Laura Dodsworth:

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control.

Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach.

A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive? Tempting little lagniappes to reward vaccination include free popsicles, milkshakes and hot dogs; free Budweiser if 70 percent of Americans are vaccinated by the Fourth of July; free Krispy Kreme donuts every day for a year. But daily donuts seem incongruous when obesity is a comorbidity for COVID. And was the person who came up with the idea of offering free ‘joints for jabs’ actually high?

Some of the rewards are substantial. United Airlines is running the ‘Your Shot to Fly’ sweepstakes, giving away 30 pairs of free flights to vaccinated customers. The state of California’s ‘Vax for the Win’ $116.5m lottery is the most generous of multiple cash giveaways in the US. There are even scholarships to public universities. And this is where we hit problems.

Doug Lederman::

Ben Nelson is a charter member of the higher education disruption crowd. Its members, often ed-tech entrepreneurs, investors and others promoting alternatives to traditional colleges and universities, believe most institutions are too expensive or ineffective, operate on too small a scale, and fail to innovate and adapt to changes in student demands.
Nelson put his (and others’) money where his mouth was nearly a decade ago when he founded the Minerva Project, which strove to outperform the nation’s best-known and most selective institutions by creating a new institution from scratch that would enroll students who could apply to Harvard and Stanford Universities but give them a higher-touch, practical education in a blended format that sent them to multiple continents.

Tim Harford:

Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I might be able to explain it. Nearly 16,000 positive Covid cases had disappeared completely from the UK’s contact tracing system. These were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening. 

Why had the cases disappeared? Apparently, Microsoft Excel had run out of numbers. 

It was an astonishing story that would, in time, lead me to delve into the history of accountancy, epidemiology and vaccination, discuss file formatting with Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, and even trace the aftershocks of the collapse of Enron. But above all, it was a story that would teach me about the way we take numbers for granted. 

Now, as the UK tentatively reopens against a background of rapidly rising cases, we are hoping that vaccinations will keep us safe. The vaccines have — rightly — been trumpeted as a scientific triumph. Their development and rollout have taken place on a heroic scale. 

But back in September and October, when the UK was also reopening against a strikingly similar backdrop of rising cases, we had no vaccine to protect us. Instead, we were trying to defend ourselves with data. And we didn’t seem to be nearly as enamoured of data as we now are of vaccines. That is a shame, because when you’re relying on numbers to keep you safe, it’s important to put some effort into keeping your numbers straight.

Julie Jargon:

Drivers who were promised money at the end of the study for keeping their phone use comparatively low showed a 17% reduction in phone use, compared with a control group. The drivers whose earnings were meted out week by week did even better, reducing their phone use by 23%. “Showing people how much they were losing each week created regret,” said lead study author Kit Delgado, an emergency room physician and associate director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jason Fagone:

Jessica had died eight years earlier, at 23, from a rare liver disease. Joshua had never gotten over it, and this was always the hardest month, because her birthday was in September. She would have been turning 31.

On his laptop, he typed his email address. The window refreshed. “Welcome back, Professor Bohr,” read the screen. He had been here before. The page displayed a menu of options.

He selected “Experimental area.”

That month, Joshua had read about a new website that had something to do with artificial intelligence and “chatbots.” It was called Project December. There wasn’t much other information, and the site itself explained little, including its name, but he was intrigued enough to pay $5 for an account.

As it turned out, the site was vastly more sophisticated than it first appeared.

Designed by a Bay Area programmer, Project December was powered by one of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt. While digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa also appear to grasp and reproduce English on some level, GPT-3 is far more advanced, able to mimic pretty much any writing style at the flick of a switch.

Andrew Sheeler:

Two parent advocacy organizations announced Thursday afternoon that they are suing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s top health officials over the statewide mandate that children wear masks to school regardless of their vaccination status.

The lawsuit, filed by Let Them Breathe and Reopen California Schools in San Diego County Superior Court, names Newsom, Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly, Public Health Director Tomás Aragón of the Department of Public Health, and Dr. Naomi Bardach of Safe Schools for All as defendants.

“It’s clear that (the health the department) has chosen to ignore the overwhelming evidence that show children are at a very low risk from being infected with COVID-19, transmitting it to others, or becoming seriously ill from COVID-19,” Reopen California Schools founder Jonathan Zachreson of Roseville said in a statement. “A return to a normal school year is crucial to the mental and physical health recovery for students across California who have endured months of isolation and a majority of who spent last school year entirely in distance learning.”

Rachel Feintzeig:

Brenda Fernandez has tried blocking off time on her calendar. She’s tried to keep conversations focused. She still can’t escape them.

“Everything becomes a meeting,” the 29-year-old Miami copywriter told me. Her overwhelming feeling? “This could have been an email.”

Then she excused herself to hop on a 7 p.m. call.

We are deep in the age of the never-ending check-in. Meetings have gotten shorter during the pandemic, according to researchers, with one paper finding the average length dropped 20% in spring 2020.

“Like the rest of the state, about 50 percent of Milwaukee County residents are vaccinated.
.@MKEhealth hoped to change that by offering free shots Tuesday, when 65,000 people were @DeerDistrict, but the health department says only 19 shots were given.”

Cori Hess:

Princeton Policy Advisors:

Given the track record of the Biden administration, border policy is likely to represent a pivotal issue in the 2022 election. Indeed, the administration will have to work hard to just avoid the title of ‘worst ever for illegal immigration.’

What are its prospects?

We forecast two alternatives, that the balance of the year will look about average compared to the last twelve years (the Obama and Trump administrations) or that it will be as good as the best observed year since 2009. In an average year, the July to December months attain 90-93% of the June level. By contrast, the very best case would anticipate 55% of June’s level for the balance of the fiscal year to September 30th; and 46% of June levels for the second half of the calendar year on average. These can be seen on the graph below.

BREAKING: China may force tutoring firms to go non-profit and block them from going public, in moves that could decimate the $100 billion industry https://t.co/kRtuFXfyFO pic.twitter.com/BYk1K52rvW

— Bloomberg (@business) July 23, 2021

Published by the Authority of the House of Lords:

The right to speak one’s mind is a hallmark of free societies. Many people across the world are still deprived of that right, but in the UK it has long been treasured. However, it is not an unfettered right. Civilised societies have legal safeguards to protect those who may be vulnerable. One person’s abuse of their right to freedom of expression can have a chilling effect on others, leaving them less able to express themselves freely.

The internet—and particularly social media—provides citizens with an unprecedented ability to share their views. We welcome this and seek to strengthen freedom of expression online. However, the digital public square has been monopolised by a small number of private companies, which are often based outside the UK and whose primary aim is to profit from their users’ data. They are free to ban or censor whoever and whatever they wish, as well as to design their platforms to encourage and amplify certain types of content over others. Too often they are guided by concern for their commercial and political interests rather than the rights and wellbeing of their users. The benefits of freedom of expression must not be curtailed by these companies, whether by their actions or their failures to act.

In recent years, the harms users can suffer online have received growing attention. We support the Government’s proposal that, through the draft Online Safety Bill, platforms should be obliged to remove illegal content. Ofcom should hold them to strict timeframes where content is clearly illegal. We also support the Government’s intention to protect children from harm, although the draft Bill is inadequate in this respect–particularly in relation to pornographic websites. nor are we convinced that the draft Bill sufficiently protects vulnerable adults. These duties should be complemented by an increase in resources for the police to allow them effectively to enforce the law, including on harassment, death threats, incitement, stirring up hatred, and extreme pornography. Platforms should contribute to this increase in resources.

The Government also proposes to introduce duties in relation to content which is legal but may be harmful to adults. This is not the right approach. If the Government believes that a type of content is sufficiently harmful, it should be criminalised. For example, we would expect this to include any of the vile racist abuse directed at members of the England football team which is not already illegal. It has no place in our society. The full force of the law must be brought down on the perpetrators urgently.

Content which is legal but some may find objectionable should instead be addressed through regulation of the design of platforms, digital citizenship education, and competition regulation. This approach would be more effective, as well as better protecting freedom of expression.

When Government Urges Private Entities to Restrict Others’ Speech

Darryl Coote:

Life expectancy in the United States declined by a year and a half during 2020 due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday in a new report, marking the steepest decline since the second world war.

According to the report, Americans as a whole saw their life expectancy from birth shorten from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020, the largest decline since 2.9 years were lost between 1942 and 1943.

“The decline of 1.5 years in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 was primarily due to increases in mortality due to COVID-19,” the report said, stating the pandemic contributed to 73.8% of the decline, followed by unintentional injuries at 11.2% and homicide at 3.1%.

The life expectancy for men dropped 1.8 years, from 76.3 years in 2019 to 74.5 years in 2020, while women went from 81.4 years in 2019 to 80.2 years in 2020 for a loss of 1.2 years. Between the sexes, the age divide widened to a gap of 5.7 years compared to 5.1 years a year prior.

Katie Lobosco:

A small provision tucked into a massive federal budget proposal put forth by the House Appropriations Committee would cut money for charter schools by $40 million and could potentially limit many charter schools from receiving federal funds altogether. 

The National Alliance for Public Charters Schools is calling the cut “particularly egregious” and said that the move would impact a majority of 3.3 million charter school students, who are overwhelmingly children of color and from low-income families. 

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but usually run independently from local school districts, had the support of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. But some Democrats have targeted charter schools in recent years, arguing that they take away money from other public school students. On the campaign trail last year, now-President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren opposed federal funds going to “for-profit charter schools.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Nambi Ndugga, Latoya Hill and Samantha Artiga:

Close to 70% (68.3%) of the adult population in the United States have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. While this progress represents a marked achievement in vaccinations that has led to steep declines in COVID-19 cases and deaths, vaccination coverage—and the protections provided by it—remains uneven across the country. With growing spread of the more transmissible Delta variant, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are once again rising, largely among unvaccinated people. Persistently lower vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic people compared to their White counterparts across most states leave them at increased risk, particularly as the variant spreads.

Reaching high vaccination rates across individuals and communities will be key for achieving broad protection through a vaccine, mitigating the disproportionate impacts of the virus for people of color, and preventing widening racial health disparities going forward. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has indicated that vaccine equity is an important goal and defined equity as preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected by COVID-19.

The CDC reports demographic characteristics, including race/ethnicity, of people receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at the national level. As of July 19, 2021, CDC reported that race/ethnicity was known for 58% of people who had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Among this group, nearly two thirds were White (59%), 9% were Black, 16% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian, 1% were American Indian or Alaska Native, and <1% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, while 8% reported multiple or other race. However, CDC data also show that recent vaccinations are reaching larger shares of Hispanic, Asian, and Black populations compared to overall vaccinations. Thirty percent of vaccines administered in the past 14 days have gone to Hispanic people, 6% to Asian people, and 14% to Black people (Figure 1). These recent patterns suggest a narrowing of racial gaps in vaccinations at the national level, particularly for Hispanic and Black people, who account for a larger share of recent vaccinations compared to their share of the total population (30% vs. 17% and 13% vs. 12%, respectively). While these data provide helpful insights at a national level, to date, CDC is not publicly reporting state-level data on the racial/ethnic composition of people vaccinated.

Andrew Barr, Laura Kawano, Bruce Sacerdote, William Skimmyhorn & Michael Stevens:

The Post 9/11 GI Bill (PGIB) is among the largest and most generous college subsidies enacted thus far in the U.S. We examine the impact of the PGIB on veterans’ college-going, degree completion, federal education tax benefit utilization, and long run earnings. Among veterans potentially induced to enroll, the introduction of the PGIB raised college enrollment by 0.17 years and B.A. completion by 1.2 percentage points (on a base of 9 percent). But, the PGIB reduced average annual earnings nine years after separation from the Army by $900 (on a base of $32,000). Years enrolled effects are larger and earnings effects more negative for veterans with lower AFQT scores and those who were less occupationally skilled. Under a variety of conservative assumptions, veterans are unlikely to recoup these reduced earnings during their working careers. All veterans who were already enrolled in college at the time of bill passage increase their months of schooling, but only for those in public institutions did this translate into increases in bachelor’s degree attainment and longer-run earnings. For specific groups of students, large subsidies can modestly help degree completion but harm long run earnings due to lost labor market experience.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The DeForest, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona Grove, Mount Horeb, Stoughton, Verona and Wisconsin Heights school districts have not yet made a decision regarding mask requirements in school buildings for the 2021-22 school year. Most of the Dane County districts that responded to requests for comment said they plan to finalize safety plans in August. Belleville administrator Nate Perry said the district will begin the school year with masks optional in classrooms but will follow Public Health Madison and Dane County guidelines should they change. The Waunakee Community School District will also make masking optional for students at the start of the year. District administration is exploring the possibility of providing mandatory masking in some classrooms for students under 12, spokesperson Anne Blackburn said.

Scott Girard:

Public Health Madison & Dane County, which had a mask mandate that applied to schools through June 2 this year, anticipates announcing its guidance next week, according to an email from PHMDC communications manager Sarah Mattes.

More:

That leaves decisions to local school boards or district administrators. Local officials are in a position to hear complaints no matter what decision they make, as evidenced by the mixed feedback from parents at a recent Waunakee Community School Board meeting.

Julie Willems Van Dijk, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), said during an afternoon press conference that wearing masks is not a “black and white” issue of vaccination status, but depends on factors like disease spread in a given area. She acknowledged that in elementary school settings, where most students are not vaccine-eligible, it might be easier for everyone to wear a mask regardless of vaccination status.

“In terms of how schools will enforce this, as we’ve talked about throughout the pandemic, schools are led by local school boards and local superintendents and we encourage them to think about the most protective way to ensure the safety of their students,” Van Dijk said. “But those decisions are decisions that will be made at a local level.”

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

DiDi Tang:

The gesture of defiance came after a crackdown on dissent and free speech in the territory under Beijing’s new security law. Hong Kong’s protest movement has been shut down by the threat of jail and independent media outlets have been hounded into closure.

The suspects, two men and three women aged between 25 and 28, were accused of “inciting hatred among the public, especially

Eric Berger:

SpaceX, by contrast, has ascended. Since December 2015, the company has successfully flown more than 100 orbital missions. It has developed and flown the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, and may soon debut its still more titanic Starship launch system. With the Starlink Internet constellation, SpaceX now operates more satellites than any nation or company in the world. And in 2020, thanks to SpaceX, NASA broke its dependency on Russia for human spaceflight. NASA astronauts now ride to space in style inside the sleek Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Blue Origin has also lost out when it comes to large government contracts worth billions of dollars, something Bezos craves as he seeks to find some return on his massive investment in Blue Origin. In 2020, the Department of Defense said it would only allow United Launch Alliance and SpaceX to bid on national security launch contracts in the mid-2020s. Blue Origin protested and lost. Then, in April, NASA chose SpaceX alone for a prestigious Human Landing System. This came after Bezos showily unveiled his company’s “Blue Moon” lander in 2019. Blue Origin protested this, too, and a decision is expected in early August. It would come as a surprise if Blue Origin succeeds.

In short, a once-promising space race has become something of a damp squib. In late 2019, while reporting for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff, I asked Musk why he thought Blue Origin had fallen behind. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank,” Musk replied.

Liftoff by Eric Berger is well worth reading.

Tyler Cowen:

As woke culture has led to a reexamination of American language and life, from pronoun usage to calling slaves “the enslaved,” perhaps it is time to look at professional titles. Why for instance should I be called “Professor Cowen,” but few people would address the person fixing their toilet as “Plumber Jones”?

Aren’t we giving some professionals too much status automatically? Aren’t we relegating some individuals to lower-status jobs by a consensus they cannot fight? We mock the German honorific “Herr Professor Doktor,” but are American practices so much better?

Wall Street Journal:

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content. Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann/The Wall Street Journal

LM Sacasas:

Every now and then, due to some egregious blunder or blatant overreach on the part of government agencies or tech companies, concerns about surveillance and technology break out beyond the confines of academic specialists and into the public consciousness: the Snowden leaks about the NSA in 2013, the Facebook emotional manipulation study in 2014, the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the wake of the 2016 election. These moments seem to elicit a vague anxiety that ultimately dissipates as quickly as it materialized. Concerns about the NSA are now rarely heard, and while Facebook has experienced notable turbulence, it is not at all clear that meaningful regulation will follow or that a significant number of users will abandon the platform. Indeed, the chief effect of these fleeting moments of surveillance anxiety may be a gradual inoculation to them. In my experience, most people are not only untroubled by journalistic critiques of exploitative surveillance practices; they may even be prepared to defend them: There are trade-offs, yes, but privacy appears to be a reasonable price to pay for convenience or security.

This attitude is not new. In the late 1960s, researcher Alan Weston divided the population into three groups according to their attitudes toward privacy: fundamentalists, who are generally reluctant to share personal information; the unconcerned, who are untroubled and unreflective about privacy; and pragmatists, who report some concern about privacy but are also willing to weigh the benefits they might receive in exchange for disclosing personal information. He found then that the majority of Americans were privacy pragmatists, and subsequent studies have tended to confirm those findings. When Westin updated his research in 2000, he concluded that privacy pragmatists amounted to 55 percent of the population, while 25 percent were fundamentalists and 20 percent were unconcerned.

Joanne Jacobs:

California’s new Mathematics Curriculum Framework has become a political hot potato, reports Lawrence Richard on Yahoo News. The state education board will postpone a decision on implementation for 10 months in response to critics who charged it would “de-mathematize math” and prevent high achievers from taking advanced classes.

2007 Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joanne Jacobs:

Only 45 percent of would-be elementary teachers pass state licensing tests on the first try in states with strong testing systems concludes a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Twenty-two percent of those who fail — 30 percent of test takers of color — never try again, reports Driven by Data: Using Licensure Tests to Build a Strong, Diverse Teacher Workforce.

Exam takers have the hardest time with tests of content knowledge, such as English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.

Research shows that “teachers’ test performance predicts their classroom performance,” the report states.

NCTQ found huge variation in the first-time pass rates in different teacher education programs. In some cases, less-selective, more-diverse programs  outperformed programs with more advantaged students. Examples are Western Kentucky University, Texas A&M International and Western Connecticut State University.

California, which refused to provide data for the NCTQ study, will allow teacher candidates to skip basic skills and subject-matter tests, if they pass relevant college classes with a B or better, reports Diana Lambert for EdSource.

The California Basic Skills Test (CBEST) measures reading, writing and math skills normally learned in middle school or early in high school. The California Subject Matter Exams for Teachers (CSET) tests proficiency in the subject the prospective teacher will teach, Lambert writes.

Curiously, the Wisconsin State Journal backed Jill Underly for state education superintendent, despite her interest in killing our one teacher content knowledge exam: Foundations of Reading. Wisconsin students now trail Mississippi, a stare that spends less and has fewer teachers per pupil.

Foundations of reading results. 2020 update.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Reuters:

YouTube said on Wednesday it had removed videos from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s channel for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak, becoming the latest tech giant to pull his pandemic pronouncements.

YouTube said in a press release the decision was taken “after careful review” and without consideration for Bolsonaro’s job or political ideology. The far-right former army captain, who has overseen the world’s second deadliest outbreak, has won widespread criticism for railing against lockdowns, touting unproven miracle cures, sowing vaccine doubts and shunning masks.

“Our rules do not allow content that states that hydroxychloroquine and/or ivermectin are effective in treating or preventing COVID-19, that states there is a cure for the disease, or says that masks do not work to prevent the spread of the virus,” it said in a statement.

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Register-Guard:

Professor Emerit Jennifer Freyd and the University of Oregon are pleased to announce that we have settled our lawsuit after more than four years of litigation. Under the settlement, the University will pay Prof. Freyd and her attorneys $350,000 to cover her claims for damages as well as attorney’s fees over the four years of litigation. In addition, the University will make a $100,000 donation to the Center for Institutional Courage, the foundation founded by Prof. Freyd dedicated to scientific research and action promoting institutional courage.

We are pleased to put this litigation behind us and together affirm our continued commitment to uncover, acknowledge, and address gender inequity and other forms of discrimination.

Knoxville Tax Cap:

This ordinance-by-voter-petition, if adopted by the Knoxville City Council or approved by the voters of the City of Knoxville, would require voter approval in the future before the property tax rate could be increased above the level appearing in the ordinance, which is the current tax rate today.

To be successful the goal is to get 14,854 signatures to avoid any challenge to the number of valid signatures.

Quin Hillyer:

I wrote yesterday about how the school district in the Chicago suburb of Evanston teaches that the nuclear family must be aggressively undermined as a vehicle of white supremacism. I wrote about how this ideology holds that “the very foundations” of republican government and its “principles of constitutional law” must be challenged. The lawsuit in Evanston and the related findings by a Department of Education investigation make for essential reading for anyone who is currently in denial about this or doubts that the misnamed “anti-racism” training being used in our schools amounts to a moral disaster.

New Jersey Education Report:

Judge Scarola suggested that NJ’s Commissioner do a needs assessment. Allen-McMillancomplied and ruled that the district has shortcomings (here’s the latest on student outcomes) but Lakewood is fulfilling its constitutional duties to public school students and there is no need for any change in the state school funding formula, despite Lakewood’s need to “borrow” millions of dollars from the state every year. (Current debt is over $100 million. Lakewood will never pay this “loan” back.)
District officials, especially attorney Michael Inzelbuch, whom the district pays over $700,000 a year, more than any school district anywhere in the known universe, want the state to say that Lakewood in-district students are just fine, thank you very much, but the school funding formula is inapplicable to Lakewood because of its unusual demographics. The district filed a lawsuit in 2019; that suit was dismissed for lack of merit.
David Sciarra, Executive Director of Education Law Center, is critical of Judge Scarola’s ruling, and, presumably, Allen-McMillan’s as well. He cites as evidence “the lavish and unprecedented payments to the district’s lawyer in recent years” and says the New Jersey Commissioner is ultimately responsible for not demanding changes to the way Lakewood privileges ultra-Orthodox students.

Cory Clark and Bo Winegard

Many feminists and progressives argue that the West is plagued by pervasive misogyny. In fact, this claim is made with such frequency, and is so rarely challenged, that it has become part of the Left’s catechism of victimhood, repeated by rote without a second thought. The only real question is how powerful and pernicious the misogyny is. Real-world data, however, suggest a different narrative, complicated by the fact that men have worse outcomes in many domains. For example, they are much more likely to be incarcerated, to be shot by the police, to be a victim of violent crime, to be homeless, to commit suicide, and to die on the job or in combat than women. Furthermore, they have a shorter life expectancy and are less likely to be college educated than women. Although these (and similar) data can be reconciled with the pervasive misogyny theory, they should at least give pause to the open-minded. The best data from contemporary social science tell a rather different story and suggest that the very persistence of the pervasive misogyny narrative is itself a manifestation of the opposite: society is largely biased in favor of women.

The world, of course, is a messy place and disparities between men and women may have many causes. This is why carefully controlled social science is useful for examining the extent, direction, and nature of sex-related biases. Although the details can get complicated, the basic idea behind most bias studies is pretty straightforward. Researchers present participants with identical information that has some bearing on the abilities of males or females while manipulating which sex the information is about. For example, they might ask two groups of people to evaluate identical essays, telling one group that it was written by a man and the other group that it was written by a woman. If participants who believed the essay was written by a man evaluated it as more compelling, more intelligent, more insightful, and so on than participants who believed it was written by a woman, psychologists would consider that a bias in favor of men. Similarly, if one asked two groups of people to evaluate identical scientific studies that discovered that either men or women performed better on a measure of leadership, and participants who read that men outperformed women regarded the study as higher quality than participants who read that women outperformed men, psychologists would consider this a male-favoring bias (everyday people consider such patterns to be biases as well).

Contrary to expectations from the pervasive misogyny theory, across a variety of topics, samples, and research teams, recent findings in psychology suggest that such biases often favor women. For example, a paper just published in the British Journal of Psychology led by Steve Stewart-Williams found that people respond to research on sex differences in ways that favor females. In two studies, participants were asked to read a popular science article that was experimentally manipulated to suggest that either men or women have a more desirable quality (for example, men/women are better at drawing or men/women lie less often). Participants evaluated the female-favoring research more favorably than the male-favoring research. Specifically, participants found the female-favoring research more important, more plausible, and more well-conducted and found the male-favoring research more offensive, more harmful, more upsetting, and more inherently sexist. This pro-female bias was observed among both male and female participants, and in study two, the researchers replicated the results in a south-east Asian sample.

Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison:

“The man who’d advised them on where to put the explosives — and offered to get them as much as the task would require — was an undercover FBI agent. So was a man in one of the other cars who said little and went by the name Mark.”

Robert Zimmerman

As noted by Kelly Scott Franklin, a professor of English literature at Hillsdale College and a scholar of Whitman,

“What this new movement of censorship really wants is to do away with the very act and process of education, because education is complicated and it’s hard work. It requires a lot of sifting to find beauty, truth, and goodness,” he said. “It requires compassion and a willingness to try to see the world as others did in their time and place. It requires acts of magnanimity toward flawed and wounded human beings, even if we disagree, and even if they’re in grave error. Those activities are hard–in the classroom and in everyday life. So it’s much simpler just to silence, cancel, and destroy.”

San Francisco, where it’s just easier to walk around the bodies on the sidewalk than to do anything about it pic.twitter.com/hVFfdIhNg5

— Beth Odonnell (@BethOdo_SF) July 20, 2021

Paul Lewis:

Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.

Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.

NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.

Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.

Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

Joe Hong:

Some school officials are flouting the updated state rules, saying students will be allowed to return to the classroom with or without a mask.

California’s smallest school districts say they will refuse to send kids home for not wearing a mask despite a new state mandate. 

Superintendents in these tight-knit and typically more conservative communities want the state to let local districts make their own decisions, considering the success some of them have had with reopening their campuses last year without triggering COVID-19 outbreaks.

“These districts were in class all year, and they just don’t believe masks are needed to teach children,” said Tim Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts Association, which represents hundreds of districts with fewer than 5,000 students.

On Monday afternoon, the California Department of Public Health went back and forth on updates to its masking rule. Health officials first said students who refuse to wear masks without a valid medical excuse won’t be allowed on campuses. Four hours later, the agency revised the guidelines to say local districts will be responsible for enforcing the mask mandate.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Game

Chris Rickert:

East was largely shut down to in-person learning during Kearney’s tenure as principal. Madison high schools were the last in Dane County to welcome back students amid the COVID-19 pandemic when they began reopening to two half-days per student in late April.

Kearney dealt with most of the fallout from two high-profile incidents involving school staff. Business teacher David Kruchten resigned in February 2020 after he was indicted for placing hidden cameras in students’ hotel rooms during class trips. He is expected to plead guilty to a federal charge of attempting to produce child pornography.

Report recommends Madison terminate district employees who OK’d East High hidden cameras
Report recommends Madison terminate district employees who OK’d East High hidden cameras
Elizabeth Beyer | Wisconsin State Journal
A hidden camera was also found in January in a coach’s office at the high school, placed there to catch a custodian suspected of sleeping on the job. An independent investigation recommended staff involved in the incident be fired. District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said Tuesday that “staff who were identified to be directly involved in approving the installation of cameras were either already retired, or have since retired.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Independent Institute:

California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach their students. As textbooks and other teaching materials approved by the State would have to follow this framework and since teachers are expected to use it as a guide, its potential to steal a promising future from our children is enormous.

The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math. For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology. A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math. The proposed framework:

2007 Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The Problem: Current school funding is a complex combination of state, local and federal aid. Funding in districts is largely based on antiquated revenue limits that have cemented in place funding gaps for 25 years. Students are worth more, or less, depending on where they happen to live, or whether they attend a choice or charter school. Even worse, the current funding system utilizes a three-year rolling average of enrollment that allows districts to receive funding for students they no longer educate. This current model is a barrier to reform.

Weighted Student Funding: Wisconsin can fund students, not just buildings and systems. A system of weighted student funding would provide the same level of funding for each student regardless of school sector, or home district. Students would receive extra revenue based on characteristics like poverty, disabilities, and English language learners, but otherwise would be valued the same.

The advantage of this system would be to create a dynamic student-centered funding system that allows for the expansion of new and innovate education models. We can get more money flowing into the classroom and not get bogged down in administrative costs. Finally, weighted student funding would unshackle students and schools from an opaque and complex formula that relies too heavily on the property wealth or poverty of a given community.

Commentary.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Rachel Aviv:

Suddenly, it seemed as if all relationship structures could—and must—be reconfigured, if there was any hope of producing a generation less damaged than the previous one. In the late sixties, educators in more than thirty German cities and towns began establishing experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies. “There is no question that they were trying (in a desperate sort of neo-Rousseauian authoritarian antiauthoritarianism) to remake German/human nature,” Herzog writes. Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos. In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.

In this climate—a psychoanalyst described it as one of “denial and manic ‘self-reparation’ ”—Kentler was a star. He was asked to lead the department of social education at the Pedagogical Center, an international research institute in Berlin whose planning committee included Willy Brandt, who became the Chancellor of Germany (and won the Nobel Peace Prize), and James B. Conant, the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany and a president of Harvard. Funded and supervised by the Berlin Senate, the center was established, in 1965, to make Berlin an international leader in reforming educational practices. Kentler worked on the problem of runaways, heroin addicts, and young prostitutes, many of whom gathered in the archways of the Zoo Station, the main transportation hub in West Berlin. The milieu was memorialized in “Christiane F.,” an iconic drug movie of the eighties, about teen-agers, prematurely aware of the emptiness of modern society, self-destructing, set to a soundtrack by David Bowie.

Matt Taibbi:

Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop. 

Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:

“Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding. 

“Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I’m a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”

“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing. 

“Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway’s next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues. 

“She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity. 

“Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains. 

Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”

Janan Ganesh:

Europe’s failure to produce a Twitter or Snapchat endears the continent to me. I don’t think I have ever made an Instagram or Facebook post. I found the last of these companies unctuous and megalomaniacal when it was still linked to Barack Obama’s rise, not Donald Trump’s. The value of such outlets to the world’s brutally governed stops me — just — wishing them gone. It is with no tenderness, then, that I wince to hear a US president claim they are “killing people”. Taste matters: half the point of Joe Biden, who used the phrase twice, is to drain public life of its vitriol.

Truth matters even more. The idea that social media is the source of vaccine avoidance evokes the bots-caused-Brexit hype of yesteryear. It is not just hard to stand up. It suggests a political class in gleeful possession of a villain for all seasons. No doubt, great torrents of cant and quackery wash through Facebook. But so do facts about vaccine efficacy and dispenser locations that might otherwise elude millions of users. To a degree that is almost unique on a public policy issue, the site takes an unambiguously pro-vaccine line. The premise that the bad and the good here nets out in favour of the bad is quite the leap. A less esteemed personage than the president might have been invited to make good on the claim.

“that take-up rates might be worse without social media as a source of reassurance among the liberal-minded.”

Eugene Volokh:

Say the government urges various intermediaries—bookstores, billboard companies, payment processors, social media platforms—to stop carrying certain speech. The government isn’t prosecuting them or suing them, just asking them. (This is in the news both with regard to the Biden Administration “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” and Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to the extent they claim government officials’ speech pressured those platforms into blocking him.) Is such government urging constitutional?

[A.] Generally speaking, courts have said “yes, that’s fine,” so long as the government speech doesn’t coercethe intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here’s a sample of appellate cases so holding:

[1.] A New York City official sent a letter urging department stores not to carry “a board game titled ‘Public Assistance—Why Bother Working for a Living.'” The letter said the game “does a grave injustice to taxpayers and welfare clients alike,” and closes with, “Your cooperation in keeping this game off the shelves of your stores would be a genuine public service.” Not unconstitutional, said the Second Circuit in Hammerhead Enterprises, Inc. v. Brezenoff (1983):

[T]he record indicates that Brezenoff’s request to New York department stores to refrain from carrying Public Assistance was nothing more than a well-reasoned and sincere entreaty in support of his own political perspective…. Where comments of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request, a valid claim can be stated…. [But] appellants cannot establish that this case involves either of these troubling situations.

[2.] The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography sent letters to various corporations (such as 7-Eleven) urging them not to sell pornographic magazines:

The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography has held six hearings across the United States during the past seven months on issues related to pornography. During the hearing in Los Angeles, in October 1985, the Commission received testimony alleging that your company is involved in the sale or distribution of pornography. The Commission has determined that it would be appropriate to allow your company an opportunity to respond to the allegations prior to drafting its final report section on identified distributors.

You will find a copy of the relevant testimony enclosed herewith. Please review the allegations and advise the Commission on or before March 3, 1986, if you disagree with the statements enclosed. Failure to respond will necessarily be accepted as an indication of no objection.

Steven A. Camarota:

The idea that immigration is the solution to the aging of American society has become an article of faith among those arguing for ever-higher levels of new arrivals. They assert that, in societies such as the United States, where fertility rates are low relative to historic patterns, the native population will not supply enough workers to maintain a robust economy and pay for government services, particularly retirement programs. If native-born Americans aren’t going to have enough children to balance the longer-lived elderly population, the argument goes, then our only option is to increase immigration levels.

It’s not a crazy argument; it just happens to be incorrect. In reality, a significant body of research shows that the impact of immigration on population aging is small. While immigration can certainly make our population larger, it does not make us dramatically younger.

And yet, commentators have been making such arguments for years. The late Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer asserted in 1998 that America has been “saved by immigrants” from the kind of aging taking place in other first-world countries. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush famously said that America needed higher levels of immigration to “rebuild the demographic pyramid.” At the data-journalism site FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman has argued that immigration is the “only thing” preventing the country from facing a “demographic cliff.”

Richard Smith:

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

Fadeke Adegbuyi:

Hila, and her husband, Ethan Klein, have amassed millions of followers on YouTube over the last decade as the duo behind h3h3 Productions and co-hosts of the H3 podcast. Initially building their audience through comedy sketches and reaction videos, in the past few years their channel has centered around discussions and interviews pertaining to pop culture, politics, and the internet. They’ve also become experts at living life online. Before the big announcement, they had shared their desire to conceive a second child, discussing their struggles with fertility and giving their viewers insight into doctor’s visits and specialist’s advice. In an earlier video, Hila mentioned that they would bypass the customary three-month waiting period before telling people about getting pregnant, intentionally eschewing the taboo of discussing a potential miscarriage—their audience would be the first to know.

Kartikay Mehrotra:

At least 100 activists, journalists and government dissidents across 10 countries were targeted with spyware produced by an Israeli company called Candiru, according to cybersecurity researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which tracks illegal hacking and surveillance.

Using a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, cyber operatives operating in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Hungary, Indonesia and elsewhere purchased and installed remote spying software made by Candiru, according to the researchers. The tool was used in “precision attacks” against targets’ computers, phones, network infrastructure and internet-connected devices,” said Cristin Goodwin, general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Security Unit.

Devi Shastri:

A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum paints a grim picture of the future of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which was facing mounting financial challenges even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Enrollment was declining. State support per student lagged. Tuition was frozen.

All of these challenges alone painted a worrisome picture of the future of the state’s second-largest campus, which serves one of the most diverse and underserved student populations in Wisconsin.

The pandemic has even further imperiled that future, the report said. The report was commissioned and partially funded by the UWM Foundation.

The analysis, published Thursday, puts data to UWM administrators’ long-standing warnings that they need more support in their effort to maintain the campus, which straddles a dual mission: to provide access to higher education for as many students as possible and to maintain its status as an elite research university.

Parents should *not* sign this. https://t.co/ijubALivme

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) July 21, 2021

“This stuff can unravel so quickly,” Adams says, referring to social order.

His mission is not to let New York go the way of Portland or San Francisco.”https://t.co/MChmElmnn0

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) July 21, 2021

This passage offers a good test of basic numeracy. Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist just failed it. https://t.co/xA1FL9zOs2 pic.twitter.com/pAlLW8HE5v

— JW Mason (@JWMason1) July 19, 2021

Heather Knight:

Siva Raj often receives gifts of thanks when he’s at farmers’ markets collecting signatures to qualify a recall effort of three San Francisco school board members for the ballot. Coffee, doughnuts, cookies, strawberries. “Everything!” he said with a laugh.

But a new memo from a top Bay Area pollster outlining very grim unfavorable numbers for the three board members and strong support for recalling them, particularly among parents of kids in the city’s public schools, proved especially validating.

“It doesn’t surprise us,” Raj said. “On the streets that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Pretty much anyone who is remotely aware of the situation is eager to sign.”

Raj and Autumn Looijen, his partner, launched the recall effort of Commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga last spring after a dire year of distance learning and a number of sideshows at the board, including renaming 44 schools that weren’t open, and changing the way students are admitted to Lowell High which, like all public middle and high schools in the city, has remained shuttered to the vast majority of kids since March 2020.

The recall campaign has until Sept. 7 to turn over 51,325 valid signatures of San Francisco registered voters to the Department of Elections. So far, they’ve collected about 26,000 through weekend volunteers and are now fundraising to hire professional signature gatherers.

If students return to school like normal or close to it on Aug. 16, the anger may ease. But dropping enrollment numbers and a looming budget crisis for the school district could make the picture even worse.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Tim Odegard

As a result, a push to transform reading instruction is underway in classrooms across the nation. A transformation motivated by an honest acknowledgment of reality – most children in the United States struggle to read. These struggles are not the exception reserved for the minority of kids with a disability – such as dyslexia. No, they are the status quo. And sadly, this has been the case for decades. Sure, we can quibble over tests used to make this claim. But at the end of the day, multiple data sources indicate that most students in the nation struggle to read words strung together into text passages and answer questions about what they read. This is a fundamental problem and one that is largely preventable. Yet, we have not found the collective will to prevent this calamity that breaks parents’ hearts, teachers’ backs and causes untold suffering for children.

To be clear, the reality facing parents as they painfully watch their children struggling to read has not gone unseen. Their pleas for help are palpable, and the desperation of parents in the U.S. has led to laws being passed across the nation in an attempt to help their children. As a result, almost every state in the U.S. now has some form of legislation specifically addressing the needs of students with dyslexia – a trend that alarmed me from the start. I am leery of such laws. However, I am not a skeptic who does not “believe” the overwhelming science indicating that a minority of students have extreme difficulties learning to read and spell. The science in this regard is vast and compelling.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Mark Lorch:

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive Covid-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks. [Videos of the trick have been circulating on TikTok since December and a school in Liverpool, UK, recently wrote to parents to warn them about it.] So how are fruit juices, cola and devious kids fooling the tests, and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I’ve tried to find out.

First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs. Sure enough, a few minutes later, two lines appeared on each test, supposedly indicating the presence of the virus that causes Covid-19.

It’s worth understanding how the tests work. If you open up an LFT device, you’ll find a strip of paper-like material, called nitrocellulose, and a small red pad, hidden under the plastic casing below the T-line. Absorbed on the red pad are antibodies that bind to the Covid-19 virus. They are also attached to gold nanoparticles (tiny particles of gold actually appear red), which allow us to see where the antibodies are on the device. When you do a test, you mix your sample with a liquid buffer solution, ensuring the sample stays at an optimum pH, before dripping it on the strip.

V. I. Arnold:

I put these problems onto paper in Paris in spring 2004 when Russian Parisians asked me to help their young children gain the thinking culture tra- ditional for Russia.
I am deeply convinced that this culture is most of all cultivated by early independent reflection on simple, but not easy questions similar to those below (problems 1, 3, 13 are the most recommended).

My long experience has shown that, very frequently, dimwits falling at school behind solve them better than A-grade pupils, since – for their survival at the back of the classroom – they must permanently think more than required “for governing the whole Seville and Granada”, as Figaro used to say about himself, while A-graders cannot catch “what should be multiplied by what” in these problems. I have also noticed that five year old kids solve similar problems better than pupils spoiled by coaching, which in their turn cope with the questions better than university students used to swotting who anyway beat their professors (the worst in solving these simple problems are Nobel and Fields prize winners).

Carly Robinson:

Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which parents of middle and high school students received multiple text messages per week encouraging them to ask their children specific questions tied to their science curriculum. The intervention increased parent-child at-home conversations about science but did not detectably impact science test scores. However, the intervention decreased parent engagement in other, potentially productive, parent behaviors. These findings illustrate that parent engagement interventions are not costless: There are opportunity costs to shifting parental effort.

Chris Barianiuk:

“We converted more than 200,000 old emails from former chief editors of Helsingin Sanomat – the largest newspaper in Finland,” she says, referring to a pilot project by Digitalia, a digital data preservation project. The converted emails were later stored in a digital archive.

The US Library of Congress famously keeps a digital archive of tweets, though it has stopped recording every single public tweet and is now preserving them “on a very selective basis” instead.

Could public institutions do some digital data curation and preservation on our behalf? If so, we could potentially submit information to them such as family history and photographs for storage and subsequent access in the future.

Kosonen says that such projects would naturally require funding, probably from the public. Institutions would also be more inclined to retain information that is considered of significant cultural or historical interest.

At the heart of this discussion lies a simple fact: it’s hard for us to know – here in the present – what we, or our descendants, will actually value in the future.

Archival or regulatory interventions could go some way to addressing the ephemerality of data. But that ephemerality is something we will probably always live with, to some extent. Digital data is just too convenient for everyday purposes and there’s little rationale for trying to store everything.

Fara Dabhoiwala

In the summer of 1932 Eric Williams arrived in England from the British colony of Trinidad. Like most of the island’s population, his family was so poor that he and his eleven siblings had rarely tasted milk. But from his earliest youth his father, a disillusioned postal clerk, obsessively pressured him to achieve academic success. There were no universities in the West Indies; few Trinidadians progressed beyond primary school, and almost all professions were reserved for whites. Yet Williams won a coveted government scholarship that enabled him to continue studying beyond the age of eleven, then an even rarer bursary to complete his secondary schooling, and finally, after three years of trying, one of the island’s two annual scholarships to a British university. He sailed for Oxford to take an undergraduate degree in history.

Julia Craven:

Kyla Jenee Lacey: Initially, I was a bit shocked that a group of people would go that far. The work had been used as curriculum at different schools in different parts of the country, as well as different countries. Then I was a bit angered. I have a sensitivity towards my art. And one of the things that angered me the most was them saying that I wasn’t a credible source, and I’m not sure how I’m not a credible source to my own experience.

The poem went viral a few times, and in the very first wave of its virality, a lot of the white people who were upset continuously said, “Well, you need to learn your history. You need to learn your education.” I have a degree in history. That is literally what my degree is in.

Fordham Institute:

Is America a racist country? Or the greatest nation on earth? Or both or neither or some of each?
For the sake of our children’s education (and for any number of other reasons), we need a more thoughtful and balanced starting point for the whole conversation—one that leaves space for nuance, mutual understanding, and hope for the future. Our union is not perfect, but it will become more so if its citizens understand, value, and engage productively with the constitutional democracy in which we all live.

Sadly, far too many young (and not-so-young) Americans have only the haziest grasp of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are essential to informed citizenship, in part because for decades now we have systematically failed to impart them to our children. Culpability for that failure goes far beyond our formal education system, to be sure, but a considerable portion of it does belong there: on our schools, our school systems, and our state K–12 systems, which have focused—and been pressed by Washington to focus—on other priorities.

The consequences of that neglect are now painfully apparent on all sides, including the sorry state of American politics and the sordid behavior of many who would lead us. Rectifying the situation is an enormous project to be pursued on multiple fronts, but schools are an obvious starting point. That’s where we can best begin to inculcate the next generation of Americans with a solid grasp of their country’s past and present, its core principles, and the obligations of responsible citizenship.

The logical starting points for getting that right are the academic standards for civics and U.S. History that have been adopted
by the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

That’s because our federal system of government ensures that states and their subdivisions bear primary responsibility for education, which includes establishing academic standards that spell out the content and skills they want their public schools to teach and their students to learn. These standards are typically organized by subject, though in the realms of civics and history they are sometimes organized under the heading of “social studies.”

We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have been evaluating states’ academic standards for more than two decades. Consequently, we’re well aware that they are just the starting point—statements of aspirations, desired outcomes, and intentions. To get real traction, they must be joined by high-quality instructional materials and pedagogy, sufficient time and effort, and some form of

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

🧵The last 48 hours on here have been all about The Vaccine Discourse. Is FB killing people? Is the govt passing the buck? Who even can tell what IS misinformation, and who watches the watchmen, anyway? I’ve spent ~7 years watching the AV movement evolve online and have thoughts

— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) July 18, 2021

Laura Testino:

When former county school board member David Pickler, an advocate for the suburban school districts remaining separate, tells the story of the merger, he traces it back to the creation of each school system. Each was started around the same time, in the late 1860s after the Civil War. Memphis held more wealth than its surrounding suburbs, which were largely rural and poor. Kids in the suburbs were taught in a handful of one-room schoolhouses.

Most neighboring Southern states passed legislation ahead of the Civil War that prohibited, fined and corporally punished Black people who were learning to read or write and any other person who helped them.

After the war, Memphis became unique in opening its own district, separate from the county, which is how most Tennessee school systems were structured. The separation was motivated by wealth, Pickler said.

“They quite frankly did not want their kids associating with those poor kids out in Shelby County,” Pickler, who is white, said of the creation of the city district.

This separation continued under Jim Crow. Within the two districts, Black students received significantly less, with separate education that was unequal to education for their white peers.

Hart, born in 1971, remembers situating her own family into the Civil Rights Movement. History’s recency suddenly dawned on her.

“One day my mom came home from work and I asked her, had she ever had to drink out of a colored fountain. She said, ‘Yes,’” Hart recalled, “and I almost burst into tears.”

David Pegg and Paul Lewis in London, Michael Safi in Beirut, Nina Lakhani in Ciudad Altamirano:

successful Pegasus infection gives NSO customers access to all data stored on the device. An attack on a journalist could expose a reporter’s confidential sources as well as allowing NSO’s government client to read their chat messages, harvest their address book, listen to their calls, track their precise movements and even record their conversations by activating the device’s microphone.

Reporters whose numbers appear in the data range from local freelancers, such as the Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, who was murdered by attackers armed with guns one month after his phone was selected, through to prize-winning investigative reporters, editors and executives at leading media organisations.

In addition to the UAE, detailed analysis of the data indicates that the governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia all selected journalists as possible surveillance targets.

It is not possible to know conclusively whether phones were successfully infected with Pegasus without analysis of devices by forensic experts. Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which can detect successful Pegasus infections, found traces of the spyware on the mobile phones of 15 journalists who had agreed to have their phones examined after discovering their number was in the leaked data.

Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters’ sources in jail, and Trump could be even worse

Jordan Weissmann:

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a troubling exposé on the crushing debt burdens that students accumulate while pursuing master’s degrees at elite universities in fields like drama and film, where the job prospects are limited and the chances of making enough to repay their debt are slim. Because it focused on MFA programs at Ivy League schools—one subject accumulated around $300,000 in loans pursuing screenwriting—the article rocketed around the creative class on Twitter. But it also pointed to a more fundamental, troubling development in the world of higher education: For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.

Curious Notions:

Resources included online minority language newsletters showing months in their mastheads, articles, localization tables (a gold mine), cold contacts with university linguistics departments, YouTube videos, minority language souvenir calendars, Wikipedia pages (especially their foreign language versions), Peace Corps language primers, tourist phrasebooks, and questions and answers posted in online forums.

Dictionaries? Yes and no. We deliberately short shrifted most of the major languages in favor of the exotic, endangered, or just plain dead and buried. Most lexicons for those, such as they exist, aren’t anywhere big enough to accommodate such minutia as Gregorian month names. Or maybe one will throw you a bone for February and April and you’ll need to use those to hopscotch to other sources. Or maybe this other dictionary is just one-way, Abkhaz to Russian, say, and while you may know Russian months, you have three hundred pages of un-selectable image scans from which to pick them out. Ready, set, go.

Certain underlying abilities do help out, like those to read and use non-Roman scripts and transcribe into or out of them. A substantial knowledge base also comes in handy, as you can think of more angles for …

Mark Pesce:

A colleague was recently required to spend 10 days in a public-health-mandated quarantine after authorities used credit card receipts to determine he’d visited a location that had also hosted a known coronavirus case.

Had he paid in cash they would never have found him at all because he’d also been slack and not signed into the establishment where he was potentially exposed using the requisite QR code.

Fortunately, they found him. Even more fortunately, he hadn’t been infected. As he waited out his quarantine, he meditated on how he’d been poked by the pointy end of the continuing argy-bargy between public health and personal privacy – realising that his data trail gave anyone who bothered to look a complete snapshot of his private life.

Is there anywhere left to hide, he wondered?

In the years since Eric Schmidt declared “Privacy is dead!”, we’ve endured a continuous digital erosion of our private space. Smartphones tracking our location, apps profiling our interactions, smart speakers feeding our conversations into recommendation algorithms, CCTV cameras running facial recognition – and much, much more. Sometimes it can feel as though the battle for even a little bit of privacy has already been lost.

James Varney:

“It’s one thing to name a school of politics after Bill Clinton,” Mr. Steinbuch said about the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service. “It’s another thing to name one at a law school after a guy who had so much trouble with his law license.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Locked out of high school in Memphis, Hispanic boys are working construction jobs and taking pride in helping support their families, reports Chalkbeat’s Ian Round.

Will they return to finish high school diplomas or follow up on plans to attend community college? Probably not, says José Ayala, a college student and a counselor for Streets Ministries.

Ayala told Round that students need to learn about technical colleges and vocational certifications early in high school, before they drop out.

Mila Koumpilova, also a Chalkbeat reporter, looks at how school closures have widened education gaps for Black and Latino boys in Chicago. The pandemic has “has severed precarious ties to school, derailed college plans and pried gaping academic disparities even wider.”

I recommend reading the whole story, which focuses on three high school students whose futures were put at risk.

Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, most families in {city name} will receive monthly#ChildTaxCredit payments. It’s a guaranteed income through December. I joined@mayorsforagi because all Americans deserve an income floor. This is a step in that direction.

— Mayor of Madison (@MayorOfMadison) July 17, 2021

Via Ann Althouse

Commentary here.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Matt Jancer:

The Oregon Trail, The Yukon Trail, Number Munchers, Word Munchers, The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, Lemonade Stand, DinoPark Tycoon, Storybook Weaver. All games you played in school, all made by the same state-funded company—the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. in its earliest days. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: “One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s.” Apple II’s loaded with MECC games.

Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.

Jonathan Katz:

I published a new piece yesterday about the crisis surrounding the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. In it, I argue that a U.S. invasion of Haiti would be a colossally bad idea given the destructive history of the unending U.S. interventions in the Black Republic. You can read it here.

The publication in which the piece appears was not where it was originally supposed to run. It was originally commissioned by a different, well-known national outlet. They contacted me last week, within hours of Moïse’s death, and asked me to choose the angle that seemed right to me. The editors seemed strangely hesitant when I suggested the framing, but contracted me anyway to write the piece, so long as I included what they called “nuance.” I had my suspicions about what that meant, but a writer’s got to write (and eat), so I pressed on.

I realized I was in trouble right away when I got back the comments on my first draft. Right off the bat, the editor cast doubt on my use of the “occupation” as a way of describing what the United States did in Haiti between 1915 and 1934. They commented:

“Want to be careful with this word – what was the nature of the occupation? How many troops did we send and what exactly did they do? Eg was it more of a peacekeeping/security assistance force, or what?”

If anyone should have been prepared for that question, it was me, the guy who just spent five years writing a book that is focused in part on how woefully ignorant Americans are of what our country has done in the world, especially in the decades leading up to World War II. But I was somehow not ready to get a comment like that from a senior editor at a major U.S. publication.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school Districts use Google (YouTube) and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Matt Taibbi:

In another ominous development, Politico reported that “Biden-allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee,” were planning to:

Engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

For those who may find such developments concerning, there was solace: at least no one is policing our private thoughts. Those are still our own, correct?

Not quite, learned satirical filmmaker, YouTuber, and journalist Matt Orfalea. He’s been involved in several different slapstick-dystopian stories just in the last month or so, none more absurd than a series of YouTube warnings and strikes he received from YouTube for content not one person ever saw, or could see.

Orfalea was working on a video involving a story covered in this space, YouTube’s demonetization of podcaster Bret Weinstein and its removal of Senate testimony by Dr. Pierre Kory. He uploaded a series of rough cuts to his YouTube channel, but kept them locked and private, as part of his normal routine. Like many YouTube content creators, Orfalea uploads videos but keeps them locked while he applies for monetization. In other words, he’s keeping material private because he’s essentially checking with YouTube to see if there are problems with the content before he makes it public.

At 728 p.m. on June 14th, Orfalea received a warning from YouTube for three of those rough cuts:

If you trust the Biden WH to decree what is “misinformation,” these claims have been deemed as such:

* COVID is transmitted human-to-human (Jan 2020)

* You should wear masks to protect against COVID (March 2020)

* It’s possible COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab (all of 2020).

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 17, 2021

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

Now first, it’s important for streets to run both ways, so I’ll offer that proponents have trouble doing this because many of the most prominent anti-vaxxers do indulge in conspiratorial thinking. Some of it is politically motivated; people may remember that while Trump was president, prominent Democrats expressed their fears about the corruption of the research process based on nothing more than their intuition.

Matt Clancy:

Academic research is a sector where knowledge workers try to innovate – the whole game is trying to push the knowledge frontier outward. Whether or not the system could work better, it certainly does seem to work, generating new and useful knowledge pretty much every day. It’s also a system that’s highly competitive, where thousands of individuals compete with each other for jobs and space in journals. 

And yet, despite strong incentives to use any possible edge to generate new and better research, academics are increasingly forgoing the option to work with their local colleagues. 

Agrawal, McHale, and Oettl (2015) is a study of the changing nature of collaboration in evolutionary biology. They find the the number of distinct institutions represented on evolutionary biology papers has steadily increased from 1.4 to 2.4 over 1980-2005, while the average distance between coauthors on papers has risen from 350 to 550 miles over the same period.

John McGinnis:

American Bar Association is proposing new accrediting standards for law schools that would make them more race-conscious, more politically correct and less intellectually diverse. The proposal should fail on the merits. It’s so bad it should also prompt reconsiderations of the ABA’s role as accreditor of law schools and of the U.S. Supreme Court precedent on racial preferences in law-school admissions.

Having lawyers regulate entrance into their own profession has always been anomalous. The ABA has an abiding interest in making entry more expensive—it decreases competition for its current members. But now the ABA wants to use wokeness to raise operating costs, impose ideological uniformity, and reduce academic freedom. The new standards would require law schools to show continuous “progress” toward diversifying their faculties and student bodies. They would be encouraged to do it on a timetable, as if a school can predict when someone of a particular race who meets often specialized curricular and research needs will show up. The ABA also wants to add new diversity requirements for ethnicity and gender identity.

NY Times:

Long into the night on Wednesday, parents and students waited in line to say their piece about Boston Latin School and who deserves to attend it.

Shirley Chang Wen said she arrived in this country without speaking English, and believed in raising children to work hard and succeed. Why, she asked, shouldn’t they get a spot?

Julia Mejia, a Latina city councilor, said she spent her school years working at a shoe store to help her mother pay the rent, without a spare minute for test preparation. What about students like her?

And Gabby Finocchio, a 2019 graduate who is white, said she was admitted to the school because her parents had time and money to spend on the process. In a more equitable admissions system, she might not get in, she said, but “I’m OK with that.”

After five and a half hours of emotional discussion on Wednesday night, the Boston School Committee voted unanimously to overhaul admissions to the city’s three selective exam schools, opening the way for far greater representation of Black and Latino students.

The new admissions system will still weigh test results and grades, but, following a model pioneered in Chicago, it will also introduce ways to select applicants who come from poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Tyne Daile Sumner:

As historian Robin W. Winks observes in his 1987 book Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, many of these were English graduates who could apply literary techniques to intelligence analysis and cryptic expressions.

While it’s hard to think of poets as spies, poetry and surveillance actually use very similar styles of information gathering such as close observation, abstraction, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. 

Today, we live in an era of unprecedented surveillance. Our personal information is routinely tracked and collected, while sophisticated analytics and algorithmic systems are being designed to predict, influence and ultimately control our choices and behaviour.

And it’s changing the nature of how we see ourselves. The ubiquity of surveillance and social media is challenging the very idea of the private individual as people increasingly adopt public personas. The scholar Julie Cohen described digital culture as bringing about a ‘surveillance-innovation complex’ in which surveillance is now privatised, commercialised and increasingly participatory.

To help us comprehend, and perhaps ultimately better shape, the complex social and technological change we are caught up in, we could do a lot worse than turn to that close cousin of surveillance – poetry.

Applied Divinity Studies:

You’ve probably heard of the Rule of 70:

To estimate the doubling time of an exponential function, just divide 70 by the growth rate.

For some rates, this works really well. At 2% annual growth, the rule gives 35 years, and the actual value is 35.003 years. Other times it fails horribly. At 70% growth, the rule predicts doubling in one time step, but it actually takes 1.3.

How does the heuristic perform in general? Not that well. It’s accurate at 2% growth, but then quickly converges to being off by 0.3 timesteps.

Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford:

In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year.

The biannual report on Twitter’s enforcement of policy rules and the information and removal requests it receives comes as social media companies including Facebook Inc(FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube face government scrutiny worldwide over the content allowed on their platforms.

Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.

Support:

Do not distribute content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use google (YouTube) services, including Madison.

Jaclyn Diaz:

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law Thursday barring police from lying to underage kids during interrogations.

Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are banned for suspects under 18 years old under the new law, which goes into effect Jan. 1. 

According to the Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people, those types of interrogation methods have been shown to lead to false confessions. They’ve also played a role in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA. 

Illinois once was called the “False Confession Capital of the United States,” the organization said, because of a number of high-profile exonerations of people

Rachel Kraus:

Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were “glitches in wonderland.” Then, there was “disillusionment.”

Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet’s two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also spent 11 of his 14 years at Google drawing comics about employees, quirks, culture, and, eventually, larger societal and ethical issues facing the company and its workers. Some of those topics included Google contracts with government agencies like ICE, making a search engine for China’s government that complies with censorship laws, and more.

Chronicling those issues allowed Cornet to reflect on his place at Google, and prompted him to make a change. Cornet recently quit, and has taken a new job (at Twitter, a company with whom he says he has fewer ethical qualms). He is now the latest big tech employee — including employees at Facebook and Amazon — to publicly resign from their positions in protest of the company’s overall behavior. 

“As the years passed by there were more and more things to have ethical qualms about that the company was doing at a higher level,” Cornet said. “I had to look at the bigger picture and think that maybe I would be better elsewhere.”

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google Services, including Madison.

Tom Simonite:

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.

Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. “Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities,” Ochigame says.

Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.

Just like Google’s homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate.

Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals “information borders” created by the way Google’s search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.

Many taxpayer supported k-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Chris Papst:

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city – freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Patterson. “If almost half of our kids are failing, what options do they have after high school? This is really disheartening. It’s sad to see this.”

On the other end of the chart, 21 percent of city high school students earned a GPA of 3.0 or better; a B average. That’s about half as many who earned below a D. We can also see the district lost 706 high school students during the first three quarters of the year.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Tahir Hamut Izgil

If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets. Tahir Hamut Izgil arrived with his family in the United States in 2017, fleeing the Chinese government’s merciless persecution of his people. Tahir’s escape not only spared him near-certain internment in the camps that have swallowed more than 1 million Uyghurs; it also allowed him to share with the world his experience of the calamity engulfing his homeland. The following articles are Tahir’s firsthand account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and of one family’s survival.

Before I met Tahir, I knew his poems. I encountered them soon after I began working as a translator in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region in western China. A close friend there kept telling me that if I really wanted to understand Uyghur culture, I had to read the poetry. Like many Americans, I rarely felt drawn to poetry, but one day, another friend put a sheaf of Tahir’s verses in my hand. Poetry had never affected me so deeply.

Sarah Jackson:

Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees for exploiting user data for personal means, according to an advance copy of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” that Insider obtained. 

The engineer, who is unnamed, reportedly tapped into the data to “confront” a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel. 

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company’s systems, he had access to “years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on,” according to the book. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book claims, he was also able to see her location in real time. 

Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to “cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers,” the book says.

This is so completely fucked. Unbelievable https://t.co/dBnoK9XZEG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 15, 2021

It puzzles me how ruthlessly pragmatic, flexible and protean Facebook is with product but how stubborn and inflexible it is on questions like this https://t.co/j8HOU6DuVY

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) July 15, 2021

Alexandra Olins:

On March 11, 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was the first large school district in the country to close. First, we were told there would be no school during the closure because the district couldn’t distribute laptops to everyone — despite being in the tech capital of the country. Next, we heard there would be online class meetings but zero instruction.

For the rest of the school year, my 11-year-old son had four one-hour Zoom check-ins a week. That is all. Like many parents, we wrote off the year and hoped like hell that fall would be better.

Over the summer, SPS asked families to choose between hybrid and remote options for fall. For those ready to send their children back in-person, it felt hopeful. But when former President Donald Trump weighed in to say kids should be 100% in person in fall, SPS — along with hundreds of other districts — reversed course. Despite Seattle having a relatively low number of COVID cases, the district announced plans for 100% remote learning for fall. The hybrid option was off the table.

As fall 2020 wore on, my normally gregarious son became increasingly silent, sedentary, and disengaged during remote school, watching Fortnite on YouTube during “school,” despite my best efforts to stop it (while trying to keep my own job), creating a nasty parent/child dynamic. It soon became clear that SPS had no plan for how — or when — to transition back to in-person school.

Some parents, growing weary of seeing their kids stare into a screen for hours on end, began to ask questions of SPS and the SPS board. We got no answers. And we began to wonder, where was our local paper, the Seattle Times, when it came to covering the impact of prolonged school closures on kids and parents?

As the following months would reveal, the Seattle Times could not — or would not — cover the situation by asking the hard questions about why Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts and took so long to reopen. A lifelong Democrat, former teacher, and union member, I became increasingly enraged at both the failure of the school system and the inadequacies of the education team to cover what was happening with the hard questions and critical analysis that the situation demanded.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ramona Bessinger:

I have been a public school teacher for the past 22 years, with the past seven in Providence, Rhode Island.  I have had the honor of serving public school children and their families as an English teacher first at the high school level, and currently at the middle school level.

During my career I have always tried to provide the best education for my students. I am designated by the Rhode Island Department of Education a ‘Highly Qualified’ teacher, meaning, I have tenure and experience in my certifications.  I was awarded the English Speaking Union Shakespeare Scholarship for excellence in teaching Shakespeare. I helped implement curriculum and I have hosted multiple student clubs, literary magazines, youth groups and community outreach programs.

I love being a teacher and I care a great deal about my students, almost all of whom are non-white.  This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.

Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before.

Liz George:

U.S. Capitol Police will start using Army surveillance equipment to monitor Americans as part of a larger effort to improve security and turn the force into “an intelligence-based protective agency” in the wake of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Last week, the USCP took possession of eight Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground – Medium (PSSG-M) units, fulfilling a request that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved on June 2. The units capture high-definition video and include night vision, but do not feature facial recognition capabilities.

“This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats,” the Pentagon said.

The same technology was used by troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to observe large areas day and night.  

The Army will install the units and train Capitol Police on how to operate the systems, the Pentagon said.

In a statement last week, the USCP called the technology “state-of-the-art campus surveillance technology, which will enhance the ability to detect and monitor threat activity.”

Related: drones and US internal security.

Joshua Coleman:

Many fathers and mothers tell me they feel betrayed by their children’s lack of availability or responsivity, especially those who provided their children with a life they see as enviable compared with their own childhoods. As the University of Virginia sociologist Joseph E. Davis told me, parents expect a “reciprocal bond of kinship” in which their years of parenting will be repaid with later closeness. The University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard told me in an interview that this expectation of reciprocity is fraught because “today, the boundary of parenting is unclear. If receiving shelter, food, and clothing is enough, then most of us should be grateful to our parents, irrespective of how our lives go.” However, if parents are supposed to produce happy adults, then, fairly or not, adult children might hold parents responsible for their unhappiness.

In my experience, part of what confuses today’s parents of adult children is how little power they have when their child decides to end contact. From the adult child’s perspective, there might be much to gain from an estrangement: the liberation from those perceived as hurtful or oppressive, the claiming of authority in a relationship, and the sense of control over which people to keep in one’s life. For the mother or father, there is little benefit when their child cuts off contact. Parents instead describe profound feelings of loss, shame, and regret.

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ average confidence in major U.S. institutions has edged down after increasing modestly several months into the coronavirus pandemic last year. Currently, an average 33% of U.S. adults express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 institutions, marking a three-percentage-point dip since 2020 and a return to the level seen in 2018 and 2019.

ncee.org

Since gaining independence in the early 1990s, Estonia has transformed itself into a digital society, which has resulted in a high level of public trust in technology solutions. While Estonia is perhaps best known for its advances in e-governance, which allow Estonians to access nearly all government services online, this commitment to technology applies to education as well. Estonia’s efforts to leverage technology for teaching and learning began in the 1990s with an ambitious programto build up schools’ technology infrastructure, including providing internet access to all schools nationwide. By the early 2000s, Estonia had already met this goal and moved on to developing digital resources for online teaching and learning. Throughout these early years and in the years that followed, as new technologies and digital resources were introduced, Estonia maintained a parallel focus on building digital literacy skills among educators and students. For example, school-based educational technologists—experienced teachers who complete an additional master’s degree to become technology integration specialists—have supported teachers in Estonian schools since 2005. Their focus is on how digital resources can best be used to enhance the curriculum. 

Two government-supported foundations—the Innove Foundation, founded in 2003 to provide implementation support for the Ministry of Education and Research, and the Information Technology Foundation for Education(HITSA), founded in 2013 to promote digital skills development in education—have played key roles in centrally organizing and curating Estonia’s collection of digital resources. These resources, which today form the backbone of Estonia’s jurisdiction-level support for distance learning, are described below.

Ben Zeisloft:

Some Canadian professors are trying to justify recent church burnings in the country by invoking “systemic injustice” and “civil disobedience.” 

Over the past several weeks, several Canadian churches have been torched after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked Native American graves near former residential schools, which as the BBC explains, were intended to assimilate children into Canadian culture.

Many activists across the nation therefore decided to cancel “Canada Day,” with some wearing orange to recall the residential schools’ history. 

The holiday commemorates the formation of Canada into a distinct nation on July 1, 1867, upon which the Canadian colonies were enjoined into a single union within the British Empire.

I have been avoiding Twitter. But this brought me back. Anyone else questioning this statement by the Exec Director of BC Civil Liberties… ? The same person who wants to abolish police. Honest question – how is this not hate and incitement? pic.twitter.com/t7FuXyaHt0

— Darlene Heidemann (@DarHeidemann) July 3, 2021

The rules:

Suppress ideas/people considered threats or counter-narrative

(this gets broader and more expansive with time)

Next

Amplify people seen as tribal heroes and ideas pro-narrative

(this gets more sophisticated and scalable with AI/ML).#longnight pic.twitter.com/CPTJbdb7gD

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 14, 2021

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a demand letter, on behalf of a group of concerned parents, to Elmbrook Schools urging immediate action to remove sexually explicit materials available through the district’s online library that violate state law and parents’ constitutional rights. At least three books and ebooks in the Elmbrook School system, which were until very recently available to children as young as 3rd grade, feature graphic instructions on sex acts and the use of online sex apps. The books are still available to 6th graders.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “School districts have an obligation to know if their library collections feature sexually explicit material available to young children. Elmbrook needs to immediately address this content and make clear to District parents that they take this matter seriously.”

Background: Recently, the parent of a sixteen-year-old Elmbrook student used that student’s school-issued Chromebook to access Sora, a school-sponsored app that makes available Elmbrook’s ebook and audiobook collection to students “for all levels – preschool to adult,” and confirmed access to sexually explicit material. Another book is available in a middle school library.

The content that has parents concerned include:

Shannon Whitworth:

School Choice advocates across the nation were given a gem of an opportunity this past year to prove the value of their programs when teachers unions refused to return teachers to classrooms when it was demonstrably safe to do so. In fact, across 30 states nearly 50 school choice bills were introduced this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers showed again on June 18 that he does not care about children’s education — except to the extent that he can continue to bolster Wisconsin’s failed public school establishment — when he vetoed a bill which would have expanded school choice in the state.

The bill would have broadened the income restrictions to three times the poverty level for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which would have increased access for students and parents desperate to get their kids out of failing Wisconsin public schools.

Wisconsin voters should remember that Evers, immediately prior to becoming the state’s highest elected official, was the superintendent of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction for a decade. Presiding over public schools with the worst achievement gap between Black and white students in the nation and a Milwaukee Public School District in which his own agency graded nearly 75% of the schools as failing to meet expectations for over 50,000 children, Evers is also a staunch school choice opponent.

Expanding school choice would not only benefit urban children. According to a study the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty put out last summer, 44,000 rural students in Wisconsin do not live within 10 miles of a high-quality school. By vetoing this bill, Evers has not only failed inner-city Black children, but children in rural Wisconsin.

Evers’ rationale for the veto was that expansion of the choice program would necessarily take funds away from the public school system. This argument has been debunked a myriad of times. In fact, after a student leaves a district, the public school still receives funds for the student for a rolling period of three years. The real question is, why give a school that is continuing to fail children even more taxpayer money? Outside of government, employees must improve their skills and productivity to merit being paid more money by their employer, and our schools should be no different.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ankush Khardori:

In February, however, the Associated Pressreported that the investigation was “dead,” with no charges to be brought against Trump, and there is no indication the Biden administration will reopen it. This likely has something to do with the fact that a case built largely on the word of Cohen — a notorious liar who did not fully cooperate with prosecutors — would be very risky. Another problem is that a criminal prosecution based on violations of campaign-finance law requires the government to prove the defendant knew his conduct was unlawful, and Cohen could not by himself establish that on the part of Trump, a problem that may similarly complicate Weisselberg’s potential utility as a cooperator against Trump in the pending tax-fraud case.

This dissonance between the confidence in Trump’s criminal exposure expressed by commentators and its reality was conspicuous throughout the Mueller investigation, which proved to be ratings gold for cable news and an incomparable star-making vehicle for lawyers. Mueller’s secretive two-year probe into the Trump campaign and Russian election interference was punctuated by legitimatebombshell developments, and its progression lent itself to endless on-air speculation, as when legal analysts argued that Paul Manafort’s indictment meant that Mueller was “quite likely on the verge of handing down new major indictments” or that, after Manafort’s conviction, there was a good chance he would finally flip on Trump. Hennessey in particular has been calledto the carpet since getting a job in the Biden Justice Department. Most of the hand-wringing was over the top, but for those of us who watched in real time, it was hard to argue with the assessment, contained in a critical National Review article, that she had “repeatedly suggested that [Mueller’s] findings would spell disaster for the Trump White House” — even if the same could be said about pretty much every legal analyst on CNN and MSNBC at the time.

June 30, 2021:

I hope and pray you and your family are well ! This summer is a scorcher’ Here is my brief and candid letter of resignation: “How sad it is to see our beloved Harvard Divinity School in such decline and decay. The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of a talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large. When I arrived four years ago- with a salary less than what I received 15 years earlier and with no tenure status after being a University Professor a( Harvard and Princeton – I hoped and prayed I could still end my career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect. How wrong I was! With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity: all my courses were subsumed under Afro-American Religious Studies, including those on Existentialism.

American Democracy and The Conduct of Life. no possible summer salary alongside the lowest increase possible every year. Yet I delivered two convocation addresses and one commencemenl speech in four years. I was promised a year sabbalical but could only lake one semester in practice. And to witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvaid administration’s hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting. We all knew the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards. When my committee recommended a tenure review – also rejected by the Harvard adminutration – I knew my academic achievements and student teaching meant far less than their political prejudices. Even my good friends in the Afro-American and African Studies Department were paralyzed, given their close relations to the administration. And after teaching extra courses. including five courses in one year, this silence continued. When the announcement of the death of my beloved Mother appeared in the regular newsletter, I received two public replies (just as that of my colleague Dr. Jacqueline Olga Cooke-Rivers who received none when her blessed Mother died). Any ordinary announcement about a lecture, award or professional advancement receives about twenty replies. This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother’s death constitute an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths. In my case, a serious commitment to Veritas requires resignation – with precious memories but absolutely no regrets.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

Dear School Boards, Administrators, and Concerned Parents of Wisconsin:

It has come to our attention that, in the guise of providing (unsolicited) advice, the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to district administrators purporting to tell them what the law “requires” that they teach about race and related matters of cultural diversity. If the point of the letter is to simply remind districts of the commonplace: that they should continue to teach American history in full, including things like the existence of slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and the substantial contributions of racial minorities to American culture and success, it is, if unnecessary, unobjectionable. Schools should do all of these things.

But it would be naïve to believe that the ACLU’s objectives are that modest. The “advice” is expressly offered in the context of criticisms of and efforts to restrict the use of concepts derived from Critical Race Theory and adjacent ideologies, clearly implying that state law must somehow “mandate” or limit the restriction of these concepts. It does not.

Let’s begin by defining “Critical Race Theory” and the instructional concepts derived from it. While a full explication of these concepts is not needed for our purposes, what characterizes these concepts is a focus on racial essentialism (the idea that persons are substantially defined by their race), an exaggerated standpoint epistemology (the idea that one’s perspective is substantially formed by his or her race), an emphasis on something called white privilege (the idea that all white persons benefit from a generally undefined “systemic racism”) and the assumption of black oppression (the contention that all black persons are substantially burdened by this systemic racism). They often include concepts of collective guilt or responsibility on the one hand and collective victimhood and entitlement on the other. They are generally combined with a series of contested claims about American history.

These concepts sometimes include the identification of “white” and “black” values and culture, suggesting, for example, that things like “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis,” and “hard work before play” are ‘white.” They are sometimes taught by pedagogical devices that segregate children by race and compel them to repeat or assent to a variety of contested propositions about race and a child’s “role” in “systems” of “racism” and “oppression.” They are often not limited to the provision of information or explanation of a perspective, but include a call for action. These devices may include, for example, requiring a white student to “acknowledge” or “affirm” his or her “privilege.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Scott Girard:

The School Board approved $840,000 in the 2021-22 budget to fund MPA, covering teacher and administrator costs for one year of the program.

Many school districts in Wisconsin and around the country are considering virtual options, an acknowledgement that some parents and families preferred online learning.

Online learning has been around for decades.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Stefanie Warnat-Herresthal et al.

Fast and reliable detection of patients with severe and heterogeneous illnesses is a major goal of precision medicine. Patients with leukaemia can be identified using machine learning on the basis of their blood transcriptomes. However, there is an increasing divide between what is technically possible and what is allowed, because of privacy legislation. Here, to facilitate the integration of any medical data from any data owner worldwide without violating privacy laws, we introduce Swarm Learning — a decentralized machine-learning approach that unites edge computing, blockchain-based peer-to-peer networking and coordination while maintaining confidentiality without the need for a central coordinator, thereby going beyond federated learning. To illustrate the feasibility of using Swarm Learning to develop disease classifiers using distributed data, we chose four use cases of heterogeneous diseases (COVID-19, tuberculosis, leukaemia and lung pathologies). With more than 16,400 blood transcriptomes derived from 127 clinical studies with non-uniform distributions of cases and controls and substantial study biases, as well as more than 95,000 chest X-ray images, we show that Swarm Learning classifiers outperform those developed at individual sites. In addition, Swarm Learning completely fulfils local confidentiality regulations by design. We believe that this approach will notably accelerate the introduction of precision medicine.