Dustin Volz:

The postcard verification is Facebook’s latest effort to respond to criticism from lawmakers, security experts and election integrity watchdog groups that it and other social media companies failed to detect and later responded slowly to Russia’s use of their platforms to spread divisive political content, including disinformation, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook revealed the plans a day after U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller unsealed an indictment accusing 13 Russians and three Russian companies of conducting a criminal and espionage conspiracy using social media to interfere in the election by boosting Republican Donald Trump and denigrating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The process of using postcards containing a specific code will be required for advertising that mentions a specific candidate running for a federal office, Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global director of policy programs, said. The requirement will not apply to issue-based political ads, she said.

“If you run an ad mentioning a candidate, we are going to mail you a postcard and you will have to use that code to prove you are in the United States,” Harbath said at a weekend conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State, where executives from Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google also spoke.

“It won’t solve everything,” Harbath said in a brief interview with Reuters following her remarks.

But sending codes through old-fashioned mail was the most effective method the tech company could come up with to prevent Russians and other bad actors from purchasing ads while posing as someone else, Harbath said.

In Wisconsin, new voters are sent a postcard to verify addresses. If the postcards are returned, voter records are now inactivated, according to this City of Madison blog post.

Remy Schmidt:

At dusk on Sunday night, Cameron Kasky was taking a brief, quiet moment for himself. He lay on a picnic table in a park not far from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where a gunman opened fire Wednesday, killing 17 of his classmates and teachers, and wounding 14 others.

Kasky was exhausted. He estimated that he’d done more than 50 interviews since the shooting, all to promote a movement against gun violence that he and his young friends have spearheaded in the wake of their school’s tragedy.

“We, as a community, needed one thing,” he said of his desire to form the group to give his friends a purpose amid the tragedy.

Tyler Durden:

Earlier today we discussed a report by Goldman Sachs which, when summarized, suggested that unless something significant changes in the coming years, the current US fiscal policy will lead to a debt catastrophe. In an unprecedented warning, the bank which spawned Trump’s chief economic advisor Gary Cohn, ironically the architect behind Trump’s fiscal strategy, warned that “the continued growth of public debt raises eventual sustainability questions if left unchecked.”

It is worth highlighting that for Goldman to warn that the US fiscal and debt trajectory is unsustainable is quite unprecedented, especially since it is the bank’s former President and COO who has put the US on that path.

And while we urge readers to get acquainted with Goldman’s list of concerns, all of which are very troubling, there is one specific chart which lays out clearly why the US is now headed for “banana republic” status amid developed economies when it comes to US debt sustainability, or in this case lack thereof.

That chart is below, and it shows total projected US Federal Debt on one axis, and US interest expense as a % of GDP on the other. The result is the red dot in the top right.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 organizations.

James Tanton:

It is astounding to me that mathematics – of all school subjects – elicits such potent emotional reaction when “reform” is in the air. We’ve seen the community response to the Common Core State Standards in the U.S., the potency of the Back to Basics movement in Alberta, Canada, and the myriad of internet examples of the absolute absurdity of “new math.”

At face value, the strong reactions we see can be interpreted as paradoxical. Parents might openly admit they themselves did not understand mathematics, that they actively hate mathematics even, but insist that we don’t dare do anything different for their child in math class! Parents’ befuddlement over their child’s third-grade homework might be seen as a wrong of the new curriculum, not as evidence of the failing of their own mathematics education, that they weren’t provided the flexibility and agility of thought to see simple arithmetic in multiple lights.

It seems that previous generations were seduced to equate familiarity with understanding. For instance, our standard arithmetic algorithms are somewhat bizarre – they are the end result of a human process of codifying arithmetical thinking, designed with the extra goal of using as little of precious 17th-century ink as possible. But if one does them often enough, their routine begins to feel comfortable and familiar.

Related: Math Forum

Connected math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

John Thornhill:

The historian William E Akin identified three wellsprings for budding technocrats: a growing fashion for centralised planning among progressive reformers; the popular mythology of the engineer as the saviour of American society; and the scientific management theories of Frederick W Taylor.

Abolishing the price mechanism and maximising production had some obvious parallels with what was happening in the Soviet Union. In his brilliant dystopian novel We, the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin savaged such technocratic thinking, foreseeing a society in which people had numbers, not names, and operated like cogs in a vast industrial machine. The North American technocracy movement, though, argued fiercely against both communism and fascism and claimed to be much more humane.

In spite of the media interest, the technocracy movement never succeeded in the US, largely because its leaders were hopeless politicians. President Franklin D Roosevelt was the one to salvage capitalism through his New Deal. Perhaps the movement’s greatest failing was that it never spelt out practical solutions that ordinary voters could understand. Disappointed that pure reason had not swept all before it, the movement eventually split, with one splinter group ending up as a quasi-fascist fan club.

Bernhard Rohleder:

The German government’s Network Enforcement Act, which came into effect on Jan. 1, aims to improve law enforcement on the Internet and more effectively fight hate crime. The law targets criminal online offenses including defamation, incitement and sharing unconstitutional symbols, such as the swastika.

But within just a few days of coming into effect, the inevitable has become apparent: legitimate expressions of opinion are being deleted. The law is achieving the opposite of what it intended: it is actually hampering the fight against crime.

The operators of social networks that are subject to the law now have to delete “obviously illegal” content within 24 hours of being notified. Other illegal content must be reviewed by social networks within seven days of being reported and then deleted. If the complaint management requirements are not met, fines of up to 50 million euros may be imposed. This puts companies under tremendous time pressure to check reported content.

Martin Austermuhle:

Facing increasing calls for his ouster, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson apologized Monday for a decision he said was prompted by seeing his daughter struggle in her new school.

“I was really struggling personally, and our family felt that there was a very real crisis related to our daughter and I got a great deal of tunnel vision and made a mistake,” he said in an interview with WAMU. “I reached out and asked for help and got it wrong.”

Jonathan Adler:

Rosen: There is a debate both among women and among men about what sort of behavior should be sanctionable, and one group is saying that it’s wrong to lump together violent behavior like Harvey Weinstein with less dramatic forms of sexual misconduct, and others say that all misconduct is wrong and should be sanctioned.

Ginsburg: Well, there are degrees of conduct, yes. But any time a woman is put in a position where she is inferior, subordinate, there should be—she should complain, she should not be afraid.

Rosen: What about due process for the accused?

Ginsburg: Well, that must not be ignored and it goes beyond sexual harassment. The person who is accused has a right to defend herself or himself, and we certainly should not lose sight of that. Recognizing that these are complaints that should be heard. There’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenants of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing.

Rosen: Are some of those criticisms of the college codes valid?

Ginsburg: Do I think they are? Yes.

Eliot Cohen:

What has happened here is the same phenomenon that explains so many of the ills of the last couple of decades: the algae-like bloom of elites and their simultaneous loss of substance. A younger John McCain would not have been unique for his qualities of wisdom and character at the earlier iterations of this conference. He would have been met by acute thinkers like Thérèse Delpech of France, staunch public servants like Manfred Wörner, a German defense minister and secretary general of NATO in the 1980s, or politicians like Dennis Healey of Britain. Their successors are cautious functionaries, pallid experts, and colorless politicians who think carefully about domestic audiences before speaking up abroad.

This political entropy seems to be a near-universal phenomenon in the Western world; why this is so is unclear, and probably has many explanations. But the nicely tailored generation represented in Munich this year seemed baffled by the re-entry into history of today’s authoritarians and fanatics. One wonders whether the attendees possess the steel of the earlier generation that took part in World War II, and in the subsequent struggle with Communism. Attempted Russian subversion of democratic elections in the United States and Europe elicited concern from some at the conference, but few were willing to call for a punitive response sufficient to inflict real pain on Moscow. Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs happily hobnobbed with Europeans looking to do business on the side.

Perhaps this is the inevitable price of the success of the West in creating societies prosperous beyond the dreams of 100 years ago. Perhaps it is the result of a culture that admires military courage but only from a safe distance, that makes democratic political life such a course of humiliation that few sane people will endure it, that has replaced intellectual brilliance with a Henry Ford-style industrialization of the life of the mind. Whatever it is, it hung over the conference like the February fog rising from the city’s slushy streets. This was not the Munich of Neville Chamberlain, but it was surely a long, long way from that of Ewald von Kleist, too.

Olga Khazan:

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as its known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

Adam Rogers:

Arguably one of the world’s experts on the ebb and flow of online communities, Norton didn’t exactly try to defend herself. The use of—oy, find me a better way to say this than “the N-word,” but OK—was part of an ill-conceived retweet of John Perry Barlow, who was trying to make a point about racists. Those similarly foreclosed-upon words referring to gay people were sometimes, Norton said, because she herself has been active in the queer community and were covered by in-group privilege, and sometimes because she was code-switching to the language of 4chan and other online groups that use vile epithets like cooks use salt.

Complicated. And, as Norton is a journalist covering free-speech and privacy issues online, maybe this kind of language isn’t just allowed but appropriate. She’s speaking the language of the people she writes about.

But what about the friends-with-Nazis thing?

In particular, Norton had defended Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker (who wrote an opinion piece for WIRED in 2012) and went to prison in 2013. Upon his release about a year later, Auernheimer said that he was also a white supremacist and anti-Semite.

Everyone is redeemable, Norton explained, and silence or disengagement make racism worse. She pointed to an article she posted on Medium about talking to racists as part of fighting the good fight against them, but also keeping open the lines of communication—as opposed to just, you know, punching Nazis.

Anyway, the Times compounded its apparent lack of due diligence with surrender to the mob, and fired her. Here’s the official statement from James Bennet, the editor of the editorial page: “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways.”

Bryan Bender:

The Trump administration’s ambitious new military buildup is at risk of being hobbled before it even starts — by a dwindling pool of young Americans who are fit to serve.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans age 17 to 24 are ineligible for the military due to obesity, other health problems, criminal backgrounds or lack of education, according to government data. That’s a harsh reality check for the Pentagon’s plan to recruit tens of thousands of new soldiers, sailors, pilots and cyber specialists over the next five years.

“We all have this image in our mind of this hearty American citizen, scrappy, that can do anything,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr, co-author of a new Heritage Foundation paper on the military recruiting challenge titled The Looming National Security Crisis. “That image we keep in our heads is no longer accurate.”

“Obesity and the percentage of people overweight in the country has just skyrocketed in the last 10 to 15 years,” he added in an interview. “Asthma is going up. High school graduation rates are still just barely acceptable and in some big cities they are miserable. Criminality is also not going away. We have to face the reality that these things in some cases are getting worse, not better.”

Sarah Cascone:

One of the world’s most infamous mysteries may have just been solved, thanks not to human genius, but to artificial intelligence. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, the 240-page Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script and an unknown language that no one has been able to interpret—until now.

Computing scientists at the University of Alberta claim to have cracked the code to the inscrutable handwritten 15th-century codex, which has baffled cryptologists, historians, and linguists for decades. Stymied by the seemingly unbreakable code, some have speculated it was written by aliens. Experts have even posited that the whole thing is a hoax with no hidden meaning. Today, housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, the manuscript’s delicate vellum pages are illustrated with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, and naked female figures.

When it came to tackling the centuries-old mystery, professor Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer put their expertise in natural language processing to good use, running algorithms that compared the document’s text to the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in no less than 380 different languages. According to the computer, the Voynich manuscript was written in Hebrew.

Capital and growth:

The Pulitzer-award winning reporter Charles Duhigg presents to us an interesting read about a subject that often defines our daily routine- habit. In his 2012 New York bestseller, The Power of Habit, we see a ubiquitous read that has been recommended by readers across the divide. Duhigg presents to us truths and techniques on how habits form and even goes out of his way to give us insight on how to change them.

The Power of Habit examines and recounts some important illustrations on the role played by habits in individuals, societies, and organizations. The book further goes out of way to provide practical techniques to identify and subsequently direct the cues that actually control our behaviors as well as results. A read between the lines of this book will definitely illuminate your perspectives and understanding of habit formation and a blueprint to changing them.

The book uses various stories and cases to give its readers an in-depth look into the concept of habit formation and how the characters in the story struggle to change them. The book can therefore be broadly classified in three parts: The Habits of Individuals, The Habits of Organizations and The Habits of Societies.

Charles Duhigg:

Once Foundem.com was available to everyone, the company’s honeymoon lasted precisely two days. During its first 48 hours, the Raffs saw a rush of traffic from users typing product queries into Google and other search engines. But then, suddenly, the traffic stopped. Alarmed, Adam and Shivaun began running diagnostics. They quickly discovered that their site, which until then had been appearing near the top of search results, was now languishing on Google, mired 12 or 15 or 64 or 170 pages down. On other search engines, like MSN Search and Yahoo, Foundem still ranked high. But on Google, Foundem had effectively disappeared. And Google, of course, was where a vast majority of people searched online.
 
 The Raffs wondered if this could be some kind of technical error, so they began checking their coding and sending email to Google executives, begging them to fix whatever was causing Foundem to vanish. Figuring out whom to write, and how to contact them, was a challenge in itself. Although Google’s parent company bills itself as a diversified firm with about 80,000 employees, almost 90 percent of the company’s revenues derive from advertisements, like the ones that show up in search. As a result, there are few things more important to Google’s executives than protecting the firm’s search dominance, particularly among the most profitable kinds of queries, such as those of users looking to buy things online. In fact, at about the same time the Raffs were starting Foundem.com, Google executives were growing increasingly concerned about the threats that vertical-search engines posed to Google’s business.

Reid Standish:

But unlike its neighbors, Helsinki reckons it has the tools to effectively resist any information attack from its eastern neighbor. Finnish officials believe their country’s strong public education system, long history of balancing Russia, and a comprehensive government strategy allow it to deflect coordinated propaganda and disinformation.

“The best way to respond is less by correcting the information, and more about having your own positive narrative and sticking to it,” Jed Willard, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Center for Global Engagement at Harvard, told Foreign Policy.

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

Reform Club:

United States: each action alleged that the President has and continues to violate the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. The Foreign Emoluments Clause provides:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Helen Kupp:

One of the types of projects that Strategy gets pulled into is the difficult project. The very cross-functional, complex, hairy project. Data and getting to metrics that matter is one of those projects.
Wait, data is hard?!

When most organizations think about data, they think about metrics and using these metrics to surface insights, make data-driven decisions, and continue to monitor the health of the business. This sounds like we should be able to hire smart and capable analysts, create some visual dashboards, and be off to the races!

“Every second of every day, our senses bring in way [more] data than we can possibly process in our brains.”- Peter Diamandis, Founder of the X-Prize

Having lots of data doesn’t make it immediately valuable. And when you’re scaling as fast as Slack, not only is leveraging data and metrics well critical to effective scaling, but it is also that much harder because you are “building the plane as it is flying”.

Anne Goldgar:

Right now, it’s Bitcoin. But in the past we’ve had dotcom stocks, the 1929 crash, 19th-century railways and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. All these were compared by contemporaries to “tulip mania”, the Dutch financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. Bitcoin, according some sceptics, is “tulip mania 2.0”.

Why this lasting fixation on tulip mania? It certainly makes an exciting story, one that has become a byword for insanity in the markets. The same aspects of it are constantly repeated, whether by casual tweeters or in widely read economics textbooks by luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith.

Tulip mania was irrational, the story goes. Tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined.

Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.

Susan Du:

Over the past few months, Humboldt High teacher Rachel Wannarka started noticing a lot of kids being transferred to her special education math class after failing out of regular math.

While regular math takes place daily, special ed math is every other day, taught at a level several grades lower than what many of these students were used to. Wannarka knew the kids were smart enough to succeed in the mainstream class, so she started looking for an explanation why they couldn’t keep up.

Special ed students all have unique learning disabilities – autism, cognitive difficulties, emotional behavioral disorders. But federal law stresses students with disabilities are entitled to be taught alongside students without them. It’s the school’s job to provide the extra support to make that possible.

That’s why all special ed students have a custom Individualized Education Program (IEP), a legal document that spells out when an aide is needed at their side to help them focus, get their work done, and make it through the day without incident.

Suspecting that Humboldt wasn’t giving students the extra support they needed, Wannarka cross-referenced students’ IEPs with staff schedules. She found that dozens of kids weren’t getting the time with aides that the law requires.

As a result, they’re failing out of the less restrictive mainstream classes and squandering their potential in special ed classes, where they just keep falling further behind, says Wannarka.

Jon Marcus and Matt Krupnick:

When Dustin Gordon’s high school invited juniors and seniors to meet with recruiters from colleges and universities, a handful of students showed up.

A few were serious about the prospect of continuing their educations, he said, “But I think some of them went just to get out of class.”

In his sparsely settled community in the agricultural countryside of southern Iowa, “there’s just no motivation for people to go” to college, says Gordon, who’s now a senior at the University of Iowa.

“When they’re ready to be done with high school, they think, ‘That’s all the school I need, and I’m just going to go and find a job.’ ” That job, Gordon explains, might be on the family farm or at the egg-packaging plant or the factory that makes pulleys and conveyor belts, or driving trucks that haul grain.

Variations of this mindset, among many other reasons, have given rise to a reality that has gotten lost in the impassioned debate over who gets to go to college, which often focuses on racial and ethnic minorities and students from low-income families: The high school graduates who head off to campus in the lowest proportions in America are the ones from rural places.

Casey Johnston:

My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk. In the drink cases, crowded with bottled water, Snapple, and Arizona iced tea, Muscle Milk occupies prime, eye-level real estate, protein counts splashed across the front of the bottles in black, bold lettering: 15, 20, 35 grams. Inside the bottles are creamy shakes in flavors like Chocolate, Strawberries ‘n Crème, and Mango Tangerine. The branding is literally protein-themed, and the higher the number, the greater the halo: protein is the reason for its central location and fluorescent spotlight.

We all need more protein, even if few of us know why. Protein has emerged as an undisputed Good Choice over the past 50 years of warring scientific studies slagging fat and carbs, endless opportunistic fad diets, and skyrocketing obesity in America. Just as one might look at all the world’s religions and decide that, while none is correct, there must be “something out there,” one might look at all the world’s weight-loss diets and note that, while they contradict each other in many ways, they all seem to preach protein, so protein must be good.

Caity Coyne:

School teachers and service personnel from all 55 counties will participate in West Virginia’s first statewide walkout Thursday and Friday, union leaders announced Saturday.

The announcement came at the end of a rally featuring thousands of teachers and others at the state Capitol, and follows weeks of growing tension between public employees, educators and the state Legislature regarding concerns with pay and health care.

“The entire state of West Virginia will be shut down,” said Dale Lee, president of West Virginia Education Association. “We are standing united — all 55. Will you stand with us?”

J Nathan Matias:

To find out the answer, Nikki Bourassa (@nikkiboura) and I organized a road trip from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law in Winchester Connecticut– the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to any part of the law.

(I am deeply grateful to Berkman-Klein Fellow and lawyer Salome Viljoen for reviewing this post and suggesting edits to make the legal information more accurate)
On the drive, we listened to a podcast by 99% invisible that told the fifty-year story of research and activism on the idea that car design influences people’s safety. I learned that the Egg Drop science fair project has its origin in the safety crusade of engineering professor Hugh DeHaven, who used the stunt to show that engineers were better at protecting eggs than protecting human bodies. DeHaven also pioneered crash testing, invented the three-point seatbelt, and laid the groundwork for today’s focus on vehicle safety.

research can’t change the world on its own; we need activists, lawyers, and courageous citizens who work for the public good
As a researcher, I’ve tended to focus on people like DeHaven, who changed how we understand, measure, and improve societal problems. I’ve written about the science behind public-interest environmental safety, food safety, and digital safety. But research can’t change the world on its own; for that, we need activists, lawyers, and courageous citizens who work for the public good. Our trip to the Museum of Tort Law gave me an introduction to the legal systems that make research meaningful to people’s lives.

Paul Lewis:

It was one of January’s most viral videos. Logan Paul, a YouTube celebrity, stumbles across a dead man hanging from a tree. The 22-year-old, who is in a Japanese forest famous as a suicide spot, is visibly shocked, then amused. “Dude, his hands are purple,” he says, before turning to his friends and giggling. “You never stand next to a dead guy?”

Paul, who has 16 million mostly teen subscribers to his YouTube channel, removed the video from YouTube 24 hours later amid a furious backlash. It was still long enough for the footage to receive 6m views and a spot on YouTube’s coveted list of trending videos.

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

The next day, I watched a copy of the video on YouTube. Then I clicked on the “Up next” thumbnails of recommended videos that YouTube showcases on the right-hand side of the video player. This conveyor belt of clips, which auto-play by default, are designed to seduce us to spend more time on Google’s video broadcasting platform. I was curious where they might lead.

The answer was a slew of videos of men mocking distraught teenage fans of Logan Paul, followed by CCTV footage of children stealing things and, a few clicks later, a video of children having their teeth pulled out with bizarre, homemade contraptions.

Joe Kotkin:

The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

Redesigning cities has become all the rage in the tech world, with Google parent company Alphabet leading the race to build a new city of its own and companies like Y Combinator, Lyft, Cisco, and Panasonic all vying to design the so-called smart city.

It goes without saying, this is not a matter of merely wanting to do good. These companies are promoting these new cities as fitter, happier, more productive, and convenient places, even as they are envisioning cities with expanded means to monitor our lives, and better market our previously private information to advertisers.

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

In reality, Google is entering the “smart city” business in no small part to develop high-tech dormitories for youthful tech workers and the cheaper foreign noncitizen workers in the U.S., including H1B indentured servants; overall noncitizens make up the vast majority of the Valley’s tech workforce. Even as the tech fortunes have grown ever larger, the companies own workers have been left behind, with the average programmer earning about as much today as she did in 1998 even as housing costs in tech hubs have exploded.

Karen Rivedal:

Within a few months, all 48 regular district schools will have a specially designated all-gender bathroom, as will the rented or owned space where alternative education programs are based and district headquarters. Only a “handful” of bathroom projects remain, Kepler said.

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

Zoë Carpenter :

February 23, 2017: Law-enforcement officers point their weapons at two water protectors praying near the Sacred Fire of the main resistance camp of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Both men were arrested, along with the photographer, shortly after this image was taken. (Tracie Williams)

On February 23 of last year, a day when the frozen ground had started to turn to mud, law-enforcement officers rolled into the Oceti Sakowin camp near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. Donald Trump had been inaugurated a month earlier, and the new president quickly reversed an Obama administration decision to deny Energy Transfer Partners a permit to finish construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.78 billion project running directly under the Missouri River. The water protectors, as protesters called themselves, had been fighting the pipeline since the spring of 2016, concerned that the proposed route cut through ancestral land of spiritual significance, and that a pipeline leak could contaminate the primary water supply to the reservation. The small group who had remained through the bitter winter at Oceti Sakowin had been ordered to leave by February 22 or face eviction and arrest. Most did; a few dozen remained the following the day, when Humvees with snipers on their roofs rolled into camp, a helicopter buzzing above them.

Lexia Fernández Campbell:

“Are you kids good at running and screaming?” a police officer asks a class of elementary school kids in Akron, Ohio.

His friendly tone then turns serious.

“What I don’t want you to do is hide in the corner if a bad guy comes in the room,” he says. “You gotta get moving.”

This training session — shared online by the ALICE Training Institute, a civilian safety training company — reflects the new normal at American public schools. As armed shooters continue their deadly rampages, and while Washington remains stuck on gun control, a new generation of American students have learned to lock and barricade their classroom doors the same way they learn to drop and roll in case of a fire.

Lawrence Neff Stout, :

In high school mathematics much of your time was spent learning algorithms and manipulative techniques which you were expected to be able to apply in certain well-defined situations. This limitation of material and expectations for your performance has probably led you to develop study habits which were appropriate for high school mathematics but may be insufficient for college mathematics. This can be a source of much frustration for you and for your instructors. My object in writing this essay is to help ease this frustration by describing some study strategies which may help you channel your abilities and energies in a productive direction.

The first major difference between high school mathematics and college mathematics is the amount of emphasis on what the student would call theory—the precise statement of definitions and theorems and the logical processes by which those theorems are established. To the mathematician this material, together with examples showing why the definitions chosen are the correct ones and how the theorems can be put to practical use, is the essence of mathematics. A course description using the term “rigorous” indicates that considerable care will be taken in the statement of definitions and theorems and that proofs will be given for the theorems rather than just plausibility arguments. If your approach is to go straight to the problems with only cursory reading of the “theory” this aspect of college math will cause difficulties for you.

The second difference between college mathematics and high school mathematics comes in the approach to technique and application problems. In high school you studied one technique at a time—a problem set or unit might deal, for instance, with solution of quadratic equations by factoring or by use of the quadratic formula, but it wouldn’t teach both and ask you to decide which was the better approach for particular problems. To be sure, you learn individual techniques well in this approach, but you are unlikely to learn how to attack a problem for which you are not told what technique to use or which is not exactly like other applications you have seen.

College mathematics will offer many techniques which can be applied for a particular type of problem—individual problems may have many possible approaches, some of which work better than others. Part of the task of working such a problem lies in choosing the appropriate technique. This requires study habits which develop judgment as well as technical competence.

Justin Hendrix:

In line with Sesno’s remarks, each of the technology executives pushed back on the British lawmakers, arguing that their companies are hardly unregulated. And while it is true that they are subject to a variety of data protection laws and must comply with a panoply of laws in hundreds of countries that govern questions such as how they work with law enforcement, they are still hardly accountable for the sorts of externalities we are seeing today. It seems right that democracies should demand more be done to address the scale of misinformation, propaganda, hate speech, dark political advertising and other vile content that flows freely across the platforms. Simon Hart referred to “regulation that is accountable, democratic and transparent.”

The running theme to these exchanges with the parliamentary members is clear- it isn’t whether these companies should be subject to further regulation, but rather how, and with what goals in mind? In the UK and Europe, these questions are gaining steam. In the United States, it is time for the conversation to come out of the back room and into the public square. The British inquiry was in stark contrast to the November 2017 hearings on Capitol Hill, where House and Senate Intelligence Committee members never once uttered the word “regulation” while questioning Google, Facebook and Twitter’s attorneys.

Robert Slavin:

In response to these stories, teachers across America wrote to express their views. Almost without exception, the teachers said that the situation in their districts is similar to that in DC. They said they are pressured, even threatened, to promote and then graduate every student possible. Students who fail courses are often offered “credit recovery” programs to obtain their needed credits, and these were found in an investigation by the Los Angeles Times to have extremely low standards (https://robertslavinsblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/the-high-school-graduation-miracle/). Failing students may also be allowed to do projects or otherwise show their knowledge in alternative ways, but these are derided as “Mickey Mouse.” And then there are students like some of those at Ballou, who did not even bother to show up for credit recovery or Mickey Mouse, but were graduated anyway.

The point is, it’s not just Ballou. It’s not just DC. In high-poverty districts coast to coast, standards for graduation have declined. My colleague, Bob Balfanz, coined the term “dropout factories” many years ago to describe high schools, almost always serving high-poverty areas, that produced a high proportion of all dropouts nationwide. In response, our education system got right to work on what it does best: Change the numbers to make the problem appear to go away. The FBI might make an example of DC, but if DC is in fact doing what many high-poverty districts are doing throughout the country, is it fair to punish it disproportionately? It’s not up to me to judge the legalities or ethics involved, but clearly, the problem is much, much bigger.

Some people have argued with me on this issue. “Where’s the harm,” they ask, “in letting students graduate? So many of these students encounter serious barriers to educational success. Why not give them a break?”

Iman Rastegari, Leah Shafer :

Every year, far too many African American boys fail to graduate from high school and attend a competitive four-year college. What’s standing in their way?

In the second episode of Walking the Talk, we explore obstacles on the road to college, and other issues affecting student equity, in a conversation with John Silvanus Wilson, the former president of Morehouse College and former executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, a position to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Walking the Talk, hosted by HGSE’s Domonic Rollins, is a series of video conversations streamed live on Facebook, exploring challenging questions around diversity, inclusion, and identity as they are lived and expressed in the real world. See the first installment in the series.

Here, we excerpt the audio of Rollins and Wilson’s live conversation; you can read our summary of the conversation, and the takeaways, below.

Related: They’re all rich white kids and they will do just fine, not!

Katie Notopoulos:

Last Saturday — 12 days ago now — I shared a cringeworthy video on Facebook: a 6-minute clip of a twentysomething white woman showing off her small, blandly decorated Brooklyn apartment. Sort of the pumpkin spice latte version of MTV Cribs — innocuous, but annoying. Ever since, this video has been waging a reign of terror over my friends and family, showing up at the top of their feeds every single day, over and over and over. They are complaining to me on Facebook. They are complaining to me in real life. They are tweeting me about it and emailing me. Begging me to remove this cursed video that greets them each time they open Facebook.
 
 And of course, they commented on my post. And then people commented on the comments. The more people commented, the more the video showed up on other people’s feeds. As the rage around this post intensified, so did the comments. Coworkers I sit next to commented. College friends commented. Someone I went to preschool with commented. A vicious, algorithmically delicious cycle.
 
 After a few days, the comments shifted from “I hate this woman’s apartment” to “why is this video constantly at the top of Facebook?” or “please, I beg you, delete this video,” and eventually, my boss commenting “please write about this.”

Via a kind email:

Dear Friends.

Last night, we learned that our application to establish One City Senior Preschool as a public charter school serving children in 4 year-old and 5 year-old kindergarten was approved by the University of Wisconsin System. We are very excited! This action will enable us to offer a high quality, tuition-free education to young children living in Dane County that prepares them for school success prior to beginning first grade.

We currently offer an exciting and proven curriculum that emphasizes early reading and math literacy development, creativity, and STEM learning through play. Our program features a full-time chef, healthy meals program, field trips, Family Perks, great partnerships, and a diverse and highly qualified staff. Beginning in the summer of 2018, we will implement our new co-curricular Sports and Fitness Program for children enrolled in our school. As a year-round preschool, our program will include fun summer, fall, winter and spring sports and fitness learning and activities.

We have other exciting news to share with you this month, too. Please look out for this, along with information about our staff hiring and enrollment for 2018-19 school year.

Stay tuned!

Kaleem Caire
Founder & CEO

Beginning September 1, 2018, One City will operate two different preschools in our current facility: One City Junior Preschool for children ages 1 to 3 and One City Senior Preschool for children ages 4 and 5. We will offer two 4K classrooms and two kindergarten (5K) classrooms.

Our Senior Preschool will be tuition-free while our Junior Preschool will continue to offer scholarships to families who need assistance with paying our lower than average weekly tuition rates. Wisconsin currently does not offer per-pupil funding for public school children younger than age 4, so families must continue to pay tuition for children ages 3 and younger.

Why two schools? We were required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to create a separate school to receive state-funded tuition aid for our 4K/5K charter school.

Because we will operate two different schools, we are changing our name from “One City Early Learning Centers, Incorporated” to “One City Schools, Incorporated”. We will begin using the new name on March 1, 2018.

In the mean time, we look forward to working with the Madison Metropolitan School District, University of Wisconsin System and its campuses, Edgewood College and other partners to expand educational access and opportunities for children in our city and region.

Much more about One City Early Learning Centers, here.

Kaleem Caire

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, and more recently the Montessori charter school.

Andrew McCarthy:

So we arrive at the knotty question for Obama political and law-enforcement officials: How do we “engage with the incoming team” of Trump officials while also determining that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia”?

How do we assure that an investigation of Trump can continue when Trump is about to take over the government?

What is the answer? Let’s consider what happened the next day.

Related:

Everyone from President Trump to a petty thief is at the same disadvantage when talking to prosecutors. :

Former federal prosecutor Ken White created a stir with his recent argument at Reason.com that neither President Donald Trump nor anyone else should voluntarily meet with investigators. By anyone else, White does not simply mean other people facing scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. He means you and me. Ever.

According to White, the only reason prosecutors ever really want to interview targets is to trap them into a story and catch them in a lie. If they’re after you, you can’t talk your way out of trouble. Sure, you might have information that would exonerate you, but your lawyer can instead convey it informally to the investigators, without any risk.

White is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. Prosecutors want to catch you in a lie because, when they can’t prove an underlying crime, it’s often easy to prove that you lied to them. That’s where the problem arises. I’ve been telling my astonished law students for decades that except in certain well-defined circumstances, lying to investigators shouldn’t be a crime. And it shouldn’t. Period.

Part of the reason for my position involves symmetry. As long as government investigators are allowed to deceive you, you should be allowed to deceive government investigators. And deceive you they may — rather willy-nilly. If a suspect confesses after police falsely tell him that his fingerprints were found at the crime scene, fine. If a suspect confesses after police falsely tell him that they have satellite images and DNA evidence linking him to the crime, fine. My view is that suspects should have the same freedom. If you can throw the police off the scent by telling them you weren’t there … fine. 1

This last point is important. White argues that investigators rarely talk to suspects without strong evidence of their guilt. Again, you’re not likely to be able to talk them out of pursuing you. So if your lie changes the course of the investigation, the case must not have been that strong to begin with. Another reason not to criminalize the lie.

BuzzFeed believes that evidence of the alleged D.N.C. break-in by Russian hackers might help the online publisher in a libel suit. But the D.N.C. says releasing information might make it vulnerable to more hacking.

FISA Court.

More, here.

Samantha Jordan:

On our platform, we’re fortunate to have thousands of students from all over the U.S., spanning over 200 universities. We thought this presented a unique opportunity to look at the relationship between school tier and interview performance for both juniors (interns) and seniors (new grads). To study this relationship, we first split schools into the following four tiers, based on rankings from U.S. News & World Report:

Amol Rajan:

On the surface, Facebook is one of the most successful commercial propositions in the history of business. Its market capitalisation is today over half a trillion dollars. Shares are six times more valuable today than five years ago. Though they trade at a lower price to its forward earnings multiple than at any time since Facebook went public, in 2012, the overall picture is one of astonishing growth and wealth.

As the unmissable Miles Johnson wrote in the Financial Times yesterday: “The social network… is increasing revenues at more than 50 per cent a quarter and earnings per share at more than 70 per cent, making its profitability and growth light-years ahead of the average US-listed company”.
That analysis comes in an article which suggests that, for now, Facebook is “valued at a discount to the wider market despite giddy growth”. As short-term advice for investors, this strikes me as correct.

Yet the medium and longer-term picture look very different. In fact, Facebook is accumulating enemies and challenges at such a rate that its horizons have suddenly become somewhat clouded.

Jon Marcus:

This fall, women will comprise more than 56 percent of students on campuses nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Some 2.2 million fewer men than women will be enrolled in college this year. And the trend shows no sign of abating. By 2026, the department estimates, 57 percent of college students will be women.

The new minority on campus? Men.

That’s an irony not lost on Jennifer Carlo, the vice president of student engagement and student affairs at Carlow University, which is trying all kinds of ideas to bolster its supply of men—including showcasing male college-success stories as examples to prospective applicants.

“It didn’t used to be that you were worried about providing role models and mentors for males,” Carlo mused.

Monica Disare and Alex Zimmerman:

Another is that she may not have the union support that has proven valuable to Mayor Bill de Blasio. She definitely doesn’t have the support of Randi Weingarten, the influential leader of the American Federation of Teachers.

Weingarten told Chalkbeat this week that she was “surprised” to hear Jenkins’ name surface, and compared her to leaders of the so-called education reform movement who have had contentious relationships with teacher unions.

“I think that Barbara Jenkins is much more in line with the Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee types than she is in line with the Carmen Fariña types,” Weingarten said, comparing the polarizing former schools chiefs of New York City and Washington, D.C. to the city’s current schools chancellor.

More, here.

Joanne Jacobs:

At a high-poverty, low-performing K-8 school in Philadelphia, eighth graders don’t get into fights any more. Their principal promised to pay each student $100 if they reach graduation without any fighting, reports Kristen A. Graham on Philly.com. If any of the 33 eighth graders break the peace, they all lose the money.
“They have a choice — to become the violence they see in their day-to-day lives, or to be peaceful models for our school and our community,” said Stephanie Andrewlevich, principal of Mitchell Elementary. She’s put up her own money, but hopes a sponsor will cover the rewards.

Alicia Duran:

My 10 years as a high school English teacher at Volcano Vista in Albuquerque were awesome. I love the art of teaching, the science of teaching and the joys of teaching. My students’ learning came first, which is at the heart of why I love our profession – making an impact on kids’ lives.
Yet, in my career in APS, I was always struck by how my student achievement growth wasn’t acknowledged or rewarded by my school or district. I was treated the same as every other teacher – as if every teacher delivers at the exact same level for kids. It didn’t matter that my students grew almost two years academically in one school year. … This has been the nature of our profession for much of the past century.

Matthew Ladner:

I believe that open enrollment is a big reason that Arizona has been leading the nation in NAEP gains, and that charter and private choice programs deserve some credit the eagerness with which districts participate. Take a look at Columbus on the above map- a large urban district literally surrounded by districts choosing not to allow open enrollment transfers. Now take a look at the school district map of Pima County. The Tucson Unified School District is surrounded by districts that do participate in open-enrollment- actively.

Much more on open enrollment, here.

Natasha Singer:

The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm.

Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later.

Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science.

This semester, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are jointly offering a new course on the ethics and regulation of artificial intelligence. The University of Texas at Austin just introduced a course titled “Ethical Foundations of Computer Science” — with the idea of eventually requiring it for all computer science majors.

And at Stanford University, the academic heart of the industry, three professors and a research fellow are developing a computer science ethics course for next year. They hope several hundred students will enroll.

Rather ironic.

Steve LeVine:

Amy Goldstein’s Janesville is this year’s Hillbilly Elegy — the go-to volume for understanding what is really going on in the hearts of the U.S. midsection. The book chronicles six years in a Wisconsin town where the demise of its central actor — a General Motors plant — pushes many of its long-middle class residents into poverty.

Quick take: In a survey that Goldstein commissioned, she found that, contrary to the popular consensus, reskilling is not necessarily the answer for reemploying people thrown out of work.

Mark O’Connell:

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand. If you’re interested in how our current cultural anxieties – climate catastrophe, decline of transatlantic political orders, resurgent nuclear terror – manifest themselves in apocalyptic visions, you’re interested in the place occupied by this distant archipelago of apparent peace and stability against the roiling unease of the day.

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you would have been interested, soon after Donald Trump’s election as US president, to read a New York Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, considered New Zealand to be “the Future”. Because if you are in any serious way concerned about the future, you’re also concerned about Thiel, a canary in capitalism’s coal mine who also happens to have profited lavishly from his stake in the mining concern itself.

Thiel is in one sense a caricature of outsized villainy: he was the only major Silicon Valley figure to put his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vengefully bankrupted a website because he didn’t like how they wrote about him; he is known for his public musings about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, and for expressing interest – as though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric – in a therapy involving transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the ageing process. But in another, deeper sense, he is pure symbol: less a person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.

Cara Giaimo:

This blobby social lifesaver is an isochrone map: one that indicates not just the physical distance between places, but the amount of time it takes to get from one spot to another. When they were first introduced in the 19th century, individual isochrone maps tended to center on a particular place, and contained a set amount of information: one might tell you how many days’ journey it was from London to anywhere else in the world, while another showed how many hours it would take to get from the central train station in Melbourne, Australia, to a series of more remote stops.

Now, the increasing availability of geographical and transit-related data has led to an explosion in isochrone experiments. Whether you’re trying to shorten your commute, visualize transportation-related inequalities, or simply get coffee with someone who lives across the river, there’s probably a map for that.

Rebecca Schuman:

In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent.

Brandon Wright:

Recent stories have cast doubt on the stratospheric graduation rates reported in myriad states, including accounts in Alabama, California, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas—and of course Washington, D.C., where one-third of recently awarded diplomas are reportedly attributable to educators violating district policies related to pupil absences and credit recovery.

These are just the scandals we know about. “This is sad and infuriating and, as local education reporters across the country know, not at all uncommon,” tweeted Erica L. Green, an education reporter at the New York Times, when the D.C. scandal broke. Green used to cover education for the Baltimore Sun. And what we need today is for more folks on more school beats to investigate whether similar malfeasance is occurring in their districts and states—because such behavior is almost certainly more widespread than has yet seen the light of day.

If it is, we must identify causes and propose solutions. The issue is not measurement and accountability writ large, as our friends Lindsey Burke and Max Eden proposed recently. People cheat on Wall Street too, but that doesn’t mean companies should stop reporting quarterly earnings or that the SEC should stop checking on them.

Instead, the most obvious culprits are utopian graduation rate targets that have pushed some educators to do the unthinkable. That is, the problem isn’t reporting graduation rates and using them as part of an accountability system; it’s setting goals for them that can’t possibly be achieved. We should set more realistic targets that take into account the achievement level of students when they enter ninth grade.

Corey DeAngelis:

The evidence is in. And it’s great news for kids in charter schools. A just-released study by my colleagues at the University of Arkansas and me finds that, overall, public charter schools across eight major U.S. cities are 35 percent more cost-effective and produce a 53 percent higher return-on-investment (ROI) than residentially assigned government schools.

And every single one of the cities examined exhibited a charter school productivity advantage over their district school counterparts. As shown in Figure 1 below, charter schools outperformed district schools in each city on student achievement despite receiving significantly less resources per student. Charter schools in all eight cities studied are getting more bang for the buck. And in places like D.C. and Indianapolis, charter schools are doing more with a lot less.

Locally, a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

Meredith Walker:

My son is big for his age. At only 16, he’s already 6’4” and 225 pounds. As he grew, I began to have a lot of anxiety because I knew he could get mistaken as an adult. And being an adult black male in St. Louis — like anywhere in America — can be uniquely dangerous, especially when the police are involved. This article was published in collaboration with Vice.So recently my son and I began having The Conversation: What to do if he gets stopped by a police officer.

The Day ICE Knocked on My Door
No matter what’s going on, I tell him, stay quiet. Keep your eyes down. Lower your shoulders. Let the air out of your chest. Get the bass out of your voice. Sound as much like a child as possible. And above all, do not make any sudden moves. Whatever they ask you to do, I tell him, yo

Max Eden & Matthew Ladner:

One year ago, President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos for secretary of education. Shortly thereafter, the technocratic faction of the education reform establishment joined with the teachers’ unions to declare war against her and against Michigan’s charter schools. The evidence, they said, is clear: Michigan’s charter schools are uniquely awful. But the evidence has been piling up that Michigan charter schools are actually unusually good.

The first shot fired came from the opinion pages of the New York Times, where Tulane University professor Doug Harris declared that DeVos’ nomination represented, “a triumph of ideology over evidence.” He held her responsible for charter schools in Detroit, which he called “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”

The evidence has been piling up that Michigan charter schools are actually unusually good.

Oddly, Harris linked his claim to a Stanford study showing that Detroit’s charter schools significantly outperform its traditional public schools. He, and the rest of Michigan charter critics, also ignored studies from the Mackinac Center and Excellent Schools Detroit that also showed a substantial charter edge.

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity, having rejected the proposed Madison preparatory IB charter school and more recently the Montessori charter.

Ozan Onay:

The C programming language is not trendy. The most recent edition of the canonical C text (the excitingly named The C Programming Language) was published in 1988; C is so unfashionable that the authors have neglected to update it in light of 30 years of progress in software engineering. Everyone “has been meaning to” learn Rust or Go or Clojure over a weekend, not C. There isn’t even a cute C animal in C’s non-logo on a C decal not stuck to your laptop.
But Myles and I are not trendy people, so we insist that all of our students become fluent in C. A fresh class of C converts has just finished working through the K&R bible, making this a good time for me to reflect on why we deify this ancient tongue.
We give students four reasons for learning C:

Damon Linker:

On many college campuses, groups of left-leaning students insist that free speech should be conditional on speakers adhering to explicit standards of diversity and avoiding the infliction of emotional harm on the members of marginalized groups through the spreading of “hate.”

From the opposite ideological direction, President Trump believes that the government should “take a strong look” at libel laws to keep news organizations from subjecting his own administration to negative coverage.

Finally, from the center-left come calls to use anti-discrimination law to punish organizations that oppose the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and accommodations for transgender people. If that happens — either by passing new laws that explicitly add to existing anti-discrimination statutes or by courts treating the members of these groups as protected classes covered by existing law — the result will almost certainly be a significant constriction of speech, as those holding more conservative views will face sanction for expressing them in public.

Sandor Farkas:

One hour into the lecture, an audience member asked her whether she thinks Buchanan’s libertarian philosophy was motivated by “personal greed” or “malevolence,” to which she responded by speculating that support for individual liberty might actually be the result of a mental disorder.

“It’s striking to me how many of the architects of this cause seem to be on the autism spectrum—you know, people who don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others, and who have difficult human relationships sometimes,” she answered.”

Bryan Taylor:

If you were to ask most people which country suffered the worst inflation in history, they would answer Germany, since Germany’s hyperinflation after World War I is probably the most famous. By 1923 when Germany finally put an end to its hyperinflation, it took 1 trillion old Marks to get 1 new Rentenmark. As devastating as the German inflation was, there were three hyperinflations that made the German case look amateurish: Hungary in 1946, Yugoslavia in 1992-1993 and Zimbabwe from 2004 to 2009. Of these three, Hungary’s was the worst of them all.

Hungary was no stranger to hyperinflation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the losing side of World War I and was broken up after the war. The new nation of Hungary lacked the proper government structures, so it turned to printing money to fill the hole in its budget. Before World War I, there were 5 Kronen to the US Dollar, but by 1924 there were 70,000 Kronen to the US Dollar. So Hungary replaced the Kronen with Pengö at the rate of 12,500 Pengö to the Kronen in 1926.

Related: US Debt Clock.

brilliant maps:

The map shows the percentage of children in various European countries born to parents who are not married.

While the map is in German, the colours are fairly obvious, the darker the red the greater the share of children born outside of marriage is.

The data is from 2007, so is a little old but does show some interesting differences both between countries and within them.

Matt Halvorson :

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State’s Teacher of the Year three years in a row from 1988-1990. Nearly 400,000 active teachers currently belong to the union in the Empire State, so even being mentioned in a conversation about the state’s best teachers has you breathing rarified air. Winning the award outright three straight years is an astounding singular achievement. Gatto was clearly at the pinnacle of his profession.

I stumbled onto the transcript of his third and final acceptance speech, and despite a quarter-century having passed, I find that he raised many of the same questions I have been wrestling with myself — and many I don’t think I had quite reached yet, or been quite bold enough to even ask myself.

I find that Gatto also echoes much of the stifling rigidity I struggled against as a kid growing up in the schools he’s describing. It echoes just as loudly the fears I’ve struggled as an adult to name when I think about sending my own kids into the same system of public schools — a fear that is only magnified by having kids of color.

Ahmed Rashid:

NOBODY in Pakis­tan’s brief history, which has witnessed four military coups, has matched Asma Jahan­gir for her dedication to public service, her belief in the rule of law, her relentless defence of democracy and pursuit of free and fair elections. She stood for both peace and justice with all of Pakistan’s neighbours.

Indians too mourned her loss as did people around the world. She was loved by millions while her detractors treated her with the utmost respect. At a time when Pakistan is once again facing immense political uncertainties and severe tensions with the US and all its neighbours, Asma’s role as a voice for peace and sanity was absolutely vital. Sadly that voice has now gone silent and for the time being there is nobody with the stature or the willingness to take her place.

Throughout her life she took enormous risks. She was the bravest of the brave.

Bethany Barnes:

Portland Public Schools retaliated against a substitute teacher for reporting sexual misconduct by one of its employees, a district investigation has found.

A human resources investigation found Caprice, who has asked to only be identified by her first name, was iced out of substitute teaching positions because she reported to the district in 2012 that then-teacher Mitch Whitehurst had demanded oral sex from her and a friend when they were students in the 1980s.

Amber Walker:

A physical education teacher at Madison East High School has left work after being accused of inappropriate behavior by a student and will not return to the school, according to an email sent to parents Tuesday.

East principal Michael Hernandez’ email to parents said an investigation was initiated into allegations against Gary Calhoun, a veteran East teacher. Calhoun obtained his permanent state teaching license in 1984 and was hired by the Madison Metropolitan School District in 1988. Calhoun graduated from East in 1975 and has served as the school’s baseball coach.

Gareth Cook:

We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun. In The Self-Driven Child, authors William Stixrud and Ned Johnson focus on the ways that children today are being denied a sense of controlling their own lives—doing what they find meaningful, and succeeding, or failing, on their own. Screen time, the authors say, is part of the problem, but so are well-meaning parents and schools, who are unwittingly taking from children the opportunities they need to grown stronger, more confident, and more themselves. Stixrud and Johnson answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

What makes you think that children do not have enough control over their live?

Stixrud: We know that a low sense of control is highly associated with anxiety, depression, and virtually all mental health problems. Researchers have found that a low sense of control is one of the most stressful things that people can experience. And since the 1960’s, we’ve seen a marked rise in stress-related mental health problems in children and adolescents, including anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Just in the last six or seven years, there has been an unprecedented spike in the incidence of anxiety and depression in young people.

Sarah Zhang:

The results of a massive new DNA sequencing project on the New York City subway have just been published. And yup, there’s a lot of bacteria on the subway—though we know most of it is harmless. What’s really important, though, is what we don’t know about it.

The PathoMap project, which involved sampling turnstiles, benches, and keypads at 466 stations, found 15,152 life-forms in total, half of which were bacterial. The Wall Street Journal has created a fun, interactive microbial map of the subway out of the data, showing where on the lines the bacteria “associated with” everything from mozzarella cheese to staph infections was found.

Bryan Caplan:

Parents, teachers, politicians and researchers tirelessly warn today’s youths about the unforgiving job market that awaits them. If they want to succeed in tomorrow’s economy, they can’t just coast through school. They have to soak up precious knowledge like a sponge. But even as adulthood approaches, students rarely heed this advice. Most treat high school and college like a game, not an opportunity to build lifelong skills.

Is it possible that students are on to something? There is a massive gap between school and work, between learning and earning. While the labor market rewards good grades and fancy degrees, most of the subjects schools require simply aren’t relevant on the job. Literacy and numeracy are vital, but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages after graduation. The main reason firms reward education is because it certifies (or “signals”) brains, work ethic and conformity.

Spencer Soper, Naomi Nix, Ben Brody and Bill Allison:

It capped a year of criticism from Trump about Amazon’s market power, impact on jobs and ties to the Washington Post, which Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos owns. While that Twitter barrage grabbed headlines, behind the scenes, the e-commerce giant was furiously expanding lobbying efforts that have quickly made it one of the most-influential companies in Washington, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

In the past five years, Amazon increased lobbying spending by more than 400 percent, a rate of change that far exceeds rivals’. It lobbied more government agencies than any other tech company, pressed its case on as many issues as Google, and outspent everyone in the industry except for the search giant, the data show.

“They quietly went from Chihuahua to Great Dane in just a few years,” said Bruce Mehlman, a former top technology policy official under President George W. Bush.

Bill McBride:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data today issued its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit,which reported that total household debt increased by $193 billion (1.5%) to $13.15 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2017. This report marks the fifth consecutive year of positive annual household debt growth. There were increases in mortgage, student, auto, and credit card debt (increasing by 1.6%, 1.5%, 0.7% and 3.2% respectively) and another modest decline in home equity line of credit (HELOC) balances (decreasing by 0.9%). The Report is based on data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel, a nationally representative sample of individual- and household-level debt and credit records drawn from anonymized Equifax credit data.
Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/02/ny-fed-q4-report-household-debt.html#7qrOuYQiUUgSTlkq.99

Ari Cohn::

Online outrage mobs are all the rage recently, standing at the ready to inundate colleges and universities with demands to punish a student or professor the moment they say something that offends others. Unfortunately, administrators too often capitulate, abandoning the principles of free speech that they are bound, either legally or by virtue of the promises they have made, to uphold. As I posited last month, administrators may be so willing to forsake freedom of expression when faced with a horde of angry internet denizens because they fear that if they do not, the bombardment will continue, keeping their institution in a negative press cycle and giving the impression that they do not take whatever issue is at stake seriously enough. I warned:

Ira Stoll:

Dear Lawrence Bacow: Congratulations on being named as the next president of Harvard University. I am hoping that you are a huge success in the new job. I have a Harvard degree and own a house in Boston, and the value of both those assets may fluctuate depending on your success or failure.

Also, you mentioned in the introductory video that your father was a Jewish immigrant to America from Minsk. One of my own grandfathers was also a Jewish immigrant from Minsk, so I feel like I have even more of a personal stake.

The main reason I’m rooting for you, though, is that strong universities are good for America and good for the world. They cure diseases, fuel economic growth and job creation, expand opportunity, inspire creativity, and reward excellence.

Unfortunately, as you also mentioned, the reputations of American colleges and universities are pretty tarnished at the moment. At Harvard, there are still plenty of applicants lined up and willing to pay. In Washington and all across America, though, there are plenty of people who think higher education is one of America’s problems, and that our campuses have become cesspools of leftist indoctrination and elitist privilege. That perception can be costly: the Republican Congress and President Trump imposed a new endowment tax on Harvard and similar institutions.

Erin Hinrichs:

For instance, she reminds Hudson of the conversation she had with the woman who administered his initial IQ test about the cultural bias embedded in standardized testing. There was one question that asked kids to identify a picture of a rooster. It’s the sort of question that trips up more poor, urban kids, the administrator told her, because they’d misidentify it as a chicken.

“That,” she pointed out, “was not an example of intelligence but of exposure. Yet questions like that are being used to determine if kids should be in gifted programming.”

Potential testing flaws aside, a new report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank headed up by Michael Petrilli, a former Bush administration aide, shows that Minnesota may not be doing enough to tap into the potential of students like Hudson. And the holdup may be something much more obvious: a lack of gifted programs.

Its researchers examined the so-called “gifted gap” and found that Minnesota schools are less likely to offer gifted programming, on the whole, than schools in other states. Here, only 51.5 percent of schools have gifted programs, compared to 68 percent nationally.

Further breakdown of these numbers shows that more affluent Minnesota schools are actually at the national average, with 64.5 percent offering gifted programming. That means the disparity between Minnesota and the national average is driven by a lack of offerings at middle- and high-poverty schools.

And here is where the need for reforms in the way students are flagged and tested for gifted programming may come into play: Even in high-poverty schools that do offer gifted programming, black students are less likely to actually be enrolled in them than their white and Asian peers.

Anya Kamenetz:

Marcey Morse had unwittingly found herself smack in the middle of a costly and bitter feud, pitting state authorities and mainstream charter school organizations on the one side, and virtual schools on the other. The latter have the support of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and some state-level politicians.

Unlike for the rest of the nation’s charter school students, virtual schools take place entirely online. The students are generally at home, on laptops, reading material, doing exercises, taking tests. The teachers are reachable by online chat, video conference and telephone. No after-school programs, no uniforms, no school nurse, no playground, no buildings at all. The only supervision comes from parents.

The main issue at stake in the fight is this: Virtual schools’ test scores and graduation rates have, consistently, been very low. So low that their performance, along with, at times, disputes over attendance, have led them to be shut down or placed at risk of closure in states including Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.

The travails of virtual schools have split the charter school movement. The national organizations representing traditional charter schools have sought to put daylight between themselves and virtual schools, going so far as to question “whether virtual schools should be included in the charter school model at all,” in the words of NACSA.

FIRE:

Every year, FIRE chooses the 10 worst colleges for free speech — and unfortunately, 2017 left us with plenty of options: Campuses were rocked by violent mob censorship, monitored by bias response teams, plagued by free speech zones, and beset by far too many disinvitation attempts. Although the number of colleges with the most restrictive speech codes has continued to decline, 90 percent of schools still maintain codes that either clearly restrict or could too easily be used to restrict free speech.

Today, we present our 2018 list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. As always, our list is presented in no particular order, and it includes both public and private institutions. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment; the private colleges on this list, though not required by the Constitution to protect student and faculty speech rights, explicitly promise to do so.

A new feature of this year’s list is our Lifetime Censorship Award. This “honor” goes to the one college or university that is so frequently discussed as a contender for our annual “worst colleges for free speech” list that it deserves special recognition. This year, that school is DePaul University.

Are you a student or faculty member whose free speech rights are imperiled on campus? Submit a case to FIRE. Also, check out FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus to help you fight for free speech, due process, religious liberty, and more.

Steven Pinker:

Consider the U.S. just three decades ago. Our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000. Eleven percent of us fell below the poverty line (as measured by consumption). And we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.

Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today. The homicide rate is 5.3 (a blip up from 4.4 in 2014). Three percent of us fall below the consumption poverty line. And we emit four million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulates, despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.

Karen Harris, Austin Kimson, Andrew Schwedel:

Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Our analysis shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years (see Figure 1). The aim of this report by Bain’s Macro Trends Group is to detail how the impact of aging populations, the adoption of new automation technologies and rising inequality will likely combine to give rise to new business risks and opportunities. These gathering forces already pose challenges for businesses and investors. In the next decade, they will combine to create an economic climate of increasing extremes but may also trigger a decade-plus investment boom.

In the US, a new wave of investment in automation could stimulate as much as $8 trillion in incremental investments and abruptly lift interest rates. By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, hitting middle- to low-income workers the hardest. As investments peak and then decline—probably around the end of the 2020s to the start of the 2030s—anemic demand growth is likely to constrain economic expansion, and global interest rates may again test zero percent. Faced with market imbalances and growth-stifling levels of inequality, many societies may reset the government’s role in the marketplace.

Virginia Postrel:

From the cab of Rodney Terry’s state-of-the-art John Deere cotton stripper, harvesting cotton seems like the easiest job in the world. We chug along at four or five miles an hour, watching the giant machine’s bright yellow fingers gobble up eight rows of bolls at a time. White rows magically turn brown as we pass over them. Then comes the reveal, as every few minutes a plastic-wrapped cylinder eight feet across plops out the back, holding as much as 5,000 pounds of cotton ready for the gin.

“This thing is just constantly moving,” says Terry, who farms 6,000 acres in Ropesville, Texas, a half hour’s drive southwest of Lubbock. The stripper cost a whopping $700,000, but it’s amazingly efficient. Terry can harvest 100 to 120 acres a day, compared to 80 with the previous generation of equipment, which had to stop periodically to empty its basket of harvested cotton into a trailer. He can also keep working in windy weather that would blow away loose bolls waiting to be wrapped in the field.

Most important, he no longer needs to hire a half dozen harvest workers to supplement his three full-time employees. Finding reliable seasonal laborers for farms and gins is increasingly difficult in West Texas. Locals blame government benefits that offer a better deal than temporary work. (“Don’t get me started,” says Terry.) Bringing in the harvest with his new setup takes only two people at a time: one to steer the stripper and one to drive a tractor that lines up the modules for the gin to pick up. Full-timers handle everything, and the machine can run all night if needed.

Morgan R. Frank, Lijun Sun, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Iyad Rahwan:

The city has proved to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: how will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across US urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation and subsampling of occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal forces: urban agglomeration and automation’s impact on employment.

College Debt.

Scott Jaschik:

In 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported that a leading private college consultant was charging $9,999 each to 10 attendees for a weekend “boot camp” on college admissions. The idea that parents would pay that kind of money for a few days of advice stunned and appalled many.
These days, $9,999 may be pocket change in the world of elite college consulting. A lawsuit filed last week by Ivy Coach revealed that it charged a woman in Vietnam $1.5 million to help her daughter apply to 22 elite colleges, as well as seven top boarding schools she sought to attend in high school, before applying to college. The fee was worth it, the lawsuit says. In December, an (unnamed) Ivy League institution granted the daughter early admission.

But, the lawsuit charges, the Vietnamese mother has paid only half of the $1.5 million. The family, the lawsuit says, is part of the “international aristocracy who have enlisted Ivy Coach’s premium services.”

The lawsuit says that Ivy Coach provided “substantial guidance and effort” to help the daughter apply to Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams Colleges; Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, New York, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford and Tufts Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Universities of California (Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses); Chicago, Pennsylvania and Southern California. The legal papers reviewed by Inside Higher Ed reference 22 colleges, but only 21 are named.

A. G. Hopkins:

Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, is in a state of flux. Not Even Past, or perhaps Not Ever Past, because the continuously unfolding present prompts a re-examination of approaches to history that fail to respond to the needs of the moment, as inevitably they all do.

Beth Hawkins:

Does anybody remember the coup de gras leaders of the current St. Paul School Board delivered to former Superintendent Valeria Silva? Recruited, funded and swept to electoral victory by the teachers’ union, the first thing they did upon taking office two years ago was to settle the last contract talks by granting raises of 2 percent in each of the next two years, to the tune of $21 million. On top of the contract’s automatic “step and lane” increases, which cost an additional 2 percent to 4 percent a year.

This of course exacerbated the district’s shortfall, which the new board majority believed could be made by up by cutting fat at the administrative level. They didn’t like the budget Silva presented, sent her back to do it their way and when the river of superfluous money failed to appear volunteered to buy out her contract. They didn’t have cause to let her go, so the cost of this maneuver approached $1 million.

And so how bitter is the irony that in recent weeks these same relative board newcomers have found themselves pleading publicly that there is no money? And that their 2016 decision in fact compounded the size of the shortfall today?

Kevin Williamson:

am not much one for rubbernecking at car crashes. (I’m not setting you up for a Congress joke, here. That comes later.) Most of the time they are scary but ultimately insignificant episodes involving a little property damage and a great deal of inconvenience. Sometimes they are much worse, and I couldn’t help looking at the car blazing in the middle of the freeway in the middle of the day, looking more like it had been bombed or hit with a rocket than like it had been involved in an accident. Thick black smoke covered both sides of the highway, and as the flames poured out of the doors and windows, I thought to myself that it’s a lucky thing that in real life burning cars don’t explode like they do in the movies.

Jeanne Lindsay:

With a teacher shortage in the state, lawmakers want to help license more teachers by waiving some testing requirements some educators see as a barrier to getting into the classroom.

Shon Harris says he’s had trouble passing the math requirement for his elementary school teacher license. In part, because it includes material he won’t even teach his fourth grade students.

“It goes all the way up to high school geometry, despite the fact that most of the skills on the test won’t be taught in the elementary classroom,” Harris says.

Gary Fineout:

Following a sharply worded partisan debate, the Republican-controlled Florida House on Thursday passed a sweeping education bill that would add yet another private-school voucher program in the state while also making a vast array of changes on everything from school testing to how much money charter schools can receive.

It’s the second year in a row that House Speaker Richard Corcoran and GOP leaders have pushed to overhaul Florida’s schools, which have been constantly altered and reshaped during the nearly 20 years that Republicans have controlled state government. It’s not clear the entire measure will pass, although Senate Republicans say they support many key provisions.

The fierce debate echoed previous ones in which Republicans asserted they were creating more choices for parents, while Democrats said the sweeping scope of the bill was designed to divert money from traditional public schools to schools run or controlled privately.

Nicholas Thompson:

In any case, Facebook’s move into news set off yet another explosion of ways that people could connect. Now Facebook was the place where publications could connect with their readers—and also where Macedonian teenagers could connect with voters in America, and operatives in Saint Petersburg could connect with audiences of their own choosing in a way that no one at the company had ever seen before.

III
In February of 2016, just as the Trending Topics fiasco was building up steam, Roger ­McNamee became one of the first Facebook insiders to notice strange things happening on the platform. McNamee was an early investor in Facebook who had mentored Zuckerberg through two crucial decisions: to turn down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to acquire Facebook in 2006; and to hire a Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg in 2008 to help find a business model. McNamee was no longer in touch with Zuckerberg much, but he was still an investor, and that month he started seeing things related to the Bernie Sanders campaign that worried him. “I’m observing memes ostensibly coming out of a Facebook group associated with the Sanders campaign that couldn’t possibly have been from the Sanders campaign,” he recalls, “and yet they were organized and spreading in such a way that suggested somebody had a budget. And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘That’s really weird. I mean, that’s not good.’ ”

But McNamee didn’t say anything to anyone at Facebook—at least not yet. And the company itself was not picking up on any such worrying signals, save for one blip on its radar: In early 2016, its security team noticed an uptick in Russian actors attempting to steal the credentials of journalists and public figures. Facebook reported this to the FBI. But the company says it never heard back from the government, and that was that.

Citizen Stewart:

And finally, and perhaps most importantly at the moment, we can recruit, hire and retain a diverse corps of high-quality teachers and principals who live out the ideals of equity even without adequate resources. These leaders, both within schools and on the systems level, continue to work relentlessly and creatively to access alternative funding streams because students are sitting in front of us right now and it cannot wait.
No, Superman is not coming. She and he are already here toiling in our most high-needs schools for our most high-needs students. But even Superman needs help. It’s time to demand it.

Shannon Bond:

Nearly half of Americans favour regulating how websites such as Facebook and Google select what news stories they show to readers, according to a new report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation, in the latest sign of growing public concern over big tech.

The study comes just days after Facebook announced sweeping changes to its news feed to prioritise posts from friends and family over content from media outlets, businesses and brands, in response to warnings that the world’s largest social network may be harming its users and society.

The role that technology platforms have come to play in people’s lives has come under scrutiny, with concerns over Facebook’s inability to curb the spread of Russian propaganda and hoax stories during the 2016 election and worries that the way news is presented in online feeds creates filter bubbles that exacerbate political polarisation.

The Gallup-Knight survey suggests the public shares some of those concerns. It found 57 per cent of Americans say the methods that websites use to choose which stories to show to visitors — including their past viewing history — presents “a major problem” for democracy. But they are divided on what to do about it: 49 per cent favour regulation of how websites provide news, while 47 per cent said the sites should be free to use whatever methods they choose.

Tanvi Misra:

It’s this speech that Virginia Eubanks, an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, comes back to at the end of her new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. In it, Eubanks takes a hard look at some of the seemingly agnostic—and even well-meaning technologies—that promise to make the U.S. welfare apparatus well-oiled and efficient. Automated systems that gauge eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, databases that match homeless folks to resources, statistical tools that detect cases of child abuse are all considered game-changers for welfare institutions. But Eubanks demystifies these complex-sounding technologies, detailing the ways they can compromise the human rights and dignity of the very people they claim to help. King’s vision on this front, as with many others, is yet to be realized, she argues.

CityLab caught up with Eubanks to talk about some of the main themes in her book.

Kelsey McSorley:

“Understanding global perspectives and how they are formed is not just a prerequisite for becoming a global citizen; it is necessary for becoming an engaged citizen of any local community,” asserts the preamble of the document approving the new mandate, noting that course requirements play “a critical role in helping students develop an understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of the world.”

In order to fulfill the requirement, students must complete at least six credits from a list of approved courses that address at least two out of four categories: Global Self-Awareness, Global Knowledge, Global Viewpoint, and Global Engagement.

“Global self-awareness” courses, for instance, focus on embracing the “values of diverse others,” helping students to “develop appreciation for diverse voices and stories and the contributions of cultures and countries different from one’s own.”

The “global knowledge” goal, meanwhile, addresses “the deeply interconnected nature of the world,” with courses exploring concepts like how “the impact of globalized capitalism and neoliberalism on economic systems, inter and intra-societal stratification, civil and human rights, and sustainability” form the “historical roots” of inequities around the world.

The “global viewpoint” category aims to introduce students to different cultural and historical perspectives, while the “global engagement” element teaches students to “take effective critical action” on the basis of their new knowledge by “contributing to positive change in globally diverse, interconnected, and interdependent natural, social, and business environments.”

Peter Goff, Bradley Carl, and Minseok Yang:

This report presents findings on key features of the Wisconsin teacher labor market, including mobility, attrition, supply, and demand. We use data from multiple sources (including state staffing and credentialing files, application and vacancy information, and statewide survey data on perceptions of staffing challenges) to (a) establish a common vocabulary around categories of labor supply—specifically which positions are high supply, which are medium supply, and which are low supply; (b) provide a baseline against which subsequent reports can build and future policies can be assessed; (c) provide a common base of empirical evidence to focus and foster debate; and (d) identify aspects of the teacher labor market that are problematic.
Key findings

• High attrition rates among those in low-supply positions exacerbate staffing challenges.

• There are two external applicants (those not currently teaching in a Wisconsin public
school) for every one internal applicant; yet, in the low-supply category, this external-to- internal applicant ratio is closer to 1:1, suggesting that policies that increase the labor supply may be warranted for these positions.

• There is a marked increase in the use of emergency credentialing to bring teachers entering the labor market into classrooms, and there is an increase in the number of individuals who remain on emergency certificates in consecutive years.

• Use of emergency credentialing appears incongruous with policy intent, as district leaders report using this tactic to fill 30% of high-supply vacancies.

• The prime hiring times are early March through mid-May, which therefore is the optimal time for districts to find candidates across all three labor supply categories.

• Opinions as to whether a teacher shortage exists vary with the kind of position being filled.

According to district leaders, low-supply positions draw “too few” applicants (seldom more than 10 per vacancy), reinforcing perceptions of a labor shortage. In contrast, drawing fewer than 18 applicants for high-supply positions is considered too small of an applicant pool by district leaders; the perception of a teacher shortage arises with roughly half of the vacancies for these high-supply positions.

• Regardless of the depth of the vacancy pool, district administrators perceive a lack of quality in applicants; they consider 83% of applicants for low-supply positions, 64% of medium-supply applicants, and 50% of high-supply applicants to be of low quality.

Örjan Falk, Märta Wallinius, […], and Nóra Kerekes :

The nationwide multi-generation register was used with many other linked nationwide registers to select participants. All individuals born in 1958–1980 (2,393,765 individuals) were included. Persistent violent offenders (those with a lifetime history of three or more violent crime convictions) were compared with individuals having one or two such convictions, and to matched non-offenders. Independent variables were gender, age of first conviction for a violent crime, nonviolent crime convictions, and diagnoses for major mental disorders, personality disorders, and substance use disorders.

Matt Levine:

“Berkeley is the center of the resistance, and for the resistance to work, it must have a coin,” says a city council member, in a sentence that makes as little sense as every other sentence in this story. You can just sell the municipal bonds. Why sell “tokens” that are backed by municipal bonds? Fine, fine, you want to issue the bonds “on the blockchain”? I will allow it, you gotta keep track of the bonds somehow, that is some harmless buzzwordery. But throwing in the buzzword “token” is, I think, a bridge too far.

Elsewhere here is John Quiggin arguing that “the Bitcoin bubble should finally destroy our faith in the efficiency of markets.” In particular, he notes that Bitcoin is a terrible currency, and then dismisses the alternative argument that Bitcoin’s value comes from its usefulness as a store of value:

Katie Bo Williams:

In 2016, the court reviewed 1,752 applications and certifications. In total, about 98 percent of applications were granted, either as originally requested or with modifications.

Almost 80 percent of the warrants were granted as requested. About 19 percent, 339 applications were granted with edits — like including a reporting requirement or shortening the duration of the proposed surveillance.

Twenty-six applications were denied in part and nine were denied in full.

Critics say that the FISC is a “rubber-stamp” court because so few applications are denied. Its defenders argue that the final approval rate is misleading because the vetting and editing process is so rigorous.

Cathwrine Gewertz:

The headlines made a big splash, and yet they were strangely familiar: Another school system was reporting a higher graduation rate than it deserved.

The most recent scandal-in the District of Columbia-is just the latest example in a growing case file of school systems where investigators have uncovered bogus graduation-rate practices.

Those revelations have unleashed a wave of questions about the pressures and incentives built into U.S. high schools, and fueled nagging doubts that states’ rising high school graduation rates-and the country’s current all-time-high rate of 84 percent-aren’t what they seem.

Matthew Gonzales:

Three years ago, my wife and I moved downtown for the typical reasons: to enjoy the amenities of urban living; to be closer to interesting arts, dining, and nightlife opportunities; and to live among people who shared what we imagined were our socially progressive values.

We also had our eye on a downtown elementary school for our two young sons: Center for Inquiry 2, a highly regarded Indianapolis Public Schools magnet that offers the prestigious International Baccalaureate program. Several of our friends already sent their kids there, and they assured us it was a fantastic school.

Enrollment at CFI (and all IPS magnets) is lottery-based and governed by rules that give some families an edge over others. For example, hopefuls who live in a “priority zone” around a magnet school get an advantage, as do those who have a child already attending the school of their choice.

We first played the magnet lottery when we enrolled our oldest son in pre-kindergarten—a process that’s playing out in thousands of Marion County homes this month. Since CFI 2 doesn’t have a pre-K program, we made CFI 27—a duplicate of CFI 2 in the nearby Kennedy-King neighborhood—our first choice on the lottery application. But we didn’t get in. Instead, we got ou

Tyler Coward:

On Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah announced that he was introducing legislation to protect free speech on campus. The bill, called the “Free Right to Expression in Education Act,” would prohibit public institutions of higher education from quarantining free expression into small, misleadingly labeled “free speech zones” on their campuses. If enacted, the measure would free tens of thousands of public university students from these restrictive, unconstitutional zones.

Sam
Dangremond:

This past year the price of college tuition rose faster that inflation, according to the College Board, and the cost of attending college is now higher than ever. Scroll down to see which American colleges are the most expensive to attend.

Nick Anderson:

An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen.

Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United States, English in China — with a curriculum centered on mastery of core academic subjects, ­student-driven projects and off-campus learning opportunities in major world cities.

On Thursday, veteran education entrepreneur Chris Whittle plans to announce the debut of the D.C. campus in fall 2019 at a prominent site near a cluster of embassies — the striking aluminum and glass edifice at 4000 Connecticut Ave. NW once known as the Intelsat building.

David Brady, Ryan M. Finnigan and Sabine Hübgen:

No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception, have children out of wedlock and do not marry.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty” in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.”

Josh O’Kane:

Sara Hjellstrom had just had a tonsil operation when a friend, DJ-producer Mike Perry, handed her the roots of a song he hoped she could turn into a hit. Sitting on the couch in her Stockholm apartment, Hjellstrom built Perry’s four chords into a tropical house track, with help from her songwriting partner Nirob Islam. The beat, top-line melody and the words came near-instantly.

Hjellstrom wanted her own voice on the track, but had been told by her doctors not to sing. Being from Sweden, though, where music is treated like a job – a profession, really, such as an engineer or electrician – she wanted to get that job done. So, a half an hour after she began writing, she stepped into her walk-in closet and recorded the vocals – in a single take.

In June, 2016, that song, The Ocean, began a six-week summer run atop Sweden’s charts, reaching No. 11 on Billboard’s American dance chart, too. Hjellstrom, who’s taken on the alias SHY Martin, instantly went from music-school student to coveted co-writer and guest performer, jumping on tracks by the Chainsmokers, Kygo and Bebe Rexha.

ABA Journal:

Could reforming the federal student-loan program be a way to halt the skyrocketing cost of attending law school? At the 2018 ABA Midyear Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, the American Bar Foundation gathered a panel together to discuss the issue in The Perennial (and Stubborn) Challenge of Cost, Affordability and Access in Legal Education: Has it Finally Hit the Fan?

“If I have to put the blame for the title of this panel on any one place, I would put it on these student loan programs and the fact that they are basically unregulated, really, in terms of the amount,” said Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education.

“The students can borrow as much money through those programs as they want,” Currier said. “So if Harvard Law School or New England Law School said, ‘Tuition at our school next year is $200,000, and living expenses are $50,000,’ the federal government wouldn’t say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ They would say, ‘Where can we send that check for $250,000?’” …

Currier and Stephen Daniels, a senior research professor at the American Bar Foundation, both drew attention to a current bill that would impact the federal student-loan program and potentially cause havoc for law schools and law students. HR 4508, the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity through Education Reform Act was introduced in the House of Representatives in December.

Hans-Edzard Busemann, Nadine Schimroszik:

The verdict, from a Berlin regional court, comes as Big Tech faces increasing scrutiny in Germany over its handling of sensitive personal data that enables it to micro-target online advertising.
 
 The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzvb) said that Facebook’s default settings and some of its terms of service were in breach of consumer law, and that the court had found parts of the consent to data usage to be invalid.
 
 “Facebook hides default settings that are not privacy-friendly in its privacy center and does not provide sufficient information about it when users register,” said Heiko Duenkel, litigation policy officer at the vzvb.
 
 “This does not meet the requirement for informed consent.” The vzvb posted a copy of the ruling on its website. A court spokesperson confirmed that a judgment had been handed down but declined further comment.