Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.

The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.

Padraig Belton

In the not-too-distant future, our fields could be tilled, sown, tended and harvested entirely by fleets of co-operating autonomous machines by land and air.

And they’ll be working both day and night.
Driverless tractors that can follow pre-programmed routes are already being deployed at large farms around the world.

Drones are buzzing over fields assessing crop health and soil conditions. Ground sensors are monitoring the amount of water and nutrients in the soil, triggering irrigation and fertiliser applications.
And in Japan, the world’s first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year.

Developer Y

Focus would be to keep the list to the point so that it is readable and usable. To access syllabus/notes/assignments, please visit link to the course or use Google search with course number/name.

Only MOOCs with comprehensive lecture material which may be equivalent to a standard University course will be added.
NPTEL contains large number of good Computer Science courses. To check courses by Indian IIT’s, please refer nptel site.

Kate Zernike

It is hard to find anyone more passionate about the idea of steering public dollars away from traditional public schools than Betsy DeVos, Donald J. Trump’s pick as the cabinet secretary overseeing the nation’s education system.

For nearly 30 years, as a philanthropist, activist and Republican fund-raiser, she has pushed to give families taxpayer money in the form of vouchers to attend private and parochial schools, pressed to expand publicly funded but privately run charter schools, and tried to strip teacher unions of their influence.

A daughter of privilege, she also married into it; her husband, Dick, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan a decade ago, is heir to the Amway fortune. Like many education philanthropists, she argues that children’s ZIP codes should not confine them to failing schools.

But Ms. DeVos’s efforts to expand educational opportunity in her home state of Michigan and across the country have focused little on existing public schools, and almost entirely on establishing newer, more entrepreneurial models to compete with traditional schools for students and money. Her donations and advocacy go almost entirely toward groups seeking to move students and money away from what Mr. Trump calls “failing government schools.”

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

At the elementary school level, the percentage of students living in each attendance area who transfer out of their attendance area ranges from a low of less than 1%, at Shorewood, to a high of 25.8%, at Mendota. Elementary schools with the most negative net transfers (net loss of students to internal transfer) are Mendota (-61), Schenk (-59), and Falk (-59). Schools with the highest net transfers (net gain of students to internal transfer) are Glendale (87), Shorewood (52), and Stephens (36). Mendota and Falk had less negative net transfers this year for the second year in a row (Fall 2014-15: Mendota (-106) and Fall 2015-16: Mendota (-88)). Glendale and Stephens had higher net transfers then last year (Fall 2015-16: Glendale (58) and Stephens (31)), while Shorewood had lower net internal transfer (Fall 2015-16: Shorewood (67)).

At the middle school level, the percentage of students living in each attendance area transferring to a different school ranges from a low of 3.4%, at Hamilton, to a high of 19.4%, at Sherman. The middle school with the most negative net transfers is Sherman (-35), Black Hawk (-32), and Cherokee (-31) and the schools with the highest are O’Keeffe (57) and Hamilton (31). The number of net leavers at Cherokee decreased from -56, the most negative during the 2015-16 school year and Hamilton decreased for the second year in a row, from 65 during the 2014-15 school year and 52 during the 2015-16 school year.

At the high school level, the percentage of students living in each attendance area who transfer out of their attendance area ranges from 5.6%, at West, to 8.5%, at Memorial, if we exclude students attending alternative programs. If we include students attending alternative programs as transfer students, then the percentage ranges from 8.6%, at West, to 16.1%, at East. The high school with the most net entering transfers was West (322) and the school with the most net leaving transfers was East (-128). This was similar to the previous school year with West increasing from 293 net incoming transfers and East decreasing from 129 net leaving transfers.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

As part of MMSD’s Evaluation and Review Cycle, major plans in the district have an anual monitoring snapshot of simple and consistent quantitative data. This snapshot shows key characteristics of students in the group indicated above, as well as progress on Strategic Framework Milestones and indicators from the School Targeted Asistance Tol (STAT) system used to monitor schools during the year.

Madison School District Administration (PDF)

Some themes from the English Language Learner Annual Monitoring Review are:

The percentage of ELLs enrolled in the district increased in the past two years by 1% from 26% to 27%.

Spanish and Hmong continue to be the two top languages in the district.

There was an increase in the number of students reclassified to ELP level 6.

When the ACCESS test moved from paper-and-pencil to an online format, new cut scores were implemented. Therefore, we have a new baseline of data.

The demographic breakdowns for the ELL Student Demographic stayed uniform for the last two years. There is an increase of 1% in the students who qualify for special education services.

Participation in World Languages courses increased by 3% from 43% to 46%.

Out of school suspensions increased from 137 incidents to 180.

Chronic absenteeism decreased slightly from 17% to 16%.

Madison Schools’ Dual Language Learner Data Snapshot (PDF).

Add an additional training day for new teachers (for a total of 3) to better meet the needs of
and provide information to staff new to the District.

Eliminate the language requiring a 10 day winter break and a 6 day spring break in order to provide flexibility when determining the school calendar.

Provide the District with discretion to add up to two additional professional development days during the school year as a means of offering more training opportunities without incurring additional costs.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Create language to provide for a $25 per hour rate for working on Central Office developed curriculum and attending Central Office professional development that is aligned to District priorities. The purpose of paying a higher hourly rate than the extended employment rate is to encourage participation and recognize the importance of Central Office curriculum work and professional development on District priorities.

Phillip Ball:

Yet what if it were true that diamonds really can be manufactured? When GE revealed the discovery, the stock of the De Beers diamond cartel in South Africa, which dominated the global market, plummeted. It seemed like a rare and precious commodity was about to be supplanted by an artificial form that could be fabricated by the ton, mirroring a millennia-old concern about the devastating power of fakes. Concerns over the devaluation of gold currency led the Roman emperor Diocletian to ban alchemy in the third century, and worries about counterfeiting and debased coinage also lay behind the condemnations of the art by Pope John XXII in 1317 and of King Henry IV of England in 1403.

This, though, was no alchemy: The GE diamonds were perfect chemical replicas of the real thing. Was it the end of a billion-dollar market?

Christopher Mims

This is a special time for technology. Five of the world’s seven most valuable companies are U.S. tech firms. But the core innovations underlying Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. are decades old.

The transistor was born in the 1940s at AT&T’s Bell Labs. The internet was nurtured by the U.S. Defense Department in the 1960s. Many important, but less foundational inventions, such as GPS, were products of the Cold War.

Martin Shelton

It’s not only convenient, but security experts recommend Signal for a few different reasons. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that no one but your device and conversational partner’s device can read the messages you send. The team behind the software, Open Whisper Systems, is a privacy-centered nonprofit and relies on grants and donations. Perhaps most importantly, Signal is open source, meaning that the code is publicly viewable. It can be examined for potential security holes, and has stood up to auditing. All of these features make Signal one of the best options for boosting your communication security.

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb:

Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.

The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.

When the cost of any input falls so precipitously, there are two other well-established economic implications. First, we will start using prediction to perform tasks where we previously didn’t. Second, the value of other things that complement prediction will rise.

Adrian Sampson

Computer scientists in systemsy fields, myself included, aren’t great at using statistics. Maybe it’s because there are so many other potential problems with empirical evaluations that solid statistical reasoning doesn’t seem that important. Other subfields, like HCI and machine learning, have much higher standards for data analysis. Let’s learn from their example.

Here are three kinds of avoidable statistics mistakes that I notice in published papers.

Erin Richards:

With her deep ties to Wisconsin’s private-school choice movement and disdain for unions thwarting reforms, Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Education Secretary, was a name that sent shock waves through the state’s education circles Wednesday.

“It is completely jazzing the entire school-choice community nationwide,” said Jim Bender, president of advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin. “It’s like, game on.”

Gov. Scott Walker congratulated DeVos, whom he called his friend, on Twitter while Democratic Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan tweeted the nomination was “really bad news for public schools.”

DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, and both are heirs to the fortune amassed by Michigan-based direct sales company Amway, which was co-founded by Dick’s father, Richard DeVos. Betsy DeVos was active in Republican politics and has focused on schools as board chair of her national advocacy group, American Federation for Children, based in Washington, D.C. The group has funneled millions of dollars into campaigns around the country to elect school choice friendly lawmakers and to lobby aggressively for school choice legislation.

Kris de Decker

Our so-called information economy mainly serves to manage an ever faster, larger and more complex production and consumption system, of which we have only outsourced the manufacturing part.
 
 Consequently, without the information economy — without the office — the industrial system would collape. Without the industrial system, there would be no need for the information society or the office — in fact, office work could be like it was before 1850, when the biggest bank in the US was run by just three people with a quill. [1]
 The sustainable image of the information society — as contrasted to the dirty image of the industrial society — is built on an obsession with dividing energy use into different statistical categories, fiddling around with figures on electronic calculating tools. In other words, it’s a product of office work, hiding the true nature of office work.

Related: The Transportationist.

Frank Tobe

In the last six years, (2010–2015), according to the IFR (International Federation of Robotics), US industry has installed around 135,000 new industrial robots. The principal driver is automation in the car industry. During this same period, (2010–2015), the number of employees in the automotive sector increased by 230,000.
 
 This news affirms the conclusions of a study conducted by the market research firm, Metra Martech, “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment,” that there will be growth in robot use over the next five years resulting in the creation of one million high-quality jobs around the world. “Robots, in addition to the auto industry, will help to create jobs in some of the most critical industries of this century: consumer electronics, food, solar & wind power, and advanced battery manufacturing to name just a few.”

Naomi Martin:

Two months later, a judge learned of Monica’s relapse. She was sent to prison for violating probation from an earlier meth conviction.

Her time locked up was dark, but it forced her to stay clean. At night, she would lie awake, worrying about her cyst, imagining the cancer spreading. She asked to see a doctor, she says, but was never allowed. (The Texas Department of Criminal Justice would not comment, saying only that it provides all prisoners “comprehensive health care.”)

Now, she’s ready to start her life over. She has been out of prison three weeks, living at a Dallas shelter. She receives free health care in the parking lot, on a Parkland Memorial Hospital bus. It feels like a regular doctor’s office, with a sterile smell and fluorescent lighting. It’s just much smaller.

Keith Sawyer

A new study gives us the answer: None of the above. There’s no relationship between age and creative scientific contribution. The authors of the study analyzed 2,856 physicists, working from 1893 to the present. They found that the best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It’s lots of hard work. The scientists who do the most experiments, and test the most hypotheses, are the ones with the big contributions. The researchers found that once they’d controlled for productivity, age doesn’t add any additional predictive power.

The researchers identified a second variable that’s related to scientific impact: They called it Q, and it includes intelligence, motivation, openness to ideas, ability to write well. Another surprise: The variable Q doesn’t change over your career. (Otherwise, you’d be back to the theory that age predicts creativity.)

Maria Popova

“In disputes upon moral or scientific points,” Arthur Martine counseled in his magnificent 1866 guide to the art of conversation, “let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.” Of course, this isn’t what happens most of the time when we argue, both online and off, but especially when we deploy the artillery of our righteousness from behind the comfortable shield of the keyboard. That form of “criticism” — which is really a menace of reacting rather than responding — is worthy of Mark Twain’s memorable remark that “the critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” But it needn’t be this way — there are ways to be critical while remaining charitable, of aiming not to “conquer” but to “come at truth,” not to be right at all costs but to understand and advance the collective understanding.

Craig Silverman

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

Mikhail Zinshteyn

Since the 1970s, a “doom loop” has pervaded higher education, writes Christopher Newfield in his new book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Newfield, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls this loop “privatization”—the hidden and overt ways that “business practices restructure teaching and research.”

It’s a cycle in which colleges spend more and more money chasing research projects, building luxury dorms and academic centers to attract wealthy students, and engaging in activities that compel them to compete against each other, rather than focus on their own students. Newfield says he saw this first-hand while serving on the University of California’s planning-and-budget committee.
One consequence, according to Newfield: After decades of public universities raising tuition, legislatures have learned to rely even more on tuition increases to enable them to cut funding for public higher education.

Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. “The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt,” he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business and less like a public good that all students can afford

Idle words

When John Allsopp invited me here, I told him how excited I was discuss a topic that’s been heavy on my mind: accountability in automated systems.

But then John explained that in order for the economics to work, and for it to make sense to fly me to Australia, there needed to actually be an audience.

So today I present to you my exciting new talk:

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email (PDF):

Our children all come into the world with similar bright eyes. For most of them, it takes more than their parents to pave the way and light a path for them. Thank you for being a part of our children’s community of support. We are living our name – One City – because of you. It truly does take a village to raise a child.

Because of you and our growing community of supporters, we made great
progress in our first year of operation. It was quite the journey to get to where we are today, but with hundreds of helping hearts and hands pitching in their time, money and expertise to help us move One City from an idea to a reality, we were able to achieve many awesome milestones with our children, team, families and school.

At the same time, as with any new project, our pathway to success hasn’t always been easy or smooth. The development, opening and first year of One City was not without its challenges. In this report, we decided to do something different than you might typically see in an annual report. As an investor in One City, we want you to know about our accomplishments and how we are doing. We want you to know where we are succeeding, what we are learning, what our challenges are, and how we are addressing them. We also want you and others to learn with us: to learn about the development and operation of our preschool and the unique program and revenue model we are implementing.

One City Institute for Early Learning:

A Professional Development Seminar for
Parents, Teachers and Community Educators

Presented by
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings
Kellner Distinguished Professor of Urban Education
Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, December 1, 2016 5:45pm to 7:30pm
Lincoln Elementary School
909 Sequoia Trail, Madison

Steve Denning

Why are established organizations listing towards reliability and exploitation? Perhaps the clearest explanation came from Nicholas Colin, Associate Professor in business strategy, Université Paris-Dauphine, who pointed to the shifting power relationships between workers, executives, shareholders and customers.
 
 In the 1960s, Colin explained, workers were in a strong position. But in the 1970s, the situation changed. Capital was both more mobile and more concentrated and could now exert pressure on corporations and obtain higher returns over shorter periods.

Matt Mencarini:

The affected database was accessed on Sunday and was taken offline within 24 hours of the hack, according to a university statement. The database contained about 400,000 records, but the university said records for only 449 people were confirmed to have been accessed.

University spokesman Jason Cody said the hacker or hackers sent an email to the university and “there was an attempt to extort money.” He added that the university didn’t pay any money and didn’t lose access to any affected records.

Cody said the email helped the university identify the breach and that he isn’t sure if there was additional communication from the hacker or hackers.

Betsy Russell

In U.S. history, only 157 electors have been “faithless” electors, failing to vote for the candidate their state endorsed.

Sixty-three of those came when Democratic nominee Horace Greeley died after the election in 1872 but before the electoral college convened; those 63 abstained.

The most recent incident of a faithless elector came in 2004, when one Minnesota elector voted for the same candidate for both president and vice president.

Sue Shellenbarger

Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find.

Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.

Reading skills are obviously important.

Andrew McGill:

A critique is most devastating when it is true. The American journalistic class has certainly diverged sharply from the country it covers. In 1960, nearly a third of reporters and editors had never attended a single year of college; in 2015, only 8.3 percent could say the same, according to Census figures extracted with the help of the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS project. That year 46 percent of adults 25 and older nationwide had never attended a university.

james Altucher

The Flesch-Kincaid score determines what grade level you are writing. If your score is 10, you are writing at a 10th grade reading level. If your score is 12, you are writing at a 12th grade level. And so on.

The F-K score is calculated by words per sentence (lower is better), syllables per word (lower is better), and a few other factors.

Good sales writers aim for as low a level as possible. Anything greater than 8 is considered bad sales writing. People get fired over it.

Tomi Mester

In the last few years I spent a significant time with reading books about Data Science. I found these 7 books the best. These together are a very valuable source of learning the basics. It drives you through everything, you need to know.
Though they are very enjoyable, none of these is light reading. So if you decided to go with them, allocate some time and energy. It is worth it! If you combine this knowledge with the free practical data courses, that I wrote about earlier, it’s already a good-enough level for an entry level Data Scientist position. (In my opinion, at least.)

Rick Seltzer:

Unfunded pension liabilities are higher than capital-related debt at the country’s public universities, according to a report Moody’s Investors Service issued Friday.

Moody’s said adjusted net pension liabilities will represent more than 60 percent of total adjusted debt by the end of the 2017 fiscal year. Unfunded pension liabilities totaled more than $183 billion across the sector after two straight years of investment returns below actuarial assumptions and after contributions to funds have remained weak.

Currently, pension expenses are just 3 percent of universities’ reported expenses, Moody’s said. But it anticipated pension expenses rising along with liabilities, putting more pressure on university finances. Moody’s also predicted that some states will shift pension burdens onto universities by lowering allocations to pay for other operating expenses. Certain states that currently make some or all employer pension contributions on behalf of universities are at risk. Moody’s pointed to Illinois and New Jersey as having substantial unfunded pension liabilities and budget imbalances, while Oklahoma and West Virginia are under budget pressure because of low energy prices.

Stephen B. Presser:

It was lonely being a Donald Trump supporter in the legal academy. Of my thousands of colleagues teaching law in this country, I don’t think more than a few dozen believed that he would have made a better president than Hillary Clinton, and not more than a handful of us were willing to go public with our support.

It has always been a risk to be a Republican teaching in a law school, where many teachers see a thin line between support for the GOP and bigotry or insanity. And yet, enough Americans liked what they saw in Trump to give him a smashing Electoral College victory.

How did it come about that law professors grew so out of touch with much of America?

To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a law professor everything is a problem in jurisprudence. Accordingly, it’s my guess that the legal academy, over the past 80 years or so, began to wander too far from common sense, or, to be more precise, to depart from the essentials of the rule of law. Law professors forgot the most important notion that undergirds our legal system — the basic principle endorsed by the framers, that ours is a government of laws, not men (or women).

Cool Antarctica:

For some time I have had a section on this site where people who have worked in Antarctica in the past can register their details to find old friends, the links to the sections are in the margin to the right.

There are a couple of recurring themes I see from people who post their details looking for old friends they went south with other than wanting to re-make contacts.

1 – The first is that many have lost pictures that they used to have or simply didn’t have many in the first place and would like some for themselves or to show to friends and especially family who came along long after they left Antarctica.

Do you have pictures from your time in Antarctica that you would like to share that are maybe languishing in a drawer or cupboard somewhere? I am happy to assemble such pictures and publish them by location and date on CoolAntarctica.com (it will give me a reason to rearrange the ones I already have). If you can do this, then please send me scans that are large as possible (up to max 4000px in the largest dimension) as jpgs. I can clean them up to some degree (the cleaner they are to start with the better), adjust horizons and balance colour etc. before publication. The easiest way to send them is via DropBox, let me know when you are ready and I will create a folder and send you the link by email to upload your pictures, alternatively, they could be sent by email or dvd. Information with the pictures is also of great use, as much as possible. I can also scan a limited number of slides, though this will involve posting them here and back again.

Doug Laney

#Uber just updated its Terms of Use. It has unlimited rights to modify and sell your data. uber.com/legal/other/US… #monetization #infonomics

Jason Kint

Verizon has topped itself by playing Russian roulette with consumer trust in an attempt to compete with the advertising businesses of Google and Facebook. In an email announcement last Sunday night to select subscribers, Verizon signaled how it intends to compete with those two powerhouses, outlining its plan to combine offline information, such as postal address, email address and device type, with AOL browser cookies, Apple and Google advertising IDs, and their own unique identifier header. Coupled with all of their customers’ browsing history and app usage, this mass of customer data will make for a rich competitive product to Facebook and Google.

Glenn Greenwald

LAST WEEK, A MAJOR censorship controversy erupted when Facebook began deleting all posts containing the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese “Napalm Girl” on the ground that it violated the company’s ban on “child nudity.” Facebook even deleted a post from the prime minister of Norway, who posted the photograph in protest of the censorship. As outrage spread, Facebook ultimately reversed itself — acknowledging “the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time” — but this episode illustrated many of the dangers I’ve previously highlighted in having private tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google become the arbiters of what we can and cannot see.

more.

Stephanie Saul

When it comes to predicting how President-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration will affect America’s schools and universities, education experts say they are struggling to read the tea leaves.

“The fundamental issue is that nobody really knows what the Trump administration is about” on education, said Frederick M. Hess, a conservative education policy expert. At a panel discussion in Washington last week, he joked that Mr. Trump’s trademark educational achievement thus far, creating the controversial Trump University, placed him in history alongside another president, Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia.

“He’s been all over the map on a number of these questions,” Mr. Hess, the director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, said during a panel discussion on Wednesday at the Shanker Institute, an education nonprofit.

Shannon Najmabadi and Katherine Knott

ampuses tend to be viewed as enclaves of liberalism — bubbles or oases, depending on your view, set apart from the rest of America.

In the counties that are home to public flagship universities, only nine favored Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton, according to a Chronicle analysis of voting data. In the 49 counties included in the analysis, Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Trump, on average, by about 18 percentage points. In counties with a public flagship, the percentage of voters favoring Mrs. Clinton was 11 points, on average, higher than her statewide percentage.

Jerry pournelle

The first is worth considering, but I would suggest it should be considered by the states, not the Federal Government, which ought to abandon the notion of telling the states how to educate their children. Wise states would then delegate that responsibility to local schools and locally elected school boards. Most would not adopt your proposed curriculum, but a few might. It would be worthwhile establishing such a school as a voluntary magnet in the District of Columbia (Congress certainly has that power) as example for the states to consider. There is no chance that the Congress would impose such a classic curriculum on all schools everywhere, and such a Federal imposition would rightly be considered an act of tyranny. Of course you know that.

Dictating to everyone because the government knows what’s best is not constitutional even when what is dictated may be wise and certainly better that current practice, and would not have the consent of the governed.

Eugene Volokh:

I think having more legal immigration to America is important to continued American greatness. (I say this as an immigrant myself, but I think non-immigrants have reason to take the same view.) But if immigration means reduction in our rights as Americans — the right to fly American flags, whether as a sign of patriotism or as an expression of sentiments critical of immigration, the right to own guns, or other rights — then those costs to freedom may well outweigh the benefits that immigration might provide.

If our leaders make clear that they will act boldly to defend our rights, whether against threats from recent immigrants (or the children of recent immigrants) or from the native-born, then we might feel that our rights will indeed remain secure. But if their reaction is to urge people to refrain from exercising their rights, “out of an abundance of caution” — on the theory that flying our country’s flags might yield “personal confrontation or property damage” because it “could be misinterpreted in light of the divisive election and anxiety like that expressed by Nebraska Latinos in a recent news story” — then we have legitimate cause to worry about the consequences of immigration for our freedoms.

Quantum Bits

New information about conditions that can cause Earth’s tectonic plates to sink into the earth has been released in a new report.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Saint Louis University researchers report new information about conditions that can cause Earth’s tectonic plates to sink.

John Encarnacion, Ph.D., professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at SLU, and Timothy Keenan, a graduate student, are experts in tectonics and hard rock geology, and use geochemistry and geochronology coupled with field observations to study tectonic plate movement.

Joel Mokyr

How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers and other erudite scholars with endless explanations. One way of looking at the question is by examining something basic, and arguably essential: the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress.

Such a belief may seem self-evident today, but most people in the more-remote past believed that history moved in some kind of cycle or followed a path that was determined by higher powers. The idea that humans should and could work consciously to make the world a better place for themselves and for generations to come is by and large one that emerged in the two centuries between Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton. Of course, just believing that progress could be brought about is not enough—one must bring it about. The modern world began when people resolved to do so.

Robert Turner:

At the risk of offending 469 University faculty colleagues and students who protest University President Teresa Sullivan’s practice of quoting University founder Thomas Jefferson “in light of Jefferson’s owning of slaves and other racist beliefs,” I would submit another Jefferson quote:

“This institution [the University] will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Jefferson did not want to suppress “error,” but to allow competing claims to the truth to do battle in the intellectual marketplace of ideas. We call that “academic freedom.”

Facts affirm the wisdom of Jefferson’s vision in this instance. Censoring Sullivan’s references to Jefferson would impoverish our students and faculty alike, and — as is so often the case with censorship advocates — it is premised upon ignorance.

Justin Jouvenal:

Sgt. Charles Coleman popped out of his police SUV and scanned a trash-strewn street popular with the city’s homeless, responding to a crime that hadn’t yet happened.

It wasn’t a 911 call that brought the Los Angeles Police Department officer to this spot, but a whirring computer crunching years of crime data to arrive at a prediction: An auto theft or burglary would probably occur near here on this particular morning.

Hoping to head it off, Coleman inspected a line of ramshackle RVs used for shelter by the homeless, roused a man sleeping in a pickup truck and tapped on the side of a shack made of plywood and tarps.

“How things going, sweetheart?” he asked a woman who ambled out. Coleman listened sympathetically as she described how she was nearly raped at knifepoint months earlier, saying the area was “really tough” for a woman.

Soon, Coleman was back in his SUV on his way to fight the next pre-crime. Dozens of other LAPD officers were doing the same at other spots, guided by the crime prognostication system known as PredPol.

bbc

America is in the grip of a heroin and prescription-drug epidemic. More Americans – almost 50,000 per year – now die from drugs than from guns or in car accidents.

JR Finkel

Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided “microdata,” meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.

George Will:

Academia should consider how it contributed to, and reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case, tenured faculty and cosseted students.

As “bias-response teams” fanned out across campuses, an incident report was filed about a University of Northern Colorado student who wrote “free speech matters” on one of 680 “#languagematters” posters that cautioned against politically incorrect speech. Catholic DePaul University denounced as “bigotry” a poster proclaiming “Unborn Lives Matter.” Bowdoin College provided counseling to students traumatized by the cultural appropriation committed by a sombrero-and-tequila party. Oberlin College students said they were suffering breakdowns because schoolwork was interfering with their political activism. California State University at Los Angeles established “healing” spaces for students to cope with the pain caused by a political speech delivered three months earlier . Indiana University experienced social-media panic (“Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight”) because a Catholic priest in a white robe, with a rope-like belt and rosary beads, was identified as someone “in a KKK outfit holding a whip.”

A doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Santa Barbara uses “feminist methodologies” to understand how Girl Scout cookie sales “reproduce hegemonic gender roles.” The journal GeoHumanities explores how pumpkins reveal “racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.” Another journal’s article analyzes “the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers.” A Vassar College lecture “theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine.”

Alan Borsuk:

We need to talk about Milwaukee College Prep. In fact, however much people have talked about this set of four charter schools over the years, we need to talk about Milwaukee College Prep more and more — and learn more and more from what the success of these schools.

There was an amazing fact within the mountain of school reports cards released by the state Department of Public Instruction on Thursday, namely this:

Five schools in Milwaukee were given the five-star top rating, also known as “significantly succeeds expectations.”

One of them was Cooper School, a Milwaukee Public Schools kindergarten through eighth-grade school at 5143 S. 21st St. Cooper is a very good school with a praiseworthy track record of striving to get better in innovative ways, including drawing on outside help that has been beneficial. In 2015-’16, Cooper had 421 students, 60% of them “economically disadvantaged” and 22% having disabilities. Half of the students were white, a third Hispanic.

Locally, Madison continues with it’s non diverse K-12 structure.

Jon Hamilton

There’s new evidence that excessive screen time early in life can change the circuits in a growing brain.

Scientists disagree, though, about whether those changes are helpful, or just cause problems. Both views emerged during the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego this week.

The debate centered on a study of young mice exposed to six hours daily of a sound and light show reminiscent of a video game. The mice showed “dramatic changes everywhere in the brain,” said Jan-Marino Ramirez, director of the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Will Fitzhugh:

It is important to consider what might happen if educators, consultants, EduPundits, etc., found out that our secondary students are capable, if not prevented, of reading complete History books on their own, and not only that, they can, if not advised against it in time, write long serious History research papers (average 8,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography) on their own as well.

At first, this might seem a fine way for high school students to learn History and to improve their academic expository writing abilities. But this simplistic early impression fails to take into account the potential harm to all our educational efforts. Only think! They are choosing their own topics to study! They are writing based on their own research in History, and not waiting for our ELA prompts!

What real damage this could cause to the Social Studies and Literacy empires in American education! In fact, it now appears there is a quarterly journal in existence which publishes such exemplary History research papers by students (from 41 countries since 1987), and this journal could, if we don’t act to prevent it, actually appear in secondary classrooms and even in the homes of students, to allow them to read the exemplary work of their peers!

Our defenses are wide and strong enough to stop this sort of thing from happening, except in a few isolated cases. We can refuse to allow such exemplary student writing in History into our classrooms. We can say it is not really Social Studies. We can say it is not really our Curriculum. We can say it is not really teacher-directed. We can say it is not really personal writing, creative writing or the five-paragraph essay.

If colleges are asking for 500-word personal essays from their applicants, why would we want students to be distracted, even as Seniors, by 8,000-word History research papers by their peers? The risk exists that reading such work could tempt some of our students to try their hand as Autodidacts! And it need not be pointed out what, if that practice became widespread, this could do to the foundations of the entire educational enterprise in this country. Beware! And Defend!

Kim Zetter

APPLE EMERGED AS a guardian of user privacy this year after fighting FBI demands to help crack into San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The company has gone to great lengths to secure customer data in recent years, by implementing better encryption for all phones and refusing to undermine that encryption.

But private information still escapes from Apple products under some circumstances. The latest involves the company’s online syncing service iCloud.

Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft has found that Apple’s mobile devices automatically send a user’s call history to the company’s servers if iCloud is enabled — but the data gets uploaded in many instances without user choice or notification.

Anna Diamond:

On Thursday in South Korea, hundreds of thousands of high-school seniors sat down to take the Suneung, or the College Scholastic Ability Test. As students walked to the exam centers, well-wishers handed out “yut”—a type of taffy and a sign of good luck, so that test-takers would “stick” to the university they want. Some of the students’ parents prayed at churches and temples; some may have even waited, pacing outside the gates, while their children endured the eight-hour test. Businesses delayed opening to keep traffic off the streets, and planes paused takeoffs during the English-language listening section of the test. For students running late, local police offered taxi services. It’s as if the entire nation of South Korea is focused on getting students to the test and making sure they do as well as they can.

Edwin Rios

In the last week of January, when cities around the nation took a ballpark tally of their street populations, they counted a total of 549,928 people living in some form of homelessness. And while that’s hardly good news, it represents a 3 percent drop from the previous January. However, 15 states and the District of Columbia saw increases in the number of people lacking permanent shelter.

The new figures, released Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in its annual report to Congress, mark the seventh consecutive year that homelessness has declined nationally. Sixty-eight percent of the affected people were staying in transitional housing and emergency shelters. The number experiencing chronic homelessness, defined as people with a disability who have been consistently homeless for at least a year, dropped 7 percent from 2015 to 2016—and 35 percent since 2007.

Mark Lilla:

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

Joel Kotkin

Given its almost lock-step media backing, support from oligarchs everywhere, and Trump’s self-destructive lack of self-control, the Democratic establishment will likely prevail at the election. And it will use this as a perfect opportunity to turn more Americans into effective wards of the state. It will finance its agenda at the cost of the middle class while the hedge funders, tech oligarchs and real-estate speculators continue to feed at the trough.
However, the forces stirred up and tapped by Trump will not go away anytime soon, even if he loses. What the rebellion now needs, more than anything, is a messenger like Ronald Reagan in 1980, who appealed to earlier resentments but with a fierce sense of discipline and decorum. Some day, the swagger, arrogance and manipulation of the united ruling classes may have to confront a messenger who, unlike Trump, can make a more convincing case against them. Those who laugh today at Trump and his ‘stupid’ supporters may not be so jocular that day.

Jeff Guo:

For those who doubt that racial resentment lingers in this nation, Asian Americans are a favorite talking point. The argument goes something like this: If “white privilege” is so oppressive — if the United States is so hostile toward its minorities — why do census figures show that Asian Americans out-earn everyone?

In a 2014 editorial, conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly pointed out that Asian household incomes were 20 percent higher than white household incomes on average. “So, do we have Asian privilege in America?” he asked. Of course not, he said. The real reason that Asians are “succeeding far more than African-Americans and even more than white Americans” is that “their families are intact and education is paramount,” he said.

Molly Beck:

John Matthews, former longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., called Evers a “hero” and said he deserves to be re-elected. He said Wisconsin “residents know of his advocacy for their children.”

“That said, I do worry that the far right and the corporations which want to privatize our public schools and make them for-profit private schools will spend millions in an attempt to defeat him,” Matthews said.

A spokeswoman for WEAC did not respond to a request for comment.

Pro-voucher group American Federation for Children’s political arm spent heavily on behalf of Republican candidates in legislative races this year.

An AFC official said the group has not made any decisions about the superintendent’s race, including whom to support and whether to spend money.

Evers declined to comment on the campaign.

“I have been focused on my budget and focused on several other issues that are important to the state and I haven’t paid attention to what any potential opponents are saying,” he said.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

James Astill:

Yet my children’s experience of school in America is in some ways as indifferent as their swimming classes are good, for the country’s elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff. According to the OECD’s latest international education rankings, American children are rated average at reading, below average at science, and poor at maths, at which they rank 27th out of 34 developed countries. At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at maths that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up.

This is not for lack of investment. America spends more on educating its children than all but a handful of rich countries. Nor is it due to high levels of inequality: the proportion of American children coming from under-privileged backgrounds is about par for the OECD. A better reason, in my snapshot experience of American schooling, is a frustrating lack of intellectual ambition for children to match the sporting ambition that is so excellently drummed into them in our local swimming pool and elsewhere.

My children’s elementary school, I should say, is one of America’s better ones, and in many ways terrific. It is orderly, friendly, well-provisioned and packed with the sparky offspring of high-achieving Washington, DC, commuters. Its teachers are diligent, approachable and exude the same relentless positivity as the swimming instructors. We feel fortunate to have them. Yet the contrast with the decent London state school from which we moved our eldest children is, in some ways, dispiriting.

After two years of school in England, our six-year-old was so far ahead of his American peers that he had to be bumped up a year, where he was also ahead. This was partly because American children start regular school at five, a year later than most British children; but it was also for more substantive reasons.

Related: Connected Math, Discovery Math and the Math Forum (audio and video).

Reading requires attention as well. (MTEL)

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results despite spending more than most, now around $18k per student.

And, National Council on teacher quality links are worth a look.

Charles Sahm:

Too often, folks like me in the “education reform” camp look solely to charter schools for examples of “what works” in education. But if one peruses the website SchoolGrades.org – a site launched by the Manhattan Institute (where I work) that uses a common benchmark to assess all public elementary and middle schools across the U.S. – one will find many good old-fashioned district schools among America’s best.

For example, P.S. 172, the Beacon School of Excellence, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn: 86 percent of its 600 pre-K-5th grade students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; yet according to SchoolGrades.org, it’s one of the top 10 schools in New York state.

By David Shepardson, Malathi Nayak and Julia Love

Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google faces a tougher regulatory landscape as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration looks poised to reverse Obama administration policies that often favored the internet giant in the company’s battles with telecoms and cable heavyweights, analysts say.

Google had close ties with outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, and its employees donated much more to defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton than to the Republican Trump.

In the most concrete sign yet that the tech policy balance may be tipping in favor of telecom firms ahead of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday halted action on contentious regulatory reform measures opposed by companies such as AT&T Inc (T.N) and CenturyLink Inc.(CTL.N)

Times-Dispatch

Anyone even casually familiar with Thomas Jefferson knows well the contradictions he lived and the numerous ways he fell short not only of 21st-century ideals but of his own — just like every other human being who has ever lived. Jefferson was a slaveholder and a bigot and a genius and one of the greatest figures in American history.

In response to the letter, Sullivan sensibly explained that quoting Jefferson “does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time, such as slavery and the exclusion of women and people of color from the university.” The point is blindingly obvious, and the necessity of its repetition does not speak well of the capacity for nuance of the letter’s signatories — some of whom, we suspect, at some point have approvingly cited other historical figures who also have feet of clay.

Ron French:

Dual enrollment is suffering growing pains. The popular program allows high schoolers to take college courses free, with the incentive that they will apply to a degree program. But opportunities still vary widely between counties, and credits earned come with strings attached at many Michigan universities.

There is no state office assuring that dual-enrollment courses align with requirements at the state’s universities. And because Michigan’s 15 public universities are autonomous, their policies on accepting dual-enrollment credits vary.

Dual enrollment has benefited thousands of Michigan students by giving them an early taste of college and, in many cases, allowed them to earn credits without paying tuition. But frustrations remain for students and families, who often find out later that the credits either aren’t accepted at the university they enroll in, or are counted only as general credits rather than applying toward a major.

Miranda Spivack:

For more than three decades, Nick Maravell and his family farmed on a 20-acre plot in suburban Maryland, tucked between the Potomac River and megamansions in Potomac, a tony suburb that is home to powerful lobbyists, government contractors and other wealthy families.

Nick’s Organic Farm, a relaxed place where customers would stop by to pick up some vegetables or simply drop in for a chat, was a tenant on land owned by the county public school system. But one day in 2011, Maravell got some bad news. Montgomery County’s top elected official and his aides had been negotiating in secret to get the school board to kick out Maravell’s farm and rent the site to a private soccer club.

“It caught everybody by surprise,” said Curt Uhre, a neighbor.

Residents who cherished the farm quickly rallied to Maravell’s side. Worried about traffic and the potential loss of open space, they began researching the county’s proposal to convert the farm to soccer fields.

During the legal fight, they also began learning about Maryland’s open records law. Used frequently by journalists and business interests, the state’s public records law allowed them to seek government documents — memos, officials’ calendars and other items — that might offer clues to how the deal was done or hints about who had been speaking with whom, when the plans were hatched and why.

Matthew Reade & Ross Steinberg

The Claremont Independent has learned that a concerned individual has lodged a complaint with the IRS in response to Pomona College’s promotion and funding of an anti-Trump rally.

As the Independent reported this week, Pomona College’s Draper Center for Community Partnerships may have run afoul of federal non-profit regulations by reimbursing transportation costs to and from a rally against Donald Trump in Los Angeles on November 9th. Draper Center staff also promoted the event on Facebook and organized bus transportation for students who wished to attend.

As a 501(c)(3) educational institution, Pomona College is prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity with tax-exempt dollars. If an investigation is launched, it could lead to the revocation of Pomona College’s tax-exempt status, among other possible sanctions.

John Markoff

An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University.
 
 The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like #Clinton.
 
 Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions, said Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report. If you were looking for a real debate of the issues, you weren’t going to find it with a chatbot.

Related: Fake web traffic.

Stephen Rohde

THE EXPANSION of worldwide means of communications has been unprecedented. On October 29, 1969, the very first message was sent from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute. A December 1969 map of what would eventually become the internet showed a total of four computers. In August 1981, there were just 213 internet hosts.

The first-ever website was created in 1991.
As of 2015, there are approximately three billion internet users. There are about two billion smartphones across the world, which is projected to reach four billion by 2020. It is estimated that it would take about six million years to watch all the videos crossing global networks in a single month. Were each Facebook user counted as an inhabitant, Facebook would have a larger population than China.

Philip Ball

Science has been peculiarly resistant to self-examination. During the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, for instance, scientists disdained sociological studies of their culture. Yet there is now a growing trend for scientists to use the quantitative methods of data analysis and theoretical modelling to try to work out how, and how well, science works — often with depressing conclusions. Why are these kinds of studies being produced, and what is their value?

Take a study published on 10 November1 by psychologists Andrew Higginson of the University of Exeter and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, UK. It considers how scientists can maximize their ‘fitness’, or career success, in a simplified ecosystem that allows them to invest varying amounts of time and effort into exploratory studies. The study finds that in an ecosystem that rewards a constant stream of high-profile claims, researchers will rationally opt for corner-cutting strategies, such as small sample sizes. These save on the effort required for each study, but they raise the danger that new findings will not prove robust or repeatable.

Danielle Dreilinger:

Louisiana’s overall school performance score dipped this year. The state released the annual capstone results Thursday (Nov. 17). Louisiana as a whole fell from a B to a C, losing about 6 points on a 150-point scale — not a good direction in a state that’s already well behind the nation.

Not only do these scores matter for community pride and the desirability of a neighborhood among parents, but they determine whether charter schools stay open — which affects almost all of New Orleans — and whether traditional schools are subject to state intervention.

Colleen Flaherty:

Oberlin College has dismissed Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition, following an investigation into anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements she made on social media — including her assertion that ISIS is really an arm of Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies and that Israel was behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

The college initially affirmed Karega’s right to academic freedom when her inflammatory statements surfaced earlier this year, but placed her on leave in August, pending an investigation into her conduct. Beyond concerns about anti-Semitism, which fit into larger complaints about escalating anti-Jewish rhetoric on campus, Karega’s case has raised questions about whether academic freedom covers statements that have no basis in fact.

Oberlin’s Board of Trustees ultimately voted to dismiss Karega for “failing to meet the academic standards that Oberlin requires of its faculty and failing to demonstrate intellectual honesty,” the college said in a statement released late Tuesday. The vote followed “extensive consideration and a comprehensive review of recommendations from multiple faculty committees,” and from President Marvin Krislov.

Doug Erickson:

All 16 Dane County school districts earned three or more stars on the state’s 2015-16 report cards, meaning they met or exceeded expectations for educating children.

The top county score went to Waunakee, the only one of the 16 to earn all five stars. That placed it in the top category: “significantly exceeds expectations.” Only 53 other districts in the state out of 424 earned that highest honor.

This is the first year the report cards used a five-star rating system. The stars correspond to one of five categories: “fails to meet expectations,” “meets few expectations,” “meets expectations,” “exceeds expectations” and “significantly exceeds expectations.”

The Madison School District earned three stars. Its score, the lowest of the 16 county districts, placed it in the middle of the “meets expectations” category.

The report cards were released Thursday by the state Department of Public Instruction. In addition to each district getting a score, individual schools were rated.

Kurt Wagner:

A traditional college education is expensive. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner also thinks it might be overvalued.

“Historically here, there’s been a tremendous amount of weight that’s been given to four-year university degrees and not nearly enough weight in my opinion is given to vocational training facilities and vocational training certifications,” Weiner said Tuesday at Recode’s Code Enterpriseconference in San Francisco.

Weiner was discussing the ever-widening educational gap between two-year vocational programs and traditional four-year degrees. Quite frankly, he believes that specific skills, not diplomas, need to be valued more in today’s workforce.

Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott:

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

Joanne Jacobs

Unions targeted charters because they’re so good, he concludes. “The better the charter, the bigger the threat.”

Educators fought to defend the premise that schools can’t make a difference for kids in poverty, writes Whitmire.

When a charter operator such as Brooke Charter Schools, which serves a poor and minority student population, turns its students into scholars who rival the white and Asian students attending amply funded public schools in the suburbs along the Route 128 corridor, the question has to be asked: If Brooke can do it, why not others?
The Massachusetts Teachers Association started its anti-charter campaign seven months before the election, focusing on funding rather than school quality, Whitmire writes. Neither unions nor superintendents “can afford to lose the poverty argument. That risks losing everything.”

Eduwonk’s Andrew Rotherham asks how much the unions spent in Massachusetts to “protect jobs and keep poor black kids bottled up in crappy schools?” What if they’d spent that money “in, oh I don’t know, Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania on politics there?”

Sue Shellenbarger:

Moving back in with your parents in your 20s is one thing. But what about when you’re over 40?

More people in their 40s and beyond are moving in with their aging parents because of a financial or health setback. “This is kind of a hidden group,” says Steven Wallace, associate director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. They expect to be well-established in a career by midlife and thinking ahead toward retirement; then lightning strikes, in the form of a job loss, injury or illness.

Living with Mom and Dad at midlife comes with a heavy stigma and may force painful adjustments in family roles. Deborah Graves moved in with her 87-year-old mother, Jacqueline Graves, in Flossmoor, Ill., last year after a layoff from her 20-year job as a clinical laboratory technician and an unsuccessful job search. Now, she is juggling new demands on her time, including college courses in medical coding, a 20-hour workweek in a department store and driving her mother to medical appointments. She cooks one or two meals a day for her mother—a task “I wish I didn’t have to do,” says Ms. Graves, 58 years old.

Muhammad Ikram, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Suranga Seneviratne, Mohamed Ali Kaafar and Vern Paxson:

Millions of users worldwide resort to mobile VPN clients to either circumvent censorship or to access geo-blocked con- tent, and more generally for privacy and security purposes. In practice, however, users have little if any guarantees about the corresponding security and privacy settings, and perhaps no practical knowledge about the entities accessing their mo- bile traffic.

In this paper we provide a first comprehensive analysis of 283 Android apps that use the Android VPN permission, which we extracted from a corpus of more than 1.4 million apps on the Google Play store. We perform a number of passive and active measurements designed to investigate a wide range of security and privacy features and to study the behavior of each VPN-based app. Our analysis includes in- vestigation of possible malware presence, third-party library embedding, and traffic manipulation, as well as gauging user perception of the security and privacy of such apps. Our ex- periments reveal several instances of VPN apps that expose users to serious privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as use of insecure VPN tunneling protocols, as well as IPv6 and DNS traffic leakage. We also report on a number of apps actively performing TLS interception. Of particular con- cern are instances of apps that inject JavaScript programs for tracking, advertising, and for redirecting e-commerce traffic to external partners.

Valerie Strauss

If you listen to the school reform debate these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that public schools across the board are failing students and that schools that are struggling can only improve if they fire all of their staff, become a charter school or let the state take them over. It’s just not so.

This is clear in a project called the Schools of Opportunity, launched a few years ago by educators who sought to highlight public high schools that actively seek to close opportunity gaps through 11 research-proven practices and not standardized test scores (which are more a measure of socioeconomic status than anything else).

The project assesses how well schools provide health and psychological support for students, judicious and fair discipline policies, high-quality teacher mentoring programs, outreach to the community, effective student and faculty support systems, and broad and enriched curriculum. Schools submit applications explaining why they believe their school should be recognized

Molly Beck:

Over all, Evers is seeking about a $707 million increase in spending including a $525 million increase in general school aid and other changes that would comprise a funding formula overhaul. The request seeks a 2.7 percent increase in overall spending in the 2017-18 school year and a 5.4 percent increase in the 2018-19 school year.

The request marks the fourth time Evers has asked the Legislature to change the state’s funding formula.

Part of the overhaul would eliminate a special funding stream to pay for students living in high poverty and factor more money into the main funding formula for the same purpose.

The budget also asks for increases in state-imposed revenue caps and would set a minimum amount of money the state sends to schools, regardless of how wealthy the district is. Each district would receive a minimum of $3,000 per student under the request.

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Tim Mak

For nearly eight years, President Obama massively expanded his authority on national security issues: on the prosecution of whistleblowers, secret surveillance courts, wars without congressional authorization, and drone campaigns without public oversight. During this time the left, with the exception of some civil liberties groups, remained largely silent.

But now this entire apparatus is being handed over to Donald Trump, a president with a penchant for authoritarianism, who will no doubt point to Obama as precedent to justify the continuation, and perhaps broadening, of these national security excesses.

Track
Changes

This is a big question that often gets asked about technology giants. It’s important to understand that “media” here is not just “thing that delivers news and entertainment” but rather “corporation with primary mission of providing a revenue-driving platform that can deliver information and advertising to an audience.”

To technology companies, being a “media company” is basically a death sentence. Look at Google: It’s an advertising company dependent on people publishing web pages on the Internet, but actually look over here at Alphabet, at these self-driving cars and immense opportunities. Media companies have unions and ombudswomen and declining growth. Technology companies fund trips to Mars. So, as Nick Carr wrote in September:

Caleb Taylor

They’re coddling students. They’re overreacting to a Presidential election result that displeases them. And some, I assume, are good people. I’m talking, of course, about the administrators at the UALR Bowen School of Law. Are you a budding legal scholar distraught over the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump? Well, Bowen School of Law has on-campus counseling available for that.

Bowen Dean Michael Schwartz notified students today that “this election season was the most upsetting, most painful, most disturbing election season of my lifetime” and that “extra on-campus counseling services” would be available for those who “feel upset.”

newsbusters:

The Media Research Center (MRC) announces the findings of a new post-election poll on what actual voters thought about the media’s influence on the 2016 presidential race. The MRC/YouGov poll was conducted on November 9 and 10

Kate Bellows:

Several groups on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.

In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”

Some professors from the Psychology Department — and other academic departments — did not agree with the use of this quote. Their letter to Sullivan argued that in light of Jefferson’s owning of slaves and other racist beliefs, she should refrain from quoting Jefferson in email communications.

“We would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it,” the letter read. “For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotations in these e-mails undermines the message of unity, equality and civility that you are attempting to convey.”

Glenn Reynolds

One of the more amusing bits of fallout from last week’s election has been the safe-space response of many colleges and universities to the election of the “wrong” candidate. But on closer examination, this response isn’t really amusing. In fact, it’s downright mean.

Trump’s substantial victory, when most progressives expected a Hillary landslide, came as a shock to many. That shock seems to have been multiplied in academe, where few people seem to know any Trump supporters — or, at least, any Trump supporters who’ll admit to it.

The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food and play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough [sic], positive card-making, Legos and bubbles with your fellow law students.” (Embarrassed by the attention, UM Law scrubbed the announcement from its website, perhaps concerned that people would wonder if its graduates would require Legos and bubbles in the event of stressful litigation.)

Matt Apuzzo & Michael Schmidt

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data service and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours.
 
 Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.
 
 International customers and users of disposable or prepaid phones are the people most affected by the software. But the scope is unclear. The Chinese company that wrote the software, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, says its code runs on more than 700 million phones, cars and other smart devices. One American phone manufacturer, BLU Products, said that 120,000 of its phones had been affected and that it had updated the software to eliminate the feature.

Walter Dellinger:

First and foremost, he will have been chosen by the constitutional rules currently in place. This alone is a source of legitimacy. Moreover, we simply do not and cannot know who would have won a national popular-vote contest had one been held. In such a case, both candidates would have run fundamentally different campaigns, emphasizing different issues and appearing frequently in states like California, New York, and Texas. Who can know how people in those states would have responded had they been as informed by exposure to the candidates and their ads as citizens in Wisconsin and Ohio? One cannot persuasively impeach the electoral vote with a national popular-vote number that was wholly irrelevant to the campaign that was actually run. The hypothetical question of who would have won a national popular-vote contest if one had been held is thus completely unanswerable. (One note: It seems odd to hear commentators from England, Canada, or other parliamentary countries criticize the electoral-vote system when, in their own countries, it sometimes happens that one party receives more total votes nationally for its parliamentary candidates, yet the other party with fewer total votes elects more members and thus chooses the nation’s prime minister.)

and: via a kind reader.

Clay Routledge, via a kind reader email:

Administrators at the University of Florida recently notified students that a 24-hour counseling hotline is available to anyone who feels offended by Halloween costumes. Other colleges, in an attempt to pre-empt the psychological threat of offensive costumes, have created and distributed Halloween costume guidelines to help students make appropriate choices if they decide to dress up.

The University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, for example, encouraged students to attend a special seminar titled “Is Your Halloween Costume Racist?” while Tufts University went a step further, sending a letter to students in fraternities and sororities indicating they could face investigation (by university police) and punishment for making the wrong costume choice.

Of course, this issue is not about Halloween. More and more colleges are creating “bias response teams” that students can contact if they feel they have been victimized by microaggressions. There is an increasing demand for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students not from physical danger, but from ideas, course material, and viewpoints they may find offensive. Conservative speakers are being banned from campus because students claim to find them threatening. Professors are being investigated for not being sufficiently politically correct in class, failing to predict what material might trigger students, or refusing to use gender neutral pronouns that are not even part of the English language.

John Thompson

Although probably not one of the main reasons for the 2016 Democratic defeat, education reform could have cost Clinton electoral votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Because it is the policy that I most fully understand, I will describe education reform as a metaphor for how “the Billionaires Boys Club” and the Obama administration pushed technocratic policies that helped open the door for Trump’s victory.

First, then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan staffed his agency with Gates Foundation wonks and imposed a set of Gov. Scott Walker-lite, anti-union, anti-teacher corporate school reforms. Second, the Democratic Party remained on the sidelines during the campaigns to resist Right to Work and recall Walker and Koch-funded legislators. As they should be, deep-pocket donors and the Ten Percent, are always quick to open their wallets in support of liberal social issues, however, they seemed oblivious to the need to support blue collar workers and teachers.

Nick Anderson:

On election night, some emailed an economics professor, Steven Berry, to ask if he could postpone a midterm exam scheduled the next morning. He agreed to make the exam optional — with additional stakes put onto the final exam for anyone who wanted to skip the midterm. Most ended up taking the test Wednesday.

University officials said academic work must go on. They said they would not issue exemptions, known as “dean’s excuses,” granting students a temporary reprieve from testing requirements because of postelection trauma.

“Dean’s excuses are not designed to respond to reactions, howsoever deeply felt or unsettling, to an event such as a national election,” the dean of academic affairs, Mark Schenker, told the Yale Daily News. Instead, Schenker said, students who need help could turn to the university’s mental health and counseling services.

Some found solace in other ways.

Evan Osnos:

“What has gone awry in American politics is not purely that we’ve got issues with the mechanics of democracy,” he said. “Over the past two generations, the idea of education being about teaching people how to engage in public affairs has been lost. At one point, the core curriculum at the college level was focused on: How do you get ready to be an active citizen in America? How do we make democracy endure? Today, education is almost exclusively thought of in terms of career preparation. That’s what we’ve lost.

Pamela Cotant:

Kaleb Villalba, a fifth-grader at St. James Catholic School, who was dressed in a red dress shirt and a red, white and blue tie, said it was important to give thanks to veterans for “giving everyone else liberty.”

He was one of the fourth- through eighth-grade students from the Madison school — many dressed in red, white and blue — who sang songs and gave cards to veterans at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Friday in honor of Veterans Day. The cards were made by the school’s elementary students with help from their buddies who presented them.

In addition, students and the veterans observed a moment of silence for fallen soldiers.

Frank Bayer, who lives outside of Cross Plains and served in Vietnam for 14 months, said he was touched when a handful of kids gave him cards.

Trisha Powell Crain

Test scores are up in small ways across grade levels in Alabama. State Superintendent Michael Sentance on Thursday pointed to schools and districts showing high levels of growth, praising educators for the “hard things” they do to improve achievement.

But it’s clear Sentance believes Alabama’s students can achieve at much higher levels, telling board members “as the Chicago Cubs demonstrated, even if you’re at the bottom, you can eventually reach the top.”

Board member Mary Scott Hunter quickly replied, “But we’re not going to wait a hundred years,” referring to the time it took for the Cubs to win the World Series.

Bruce Vielmetti:

A state lawmaker said Saturday he would introduce a bill to allow licensed gun owners to carry weapons on the grounds of private schools, and he expects to advance similar bills aimed at public K-12 schools and college campuses.

State Rep. Jesse Kremer (R-Kewaskum) said the state’s concealed carry law, which restricts permit holders from taking their weapons on school grounds, needs to be adjusted to match the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, which includes an exception for those with CCW licenses. He said the effort is targeting private schools first because “it’s an easier lift” politically.

Kremer also believes schools should be permitted to let licensed, trained teachers and other staff keep guns in schools as a means to stop deadly mass shootings like those at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech University and Sandy Hook Elementary.

Caleb Crain

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

Mark Walker, Patrick Anderson and John Hult

The practice isn’t new, according to attorneys, but it’s been brought to light in a recent case in Pierre, S.D. An attorney for a man charged with felony drug ingestion is asking a judge to throw out evidence from an involuntary urine sample, saying it violated his client’s constitutional rights.
Dirk Landon Sparks was arrested March 14 after a report of a domestic disturbance. While in custody, officers with the Pierre Police Department observed Sparks fidgeting and his mood changing rapidly. A judge signed off on a search warrant for police to obtain blood or urine.

After Sparks refused to cooperate, police transported him to Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, where he was strapped to a bed while a catheter was forced into his penis so that officers could obtain a urine sample.

Steven Brill

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.
 
Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.
 
Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like
that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.

Shelby du Lac

Ziegler, a Madison native now attending UWGB as a business major with a focus in social work, said she originally wanted to go to Arizona State University, but the high cost of out-of-state tuition made her look elsewhere. By comparison, Jones said the average cost for a Wisconsin resident to attend UWGB is just $8,000 per semester.

“My cousins introduced me to UWGB and when I visited campus I fell in love with it,” Ziegler said. She added the combination of a tight-knit campus and small classes that guaranteed a personalized education calmed any nerves she had about starting college.
Jones said the university is known for providing that sort of smooth transition for those right out of high school.

New Yorker:

We ducked into a room stuffed with rusted bed frames and dirty plastic barrels, where in a corner a thin young man was propped on a bed without sheets. He watched us weakly. A young woman in a pink T-shirt stood beside him, rigid with surprise. The medical student gently asked if they would answer my questions. The young man nodded. His name was Nestor. He was twenty-one. This was his wife, Grace. Three weeks earlier, he had been ambushed on his motorbike and shot three times, in the chest and the left arm. “They were going to shoot me again, but one of the malandros”—bad guys—“said I was already dead. They took my motorbike.” Nestor spoke slowly, his voice uninflected. His skin was waxy. The wounds to his arm and chest were uncovered, half healed, dark with dried blood. There was a saline drip in his right arm and, at the foot of his bed, an improvised contraption, made from twine and an old one-litre plastic bottle, whose purpose I couldn’t figure out.

Did the hospital provide the saline?

No. Grace brought it. She also brought food, water, and, when she could find them, bandages, pain medication, antibiotics. These things were available only on the black market, at high prices, and Grace’s job, in a warehouse, paid less than a dollar a day.

“The hospital doesn’t even give water,” the medical student said. He was watching the hallway. He studied Nestor briefly. “The lungs fill with liquid after someone is shot in the thorax,” he told me. “We usually take the bullet out if we can. But, either way, the wounds need to be drained.”

Saul Klein.

Howard Blume

Two incumbents are running again for their seats, and a third is open. The primary election takes place in March, after which the top two finishers in each district face off in the May general election.

Among the incumbents is Monica Garcia, who represents District 2, which encompasses downtown Los Angeles and surrounding neighborhoods. She’s the longest-serving board member, having joined the seven-member body in 2006. Garcia is expected to have the support of the philanthropists, but she has also been endorsed in the past by employee unions that typically back incumbents.