That’s a lot of kids.

The even bigger problem is that they are far disproportionately found in schools serving low-income students and minority students. There are, for example, several dozen schools of all kinds in Milwaukee where the “proficient” and “advanced” totals are in single digits, year after year, and where the “below basic” totals are over 60% or worse.

A couple of examples: At Auer Avenue school in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, 82.5% of students were below basic in reading and 85.3% in math. The combined proficient and advanced figure was 1.4% for each subject. A private school example: The totals for Hickman Academy, on Milwaukee’s north side, were 85% below basic in both reading and math. No students were proficient in math, and 2% were so in reading.

The Economist:

FINANCIERS with PhDs like to remind each other to “read your Kindleberger”. The rare academic who could speak fluently to bureaucrats and normal people, Charles Kindleberger designed the Marshall Plan and wrote vast economic histories worthy of Tolstoy. “Read your Kindleberger” is just a coded way of saying “don’t forget this has all happened before”. So to anyone invested in, mining or building applications for distributed ledger money such as bitcoin or ethereum: read your Kindleberger.
 
 Start with A Financial History of Western Europe, in which Kindleberger documents how many times merchants in different centuries figured out clever ways of doing the exact same thing. They made transactions easier, and in the process created new deposits and bills that increased the supply of money. In most cases, the Bürgermeister or the king left these innovations in place, but decided to control the supply of money and credit themselves. It is good for the king to be in charge of his own creditors. But also, it has always been tempting for private finance to create too much money. There is no evidence that money born on a distributed ledger will be clean of this sin.

 

:

Wisconsin is now 22nd highest in the country when measuring taxes against income. Because high-tax states such as New York can skew the national average upward, it’s possible for a state to fall below the national average in taxes but still rank higher than 25th.

State and local taxes in 2014 added up to $4,661 per person in Wisconsin, $214 below the national average of $4,875. On this per-capita measure, Wisconsin ranks 20th in the country, according to Jon Peacock, the research director of Kids Forward, which advocates for needy children and families.

Peacock noted that the state’s falling tax ranking hasn’t kept Wisconsin from lagging in job creation compared to other states in recent years.

“In light of the new tax ranking, I hope legislators will be less obsessed with additional tax cuts will focus instead on making the investments in education, health care and infrastructure that are critical for our state’s future economic prosperity,” Peacock said.

There’s no sign that conservative lawmakers like Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) are going to drop talk of tax cuts, however. In a statement, Stroebel said he still wanted to lower taxes on businesses and flatten the state income taxes to have the rich and the poor pay taxes at more similar rates.

Locally, the K-12 spending and tax burden continue to grow, significantly.

Jan-Werner Müller:

One might think that the obvious answer to voter ignorance is education, and the answer to the more specific quandary of voter unreasonableness is perhaps some sort of civic reeducation. But the political philosopher Jason Brennan is having none of this argument. In his book Against Democracy, Brennan points to evidence that the generally rising education levels in the United States have not made citizens more knowledgeable about politics. Like many social scientists, he thinks there’s a simple explanation for why Americans remain so clueless: Ignorance is a rational choice. Since one’s individual vote has an infinitesimally small chance of actually deciding the outcome of an election, it simply isn’t worth the time and effort to bone up on policy basics—or even read the Constitution. As Brennan argues in another of his writings on the subject, democracy’s “essential flaw” is that it spreads power out widely, thereby removing any incentive for individual voters to use their own, more diffuse power wisely.

Of course, some voters seem happy to participate in the process nevertheless; they still display a passionate interest in political, and even constitutional, matters. But most of them, according to Brennan, treat politics like a spectator sport or, even worse, a brutal contact sport. The completely ignorant are what he calls “hobbits”; by contrast, those who root for one team and hate the other are “hooligans.” For hooligans, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: They understand enough to be deeply convinced that their team is on the side of the angels and that the other side are devils (witness how 40 percent of Trump supporters in Florida thought that Hillary Clinton had literally emerged from hell). But they are incapable of rationally weighing policy options or even comprehending their own basic interests. For the hooligans, it’s all about identity.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

James Somers:

I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there, one morning this summer, to meet him. My guide, who said it took her a year to learn how to get around the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, led us to an elevator off Astor Hall, up past the McGraw Rotunda, through a little door at the back of the Rose Main Reading Room. Our destination was Room 328.

A sign above the door called it the “Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts.” Inside, there were a handful of quiet researchers stooped at large wooden desks, and in the corner, presiding over a cart of acid-free Hollinger document boxes, was the archivist Thomas Lannon.

Lannon is younger than you’d expect, just thirty-nine years old. Clean shaven, with slacks, well-kept shoes, and a blue knit tie over a light button-down shirt, he looks less like an assistant director for manuscripts/the acting Charles J. Liebman curator of manuscripts than a high-level congressional aide. He talks with a kind of earnest intensity, and fast, with constant revisions, so that he sounds almost like a scientist who can’t quite put his discovery into words.

Having grown up in Exeter, New Hampshire, Lannon had always wanted to get to New York, the fount of his heroes (Sonic Youth, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg). But he makes a point of the undistinguished academic career that led him to the library a decade ago. He went to Bard (“a middling to decent liberal arts school”), where he first met his now-wife, also an archivist, in an early Greek philosophy class. Later, he studied library and information science at Pratt, before getting a master’s in liberal studies at The Graduate Center at CUNY.

Before he started pulling out boxes, I was asked to trade my pen for a pencil, for fear that I might get ink on the ledger from the late 1700s that came out of the first one. Lannon held it with bare hands (because gloves, I learned later, would dull his sense of how fragile a page is). The ledger belonged to Samuel Bayard, a wealthy New York landowner whose ancestors had married into the Stuyvesants, and whose estate, when he died, may have fueled the feud between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. It seemed full of accounting minutiae, Lannon said, but if you knew what you were looking for it told a story.

That was the way it was with archives. He flipped to page 19, which assessed the value of a plot of land that Bayard owned, a so-called “negro burial ground.” “Everyone talks about how in archives you find things,” Lannon said. “But this shows the moment when something disappeared.” This entry, he explained, was the last surviving reference to the burial ground, which was on land at New York City’s 1750s border near Duane and Reade streets. Shut down in the 1790s, the burial ground disappeared from popular memory, remaining known to history only through documents like this.

Lannon had a story like this for every box he showed me. In one, among administrative debris, there was an investigation by the New York Academy of Medicine into marijuana, signed in ink by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. It was the first American study to declare that the drug wasn’t addictive or dangerous. In another, there were records from the sign-making company that built what it called “spectaculars” around the city, like a Camel Cigarettes billboard in Times Square that actually blew smoke, and the New Year’s Eve ball.

In still another box, a diary from the 1840s of a sixteen-year-old girl. The July 7 entry tells of encountering Mr. Levi, a Jewish man, on her walk around the neighborhood. “This is an account of the peopling of New York, where you have a well-to-do daughter going for a walk, exploring the city, meeting someone from another background, and sort of marveling over the way they live,” Lannon said. “Mr. Levi who lived in that house wrote no books, left no records, we have no idea who he is except here he is in this diary.”

The New York Public Library’s Schwarzman building is most famous for the ornate and cavernous Rose Reading Room, now reopened after two years of restoration. The stacks under the library can hold 4 million books (the actual number in storage is lower, though no one is quite sure), which are delivered to the reading room by 950 feet of miniature rail running at 75 feet per minute.

But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view, is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn across the table. “You can get a book anywhere,” he said. “An archive exists in one location.” The room we’re standing in is the only place that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses, or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach.

David Wahlberg:

UW-Madison students with concussions reported 14 percent greater academic side effects than those with other kinds of injuries, a study found.

Campus researchers are now surveying Madison-area high school athletes in the weeks after they get concussions to more closely assess the educational toll.

“This is a very important time of their life, where they’re growing independent, making career decisions and planning a future,” said Traci Snedden, a UW-Madison assistant professor of nursing leading the research. “If their academic experience is affected because of their cognitive deficits, there potentially could be long-term ramifications.”

Jonathan Butcher:

The storm of censorship on college campuses continues to swirl around the country.

In just the past two weeks, students in Texas sought to shout down an invited speaker, and Oregon students silenced their own college president.

But on college campuses and in state legislatures, defenders of free speech are pushing back. With some adjustment, a new proposal in Ohio looks promising.

Last week, Ohio lawmakers assigned a bill to committee to help preserve free speech on Ohio’s public college campuses. Sponsored by state Reps. Wesley Goodman, R-Cardington, and Andrew Brenner, R-Powell, the proposal prohibits state-funded schools from disinviting campus lecturers based on the content of their expression.

The proposal maintains that public colleges and universities must commit themselves to being bastions of free speech:

Sally Adee:

We’re getting stupider – and our ageing population may be to blame. Since around 1975, average IQ scores seem to have been falling. Some have attributed this to the evolutionary effect of smarter women tending to have fewer children. But new evidence suggests population-wide intelligence could in fact be sinking because people now live longer, and certain types of intelligence falter with advanced age.

For about a century, average IQ scores in wealthy nations rose in a steady and predictable way – by about three points a decade. This is thought to be thanks to improvements in social conditions like public health, nutrition and education. Since this trend – called the Flynn effect – was first noticed in the 1940s, it has been seen in many countries, from the Netherlands to Japan.

But by 2004, researchers had begun to notice what appears to be a reversal in this trend, with average IQ scores going into decline. “The drop is around 7 to 10 IQ points per century,” says Michael Woodley of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

Jonathan Wolff:

If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor.

These figures may look too bad to be true, but who are we to question the Royal Society’s grasp of statistics? What, then, should we make of the calculation that so few people gaining PhDs in the sciences go on to academic careers?

Perhaps it is good news. Many will applaud the fact that there appears to be so much demand in this country for scientific researchers in the private, charity and government sectors.

The arts and humanities and the social sciences may be another matter. Other figures suggest that academic job prospects are a little better in these areas. Even so, the number of academic jobs each year in every subject is far fewer than the number of jobseekers.

Matthew Crain and Anthony Nadler:

Once momentum and capital accrued, it became increasingly difficult to alter course. Historians of technology call this “path dependence,” and it highlights that the evolution of technology is always about more than technology per se. With an accommodating policy framework, surveillance was cemented as the net’s primary business model. A supporting infrastructure advanced rapidly. When Google and Facebook went on to build advertising empires in the intervening years, they relied on more than just moxie and heaps of venture capital. They also banked on the political premise that data collection would be pervasive by default, that they would be free to build the tools of mass surveillance and targeted persuasion without being held to public account. While privacy dust-ups have been perennial, a digital marketing lobby has ballooned to mitigate threats. Google is now among the nation’s biggest lobbyists and Facebook is on track to join the ranks.
 
 The internet’s apparent tendency to promote winner-take-all markets, combined with neoliberalism’s high tolerance for market concentration, has enabled Facebook and Google to achieve extraordinary control over the digital marketing sector. These two behemoths, increasingly recognized as an online advertising duopoly, are among the world’s leading purveyors of marketing surveillance and key platforms for political persuasion. At Facebook in particular, this incredible bottlenecking of surveillance capacity has drawn a surge of criticism regarding the company’s role in enabling political manipulation and what, if any, civic responsibilities are borne by private enterprise of such magnitude.

Dave Huber:

For all the yammering we hear and see often in the news about “underrepresentation” of women in the areas of math and science, it seems if we’re really concerned about “getting the numbers right” we should try to get more men involved in realms such as education and health sciences.

After all, according to stats by the Council of Graduate Schools, women outnumber men in seven of eleven doctoral and master’s degree fields, as well as in total graduate school enrollment.

Men lead only in the areas of business, engineering, math/computer science, and physical/earth sciences.

Melissa Korn:

Women make up more than half of students on U.S. college campuses, but receive only about two of every 10 degrees in high-paying and in-demand fields such as computer science and engineering, according to federal data.

Administrators say there is no easy fix to the mismatch, which could be key in maintaining the nation’s long-term economic strength. But recent efforts to recruit women to the hard sciences and more technical fields,…

NFL arrest.com:

NFL Arrest provides an interactive visualized database of National Football League player Arrests & Charges. Learn about your rival team’s history with the law, break down arrests by Player, Position, Crime and Team. Keep in mind there are 1700 NFL Players and their arrest rates are lower than the USA arrest rate.

The Economist:

DAYS before the start of the new school year, Merve, an eighth-grade science teacher, is flipping through the pages of her old biology textbook. A picture of a giraffe appears, alongside a few lines about Charles Darwin. Teaching evolution in a predominantly Muslim country where six out of ten people refer to themselves as creationists, according to a 2010 study, has never been easy. As of today it is no longer possible. A new curriculum has scrapped all references to Darwin and evolution. Such subjects, the head of Turkey’s board of education said earlier this summer, were “beyond the comprehension” of young students. Merve says her hands are now tied. “There’s no way we can talk about evolution.”

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made clear on more than one occasion that he would like to bring up a “pious generation” of young Turks. He has made plenty of headway. The education ministry, says Feray Aytekin Aydogan, the head of a leftist teachers’ union, is working more closely than ever with Islamic NGOs and with the directorate of religious affairs. Attendance at so-called imam hatip schools, used to train Muslim preachers, has shot up from about 60,000 in 2002 to over 1.1m, or about a tenth of all public-school students. The government recently reduced the minimum population requirement for areas where such schools are allowed to open from 50,000 to 5,000. An earlier reform lowered the age at which children can enter them from 14 to ten.

Randy Dotinga::

Heredity contributes to about 83 percent of the risk of autism in children with the disorder, a new study suggests.

The estimate, from a re-analysis of a previous study, adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing debate over how much autism is inherited from parents. Essentially, the findings suggest that rare genetic traits combine in parents and explain about eight in 10 cases of the neurodevelopmental disorder in children.

Mike Antonucci:

he Clark County Education Association, representing 10,000 teachers who work for the Las Vegas schools, filed a lawsuit earlier this month against its parent affiliate, the Nevada State Education Association, alleging a breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract.
Soon after, NSEA and the National Education Association filed a countersuit also charging of breach of contract, as well as unjust enrichment and fraud.
The dueling lawsuits are just the latest in a long series of conflicts between NSEA and its locals, particularly Clark County, whose membership comprises almost half of NSEA’s total. I questioned the outlook for the Nevada union’s survival last March, and now a crisis appears imminent.
The Clark County lawsuit details the timeline of its deteriorating relationship with NSEA and lays out what the local union wants.

Journal-Sentinel:

DEC. 9, 1965
Gov. Warren Knowles signs an open housing law that prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing. The law, a watered-down version of a measure proposed by Rep. Lloyd Barbee and other lawmakers, exempts owner-occupied properties with four or fewer units – leaving out the overwhelming majority of the housing stock in Milwaukee’s central city.

Krzysztof Kornel Garstka and David Erdos:

In the wake of the Google Spain (2014) and debate on the “right to be forgotten”, now included in the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it has become widely recognised that data protection law within the EU/EEA grants individuals a qualified right to have personal data relating to them deindexed from search engines. At the same time, however, this outcome has at times been conceptualised as a uniquely EU/EEA phenomena, perhaps even resulting from one idiosyncratic CJEU judgment. This paper questions such a conceptualisation. Through an analysis of five major extra-EU/EEA international data protection instruments, it argues that most of these could on a reasonable interpretation be read as supporting a Google Spain-like result. Further, and in light of the serious threats faced by individuals as a result of the public processing of data relating to them, it argues that the time is ripe for a broader process of international discussion and consensus-building on the “right to be forgotten”. Such an exercise should not be limited to generalised search engines (which undoubtedly raise some uniquely challenging interpretative conundrums within data protection), but should also encompass other actors including social networking sites, video-sharing platforms and rating websites.

Adam Liptak:

The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a case that could deal a crushing blow to organized labor.

It was one of 11 cases the justices added to the court’s docket from the roughly 2,000 petitions seeking review that had piled up during the court’s summer break.

In the labor case, the court will consider whether public-sector unions may require workers who are not members to help pay for collective bargaining. If the court’s answer is no, unions would probably lose a substantial source of revenue.

The question was before the justices last year in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and they seemed poised to rule against the unions when the case was argued in January 2016. But the death of Justice Antonin Scalia the next month resulted in a 4-to-4 deadlock.

Alli Shultes::

A set of jargon-busting guides that teach children about their rights on social media sites has been published.
 
 Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield said Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and YouTube had “not done enough” to clarify their policies.
 
 She simplified the websites’ terms and conditions with privacy law firm Schillings.
 
 But Instagram said the simplified version of its terms contained “a number of inaccuracies”.
 
 The slimmed-down guides are a response to the Commissioner’s Growing Up Digital report, which found that most children do not understand the agreements they sign when they create social media accounts.
 
 All the sites require children to be over 13 to create an account.

Heather Long & Tracy Jan:

Nearly all American families saw substantial gains in wealth from 2013 to 2016, according to new data released Wednesday from the Federal Reserve, a sign the recovery is picking up.

African-Americans and Hispanic families and people without college degrees had the fastest rise in wealth, a sign that the economic gains are finally spreading to all Americans. Economists say it’s an encouraging sign that the economic gains are finally spreading to all Americans. It’s a marked shift from the period between 2010 and 2013, when wealth feel for all racial and ethnic groups except whites.

“We’re glad the recovery is spreading to a lot of households,” Fed economists said Wednesday. The Fed does its Survey of Consumer Finances every three years, surveying over 6,200 households about their pay, debt, home ownership, stock holdings and other financial assets. It’s considered one of the deepest dives into the total net worth of American families.

Madison has long spent more than most on it’s government/taxpayer funded K-12 schools.

Bruce Levine:

The Harvard Business School information session on how to be a good class participant instructs, “Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only 55 percent, say it as if you believe it 100 percent,” Susan Cain reported in her bestselling book Quiet. At HBS, Cain noticed, “If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t, he’s on the margins.”

Cain observed that the men at HBS “look like people who expect to be in charge…. I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination — whether or not he knew the way.”

Jason Daily:

After three field seasons, the Black Sea Maritime Archaeological Project is drawing to a close, but the things the team has discovered on the sea floor will keep researchers busy for a generation. Over the course of the expedition, researchers found 60 incredibly well-preserved ships from the medieval, Roman, Byzantine and ancient Greek eras, which are rewriting what historians know about ancient trade and shipbuilding reports Damien Sharkov at Newsweek.

The project, begun in 2015, wasn’t originally about finding ancient ships. According to a press release, the team set out to use remote operated vehicles laser scanners to map the floor of the Black Sea off Bulgaria to learn more about the changing environment of the region and fluctuations in sea level since the last glacier cycle. But they couldn’t help but locate ships too. Last year, they found 44 ancient vessels during their survey representing 2,500 years of history. “The wrecks are a complete bonus, but a fascinating discovery, found during the course of our extensive geophysical surveys,” Jon Adams, principle investigator and director of the University of Southampton’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said at the time.

Citizen Stewart:

Kim Sordyl is a school district’s worst nightmare. A mother of two public school students, a fierce activist, and a former litigator with sharp investigative skills, Sordyl has become a one-woman-wrecking-crew cutting through attempts to hide critical information from the public.

Say her name in Portland and any employee of the Portland Public Schools should know who she is. Her relentless social media campaigns targeted at the PPS have successfully revealed borderline corruption, problems with district staff, eyebrow-raising business deals, and unexplained financial waste.

Patrick Kiger::

A patient fills in a questionnaire and sleep diary before undergoing a polysomnography at a sleep center in Switzerland. What are some biasess scientists need to be aware of when conducting studies? AMELIE-BENOIST /BSIP/Getty Images

Arrhythmia, an irregular rhythm of the heart, is common during and soon after a heart attack and can lead to early death. That’s why when anti-arrhythmia drugs became available in the early 1980s, they seemed like a major life-saving breakthrough [source: Freedman].

The problem, though, was that although small-scale trials showed that the drugs stopped arrhythmia, the drugs didn’t actually save lives. Instead, as larger-scale studies showed, patients who received such treatments were one-third less likely to survive. Researchers had focused on stopping arrhythmia as a measure of effectiveness rather than on the problem that they were trying to solve, which was preventing deaths [sources: Freedman, Hampton].

Steven Englehardt, Jeffrey Han and Arvind Narayanan:

We show that the simple act of viewing emails contains privacy pitfalls for the unwary. We assembled a corpus of commercial mailing-list emails, and find a network of hundreds of third parties that track email recipients via methods such as embedded pixels. About 30% of emails leak the recipient’s email address to one or more of these third parties when they are viewed. In the majority of cases, these leaks are intentional on the part of email senders, and further leaks occur if the recipi- ent clicks links in emails. Mail servers and clients may employ a variety of defenses, but we analyze 16 servers and clients and find that they are far from comprehen- sive. We propose, prototype, and evaluate a new defense, namely stripping tracking tags from emails based on en- hanced versions of existing web tracking protection lists.
 

NWEA.org (PDF):

The results in Table 5 demonstrate that MAP reading scores can consistently classify students’ proficiency (Level 3 or higher) status on Forward ELA test 81-83% of the time and MAP math scores can consistently classify students on Forward math test 86-88% of the time. Those numbers are high suggesting that both MAP reading and math tests are great predictors of students’ proficiency status on the Forward tests.”

Much more, here on the 2017 “Wisconsin Forward Assessments“.

Catherine McKiernan:

But changing that system, DeVos insisted, should be up to states and not the federal government and that Washington needs to “get out of the way.”

“States are different, families are dynamic and children are unique,” the U.S. education secretary added. “Each should be free to pursue different avenues that lead each child to his or (her) fullest future.”

DeVos spoke as part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Education Policy and Governance conference on “The Future of School Choice: Helping Students Succeed.”

Frank WU:

At last, as evidenced by more colleges and universities performing a tuition reset, higher education leaders are awakening to the threat of tuition discounting. The increasing rates by which many institutions have had to cut what they wish to charge students should be cause for public concern. On more than one campus, the overall discount rate has surpassed 50 percent on a sharp trajectory, compared to levels less than half that in recent memory.

The situation is alarming for two independent reasons. First, colleges and universities, even those proclaiming a commitment to diversity, are leaving behind disadvantaged students for their own rise in rankings. Second, they are imperiling their continued existence by reducing revenues to sums below sustainability. Even administrators and board members who are indifferent to accessibility should care about bankruptcy. Tuition discounting is like other bets against the future — heavily against the odds.

Tuition discounting has been around for some time. But it is being used for very different purposes than previously. Tuition discounting is the practice, on a significant scale, of advertising a list price for enrollment and offering deals that reduce that amount for select students. It is akin to other forms of differential pricing and dynamic pricing, responsive to supply and demand in the marketplace.

Related: Financial aid leveraging.

JDLM:

In my last 2048 post, I found that it takes at least 938.8 moves on average to win a game of 2048. The main simplification that enabled that calculation was to ignore the structure of the board — essentially to throw the tiles into a bag instead of placing them on a board. With the ‘bag’ simplification, we were able to model the game as a Markov chain with only 3486 distinct states.

In this post, we’ll make a first cut at counting the number of states without the bag simplification. That is, in this post a state captures the complete configuration of the board by specifying which tile, if any, is in each of the board’s cells. We would therefore expect there to be a lot more states of this kind, now that the positions of the tiles (and cells without tiles) are included, and we will see that this is indeed the case.

To do so, we will use some (simple) techniques from enumerative combinatorics to exclude some states that we can write down but which can’t actually occur in the game, such as the one above. The results will also apply to 2048-like games played on different boards (not just 4×4) and up to different tiles (not just the 2048 tile). We’ll see that such games on smaller boards and/or to smaller tiles have far fewer states than the full 4×4 game to 2048, and that the techniques used here are relatively much more effective at reducing the estimated number of states when the board size is small. As a bonus, we’ll also see that the 4×4 board is the smallest square board on which it is possible to reach the 2048 tile.

The (research quality) code behind this article is open source, in case you would like to see the implementation or code for the plots.

Judith Duportail

The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.

With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.

Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.

Shahid Nasiripour:

More student debtors are falling behind on their federal student loans, after three years of declines in late payments—and with no clear explanation, experts aren’t sure whether to take it as a sign of distress or a temporary blip.

The share of Americans at least 31 days late on loans from the U.S. Department of Education ticked up to 18.8 percent as of June 30, up from 18.6 percent the same time last year, new federal data show 1 . About 3.3 million Americans have gone more than a month without making a required payment on their Education Department loans—up about 320,000 borrowers. 2

The rise interrupts a period of 12 straight quarters of declines in delinquency rates, according to numbers dating to 2013, and comes despite the fact that the U.S. economy has improved, which normally would mean richer borrowers better able to afford their bills.

Lee Ann Stephens:

Three truths I wish I’d known as a first-year teacher.

I walked into my first official day in the classroom as an idealistic twenty something with some innate skills, a boatload of ambition, and a newly minted teaching degree from a program that did its best to school me on theory and practice. But what I couldn’t have known, and what my teacher training program didn’t completely prepare me for, was how much I’d have to learn on the job. When it came time for me to turn the teaching theories I’d learned into real, boots on the ground results, I was in for a schooling of a new kind. I call those early months in the classroom my “Fumbling Through” era.

Now nearly three decades later, my rookie learning curve is ancient history. I’ve taught a wide range of subject areas from first grade to high school, and I help other classroom teachers address the racial disparities in education in my current job as a racial equity coach. But even today, I still think about those first days of my career and can’t help but wonder: Can we do better to set new teachers up for success? What skills would have been good to have in my teaching toolbox as I was getting my sea legs?

OED::

The September 2017 quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 1,000 new headwords, senses, and subentries. The full list of new entries can be found here.

Not all words that are new to the dictionary are new in the sense of being recent additions to the English language itself. Many additions are ancient and obsolete, but they contribute to the OED’s mission of recording the millennium-long history of English. One evocative obsolete word in the new update is the verb afound meaning ‘to become numb or stiff with cold’, an Anglo-Norman loanword used by Chaucer. Another is through-smite (‘to pierce or run through, as with a spear or other pointed weapon’), which was used by John Gower and William Caxton, among others. By the 19th century, through-smite was only in self-consciously poetic or archaic use, and by the early 20th century it had fallen out of use altogether.

Stephanie Lee:

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, a $22 million federally funded program that pushes healthy-eating strategies in almost 30,000 schools, is partly based on studies that contained flawed — or even missing — data.

The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it’s sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).

Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.

Rachel Cohen:

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

Christine Porath and Christine Pearson :

We studied this phenomenon with the USC marketing professors Debbie MacInnis and Valerie Folkes. In one experiment, half the participants witnessed a supposed bank representative publicly reprimanding another for incorrectly presenting credit card information. Only 20% of those who’d seen the encounter said that they would use the bank’s services in the future, compared with 80% of those who hadn’t. And nearly two-thirds of those who’d seen the exchange said that they would feel anxious dealing with any employee of the bank.
 
 What’s more, when we tested various scenarios, we found that it didn’t matter whether the targeted employee was incompetent, whether the reprimand had been delivered behind closed doors (but overheard), or whether the employee had done something questionable or illegal, such as park in a handicapped spot. Regardless of the circumstances, people don’t like to see others treated badly.

Daniel Steingold:

A sizable portion of the American public seems to show little interest in the fabric of the country’s government and history, a new survey finds.

Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) surveyed over 1,000 American adults, finding a shocking lack of knowledge as it pertains to U.S. politics among the general populace.
United States Constitution
In a new survey of American adults, just a quarter were able to name all three branches of the federal government, while 37% couldn’t name a single right protected by First Amendment.

Fifty-three percent of respondents believed the falsehood that illegal immigrants aren’t granted any constitutional rights, while 37 percent couldn’t even name a single right endowed by the First Amendment.

Thankfully, 48 percent of those surveyed were able to identify freedom of speech as being a right enshrined by the First Amendment, although far fewer could identify other rights accorded.

These include freedom of religion (15 percent), freedom of the press (14 percent), right of peaceful assembly (10 percent), and right to petition the government (three percent).

“Protecting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution presupposes that we know what they are. The fact that many don’t is worrisome,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, in a press release. “These results emphasize the need for high-quality civics education in the schools and for press reporting that underscores the existence of constitutional protections.”

Elena Knopp, via a kind reader:

For the last 22 years, Newark’s Board of Education has served in an advisory capacity, with it’s power to make decisions severely diminished by a state-appointed superintendent.

But earlier this month, the state’s Board of Education voted unanimously to hand back control to Newark’s elected Board of Education, a decision that has served to usher in a new era of pride, determination and autonomy.

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Newark Public Schools will now work in close partnership with the state, with a full transition plan expected within the next few months.

Newark Public Schools Superintendent Christopher Cerf — likely the last state-appointed superintendent of Newark — took the helm of the district in 2015 after what many call a disastrous run with former school superintendent Cami Anderson, an appointee of Governor Chris Christie who ultimately resigned eight months before her contract expired.

Appointed in 2011, Anderson alienated many parents with the implementation of universal enrollment reorganization plan One Newark, which resulted in school closings, mass firings and months of contentious public board meetings.

Marta Jewson:

Einstein Charter Schools is poised to fight the Orleans Parish School Board after being cited for not busing elementary students.

Einstein started to bus some children four years ago after taking over a failing school. But at some point, it apparently stopped. The mother of two children, 5 and 10 years old, said at a public meeting in August that Einstein had offered her public-transit tokens to get them to and from school, WWNO reported.

In a hastily called meeting Monday afternoon, Einstein’s board authorized CEO Shawn Toranto to hire a lawyer “to institute legal action arising from Orleans Parish School Board’s issuance of a notice of non-compliance.”

Einstein received a warning Sept. 19 from Dina Hasiotis, the school district’s executive director of school performance.

Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman:

The Foreign Emoluments Clause provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” In a series of coordinated lawsuits brought under the Foreign Emoluments Clause, plaintiffs contend that because “Defendant Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States of America,” he “thus holds an ‘Office of Profit or Trust’ under the United States.” Their argument certainly has an intuitive appeal: How could the presidency not qualify as an “Office of Profit or Trust under the United States” for purposes of this important anti-corruption provision? But an intuition is not an argument, and it is not evidence. Plaintiffs cannot point to a single judicial decision holding that this language in the Foreign Emoluments Clause, or the similar and more expansive phrase, “Office … under the United States” used in other constitutional provisions, applies to the president. Rather, the text and history of the Constitution, and post-ratification practice during the early republic, strongly support the counterintuitive view: The president does not hold an “Office … under the United States.”

Frontier Myanmar:

It is only by listening to each other that we will be able to build understanding and ultimately confront the demons that have plagued Rakhine State for generations.

THIS WEEK, Frontier has covered the Rakhine State crisis from over the border in Bangladesh.

In less than a month, more than 430,000 people, mostly Muslims, have sought refuge there. As The Economist reported this week, it is the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide based on the speed with which it has unfolded.

The scale of the humanitarian calamity in Bangladesh is overwhelming. Many people have literally arrived with nothing; some are in such poor health they may not survive. Most have no idea how they can remain in Bangladesh but are also reluctant to return until their safety can be guaranteed.

Sean Illing:

Glenn Loury is an outlier in this environment — his politics are difficult to pin down exactly, but they’re probably best described as right of center. An author and professor of economics at Brown University, Loury has written books questioning what he sees as the liberal orthodoxy on race and history, including One by One From the Inside Out and The Anatomy of Racial Inequality.

I spoke with Loury earlier this month about his views on political correctness, the legacy of state-sanctioned racism, and his disagreements with the Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows

Annysa Johnson:

On the ACT exam, for example, he noted that students on vouchers scored an average 17.2 compared with 16.3 by MPS students overall and 15.6 for MPS students considered economically disadvantaged. Similarly, he said, students in the statewide voucher program, which accepts students from outside of Milwaukee and Racine, scored an average 21.3 on the ACT, compared with a 20 for all statewide students and 17.1 for those considered economically disadvantaged.

In all, more than 453,000 students took the exams in the spring. The Forward and DLM are given to students in grades three through eight; the ACT to high school juniors. The Forward tests English language arts, math and science.

According to DPI:

40.5% of students overall were proficient or above in math, 42.7% in English and 42.3% in science.
Scores for public school students were comparable: 41.4% were proficient or above in math, 43.5% in English and 43.1% in science.

Voucher students scored far below those, with 15.2% proficient or above in math, 20.1% in English and 19.2% in science. Bender said those numbers are skewed by the large numbers of students in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs.

There were wide gaps in achievement for several student subgroups. For example, black, Hispanic and poor students scored well-below their peers on the overall ACT composite and across the board in math, English and science.

Karen Rivedal:

Related: Linking the Wisconsin Forward Assessments to NWEA MAP Growth Tests (PDF), via a kind reader:

The results in Table 5 demonstrate that MAP reading scores can consistently classify students’ proficiency (Level 3 or higher) status on Forward ELA test 81-83% of the time and MAP math scores can consistently classify students on Forward math test 86-88% of the time. Those numbers are high suggesting that both MAP reading and math tests are great predictors of students’ proficiency status on the Forward tests.”

Alexandre Tanzi:

Newly released income and wealth data from the Federal Reserve Board’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances show that America’s richest families enjoyed gains in income and net worth over the last decade. Not part of the top 10 percent? Then your income probably fell. The data show that families ranked in the highest percentile saw an income gain of $16,300 from 2007 to 2016. Those below are still making less money.

When it comes to wealth, the gap is even bigger. In 2007, half of families had a net worth of $139,700 or more and half fell below this level. By 2016, the midpoint dropped to $97,300 — a decline of $42,600. Families ranked in the top tenth of net worth have enjoyed a sizable gain since 2007: a $132,100 rise in net worth to reach almost $1.2 million.

Madison’s taxpayer / government funded K-12 schools have significantly increased taxes and spending since the Great Recession. We now spend nearly $20,000 per student despite tolerating disastrous reading results.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

We make frequent use of the influence of their high school peers on many of our students. We have peer counseling programs and even peer discipline systems, in some cases. We show students the artistic abilities of their peers in exhibitions, concerts, plays, recitals, and the like.

Most obviously, we put before our high school students the athletic skills and performances of their peers in a very wide range of meets, matches, and games, some of which, of course, are better attended than others.

While some high schools still have just one valedictorian, fellow students have little or no idea what sort of academic work the student who is first in her class has done. Academic scholarships may be announced, but it is quite impossible for peers to see the academic work for which the scholarship has been awarded. Here again, the contrast with athletics is clear.

We show high school students the artistic, athletic, and other examples of the outstanding efforts and accomplishments of their peers without seeming to worry that such examples will send their peers into unmanageable depressions or cause them to give up their own efforts to do their best.

When it comes to academic achievements, on the other hand, we do seem to worry that they will have a harmful effect if they are shown to other students. I am not quite sure how that attitude got its hold on us, but I do have some comments from authors whose papers I have published in The Concord Review, on their reaction to seeing the exemplary academic work of their peers:

“When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports…As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task…In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.”

North Central High School (IN)

“The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college.”

Thomas Worthington High School (OH)

“Thank you for selecting my essay regarding Augustus Caesar and his rule of the Roman Republic for publication in the Spring issue of The Concord Review. I am both delighted and honored to know that this essay will be of some use to readers around the world. The process of researching and writing this paper for my IB Diploma was truly enjoyable and it is my hope that it will inspire other students to undertake their own research projects on historical topics.”

Old Scona Academic High School, Edmonton, Alberta, (Canada)

“In the end, working on that history paper, inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly.”

Isidore Newman School (LA)

“At CRLHS, a much-beloved history teacher suggested to me that I consider writing for The Concord Review, a publication that I had previously heard of, but knew little about. He proposed, and I agreed, that it would be an opportunity for me to pursue more independent work, something that I longed for, and hone my writing and research skills in a project of considerably broader scope than anything I had undertaken up to that point.”

Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (MA)

Now, whenever a counterintuitive result—like this enthusiasm for a challenge—is found, there is always an attempt to limit the damage to our preconceptions. “This is only a tiny fringe group (of trouble-makers, nerds, etc.)” or “most of our high school students would not respond with interest to the exemplary academic work of their peers.” The problem with those arguments is that we really don’t know enough. We haven’t often actually tried to see what would happen if we presented our high school students with good academic work done by their more diligent peers. Perhaps we should consider giving that experiment a serious try. I have, as it happens, some good high school academic expository writing in History to use as examples in such a trial…see tcr.org.

Contact: Will Fitzhugh, fitzhugh@tcr.org

Preethi Kasireddy:

Odds are you’ve heard about the Ethereum blockchain, whether or not you know what it is. It’s been in the news a lot lately, including the cover of some major magazines, but reading those articles can be like gibberish if you don’t have a foundation for what exactly Ethereum is. So what is it? In essence, a public database that keeps a permanent record of digital transactions. Importantly, this database doesn’t require any central authority to maintain and secure it. Instead it operates as a “trustless” transactional system — a framework in which individuals can make peer-to-peer transactions without needing to trust a third party OR one another.
 
 Still confused? That’s where this post comes in. My aim is to explain how Ethereum functions at a technical level, without complex math or scary-looking formulas. Even if you’re not a programmer, I hope you’ll walk away with at least better grasp of the tech. If some parts are too technical and difficult to grok, that’s totally fine! There’s really no need to understand every little detail. I recommend just focusing on understanding things at a broad level.
 
 Many of the topics covered in this post are a breakdown of the concepts discussed in the yellow paper. I’ve added my own explanations and diagrams to make understanding Ethereum easier. Those brave enough to take on the technical challenge can also read the Ethereum yellow paper.

Wisconsin DPI:

<< What does this graph measure? This graph displays the percentage of students in each performance category on the Forward and DLM (alternate) assessments during the selected year's administration. The Forward assessment is administered to students in grades 3-8 for ELA and Mathematics, 4 and 8 for Science and 4, 8 and 10 for Social Studies. While the DLM assessment is administered to students in grades 3-11, only DLM results for students in grades 3-8,10 are included here. The graph also displays the percentage of students who are indicated as not completing either exam (No Test). This group includes students who were opted out of testing by their parent/guardian and other non-tested students. Explore the data How do the performance outcomes for students in your school change for different subgroups and different assessments? Full Academic Year (FAY) has an effect on some results. Click the Glossary button to learn how FAY is applied. Learn more about this data. Visit Forward About the Data. For Dynamic Learning Maps, visit DLM About the Data.

Katelyn Ferral

More people are borrowing more money to pay for college each year. Total student loan debt reached $1.44 trillion this year, held by 44.2 million borrowers nationwide, according to federal government figures. In Wisconsin, there are about 1 million people who together hold more than $19 billion in student loan debt, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Education, the country’s largest student lender.

Decades ago, students could pay for college tuition and living expenses by working throughout school and during summers. Now, college is so expensive — up 237 percent for in-state tuition at public universities since 1997 — that many students are only able to go if they take out loans.

Even with the best attempts at financial planning, changing regulations and compounding interest have made college debt a heavy burden for many borrowers.

Walter Frick:

The online economy — from search to email to social media — is built in large part on the fact that consumers are willing to give away their data in exchange for products that are free and easy to use. The assumption behind this trade-off is that without giving up all that data, those products either couldn’t be so good or would have to come at a cost.
 
 But a new working paper, released this week by Lesley Chiou of Occidental College and Catherine Tucker of MIT, suggests that the trade-off may not always be necessary. By studying the effects of privacy regulations in the EU, they attempted to measure whether the anonymization and de-identification of search data hurts the quality of search results.
 
 Most search engines capture user data, including IP addresses and other data that can identify a user across multiple visits. This data then allows search companies to improve their algorithms and to personalize results for the user. At least, that’s the idea. To determine whether storage of users’ personal data improves search results, Chiou and Tucker looked at how search results from Bing and Yahoo differed before and after changes in the European Commission’s rules on data retention. In 2008 the Commission recommended that search engines reduce the period over which search engines kept user records. In response, Yahoo decided to strengthen its privacy policy by anonymizing user data after 90 days. In 2010 Microsoft changed its policy, and began deleting IP addresses associated with searches on Bing after six months and all data points intended to identify a user across visits after 18 months. In 2011 Yahoo changed its policy again, this time deciding to store personal data longer — for 18 months rather than 90 days — allowing the researchers yet another chance to measure how changes in data storage affected search results. (Google did not change its policies during this period, and so is not included in the study. Some of Tucker’s past research has been funded by Google.)

Eric Raymond:

Looking back, we can see that between 1865 and around 1914 the Union and the former South negotiated an imperfect but workable peace. The first step in that negotiation took place at Appomattox, when the Union troops accepting General Robert E. Lee’s surrender saluted the defeated and allowed them to retain their arms, treating them with the most punctilious military courtesy due to honorable foes.

Over the next few years, the Union Army reintegrated the Confederate military into itself. Confederate officers not charged with war crimes were generally able to retain rank and seniority; many served in the frontier wars of the next 35 years. Elements of Confederate uniform were adopted for Western service.

The political leaders of the revolt were not executed. Instead, they were spared to urge reconciliation, and generally did. By all historical precedent they were treated with shocking leniency. This paid off.

Of course, not all went smoothly. The Reconstruction of the South between 1863 and 1877 was badly bungled, creating resentments that linger to this day and – in the folk memory of Southerners – often overshadow the harms of the war itself. The condition of emancipated blacks remained dire.

But overall, the reintegration of the South went far better than it could have. Confederate nationalism was successfully reabsorbed into American nationalism. One of the prices of this adjustment was that Confederate heroes had to become American heroes. An early and continuing example of this was the reverence paid to Robert E. Lee by Unionists after the war; his qualities as a military leader were extolled and his opposition to full civil rights for black freedmen memory-holed.

Fernando Ramirez:

FEMA’s 100-year flood plain map doesn’t have the best reputation in Bayou City – just ask any Houstonian whose home was outside the flood risk zone yet still filled with water during one if the city’s many and recent flooding events.

Still, a new study by Rice University and Texas A&M-Galveston suggests FEMA’s hazard mapping may be even less accurate than most people think.

Researchers examined flood damage claims from several southeast Houston suburbs between 1999 to 2009 and found that FEMA’s flood predictive maps failed to show 75 percent of flood damage.

“The takeaway from this study, which was borne out in Harvey, is that many losses occur in areas outside FEMA’s 100-year flood plain,” said study co-author Antonia Sebastian in a prepared statement.

Thomas Lambert:

The University of Missouri, where I teach and which I dearly love, is in crisis. Freshman enrollment at the university’s Columbia campus (Mizzou) is down by a whopping 35% from two years ago. Missouri’s governor and legislature slashed Mizzou’s state appropriation by $22 million this year.

Administrators have responded by cutting Mizzou’s operating budget by 12% and laying off 307 employees (474 across the entire University of Missouri system). They’ve also closed seven dormitories to students, instead renting out the rooms for football games and special events like the recent solar eclipse.

Suffice it to say, morale on campus is low.

The primary culprit, of course, is Mizzou’s reaction to the student protests of 2015. In November of that year, a group of students, justifiably angered by three racist incidents on the 35,000-student Columbia campus, presented administrators with a number of unreasonable demands. Among other things, they insisted that the president of the 77,000-student University of Missouri system publicly acknowledge his “white male privilege” and resign his post and that the university adopt patently unconstitutional racial quotas for faculty and staff.

Instead of leading like compassionate, wise adults—joining the protestors’ rightful condemnation of racist conduct but working to convince them that their demands were unreasonable—many Mizzou officials either succumbed to or actively perpetuated the frenzy.

Ryan Gallagher:

It was not the first time Muhammad Rabbani had problems when returning to the United Kingdom from travels overseas. But on this occasion something was different — he was arrested, handcuffed, and hauled through London’s largest airport, then put into the back of a waiting police van.

Rabbani is the 36-year-old international director of Cage, a British group that was founded in 2003 to raise awareness about the plight of prisoners held at the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detention site. Today, the organization has a broader focus and says it is working to highlight “the erosion of the rule of law in the context of the war on terror.” Due to its work campaigning for the legal rights of terrorism suspects, Cage has attracted controversy, and Rabbani has faced the government’s wrath.

His trouble at Heathrow Airport in late November began with a familiar routine. Often, on his return to the U.K. from foreign trips, he was stopped by police and questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act — a sweeping power British authorities can use at the border to interrogate and search people without requiring any suspicion of wrongdoing. People questioned under Schedule 7 have no right to remain silent, and they can be interrogated for up to six hours. Rabbani estimates that he has been stopped under Schedule 7 about 20 times. Usually, he was let free after a few questions without any charges or arrest. But not this time.

Matt Barnum:

When charter school teachers push to unionize, charter leaders often fight back.

That’s happened in Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Unionizing, they argue, would limit the schools’ ability to innovate, ultimately hurting kids.

But a new study of California schools finds that, far from harming student achievement, unionization of charter schools actually boosts test scores.

“In contrast to the predominant public opinion about school unionizations, we find that unionization has a positive … impact on student math performance,” write researchers Jordan Matsudaira of Cornell and Richard Patterson of the U.S. Military Academy.

The analysis is hardly the last word on the question, but it highlights the limited evidence for the idea that not having unionized teachers helps charter schools succeed — even though that is a major aspect of the charter-school movement, as most charters are not unionized.

“Contrary to the anti-worker and anti-union ideologues, the teacher unions in charter schools don’t impede teaching and learning or hurt kids,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in more than 240 charter schools. “And the findings — that schools with teachers who have an independent voice through its unions have a positive effects on student performance — are consistent with common sense and other studies.”

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

Fran Smith:

Patrick Perotti scoffed when his mother told him about a doctor who uses electromagnetic waves to treat drug addiction. “I thought he was a swindler,” Perotti says.

Perotti, who is 38 and lives in Genoa, Italy, began snorting cocaine at 17, a rich kid who loved to party. His indulgence gradually turned into a daily habit and then an all-consuming compulsion. He fell in love, had a son, and opened a restaurant. Under the weight of his addiction, his family and business eventually collapsed.

He did a three-month stint in rehab and relapsed 36 hours after he left. He spent eight months in another program, but the day he returned home, he saw his dealer and got high. “I began to use cocaine with rage,” he says. “I became paranoid, obsessed, crazy. I could not see any way to stop.”

When his mother pressed him to call the doctor, Perotti gave in. He learned he would just have to sit in a chair like a dentist’s and let the doctor, Luigi Gallimberti, hold a device near the left side of his head, on the theory it would suppress his hunger for cocaine. “It was either the cliff or Dr. Gallimberti,” he recalls.

Kim Hart:

U.S. geographical economic inequality is growing, meaning your economic opportunity is more tied to your location than ever before. A large portion of the country is being left behind by today’s economy, according to a county-by-county report released this morning by the Economic Innovation Group, a non-profit research and advocacy organization. This was a major election theme that helped thrust Donald Trump to the White House.

Jack Dolan:

Last year, more than 5,400 UC retirees received pensions over $100,000. Someone without a pension would need savings between $2 million and $3 million to guarantee a similar income in retirement.

The number of UC retirees collecting six-figure pensions has increased 60% since 2012, a Times analysis of university data shows. Nearly three dozen received pensions in excess of $300,000 last year, four times as many as in 2012. Among those joining the top echelon was former UC President Mark Yudof, who worked at the university for only seven years — including one year on paid sabbatical and another in which he taught one class per semester.

CBSLA

Whitney High School junior Timothy Reyes had his hands taped together and was a part of a slave ship reenactment when he was an 8th grader on the Cerritos campus.

A mother complained recently after getting an email from her son’s teacher explaining the “unique classroom activity,” which was to be a surprise. Staff would act as slave ship captains, the email described, and the children slaves.

After lining the kids up, the note said, they’d “use masking tape to ‘tie’ their wrists together, make them lay on the ground, and in a dark room have them watch a clip from the film ‘Roots.’ ”

LaMonica Bryson, a Whitney High English teacher agrees with the decision to pull the activity from campus which students said was announced Monday.

“I think there are other ways to teach tolerance and maybe even better ways and best practices to broach these sensitive topics,” said Bryson.

Some students agree.

Pieter Levels:

I wouldn’t go to university. This was a hard one for me, because I finished a Master’s degree myself. But I did it mostly to prove to society I wasn’t a complete idiot because I’d been kicked off a very elite high school. I can’t say I learnt anything useful in university except how to talk to people better and do presentations in front of large crowds without getting sick.

As I also kinda employ people now, I can tell you from both sides too. I’ve never even asked about people’s academic credentials. I don’t care. I ask them if they can do specific tasks and have specific skills that can make my company better and take work off from me. That’s it. So I feel universities are a scam now (especially in the US where they’re very pricey).

If you do want to go to university, go abroad to a place where it’s cheap like Germany (I think it costs less than $1k/y there). I also heard it’s actually free in some Scandinavian countries (even for foreigners).

Learn

Instead of going to university, go online and learn how to code. That’s the most important one. Learn the basics of programming, learn different languages, web and native, whatever is relevant at the time.

Learn design, copy other designers and start putting your own ideas in slowly.

Roy Bragg:

One of the seminal moments in Texas high school football history came in summer 1938 when Prairie Lea played Martindale in the state’s first six-man football game.

Lisa De Pasquale:

Today I was scheduled to speak at “Feminism Awareness Day” during Free Speech Week at UC-Berkeley. I am extremely thankful to Milo Yiannopoulos for inviting me to debut my new book, The Social Justice Warrior Handbook. I’m also thankful to Milo for taking the fight for free speech to ground zero — college campuses. In a recent radio interview, an NPR host asked him why he doesn’t just rent a theater rather than deal with college campus rules. Milo responded by asking why conservatives should relinquish participation in an arena that should be open to all views.

Unfortunately, events were canceled because of coordinated efforts by the school administration, leftist media, and leftist groups from across the country. Within hours of being included on a leaked list of invited (not scheduled) speakers, I heard from reporters with information they wanted confirmed or denied in order to catch the organizers in some sort of deceit. They went down the line speaker by speaker in order to discredit and disrupt the event. While I’m disappointed students at Berkeley won’t be able to hear from many of the invited speakers, I’m not surprised.

T. William Fair:

Once upon a time it may have been unheard of for the head of an urban league dedicated to the improvement of lives for African-American children to partner with a Republican to work on school reform. As part of one of his education reform efforts, Florida governor Jeb Bush convinced me to help him go around that state in an attempt to get school choice legislation passed. I leapt at the opportunity because I was desperately concerned about the lack of quality educational options for children in Liberty City, a neighborhood of the city of Miami where a branch of the urban league is headquartered.

But that one achievement 30 plus years ago created a path that has changed lives for the children not only for Liberty City but children across the state. That is why I am compelled to speak up with deep concern and opposition to the statements of late by the NAACP, whose leadership has begun to ignore the reality of communities like mine, and indeed the conditions of African American students all over the country.

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

Derek Muller::

Virtually all the deans of law schools in California, of ABA-accredited and California-accredited schools, have come out in favor, at multiple stages, of lowering the cut score for the California bar exam. The score, 144, is the second-highest in the country and has long been this high. Given the size of California and the number of test-takers each year, even modest changes could result in hundreds of new first-time passers each test administration.

The State Bar, in a narrowly-divided 6-5 vote, recommended three options to the California Supreme Court: keep the score; lower it to 141.1; or lower it to 139. As I watched the hearing, the dissenters seemed more in favor of keeping it at 144. At least some of the supporters seem inclined to support the 139 score, or something even lower, but recognized the limitations of securing a majority vote on an issue. Essentially, however, the State Bar adopted the staff recommendation and offered these options to the California Supreme Court.

The Court could adopt none of these options, but I imagine it would be inclined to adopt a recommended standard, and probably the lowest standard at that, 139. (The link above includes the call from the Supreme Court to evaluate the appropriateness of the cut score, a hint, but hardly definitive, that it believes something ought to be done.)

Tom Moran:

Brace yourself: The top five officers earned an average of $764,000 in compensation in 2015. The big winner was the executive director, Ed Richardson, who pulled in $1.2 million, roughly twice what the national union pays its executive director.

These are union folks, remember, the same ones who rail about economic injustice. The middle-class teachers they represent earn $70,000 on average, and pay about $900 of that in annual dues to this crowd.

I wanted to ask Richardson how he can justify this money grab, so I called, over and over, and sent e-mails. But like those little critters, he slithered into the muck to escape the sunlight.

Murtaza Hussein:

Through a network of nearly 800 military bases located in 70 countries around the globe, in addition to an array of trade deals and alliances, the U.S. has cemented its influence for decades across both Europe and Asia. American leaders helped impose a set of rules and norms that promoted free trade, democratic governance — in theory, if not always in practice — and a prohibition on changing borders militarily, using a mixture of force and suasion to sustain the systems that keep its hegemony intact. Meanwhile, although the U.S. generally eschewed direct colonialism, its promotion of global free trade helped “open a door through which America’s preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all the underdeveloped areas of the world,” wrote the revisionist historian William Appleman Williams in his more-than-half-century-old classic, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy”.

That strategy of “non-colonial imperial expansion,” as Williams called it, became the basis for U.S. foreign policy over the past century. For American elites, such a policy has provided remarkable benefits, even if the resulting largesse has not always trickled down to the rest of the country. Thanks to its status as the world’s only superpower, the U.S. today enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of having its dollar serve as the world’s reserve currency, while U.S. leaders dominate the agenda of international institutions promoting governance and trade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the successful creation of a global military alliance to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that same year, America’s imperial confidence reached a zenith; President George H.W. Bush publicly declared the start of a “new world order” under American leadership.

Chris Gilliard:

In his initial New Horizons column in EDUCAUSE Review, Mike Caulfield asked: “Can Higher Education Save the Web?”1 I was intrigued by this question since I often say to my students that the web is broken and that the ideal thing to do (although quite unrealistic) would be to tear it down and start from scratch.

I call the web “broken” because its primary architecture is based on what Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” a “form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.”2 Web2.0—the web of platforms, personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—is the only web most students know. That web exists by extracting individuals’ data through persistent surveillance, data mining, tracking, and browser fingerprinting3 and then seeking new and “innovative” ways to monetize that data. As platforms and advertisers seek to perfect these strategies, colleges and universities rush to mimic those strategies in order to improve retention.4

That said, I admit it might be useful to search for a more suitable term than “broken.” The web is not broken in this regard: a web based on surveillance, personalization, and monetization works perfectly well for particular constituencies, but it doesn’t work quite as well for persons of color, lower-income students, and people who have been walled off from information or opportunities because of the ways they are categorized according to opaque algorithms.

Karen Lien:

We’re interested in companies re-thinking the entire model of schooling, especially for pre-K and higher education. In the US, new models may rely on technology to personalize or otherwise improve the learning experience. We’re also interested in applications of technology that have the potential to deliver high quality educational experiences to every student in the world. An example:

The Rumie Initiative curates free online educational content, packages it into comprehensive offline curricula, and delivers it to educators working in refugee camps and other remote or under-resourced communities.

Annysa Johnson:

In the long term, Driver and board members said, the district may be forced to re-examine its generous employee benefits package and consolidate or close some schools.

MPS’ final $1.1 billion budget is expected to be finalized in November. The district already made a series of cuts in the spring aimed at closing what was then a $50 million budget gap. Those included cutting 96 teaching positions and 98 classroom assistant posts.

“Bennett said he continues to work closely with the district, noting he recently met with district lawyer Dylan Pauly to work out an agreement for the internal sharing and public posting of any Madison charter school applications that are submitted. Proposals are to be posted on the district’s website within two weeks of the submission date, and on his own office’s website within one week, Bennett said.”

“I’d have to have a proposal approved by the UW Board of Regents and to the (state) Department of Public Instruction by Feb. 1,” Bennett said, for a 2018 opening.

That means school proposers would have to have a completed proposal to him for review within a few months, which seems unlikely, Bennett said.

He declined to characterize in detail the ideas for any Madison proposals he’s seen so far before any official applications are in, but he said they “range from really focused content-area schools to innovative, project-based learning schools.”

“Those conversations are really rewarding,” Bennett said, lauding the opportunity he said his office has “to really grow quality (educational) choices for kids.”

Bennett said he has spent most of the time since his hiring developing a process for office operations and shepherding through the Legislature a drug-addiction recovery charter school favored by GOP lawmakers. The school, approved in July, could go anywhere in the state, with competitive proposals to create it, including a location, due by Dec. 2.

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

The Economist:

MANAGEMENT gurus have chewed over the topic endlessly: is a flair for entrepreneurship something that you are born with, or something that can be taught? In a break with those gurus’ traditions, a group of economists and researchers from the World Bank, the National University of Singapore and Leuphana University in Germany decided that rather than simply cook up a pet theory of their own, they would conduct a controlled experiment.

Moreover, instead of choosing subjects from the boardrooms of powerful corporations or among the latest crop of young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Francisco Campos and his fellow researchers chose to monitor 1,500 people running small businesses in Togo in West Africa. These are not the sorts of business owners who give TED talks or negotiate billion-dollar mergers. The typical firm had three employees and profits of 94,512 CFA francs ($173) a month. Only about a third kept books, and less than one in 20 had a written budget.

Jillian Kay Melchior:

Biology professor Bret Weinstein has settled his lawsuit against Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Weinstein became a pariah last spring when he criticized an officially sanctioned “Day of Absence” during which white people were asked to stay away from campus. He and his wife, anthropology professor Heather Heying, alleged that Evergreen “has permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment.” They claimed administrators failed to protect them from “repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.”

Last week the university announced it would pay $500,000 to settle the couple’s complaint. Evergreen said in a statement that the college “strongly rejects” the lawsuit’s allegations, denies the Day of Absence was discriminatory, and asserts: “The college took reasonable and appropriate steps to engage with protesters, de-escalate conflict, and keep the campus safe.”

Alan Borsuk:

A setting for greatness: I was part of a program a few days ago with 40 or so leaders of Milwaukee-area public school districts. One thing I said was that I didn’t see much bold action or big orders coming their way from Washington. And there wasn’t much big news in the state ESSA plan or the new state budget (special-education vouchers being one exception). I said if there’s going to be a rising tide of quality, it’s going to come from people such as them — from the local level.

And in some places, that is happening. Some particularly innovative and nationally recognized school leaders were in the room. You want names? This is not a full list, but I’d mention Menomonee Falls Superintendent Patricia Greco, Kettle Moraine Superintendent Patricia Deklotz and Brown Deer Superintendent Deb Kerr.

T Willard Fair:

Here’s what I need to say to them, to the people of this nation, to people of color — I am involved in the school choice movement because the future of my life and your life depends upon it. Starting the state’s first charter school was one of the most significant accomplishments of my life. Because of our willingness to look beyond traditional divisions and leave beyond our tendency to only work with those with whom we are comfortable, our children of color are closing the achievement gap. African-American students in charter schools are scoring 4% higher on reading tests than those in traditional public schools and Florida charter school students are more likely to attend college. Hispanic students do 12% better than their peers at traditional public schools. These are but two of the many indicators that point to increased success for students of color because their families were empowered to find schools that better met the needs of their children.

Jorie Koster-HaleAug:

Predicting future crime poses a particularly interesting data challenge because it has both geospatial and temporal dimensions and may be affected by many different types of features like weather, city infrastructure, population demographics, public events, government policy, etc.

In September 2016, the National Institute of Justice launched a Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge to predict crime hotspots in the city of Portland, Oregon. Our team (Maxime and I) made a submission to the challenge. Our goal was to use both geospatial and temporal data to understand underlying factors of crime and predict future hotspots. All of the data are open source, making the project fully reproducible. And in the end, we are very excited to have been announced as one of the winners of the challenge!

How did we do it? In a series of two blog posts, I will walk through our approach to the challenge, which was ultimately a combination of machine learning, time-series modeling, and geostatistics (a combination that was more effective at predicting future crime hotspots than any of these techniques by themselves). This first post will focus on the data we used, and the next post (coming soon) will delve into the analysis of that data.

Jack Mara, Lewis Davis and Stephen Schmidt

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade-offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus.

Tom Jackman

A device that tricks cellphones into sending it their location information and has been used quietly by police and federal agents for years, requires a search warrant before it is turned on, an appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday. It is the fourth such ruling by either a state appeals court or federal district court, and may end up deciding the issue unless the government takes the case to the U.S. Supreme Court or persuades the city’s highest court to reverse the ruling.

The case against Prince Jones in 2013 involved D.C. police use of a “StingRay” cell-site simulator, which enables law enforcement to pinpoint the location of a cellphone more precisely than a phone company can when triangulating a signal between cell towers or using a phone’s GPS function. Civil liberties advocates say the StingRay, by providing someone’s location to police without court approval, is a violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment right not to be unreasonably searched. The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed in a 2 to 1 ruling, echoing similar rulings in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and federal district courts in New York City and San Francisco.

Alex Emmons:

One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.”

The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To put that in further perspective: If the package becomes law, U.S. military spending would exceed the total spending of its next 10 rivals put together, going off of 2016 military spending estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

GeoGebra Augmented Reality by International GeoGebra Institute (IGI).

Robert McFadden

“We find when we bring average Americans together that they listen to one another, that they can contribute and that they can build, develop a vision of what they want our society to be like. And it’s really inspiring.”

In a speech at the Drucker Institute in Claremont, Calif., in late 2008, Mr. Yankelovich enumerated overwhelming national problems — the financial meltdown, the soaring debt, lost standing in the world, runaway health and education costs — and, typically, offered his vision of a way out of the mess. He called it “The New Pragmatism,” and insisted that it would soon spread across America.

“It’s going to occur,” he said, certitude rising in his New England accent, “through entrepreneurship and innovative thinking at all levels of society: individual, commercial, public, nonprofit, private, institutional, and all of these in interlocking, interacting ways.”

Amanda Ripley:

In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.

This is baffling on the most obvious levels. In the West, researchers have long believed that future prospects incentivize students to invest in school. The conventional wisdom is that girls do better in school as women acquire more legal and political rights in society. But many Middle Eastern women do not go on to have long professional careers after graduating; they spend much of their lives working at home as wives and mothers. Fewer than one in every five workers is female in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

This spring, I went to the Middle East to try to understand why girls are doing so much better in school, despite living in quintessentially patriarchal societies. Or, put another way, why boys are doing so badly.

Erika Christakis

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

Bruce Schneier:

The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It’s because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance.

Sarah Ruden:

It was the end of a semester at Harvard University, where I was a doctoral student, and I’d been called into a professor’s office. He was the faculty member overseeing the third-year undergraduate Latin course that I had just finished teaching and grading. One of my students was seated in the office when I arrived, with a look of dignified outrage on his face, having already made his case against me. The offense?

I’d given him an A-minus.

That he apparently felt welcome to petition against that grade might tell you everything you need to know about how Harvard coddles certain students.

True, giving an A-minus to a classics major, a potential “friend of the department” (read: likely future donor), didn’t always go over well. But the same professor who was now entertaining that undergrad’s grievance had, that year, briefed us teaching assistants on the tough new guidelines for combating grade inflation, counseling us to be judicious, to think through what a Harvard “A” meant before awarding one. Hence, it had seemed reasonably safe to assign that grade.

Sam Koppelman:

But if an 18-year-old student losing his ability to breathe and walk on his own is not a national news story, if we refuse to ask ourselves how we let this happen, then we are all complicit.

We are complicit in the deaths that take place on the football field, including those that occur at the high school level every year. We are complicit in the head injuries that keep student-athletes out of class. And we are complicit in the long-term health impacts — from post-concussion syndrome to degenerative brain diseases like CTE to depression and even suicide — thousands of football players face across the country.