Kelly Meyerhofer
:

The University of Wisconsin System is asking for $107 million more in state money, three-quarters of which would be outcomes-based, rewarding or punishing campuses based on how well they meet performance metrics such as student access, progress toward completion, “workforce contributions” and operating efficiencies.

The 2019-21 budget proposal, released by the UW System Monday afternoon, is tailored to Republicans’ demand for more accountability from universities. It also does not raise tuition, something Republicans have shown little appetite in supporting.

The UW Board of Regents, almost all of whom were appointed by Gov. Scott Walker, will consider it during the board’s Aug. 23 meeting in Madison.

In the two-year operating budget proposal, $82.5 million would be divvied up among the System’s campuses based on each institution’s performance in 16 measures developed by the regents. Each campus determines how much weight to assign each metric, so long as the measures within each of the four goals passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature equal 25 percent.

Hayley Krischer:

Donna* is from the suburbs. She says so proudly. A really nice town not far from Philadelphia. Donna grew up in a nice middle-class family. She wrote poetry. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and a job at the board of social services.

Today Donna is in a group therapy session at Family First, an outpatient substance abuse program for women.

In 2011, after she gave birth to her son Marco*, now six, a doctor prescribed the then-25-year-old Donna Oxycodone and Xanax for chronic back pain. Donna paid the doctor in cash. It was a “pill mill,” where doctors doled out prescriptions like candy. Her family knew that she was taking a lot of pills, but it wasn’t some drug dealer she was seeing. This was a doctor, after all. And the pills helped. Still, her mother didn’t like it. Her mother thought it was going to lead to something else.

This went on for a while, taking pills without any real issue. And then in 2013, Donna got into a very bad car accident. More prescriptions. Severe depression. A suicide attempt. A stint in rehab. Someone reported the doctor at the pill mill to the DEA and the place shut down. Maybe things were looking up.

Lisa arapaport:

Life expectancy is declining in high-income countries worldwide, driven in part by the effects of the opioid epidemic on younger adults in the U.S. and the impact of a severe flu season on older adults in other nations, two new studies suggest.

A man is seen in silhouette walking a dog at Cunningham Park in the Queens borough of New York U.S., January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Life expectancy is a measure of the health and wellbeing of a population. Widespread or sustained declines in life expectancy may signal problems in a nation’s social and economic conditions or in the provision or quality of its healthcare services, researchers write in The BMJ.

The first study looked at trends across 18 high-income countries and found that most countries experienced declines in life expectancy in 2015. This is the first time in recent decades that so many high-income countries simultaneously experienced declines in life expectancy for both men and women.

Out of 18 countries in the study, 12 experienced life expectancy declines among men and 11 experienced life expectancy declines among women.

Ben Miller:

Millions of students will arrive on college campuses soon, and they will share a similar burden: college debt. The typical student borrower will take out $6,600 in a single year, averaging $22,000 in debt by graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

There are two ways to measure whether borrowers can repay those loans: There’s what the federal government looks at to judge colleges, and then there’s the real story. The latter is coming to light, and it’s not pretty.

Consider the official statistics: Of borrowers who started repaying in 2012, just over 10 percent had defaulted three years later. That’s not too bad — but it’s not the whole story. Federal data never before released shows that the default rate continued climbing to 16 percent over the next two years, after official tracking ended, meaning more than 841,000 borrowers were in default. Nearly as many were severely delinquent or not repaying their loans (for reasons besides going back to school or being in the military). The share of students facing serious struggles rose to 30 percent over all.

Alexandra Lange:

Parents obsess over their children’s playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but the toys, classrooms, playgrounds, and neighborhoods little ones engage with are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades, even centuries of changing ideas about what makes for good child-rearing-and what does not. Do you choose wooden toys, or plastic, or, increasingly, digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can the built environment help children cultivate independence? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle.

Corey DeAngelis:

EducationNext just released its 12th annual survey of public opinion. The nationally representative survey, administered in May 2018, finds that 54 percent of the general public supports private school vouchers for all students. This result is up 9 percentage points (20 percent) from 2017. On the other hand, only 43 percent of the survey respondents support income-targeted vouchers. This is great news for all families. Here’s why.

Melissa Benn:

Unlikely as it might sound, one of the most electric political meetings I have ever attended was a lecture on the Finnish educational system given by Pasi Sahlberg, the Finnish educator and author, in London in the spring of 2012. Sahlberg, who was speaking to a packed committee room 14 of the House of Commons – the most magnificent of a run of grand meeting rooms that directly overlook the Thames – has a rather laconic manner of delivery. However, in this particular instance, his flat speaking style proved the perfect vehicle for an unexpectedly radical message.

Sahlberg described how Finnish education had evolved, in the postwar period, from a steeply hierarchical one, rather like our own, made up of private, selective and less-well regarded “local” schools, to become a system in which every child attends the “common school”. The long march to educational reform was partly initiated to strengthen the Finnish nation after the second world war, and to defend it against Russian incursions in particular.

Finland’s politicians and educational figures recognised that a profoundly unequal education system did not simply reproduce inequality down the generations, but weakened the fabric of the nation itself. Following a long period of discussion – which drew in figures from the political right and left, educators and academics – Finland abolished its fee-paying schools and instituted a nationwide comprehensive system from the early 1970s onwards. Not only did such reforms lead to the closing of the attainment gap between the richest and poorest students, it also turned Finland into one of the global educational success stories of the modern era.

I was recently reminded of this meeting when reading a short pamphlet published in November 1964 by the Young Fabian authors Howard Glennerster and Richard Pryke on “the public schools”. Much of the pamphlet covers the same ground occasionally trod today by the odd brave soul: the social divisiveness bred by a parallel school system for the better-off; the disproportionate access of privately educated pupils to Oxford and Cambridge and then to the top jobs in society; the dispersal of bursaries largely to the cash-strapped middle class; and the numerous canny tax schemes enjoyed by both private school parents and the schools themselves that amount to large state subsidies to the most privileged in society. The pamphlet ended by dismissing the foolishness of those who say that state schools should “catch up” with the private sector. The answer was integration.

Madison’s non diverse K-12 governance model has long tolerated disastrous reding results.

Ben Miller:

Millions of students will arrive on college campuses soon, and they will share a similar burden: college debt. The typical student borrower will take out $6,600 in a single year, averaging $22,000 in debt by graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

There are two ways to measure whether borrowers can repay those loans: There’s what the federal government looks at to judge colleges, and then there’s the real story. The latter is coming to light, and it’s not pretty.

Consider the official statistics: Of borrowers who started repaying in 2012, just over 10 percent had defaulted three years later. That’s not too bad — but it’s not the whole story. Federal data never before released shows that the default rate continued climbing to 16 percent over the next two years, after official tracking ended, meaning more than 841,000 borrowers were in default. Nearly as many were severely delinquent or not repaying their loans (for reasons besides going back to school or being in the military). The share of students facing serious struggles rose to 30 percent over all.

Dan Wang:

I consider Definite Optimism as Human Capital to be my most creative piece. Unfortunately, it’s oblique and meandering. So I thought to write a followup to lay out its premises more directly and to offer a restatement of its ideas.
 
 The goal of both pieces is to broaden the terms in which we discuss “technology.” Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.
 
 I submit that we have two big biases when we talk about technology. First, we think about it too much in terms of tools and recipes, when really we should think about it more in terms of process knowledge and technical experience. Second, most of us focus too much on the digital world and not enough on the industrial world. Our obsession with the digital world has pushed our expectation of the technological future in the direction of cyberpunk dystopia; I hope instead that we can look forward to a joyful vision of the technological future, driven by advances in industry.
 
 This is one of my longer essays; the final section summarizes the main points.
 
 Process knowledge is represented by an experienced workforce. I’ve been studying the semiconductor industry, and that has helped to clarify my thoughts on technological innovation more broadly. It’s easy to identify all three forms of technology in the production of semiconductors: tools, instructions, and process knowledge. The three firms most responsible for executing Moore’s Law—TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—make full use of each of these tools. Each of them invest north of $10 billion a year to push forward that technological frontier.

Lily Hay Newman:

 “The bottom line is society needs identifiers,” says Jeremy Grant, coordinator of the Better Identity Coalition, an industry collaboration that includes Visa, Bank of America, Aetna, and Symantec. “We just have to make sure that knowledge of an identifier can’t be used to somehow take over the authenticator. And a phone number is only an identifier; in most cases, it’s public.”
 
 Think of your usernames and passwords. The former are generally public knowledge; it’s how people know who you are. But you keep the latter guarded, because it’s how you prove who you are.
 
 The use of phone numbers as both lock and key has led to the rise, in recent years, of so-called SIM swapping attacks, in which an attacker steals your phone number. When you add two-factor authentication to an account and receive your codes through SMS texts, they go to the attacker instead, along with any calls and texts intended for the victim. Sometimes attackers even use inside sources at carriers who will transfer numbers for them.

Kaushik:

In the early part of the 20th century, in between the two World Wars, Vavilov travelled far and wide across five continents, visiting 64 countries in total, collecting varieties of plants and food crop specimens. He taught himself 15 languages so that he could speak with native farmers. After nearly a decade of travels and hundreds of trips later, Vavilov founded the Pavlovsk Experimental Station as part of the Institute of Plant Industry situated in Pavlovsk in Leningrad in what is now St. Petersburg.

Andrew Xia.

Jessica Guynn:

“They were the kind of social media posts that regularly get shared in liberal circles, but they were coming from sham accounts originating in Iran..”

Lenny Teytelman:

It’s not the chasing you around for sometimes thousands of miles, leaving behind my family and friends over and over to follow you. It isn’t even because of the neglect or the mistreatment, the living in less than ideal or even normal dwellings because you had so few resources to sustain me, the lack of acknowledgment, appreciation, or respect for what I offered you. I spent my best (and peak reproductive) years with you, hoping that we could get to the point where we could finally settle down before it was too late for me. All of this took so much longer than you promised at the beginning of our relationship. No matter how hard I worked, you kept moving the target, saying “Oh I’ll commit when…”, but the list just kept growing. I sacrificed time, money, and sometimes physical and mental health to devote myself to you. And, believe me, there were others in line…promising commitment, stability, and respect. But I ignored them. I ignored the red flags. I had invested so much. I didn’t want to give up on us. You were just so damn…interesting…and I loved the people you connected me to. You really have a way of attracting wonderful people to you. People that care. I saw them start to drop away; start to distance themselves from you (or perhaps you from them). It started to become less clear what it was I had to do to stay with you, what you wanted out of me. It started to become apparent that you would not necessarily be there for me in the future.

Tom Angell:

It’s well known that many banks are reluctant to open accounts for marijuana businesses out of fear of running afoul of the U.S’s government’s continued criminalization of the drug.

But one major institution just took the financial services industry’s cannabis cash paranoia a step further, saying—in what appears to be a first—that it won’t do business with a political candidate because she has received donations from cannabis industry interests.

Toni Airaksinen:

Two weeks ago, school officials confirmed that 20 students have been hired, at an estimated annual cost of up to $42,000. Reached by Campus Reform, a spokesman claimed that the project is not funded by taxpayers, but rather, by the Student Services Fee.

That $376-per-quarter fee is not optional. Over a standard four-year degree, the fee amounts to at least $4,512—more if a student takes longer to graduate.

Despite mounting criticism of the program since Campus Reform initially broke the story, UCLA has since chosen to hire even more students, announcing on Tuesday that it hopes to recruit an unspecified number of graduate students to the program, too.

“Attention friends of IGR! We have re-opened applications for GRADUATE students who want to be paid Diversity Peer Leaders for 2018-2019! Check out the application… and please share it with friends!” notes the August 14 Facebook post.

UCLA declined to disclose how many additional students they seek to hire. With 20 undergraduates already hired, it’s unclear if they seek to hire an equal number of graduate students, or perhaps just a handful to watch over the younger students.

Shaun Nichols:

An American woman is suing the US government’s Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to get the data border agents copied from her phone.

Rejhane Lazoja said that when she landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on February 26 after a nine-hour transatlantic flight, she was subjected to a secondary screening by CBP agents who, over the course of the inspection, seized her iPhone 6S Plus.

While the phone was returned to Lazoja in July, her attorneys want to know what data was copied. Believing the search to have been illegal, she is now suing the CBP to have any copied data from the phone returned to her as personal property.

“The seizure, retention, and any sharing of her property without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant have violated Ms Lazoja’s rights under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, and are at odds with recent Supreme Court holdings as well as District Court and Court of Appeals decisions scrutinizing CBP’s practices of seizing digital storage devices without a warrant,” the filing [PDF] reads.

Keiser:

As Twitter and Facebook are criticized over censorship and constant finger-pointing at Russia, RT’s Max Keiser speaks to the senior editor of the Grayzone Project, Max Blumenthal, who sums up the reality of the situation.
In this episode of Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the fact that despite there being an avalanche of information today, it’s actually more difficult to be educated about what’s going on in the world than it was in the 60s.

Ira Stoll:

The best explanation of the firing of FBI director James Comey and of the subsequent investigation by special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller may just come from a social scientist who died years before President Trump took office.

When James Q. Wilson died in 2012, he was remembered primarily for his influential 1982 Atlantic article with George Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police And Neighborhood Safety,” advocating police tactics focused on maintaining order and reducing fear.

It turns out, though, that Wilson—whose colleagues in the government department at Harvard included Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—also wrote a whole book about the FBI.

That book, The Investigators: Managing FBI And Narcotics Agents, was published in 1978 by Basic Books and funded in part by a grant from Irving Kristol’s company, National Affairs, Inc. It is based on in part on Professor Wilson’s personal experience as an adviser to FBI director Clarence Kelley, who served from 1973 to 1978.

Its insights relevant to Comey and Mueller come in a chapter considering the motivation of FBI executives, and of government officials in general. Wilson writes, “In my view, it is the desire for autonomy, and not for large budgets, new powers, or additional employees, that is the dominant motive of public executives.”

What does Wilson mean by “autonomy”? His book explains, “An agency is autonomous to the degree it can act independently of some or all of the groups that have the authority to constrain it.” Autonomy comes “by acquiring sufficient good will and prestige as to make attacks on oneself or one’s agency costly for one’s critics.”

Eric Dolan:

More than one billion people use Facebook to connect with others and maintain social relationships. But new research suggests that the social networking website can have an addictive side for some.

A study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that people who believed they needed to be socially accepted in order to have worth as a person were at higher risk of using Facebook in compulsive and maladaptive way.

Previous research has examined the relationship between self-esteem and Facebook use. The researchers from Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology sought to expand on the prior work by examining contingencies of self-worth, meaning the contingencies which are viewed as primary sources of self-esteem.

These contingencies are social acceptance, physical appearance, outdoing others in competition, academic competence, family love and support, being a virtuous or moral person, and God’s love. For those who view social acceptance as an important contingency, feelings of self-worth depend on the approval of others.

Jichang Lulu and Martin Hála:

The finance ministry told Kvennablaðið that human rights were not discussed in Bjarni’s meeting with the ILD. The conversation was about Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, among other topics.

Roads of Influence
On the same day that news about the ILD meeting reached the Icelandic public, Björn Bjarnason, a journalist and Independence Party politician who was a minister under six cabinets, published an op-ed on China in Morgunblaðið. Titled “Chinese Pressure, Near and Far,” the article calls on Iceland to maintain its indepndence in the face of pressures it can expect once it assumes the Arctic Council chairmanship next year.

Björn’s piece notes China’s interest in becoming a ‘polar great power’ (极地强国), officially proclaimed at Xi Jinping’s 2014 speech in Hobart. He discusses the case of Greenland, where certain aspects of the PRC’s interests, such as CCCC’s possible involvement in airport development and General Nice (俊安集团)’s attempt to buy a derelict naval base, have led to Danish and American concerns. In Iceland, he points to the long-delayed Kárhóll Chinese-Icelandic Aurora Observatory project, predicting its eventual opening will attract international attention as a sign of China’s assertiveness in the Arctic. Kárhóll will give China “an important foothold” in Iceland.

Björn places the PRC’s Arctic interests within the context of a push for global influence, and mentions the newly introduced anti-interference legislation in Australia.

Eillie Anzilotti:

“We did background checks–I don’t know how I missed it,” Hookway says. But Coley was a good worker and trustworthy; Hookway didn’t want to fire him. So he didn’t. Today, Coley is a manager at CleanCraft. “I’ve got around 50 stories like that,” Hookway says. Over the course of his time running his company, he’s found that giving jobs to people with barriers to employment like a criminal record, a practice often called fair hiring or second-chance hiring, has proven to be good for his business.

In general, he says, when people like Coley come on the job, they work hard, knowing that in labor landscape that overwhelmingly turns its back on ex-offenders–just 12.5% of employers say they will accept applications from someone with a record–they’ve found a fortunate situation. Soon, the lines between workers with a criminal record and those without blur.

Two Bit History:

The story of Microsoft’s founding is one of the most famous episodes in computing history. In 1975, Paul Allen flew out to Albuquerque to demonstrate the BASIC interpreter that he and Bill Gates had written for the Altair microcomputer. Because neither of them had a working Altair, Allen and Gates tested their interpreter using an emulator that they wrote and ran on Harvard’s computer system. The emulator was based on nothing more than the published specifications for the Intel 8080 processor. When Allen finally ran their interpreter on a real Altair—in front of the person he and Gates hoped would buy their software—he had no idea if it would work. But it did. The next month, Allen and Gates officially founded their new company.

Over a century before Allen and Gates wrote their BASIC interpreter, Ada Lovelace wrote and published a computer program. She, too, wrote a program for a computer that had only been described to her. But her program, unlike the Microsoft BASIC interpreter, was never run, because the computer she was targeting was never built.

Caroline O’Donovan:

Google employees are demanding greater transparency from their employer and confronting management with their ethical concerns about a project named Dragonfly, a controversial censored search app for the Chinese market.

Employees are circulating a list of demands for the company in a letter obtained by BuzzFeed News (posted in full, below), calling for an ethics review structure with rank-and-file employee representatives, the appointment of ombudspeople, and an ethical assessment of Google projects including Dragonfly and Maven, Google’s contract with the Pentagon to build AI-assisted drone technology.

“Many of us believe that Dragonfly poses a threat to freedom of expression and political dissent globally, and violates our AI principles,” two employees wrote in an email distributing the demand list.

“But this is not about Dragonfly specifically,” the email continues. “While we support and will join with concerned Googlers in resisting this effort, we need to be clear: Individual employees organizing against the latest dubious project cannot be our only safeguard against unethical decisions. This amounts to unsustainable ethics whack-a-mole, and assumes employees know about a project to begin with.”

Sean Illing:

President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government’s role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis. But since then, it’s become a kind of blanket truism in Republican circles. The government is a perennial boogeyman, and the main policy objective on the right has been to reduce the role of government in public life.

But there’s a problem: Many who accept this dogma are the very people who need the government the most. Research shows, for instance, that Republican states are disproportionately dependent on federal aid. Yet many Republican voters appear blissfully unaware of this contradiction.

In her new book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler investigates this paradox. She looks at historical government data as well as surveys of Americans’ experiences with 21 federal social policies, including food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, and the home mortgage interest deduction.

Matthew DeFour:

The Department of Public Instruction has declined to revoke the license of a teacher accused of immoral conduct 88 times, or in only one out of every five cases, since State Superintendent Tony Evers took office a decade ago.

In a greater number of cases, 150 out of the 432 investigations opened since July 2009, the department revoked or denied teacher licenses after investigating allegations of immoral conduct.

Another 121 investigations are on hold because the teacher’s license expired while the investigation was ongoing. DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy emphasized none of the teachers in those cases are still in the classroom. The final 73 cases remain open.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has turned license revocation into an issue in the governor’s race between Evers and Gov. Scott Walker, spending roughly $1 million on TV ads over a two-week span featuring three of those 88 cases in which the department didn’t revoke a license.

Christina Larson:

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.

For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?

CBC:

Jessica Allen had two children of her own and decided she wanted to be a surrogate ‘to bless someone with a child.’ When she gave birth to what she was told were identical twins, Allen found out one of the babies was actually her biological son.

The Economist:

If ever there was a vivid illustration of illiberal liberalism, it was the response to one of the essays in this very series. After The Economist published an article by Kathleen Stock, reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex, which sensitively questioned whether “self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans”, the Sussex Students’ Union denounced her as a transphobe. In the union’s original statement, it declared “we will not tolerate hate on our campus.” “Trans and non-binary lives are not a debate.”

These key tropes—“we will not tolerate” and “this is not a debate”—are now frequently deployed to curtail discussion of issues deemed to be taboo, invariably to “protect” people deemed vulnerable from speech deemed hateful. This secular version of blasphemy follows a sacred script, written by those who consider themselves liberals. Dare to query it and you’ll be damned.

China Change:

Yang Shaozheng (杨绍政), a couple of months shy of 49, was for 11 years a professor of good standing in the College of Economics at Guizhou University. He taught game theory and advanced microeconomics, focused his research on optimization theory and mechanism design theory, and managed numerous provincial- and state-funded research projects. On August 15, however, Guizhou University made a decision to expel him for “long-running publication and spreading online of politically mistaken speech, writing a large number of politically harmful articles, and creating a deleterious influence on campus and in society.” He was also guilty of “being unrepentant” and refusing to accept “educational help.”

Prior to this, last November, Yang was suspended from teaching and banned from advising graduate students. According to a personal statement he published online, Yang repeatedly approached the administration and the university’s Party Office to demand a formal statement of reasons for the sanctions. In each case he was fobbed off or refused. His written appeal to the university president was ignored.

Jia Song:

The obsession with internationalization had resulted in priority being given to overseas scholars and graduates and has diminished many top domestic universities to second or third-class status. Most domestic PhD graduates have faced discrimination in the academic job market in the past few years—the quality of these graduates is not recognized, even by the universities that educated them. The academic employment market is sending a clear message that domestic universities are incapable of producing good, qualified academics, so more students are choosing to study in developed countries. As a result, the challenge domestic universities face is that many of the best students are going abroad for graduate study.

Yin Yujun:

He Jinghua opens a faded notebook bound with cotton thread. Inside, lyrics written in a spidery script run down the page, incomprehensible to the average Mandarin speaker. In her wheelchair, which she’s used since a stroke left her paralyzed two years ago, the 84-year-old begins to sing.

As the mournful sounds escape her lips, tears stream down her weathered face. Her mind goes back 22 years to when she lost her youngest son in a road accident. “These books contain my sorrow,” He Jinghua tells Sixth Tone. She gestures to a collection of similar handbound notebooks in pink, green, and ocher, where she faithfully records her life in nüshu, a script that is only used by women.

Distorting tradition is worse than losing it.
In remote Jiangyong County, the script has been passed down from mother to daughter, elder to younger, for hundreds of years. To get to the downtown area of the county hidden in the hills, visitors must drive some three hours from Guilin, the nearest major city in neighboring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. When they arrive, they’re greeted by a street of nondescript shops, including a takeaway outlet with a storefront mimicking the KFC logo.

git:

Algo VPN is a set of Ansible scripts that simplify the setup of a personal IPSEC VPN. It uses the most secure defaults available, works with common cloud providers, and does not require client software on most devices. See our release announcement for more information.

Much more on VPN (Virtual Private Networks), here.

CATO:

We score all 50 states on over 200 policies encompassing fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. We weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government restrictions on freedom impose on their victims.

Michael Prodger:

Nineteen-fourteen was not a propitious time to announce a new artistic movement. In July of that year, however, the first edition of the artistic-literary magazine Blast appeared, declaring the birth of vorticism. Once a great deal of flim-flam had been sifted through, what the movement amounted to was a repudiation of both Victorian values and Bloomsbury aesthetics, and instead an acclamation of modernity, the machine age and non-traditional representation.

Vorticism was largely the brainchild of the painter and critic Percy Wyndham Lewis, who was supported by the upper echelon of the British-based avant-garde, numbering, among others, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, CRW Nevinson, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, William Roberts and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. “You think at once of a whirlpool,” wrote Wyndham Lewis. “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated; and there at the point of concentration is the vorticist.”

Vorticism was simply the British wing of a Europe-wide movement, which held that art needed to be remade for the times. Italy had the futurists who, under the strutting Filippo Marinetti, worshipped violence, speed, the motorcar, the modern city and youth. France meanwhile had cubism, the invention of Picasso and Braque that fractured three-dimensional objects in order to reconstitute them on canvas, and Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual “anti-art”.

Peter Cunningham:

reform is much more than school choice and it certainly wasn’t done as an alternative to integration.She claims that her home state of California has abandoned integration as the “chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.” Actually, reform is much more than school choice and it certainly wasn’t done as an alternative to integration.

The goal of charters was innovation and quality, and it was based on the theory that schools serving poor kids would be better if low-income parents had the same power as higher-income parents to choose among them. Studies suggest this is true in many places.

The onion:

One of the best benefits of attending college is being exposed to a diversity of methods for shutting down debate.” At press time, Hadley expressed disappointment after the university decided to just play it safe and not invite anyone to campus this year.

Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox:

This spring, Facebook reached out to a few dozen leading social media academics with an invitation: Would they like to have a casual dinner with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Facebook’s problems?

According to five people who attended the series of off-the-record dinners at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto, California, the conversation largely centered around the most important problem plaguing the company: Content moderation.

In recent months, Facebook has been attacked from all sides: by conservatives for what they perceive is a liberal bias, by liberals for allowing white nationalism and Holocaust denial on the platform, by governments and news organizations for allowing fake news and disinformation to flourish, and by human rights organizations for its use as a platform to facilitate gender-based harassment and livestream suicide and murder. Facebook has even been blamed for contributing to genocide.

These situations have been largely framed as individual public relations fires that Facebook has tried to put out one at a time. But the need for content moderation is better looked at as a systemic issue in Facebook’s business model. Zuckerberg has said that he wants Facebook to be one global community, a radical ideal given the vast diversity of communities and cultural mores around the globe. Facebook believes highly-nuanced content moderation can resolve this tension, but it’s an unfathomably complex logistical problem that has no obvious solution, that fundamentally threatens Facebook’s business, and that has largely shifted the role of free speech arbitration from governments to a private platform.

Andy Pudzer:

The debate between capitalism and socialism is at least partly a debate over morality. The left claims benevolent socialism is necessary to protect the masses from the immorality of capitalist greed. Much of America’s youth appears to be buying into this myth.

A recent Gallup poll found that young Americans were actually more positive about socialism (51 percent) than about capitalism (45 percent). The percentage of young Americans with a positive view of capitalism has declined 23 points since 2010, when 68 percent viewed capitalism positively. That’s not surprising, given that most of these young people have been educated in a system controlled by progressives and fed leftist ideology as entertainment.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone personified the progressive notion of capitalist greed in the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” in which his character, Gordon Gekko—the Left’s stereotype of a capitalist—utters the phrase “Greed is good.” But, outside Hollywood, greed is not good, and capitalism is not based on greed. To the contrary, capitalism encourages people to improve their lives by satisfying others’ needs and desires, by providing the products or services that other people want at a price they can pay.

Brad Polumbo :

On Aug. 13, the release of a new Gallup survey made headlines with its shocking results. The poll found that 57 percent of Democrats now hold a favorable view of socialism, while the level of Democratic support for capitalism plunged to new lows. This surging support for socialism is in large part driven by emerging enthusiasm among young left-leaning voters, as there’s been a 12 percentage point fall in support for capitalism among those aged 18 to 29 in the last two years.

So the verdict is in: Many young people are sick of capitalism and want to try something new. Yet, if they actually understood what a destructive ideology socialism can be, members of my generation wouldn’t be so quick to signal their support for it.

Most Millennials Don’t Know What Socialism Is

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Orly Nadell Farber:

The AWOL students highlight increasing dissatisfaction and anxiety that there’s a mismatch between what they’re taught in class during those years and what they’re expected to know — or how they’re tested — on national licensing exams. Despite paying nearly $60,000 a year in tuition, medical students are turning to unsanctioned online resources to prepare for Step 1, the make-or-break test typically taken at the end of the preclinical years.

Meng Xiaobai:

First, autonomous systems that can operate on their own in accordance with their intended purpose will revolutionize all industries; driverless cars are just one of the earliest applications. It will be the core infrastructure for a new generation of productivity, and this infrastructure can be deployed globally.

Second, natural language interaction technology will create new computing platforms. For humans, the most natural interaction is through natural language and vision, so mature natural language interaction technology will create ubiquitous personal assistants. This will also make society more fair. In the past, only wealthy people could afford personal assistants. Anyone in the future could have an assistant to help.

This assistant can understand through hearing, understanding through seeing, and it can also be everywhere. Then, this platform can do more things through extension, such as food, clothing, housing, and education. Of course, it will take a little bit of time to realize this.

Finally, artificial intelligence technology has a very large impact on the scientific research field. I think we will usher in a Renaissance in the scientific world; because of artificial intelligence technology, more and more interdisciplinary research and applications can be developed.

What I’m doing at YC is I want to quickly push forward these visions to “land” into reality, especially in China. Because China has a large population and many industries, more people means more data. This is the main differentiating point between the artificial intelligence technology revolution and the previous technological revolution.

Helena Legarda and Meia Nouwens:

Following the build-up of infrastructure and investment projects along China’s extensive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), private security companies from China are also increasingly going global – to protect Chinese assets and the growing number of Chinese nationals living and working in countries along the BRI, in sometimes unstable regions. Out of the 5,000 registered Chinese private security companies, 20 provide international services, employing 3,200 security personnel in countries like Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan.

The impact of this newly developing Chinese activity abroad is analyzed in this MERICS China Monitor. Chinese private security companies’ international activities pose a challenge to European interests as they are often largely unregulated and their security staff are often inexperienced in dealing with serious conflict situations and combat. EU policymakers, thus, are called upon to encourage and assist Beijing to pass laws regulating Chinese private security companies’ activities overseas.

Wall Street Journal:

The Congressional Budget Office released its budget summary for July this week, and the deficit for the first 10 months of fiscal 2018 reached $682 billion, up $116 billion from a year earlier. Federal spending increased by $143 billion for all the usual reasons—especially Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But revenues were higher as well—up $26 billion. Corporate income taxes were down substantially as expected in the wake of the tax reform that cut the corporate rate and added 100% expensing. But individual income taxes increased by $104 billion, or 7.9%, despite the cut in individual tax rates.

Georgia Heyward:

In 2017 CRPE published an analysis of student and school outcomes in 18 high-choice cities. It showed us that many cities were closing the gap between the city and state on key outcomes like graduation. But while the education system as a whole improved, achievement gaps by income and race/ethnicity remained. Across the country, disadvantaged students continue to trail behind their peers—a reality that gains greater urgency as school systems prepare the next generation for a rapidly changing economy and an increasingly interconnected world.

Policymakers and system leaders need to ask: What can we do to prepare every child for the future? Do school leaders and educators have the necessary flexibility at the school and classroom level? Do they have the funding and other resources to meet the needs of the students they serve? Are they working in systems that support innovation and continuous improvement?

To prepare every child for the challenges and opportunities ahead, America’s school systems must become more agile. That may require them to rethink everything from governance to funding to the range of learning experiences available to the students they serve.

For the past two years my CRPE colleagues and I have tracked education strategies to help policymakers, system leaders, and funders understand how cities with public school choice are delivering education. The 18 cities in our study differ in size and location, but each has adopted at least some elements of a portfolio strategy—a problem-solving framework designed to ensure that all students can access a high-quality education and that the education system is nimble enough to address changing student needs.

Sharon Mee:

I have worked at Vermont Law School for 26 years and want to add my voice to what is happening now at Vermont’s only law school. Yes, some tenured faculty members are leaving or will be departing a few months or a year down the road. However, there are many extremely committed and dedicated faculty who remain on our campus. They are energetic, intelligent and moving forward to teach students in an exciting, dynamic fashion. It should be further noted that some of the tenured faculty have taught the same classes over and over again for many years, in some cases perhaps even using their teaching notes from 30 years ago.

The other factor to consider is the exorbitant salary of many tenured professors. Considering the cost of law school generally, it doesn’t make sense to pay an academician a six-figure salary when an equally well-educated practitioner can teach the same subject with a more vibrant approach for a lesser figure. In reading an article the other day I came across a comment that I believe summarizes the situation quite well: “I think financial advisers will often say that you ought to look at tenure, because tenure as a concept is expensive and it makes it difficult for an institution to make changes.” (R. Craig Wood, ABA Journal, July 13, 2018).

Angie Chan:

For generations, Hong Kong’s prestigious international schools exclusively educated the children of wealthy Western expatriates. Today, placement in those schools is increasingly competitive and enrollment fees can exceed $1 million, making them some of the most expensive private schools in the world.

Recent changes to the city’s demography — prompted by Chinese politics and global markets — have driven up tuitions and resulted in a dramatic shift in the complexion of the city’s schools: An increasing number of ethnic Chinese students are now enrolled in international schools, and many more white students are occupying desks in Cantonese-language public schools.

Hayley Miller:

Progressives calling on social media platforms to ban Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory-peddling host of “Infowars,” should be careful what they wish for, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Several companies, including Facebook and YouTube, have removed Jones and his radio show for violating their hate speech policies. But doing so may set a dangerous precedent, according to Ben Wizner, director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

As private institutions, these sites have the constitutional right to decide whether to host Jones. But a hate speech policy defining when an individual warrants being banned could be “misused and abused,” Wizner told HuffPost on Monday.

“If [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions, for example, were deciding what’s hate speech, he would be less likely to think KKK and more likely to think [Black Lives Matter],” Wizner said. “It turns out to be an extremely subjective term.”

Hechinger Report:

If you want to move up in America, go to college. That’s the advice people get. But new academic research suggests that chances for students from poor families in America to move up through higher education are shrinking. Elite colleges still don’t admit many students from poor backgrounds, and public universities are under increasing financial pressure to enroll wealthier students who can afford full tuition. For poor students, college isn’t the mobility-maker it once was.

That trend is happening at a time when social mobility in America is stagnating. The chances an American child will earn more than his or her parents has been declining: Children born in the 1940s had a 90 percent chance of surpassing their parents; kids born in 1980 had only a 50 percent chance of doing better. It’s now more difficult to break out of the class you’re born into. Children of well-to-do families are likely to stay that way, and children of poor families are likely to stay poor.

Craig Foster & Glenn Branch:

“Just 66 percent of millennials firmly believe that the Earth is round,” read the summary from the pollster YouGov. Kids today, right? But it’s not only curmudgeons eager to complain about the younger generation who ought to find the survey of interest. For despite the recent prominence of flat-earthery among musicians and athletes, YouGov’s survey seems to have been the first systematic attempt to assess the American population’s views on the shape of the Earth.

Moreover, the results raised a number of compelling questions that deserve attention. For example, why is the scientifically established view on the shape of the Earth less popular among younger respondents (according to YouGov) when the scientifically established view on the history of life and on the cause of global warming have been, in poll after poll, more popular among younger respondents?

So, anyone concerned about the understanding and acceptance of science in contemporary society—like us, a psychology professor at the Air Force Academy and a long-time staffer at the National Center for Science Education—might be expected to be fascinated by the YouGov survey. Unfortunately, when we investigated the details, the result was as much confusion as clarity and as many questions as answers.

Norbert Landsteiner:

Observations on textual strategy in infographics by the example of the “Greatest Infographic of All Times”.

In November 1869, at age 88, a year short before his death in October 1870, Charles Joseph Minard published a sheet with two graphs, one of them titled “Carte Figurative des pertes succesives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813”, commonly known as “Napoleon‘s March on Moscow”. It is this final work of the French master of statistics and visualization, which survived in collective memory still to the present day, about 150 years later, which is probably much like it was intended by its author. Thanks to authorities of the field, like Howard Wainer (Visual Revelations – Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot. Copernicus, 1997) and Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, 1983), who suggested that this “may be well the best graphic ever produced”, Minard’s March on Moscow enjoys an even increasing popularity, with Tufte’s careful suggestion soon becoming the trope of “the greatest infographic of all times”. — But, is it?

While commonly praised, Minard’s masterly work has been placed under some substantial scrutiny, as well, as others, like Michael Friendly (Visions and Re-Visions of Charles Joseph Minard. In: Journal of Educatiational and Behavioral Statistics, Spring 2002, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 31-51) have proposed revisions (implying at least the possibility of improvement), or have even, like Nicholas Jenkins, criticized Minard’s graphic for observable deficiencies. — So, is it rather Minard’s historic failure, just like the epic campaign it depicts? Does it actually deserve the recognition, it universally enjoys?

Let’s find out.

Courtney Connelly:

Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group.

In 2017, IBM’s vice president of talent Joanna Daley told CNBC Make It that about 15 percent of her company’s U.S. hires don’t have a four-year degree. She said that instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational classes.

Related: The Deflation of the academic brand, and U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.

Jeffrey Knockel, Lotus Ruan, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Ron Deibert:

WeChat (the most popular chat app in China) uses two different algorithms to filter images in Moments: an OCR-based one that filters images containing sensitive text and a visual-based one that filters images that are visually similar to those on an image blacklist

We discovered that the OCR-based algorithm has implementation details common to many OCR algorithms in that it converts images to grayscale and uses blob merging to consolidate characters

We found that the visual-based algorithm is not based on any machine learning approach that uses high level classification of an image to determine whether it is sensitive or not; however, we found that the algorithm does possess other surprising properties

For both the OCR- and visual-based algorithms, we uncovered multiple implementation details that informed techniques to evade the filter

Alison McCook:

Dartmouth College investigation has concluded that Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, one of the country’s most prominent health care policy scholars, committed research misconduct in connection with a paper published in a top medical journal.

Welch plagiarized material from a Dartmouth colleague and another researcher at a different institution, according to a letter from the college’s interim provost obtained by Retraction Watch. The material was included in a 2016 paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The work found that breast cancer screening was more likely to overdiagnose tumors (leading to unnecessary treatments) than pick up early cases that are destined to become life-threatening.

Welch is a well-known critic of unnecessary medical screening and interventions, and has written several popular books on the topic. He is frequently quoted in media discussions of health care costs.

Heather Mac Donald :

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

Cyrus Farivar:

As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press last week, Google has now been sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC are urging the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree with the agency.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court last Friday in San Francisco, attorneys representing a man named Napoleon Patacsil argued that Google is violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the state’s constitutional right to privacy.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status, and it would include both an “Android Class” and “iPhone Class” for the potential millions of people in the United States with such phones who turned off their Location History and nonetheless had it recorded by Google. It will likely take months or longer for the judge to determine whether there is a sufficient class.

Colleen Flaherty:

College says it’s eliminating programs such as math, physics and religion, in attempt to keep costs down.

Goucher College is the latest institution to announce a series of program cuts following an academic prioritization process. Majors and minors in math, music, physics, religion, Russian and elementary and special education are being phased out, as are majors in studio art and theater, the college said this week. Book studies, German and Judaic studies will also be eliminated as stand-alone majors.

All current and incoming Goucher students will be able to graduate with their intended major under the current program, but the changes take effect thereafter.

Maria Repnikova:

In the summer of 2008, when I interviewed for an internship at Google London headquarters, one of the questions was whether I would have supported Google’s entry into the Chinese market in 2006. This was two years prior to Google’s official and dramatic exit from China on account of ethical considerations.

My answer at the time was yes. I argued that some information access is better than none. In my view, the polarizing human rights narrative about the Chinese market is more concerned with our Western sensibilities than with the actual demands of Chinese citizens. While we want them to be liberated from the chains of the Communist Party, Chinese citizens may be more concerned with food safety, clean air, and consumer rights – information they may find on Google.

Eight years after its exit, Google faces a similar dilemma, but some things have changed. China’s tech sector became competitive on the global market and Chinese citizens experience more intensive censorship and surveillance than they had back in 2010. China became simultaneously more globalized and more closed. And American tech giants, including Google, are dealing with more regulations in Western markets and competition from Chinese artificial intelligence.

Once again, a number of human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, but also Google’s own employees who have been kept in the dark about this project, are decrying this decision as unethical.

The ethical lines, however, remain blurry.

Jack Goldsmith:

But Trump and his allies are not the only culprits here. In reaction to perceived evils by Trump campaign and transition officials, members of the intelligence community—intelligence bureaucrats or outgoing Obama national security officials, or both—contributed a lot to diminishing trust in the intelligence community when they leaked, early in the Trump administration, a great deal of U.S.-person information collected from FISA warrants in order to bring down Trump’s national security adviser and achieve other anti-Trump goals. As Wittes and I wrote last year, “these leaks violated the core [Grand Bargain] commitment not to politicize the use of surveillance tools or the fruits of their use.” The leaks hurt Trump, but they also hurt the intelligence community a great deal, and probably for a longer term, by making Trump’s politicization charges credible. It was an unnecessary shot in the foot since the issues that the leaks sought to shed light on were under full official investigation.

This leads to the second unfortunate trend during the Trump era: the president’s uncanny ability to induce his critics to break norms in response to his norm-breaking behavior, in the process lending credibility to his critiques. This was a major theme of my Atlantic essay last fall. The FISA leaks break norms and confirm to many that the intelligence community in general and the Russia investigation in particular are politicized. The press often overreacts to Trump by (in Bob Woodward’s words) “binge-drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid,” thereby lending credence to Trump’s charges of bias and the shortcomings of “the fake-news media.” Some early lower-court reactions to the Trump immigration orders confirmed to many the appearance of such bias when they issued heated opinions that failed to pay the president proper deference and respect in cases touching on immigration and national security.

Jon Henschen:

Throughout grade school and high school, I was fortunate to participate in quality music programs. Our high school had a top Illinois state jazz band; I also participated in symphonic band, which gave me a greater appreciation for classical music. It wasn’t enough to just read music. You would need to sight read, meaning you are given a difficult composition to play cold, without any prior practice. Sight reading would quickly reveal how fine-tuned playing “chops” really were. In college I continued in a jazz band and also took a music theory class. The experience gave me the ability to visualize music (If you play by ear only, you will never have that same depth of understanding music construct.)

Both jazz and classical art forms require not only music literacy, but for the musician to be at the top of their game in technical proficiency, tonal quality and creativity in the case of the jazz idiom. Jazz masters like John Coltrane would practice six to nine hours a day, often cutting his practice only because his inner lower lip would be bleeding from the friction caused by his mouth piece against his gums and teeth. His ability to compose and create new styles and directions for jazz was legendary. With few exceptions such as Wes Montgomery or Chet Baker, if you couldn’t read music, you couldn’t play jazz. In the case of classical music, if you can’t read music you can’t play in an orchestra or symphonic band. Over the last 20 years, musical foundations like reading and composing music are disappearing with the percentage of people that can read music notation proficiently down to 11 percent, according to some surveys.

Related: Madison’s periodic battle over the elementary strings program.

Molly F. Gordon, Jennie Y. Jiang, Kavita Kapadia Matsko, Matthew Ronfeldt, Hillary Greene Nolan, and Michelle Reininger:

Key findings teacher preparation programs may be interested in:

Student teachers’ self-reports of their own level of preparation at the end of student teaching were not related to their performance in their first year of teaching.
Mentor teachers’ instructional support and guidance mattered more impactful than their own qualifications (years of experience or status as National Board Certification). What mattered most was mentor teachers’ modeling effective teaching practices, and coaching with constructive feedback in a safe learning environment.
Key findings districts and principals may be interested in:

Student teachers were placed unevenly in schools across the district. Student teachers were less likely to be placed in low-performing schools and more likely to train in schools that served fewer low-income students.
Mentor teachers’ assessments of their student teachers’ instructional practices were good indicators of student teachers’ performance in their first year of teaching.

Related: Foundations of Reading amd the endless battle over teacher content knowledge requirements.

Digital Content Next:

In “Google Data Collection,” Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, has fully cataloged how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together.
 
 The key findings include:
 
 A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.
 
 For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.
 
 An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection. Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.
 
 Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls. Advertising identifiers—which are purportedly “user anonymous” and collect activity data on apps and third-party webpage visits—can get associated with a user’s real Google identity through passing of device-level identification information to Google servers by an Android device.
 
 Likewise, the DoubleClick cookie ID—which tracks a user’s activity on the third-party webpages—is another purportedly “user anonymous” identifier that Google can associate to a user’s Google account. It works when a user accesses a Google applica

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

Lyons said she soon realized that many people were reporting posts as false simply because they did not agree with the content. Because Facebook forwards posts that are marked as false to third-party fact-checkers, she said it was important to build systems to assess whether the posts were likely to be false to make efficient use of fact-checkers’ time. That led her team to develop ways to assess whether the people who were flagging posts as false were themselves trustworthy.
 
 “One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles,” Lyons said in a follow-up email. “For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false-news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false-news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”

What’s on Weibo:

A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial ‘no child tax’ measure proposed by two Chinese academics has set off a wave of criticism on Chinese social media this week. The proposal was published in Xinhua Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Jiangsu Communist Party branch, on August 14, and was authored by Nanjing University economics professors Liu Zhibiao (刘志彪) and Zhang Ye (张晔). In their proposal, Liu and Zhang suggest various measures to prevent a supposed demographic crisis in mainland China. Their idea of imposing taxes on those who do not have a second child particularly sparked anger online. The authors plead for a so-called ‘maternity fund system’ (生育基金制度) in which citizens under the age of 40, regardless of gender, have to pay a certain percentage of their income in some sort of ‘tax fund’ as long as they do not bear a second child. They write:

Tom Whipple on “Editing a Human”:

Doudna was in for a shock. “One attendee [at the conference] pulled me aside and said three manuscripts had been submitted to journals involving experiments on human embryos. He said, ‘You should know this is happening.’” The labs in China had destroyed the embryos they had developed, and the modification had been only partial. Far sooner than predicted, a threshold had been crossed.

The Francis Crick Institute in London is conducting its own experiments on creating fully edited human embryos, though as its goal is scientific discovery not designer babies, it destroys the embryos.

Terrency Jeffrey:

“The production of TKO-BLT mice to obtain healthy mice with high level reconstitution of human cells and tissues requires specialized methods that are presented in detail,” says the abstract at the top of the article.

“The methods in this manuscript will help prevent duplication of the empirical work done to optimize this humanization protocol and maximize the future success of others endeavoring to produce TKO-BLT mice,” the researchers say in their introduction.

The researchers stated that they “routinely produced cohorts of approximately 40 TKO-BLT mice from a single tissue donor.”

They indicated that the human tissue donors were at 17 to 22 weeks gestational age and that their tissue was provided to the researchers by Advanced Bioscience Resources, which is a non-profit organization located in Alameda, Calif.

This summary of recent newsfeed items reminds me of Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time lyrics:

Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.

Jessica Boddy:

Autoformatting in Microsoft Excel has caused many a headache—but now, a new study shows that one in five genetics papers in top scientific journals contains errors from the program, The Washington Post reports. The errors often arose when gene names in a spreadsheet were automatically changed to calendar dates or numerical values. For example, one gene called Septin-2 is commonly shortened to SEPT2, but is changed to 2-SEP and stored as the date 2 September 2016 by Excel. The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as they’re entered.

Phila Siu & Su Xinqi:

China’s prestigious Tsinghua University will require first-year students from Hong Kong and Macau to go through a mandatory three-week military training programme that was previously only compulsory for mainland students, the South China Morning Post has learned.

Two worried Hong Kong teenagers admitted to the top Beijing university told the Post on Sunday that the training would begin this Friday at the university’s campus but they still did not know details of the programme.

“As a girl, I am afraid that I am not physically strong enough,” said Carrie Li, 17, who was admitted to Tsinghua’s law school and only found out about the military training requirement from an information booklet they received from the university.

Another teenager, Leung Kwok-sum, 18, enrolled in the economic and management school, was also anxious.

Emma Pettit:

The U. of Akron announced on Wednesday that it would phase out 80 degree programs. The next day, it announced it would open “the largest amount of dedicated esports space of any university in the world to date.”

The University of Akron will phase out 80 degree programs, about 20 percent of what it now offers, in part, to save money for the future, the university announced on Wednesday.

The cuts come after a yearlong review of Akron’s degrees and degree tracks. Among the university’s strengths are nursing, biosciences, engineering, dance, and music, Akron’s Board of Trustees said in a statement. The 10 Ph.D. programs, 33 master’s programs, 20 bachelor’s programs, and 17 associate-degree programs that will be phased out suffered low enrollment or were duplicates of prosperous programs at other, similar institutions.

Musa al-Gharbi:

The Free Speech Project (FSP), based out of Georgetown University, attempts to document “incidents in which Free Speech has been challenged or compromised in recent years, and collect analysis from various points of view of the struggle to sustain First Amendment Values.”

This is a great initiative. In fact, Heterodox Academy recently ran a post emphasizing the importance of projects like this: if we want to understand the scope of the problem – and how it is evolving – we need to be looking at behaviors, rather than whether or not people say they support free speech in polls. Many who strongly support civil liberties in the abstract are perfectly happy to declare “states of exception” against those they detest in the “real world.”

So far, FSP’s “Free Speech Tracker” has pulled together 137 incidents of (attempted) free-speech suppression. Nearly 2/3 of these (88) occurred on college campuses.

Surveying just over 90 incidents from this database in a recent Medium post, FSP Director Sanford Ungar came to the following conclusions:

Giorgos Christides:

The school on the small Greek village of Kerasochori looks like the set of a disaster movie. Everything is still there: the black board, the math books, tables and chairs, the sports equipment, the map of Greece on the wall. Even the class registers are still in the corner. A layer of dust covers everything. About 20 boys and girls once went to school here, but 12 years ago it was closed down. That’s where it began. There were no longer enough families in Kerasochori to keep it running.

Konstantina Kalli, 34, has unlocked the door and stands helplessly in the ruins of the past. “Anyone who leaves doesn’t come back,” she says. “The village is shrinking.”

Kalli is Kerasochori’s hope. She has a three-year-old daughter and is six months pregnant, with a girl. The birth will likely be difficult. There is no medical clinic nearby, and she has had to drive to Athens for every checkup, a journey of five hours by car along many winding mountain roads. Kerasochori doesn’t have any child care. The nearest school is in the neighboring village, as long as there are enough children for it to remain in operation.

Kalli works for the local government, the biggest employer in Kerasochori. Together with two colleagues, a mayor, a priest and a police officer, she runs the district. About 100 people still live here in the village, most of them retirees. The average income is about 300 euros per month. There is almost no work — the main sources of income are beekeeping and a bit of forestry. There’s no tourism, even though, according to UNESCO, the air here is cleaner than almost anywhere else in Europe.

Adam Segal:

For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program to its status as a global platform that connects more than half of the world’s population and tens of billions of devices, the Internet has long been an American project. Yet today, the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has outlined his plans to turn China into a “cyber-superpower.” Already, more people in China have access to the Internet than in any other country, but Xi has grander plans. Through domestic regulations, technological innovation, and foreign policy, China aims to build an “impregnable” cyberdefense system, give itself a greater voice in Internet governance, foster more world-class companies, and lead the globe in advanced technologies.
 
 China’s continued rise as a cyber-superpower is not guaranteed. Top-down, state-led efforts at innovation in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and other ambitious technologies may well fail. Chinese technology companies will face economic and political pressures as they globalize. Chinese citizens, although they appear to have little expectation of privacy from their government, may demand more from private firms. The United States may reenergize its own digital diplomacy, and the U.S. economy may rediscover the dynamism that allowed it create so much of the modern world’s technology.
 
 But given China’s size and technological sophistication, Beijing has a good chance of succeeding—thereby remaking cyberspace in its own image. If this happens, the Internet will be less global and less open. A major part of it will run Chinese applications over Chinese-made hardware. And Beijing will reap the economic, diplomatic, national security, and intelligence benefits that once flowed to Washington.

Kunduz:

Kunduz is democratizing access to test prep by building a service that’s 10x cheaper and faster than traditional options. On Kunduz’s mobile app, a student takes a photo of a problem and Kunduz farms the solution out to its network of 7,000 tutors. Students typically get an explanation and answer within 10 minutes. They’re launched in Turkey and have solved 3 million questions asked by students across the country. The founding team attended a prestigious public high school and college in Turkey and witnessed a large discrepancy in university entrance exam preparation due to financial resources. They started Kunduz to level the playing field.

medical legal partnerships:

Integrating health services into a school-based setting ensures more equitable access to health care for children and adolescents. Yet social inequities—related to family, housing, income, and education—can negatively affect their performance in school as well as their health. School-based health center (SBHC) staff are increasingly working to identify and address these social determinants of health (SDOH). Many barriers to adequate and equitable child health are rooted in structural problems that health care alone cannot solve. To truly meet the complex needs of these young patients, health care teams benefit from legal expertise to help navigate problems that go well beyond the clinic’s door. School-based health centers with medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) provide patients with legal services to deal with issues that directly affect their health, further increasing the efficacy of health interventions.

Mollie Heningway:

Following countdown clocks on cable outlets and dramatic claims in the media about what devastating testimony to expect, James Comey sat down before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. The hearing ended up being a bit of a let-down for critics of President Trump who hoped to get him impeached (or removed via the 25th amendment!) as soon as possible. Comey admitted that Donald Trump had told the truth when he wrote that the former FBI director had thrice told him he was not under investigation in the Russia meddling probe. Comey admitted that Trump had twice encouraged him to get to the bottom of the Russian meddling issue.

But the media chose to run with a dramatically different narrative. That narrative was if James Comey had not proven obstruction, he came pretty darn close.

“Is Trump Guilty Of Obstruction Of Justice? Comey Laid Out The Case,” was the big takeaway from NPR’s Domenico Montanaro.

Jane Brody:

Attention all you happy high school graduates about to go off to college, as well as the many others returning for another year of higher education. Grandsons Stefan and Tomas, that includes you.

Whatever you may think can get in the way of a successful college experience, chances are you won’t think of one of the most important factors: how long and how well you sleep. And not just on weekends, but every day, Monday through Sunday.

Studies have shown that sleep quantity and sleep quality equal or outrank such popular campus concerns as alcohol and drug use in predicting student grades and a student’s chances of graduating.

Although in one survey 60 percent of students said they wanted information from their colleges on how to manage sleep problems, few institutions of higher learning do anything to counter the devastating effects of sleep deprivation on academic success and physical and emotional well-being. Some, in fact, do just the opposite, for example, providing 24-hour library hours that encourage students to pull all-nighters.

(I did that only once, to study for an exam in freshman year, and fell asleep in the middle of the test. Lesson well learned!)

An all-nighter may help if all you have to do is memorize a list, but if you have to do something complex with the information, you’ll do worse by staying up all night, J. Roxanne Prichard, an expert on college sleep issues, told me. After being awake 16 hours in a row, brain function starts to decline, and after 20 hours awake, you perform as if legally drunk, she said.

Privacy News:

SNI is also used for another purpose. It allows censored services to “look like” uncensored ones to automated censorship systems. These systems mistake a banned website as a permitted one and allow it to load, rather than blocking the user or redirecting them to a more friendly government approved content.

Currently, SNI in TLS 1.2 has a flaw that allows censors to differentiate between a “real” service and a “fake” service if they are savvy enough to figure it out. Interestingly, SNI in TLS 1.3 fixes this problem by hiding all of the information about the service behind encryption.

This means that services like VPNs and Tor can bypass censorship systems entirely by impersonating servers at Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. These three names are actually very important to the censorship issues of 2018 and beyond, because they are, in essence, a majority of the Internet we know. If Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure allow domain fronting with TLS 1.3, censorship countries like China are faced with a binary choice. They can either block gigantic swaths of the Internet (and face enormous backlash) or allow SNI to work, which means a serious setback for censorship around the world.

Ethan Arsht:

Ranking Every* General in the History of Warfare

*Almost every

When Africanus asked who, in Hannibal’s opinion, was the greatest general, Hannibal named Alexander… as to whom he would rank second, Hannibal selected Pyrrhus… asking whom Hannibal considered third, he named himself without hesitation. Then Scipio broke into a laugh and said, “What would you say if you had defeated me?”
— Livy
Like Hannibal, I wanted to rank powerful leaders in the history of warfare. Unlike Hannibal, I sought to use data to determine a general’s abilities, rather than specific accounts of generals’ achievements. The result is a system for ranking every prominent commander in military history.

The Method

Inspired by baseball sabermetrics, I opted to use a system of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is often used as an estimate of a baseball player’s contributions to his team. It calculates the total wins added (or subtracted) by the player compared to a replacement-level player. For example, a baseball player with 5 WAR contributed 5 additional wins to his team, compared to the average contributions of a high-level minor league player. WAR is far from perfect, but provides a way to compare players based on one statistic.

I adopted WAR to estimate a given military tactician’s contributions beyond or below an average general. My model, which I explain below, provides an estimate for the performance of an average general in any given circumstances. I can then evaluate a general’s quality based on how much they exceeded or fell short of a replacement general in the same circumstances (assuming a replacement general would perform at an average level). In other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war.

Ildi Laczko-Kerr and Eileen Sigmund:

Contrary to the common myth that charters skim the “cream of the crop” from school districts, the average student who transferred to a charter school over the summer in 2015 from a district school performed below the state average on AzMERIT in both math and English language arts. At the same time, districts that received students from charter schools during summer transfer actually enrolled higher performing students; begging the question: Who’s creaming whom?

:

Madeline Buckley
Kenwon Park was running, then suddenly fell.

His friend Kimmy stopped, knelt down and tried to talk to the 15-year-old. The teenage girl watched Kenwon struggle to breathe as chaos erupted around them.

They had been at the fieldhouse in Garfield Park on the West Side for a basketball tournament when a fight broke out around 9 p.m. Thursday, according to Chicago police. As police dispersed the crowd, gunfire exploded outside.

Kimmy, who only wanted to give her first name, saw teens run in all directions, including her friend. “He got hit,” she said. “He was trying to breathe.”

Kenwon suffered a gunshot wound to the chest and was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital. Another boy, 14, was hit in the abdomen and was in serious condition at Stroger.

John Rampton:

10. They don’t compare themselves to others.

Remember, the mentally strong are stingy with their time and energy. So why waste it on worrying about what others are doing? Feelings like jealousy and resentment aren’t just exhausting; they’re pointless.

Instead, they appreciate others and celebrate their accomplishments with them. This creates optimism — which is a win-win for everyone. According to a Harvard University study, a sense of optimism may be able to reduce the risk from dying of major causes, such as cardiovascular disease.

Celine Ryan:

A report released by The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) reveals that the average salary for professors of “Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies” during the 2017-2018 academic year was about $15,000 more per year more than for Biology, Math & Stats, and Science professors.

According to the report, “Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies” professors earned an average of $105,656 last year, while professors of Physical Sciences earned only $90,422. Mathematics and Statistics professors made an average of $89,691, and Biology and biomedical professors earned just $88,792.

Tyler Durden:

The US’ spending problem is starting to become a major issue.

According to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement, in June, the US collected $225BN in tax receipts – consisting of $110BN in individual income tax, $91BN in social security and payroll tax, $4BN in corporate tax and $20BN in other taxes and duties- a drop of 2.9% from the $232BN collected last July and a reversal from the recent increasing trend…

Joe Seyton:

So it came as no surprise that Paul lauded Trump for taking away Brennan’s security clearance. “I urged the President to do this. I filibustered Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA in 2013, and his behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information,” Paul said in a statement. “He participated in a shredding of constitutional rights, lied to Congress, and has been monetizing and making partisan political use of his clearance since his departure.”

In an interview yesterday with WKU Public Radio, Paul said he wants other ex-Obama administration intelligence officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to lose their clearances as well.

According to the Kentucky Republican, Clapper lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee when he was asked in March 2013 by Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) if U.S. intelligence was spying on American citizens. “When he was asked by Sen. Wyden if the NSA was collecting information on Americans, private information, he said no and that was a lie,” Paul said. “Later, Edward Snowden revealed that they were collecting all Americans’ phone information.”

Conor Friedersdorf:

Late last week, that internal “accountability board” announced the results of its review. If you’ve followed the impunity with which the CIA has broken U.S. laws throughout its history, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that no one is going to be “dealt with very harshly” after all. “A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode,” The New York Times reports. “The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.”

Done at the behest of Brennan, who once feigned ignorance about the actions in question, going so far as to declare them beyond the scope of reason! “While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report,” the story continues, “the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.” Who’d have guessed that a panel appointed by Brennan to look into malfeasance presided over and in some cases ordered by Brennan would decide that neither Brennan nor any of the people Brennan leads should be held accountable?

Christopher Barca:

According to the Democratic nominee in the 14th Congressional District, she and the dozens of area residents who attended the event “talked about race, immigration, healthcare, disability rights and housing.”

But unless you were in the room on Sunday, you won’t know what specific community problems were mentioned or how Ocasio-Cortez planned to address them once she is sworn in.

That’s because her campaign banned members of the media from attending the event, which was otherwise open to the public.

In the seven weeks since she pulled off one of the most remarkable upsets in recent American political history — defeating longtime Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens, Bronx) by 15 points in June’s Democratic primary — Ocasio-Cortez has become a political star.

Pankaj Mehta, Marin Bukov, Ching-Hao Wang, Alexandre Day, Clint Richardson, Charles Fisher, David Schwab. :

Information about notebooks: There are are a total of 20 notebooks that accompany the review. Most of these notebooks are new. However, others (mostly those based on the MNIST dataset) are modified versions of notebooks/tutorials developed by the makers of commonly used machine learning packages such as Keras, PyTorch, scikit learn, TensorFlow, as well as a new package Paysage for energy-based generative model maintained by Unlearn.AI. All the notebooks make generous use of code from these tutorials as well the rich ecosystem of publically available blog posts on Machine Learning by researchers, practioners, and students. We have included links to all relevant sources within each notebook. For full disclosure, we note that Unlearn.AI is affiliated with two of the authors Charles Fisher (founder) and Pankaj Mehta (scientific advisor).

The notebooks are named according to the convention NB_CXX-description.ipynb where CXX refers to the corresponding section in the review (e.g. a notebook for Section VII about Random Forests will have a name of the form NB_CVII-Random_Forests.ipynb).

Fabiola Zerpa and Jose Orozco:

Venezuela devalued its currency by about 95 percent ahead of the Aug. 20 rollout of a new bolivar, while raising its minimum wage as part of a 90-day economic recovery plan that seeks to loosen the grip of hyperinflation on the country.

The new currency will be called the sovereign bolivar and will be based on the country’s Petro cryptocurrency, now valued around $60 or 3,600 sovereign bolivars. The minimum wage will be set at 1,800 sovereign bolivars, President Nicolas Maduro said in a speech broadcast on state television. The Petro, which will fluctuate, will be used to set prices for goods.

Tying the new currency to the Petro value effectively amounts to a 95 percent devaluation on the last week’s central bank foreign exchange auction results.

Maduro’s historic devaluation comes as Venezuela sinks into a severe economic depression and wrestles with hyperinflation that the International Monetary Fund estimates will reach 1 million percent by the end of this year.

Andrew Carter:

One year has passed since Tommy Hatton took his final hit on a football field, the one to the side of his head that resulted in his fourth concussion – the one that made him decide, after months of headaches, dizziness, light sensitivity and pain, that he could no longer risk his future.

Before that hit, Hatton had been perhaps the most respected member of The University of North Carolina football team’s offensive line, a player who took great pride, in his words, in “just physically dominating dudes for four quarters.” He’d been a freshman All-American, a leader among his teammates. At 6-2 and 305 pounds, he was an undersized but ambitious player set on reaching his goal of playing in the NFL.

After a relatively routine blow to the head on Aug. 3, 2017, he felt debilitating effects that caused him to fear for his long-term health. Hatton remembers little about the hit, or what he felt in the immediate aftermath. The next morning he felt sick. He said it was “like I drank three bottles of Smirnoff.” And so began his journey from football player to case study.

During the past year, Hatton’s story has played out amid a national dialogue about football, concussions and the potential consequences of repetitive head trauma. His story has unfolded, too, amid the backdrop of a prominent university whose opposing interests accentuate the conflict between the violence of football and the scientific quest to understand the carnage unseen.

Franz Wong:

I work for Google and have never been good at the “Here’s an NP-hard problem you haven’t heard of, write correct code for nlogn solution on whiteboard in language of choice” question. I had to train extensively (reading CLR, practicing) to be able to pass.
However, large numbers of engineers at Google are very good at solving whiteboard questions. A lot of it comes from practice, a lot comes from knowing the common problems and solutions, and a lot comes from knowing the algorithmic primitives from which modern algorithms are born.
For many, whiteboard questions are “fun”- in the same way my parents like to do crossword puzzles for the intellectual exercise, Googlers like to discuss challenging, abstract-but-related-to-ads-or-search questions.
reply

Glenn Reynolds:

Call 2018 the “Year of Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media.

:

The previously unreported case in a federal court in California is proceeding under seal, so no filings are publicly available, but the three people told Reuters that Facebook is contesting the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand.

The judge in the Messenger case heard arguments on Tuesday on a government motion to hold Facebook in contempt of court for refusing to carry out the surveillance request, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Facebook and the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Rob Thomas:

One might think that when Julie Schumacher walks into a roomful of her colleagues in the English department at the University of Minnesota, everybody goes quiet.

After all, Schumacher has had a great time poking fun at a fictional English department in her last two novels. “Dear Committee Members,” 2014, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, was a book entirely made out of fictional letters of recommendation written by Jason Fitger, a hapless, failed novelist turned English professor.

Her new book, “The Shakespeare Requirement,” is more of a traditionally structured novel. It revisits the travails of Fitger, now the chair of his department, as he deals with administrators who think resources should be directed away from the arts and toward more profitable departments like economics. While very funny, the book takes a sobering look at the state of higher education. Schumacher is well aware of the controversy at UW-Stevens Point over a plan to eliminate humanities majors, part of a larger struggle over the role of the arts on college campuses.

Adeshina Emmanuel:

An unreleased report by a school choice group backed by the business community paints in stark detail what many Chicagoans have known for years: that top academic schools are clustered in wealthier neighborhoods, and that fewer black and Latino students have access to those schools.

The report highlights startling figures: About 27 percent of black students are in the district’s lowest-rated schools, compared with 8 percent of Latino students and 3 percent of whites. It also says that while Chicago Public Schools has more than 150,000 unfilled seats, 40 percent, or 60,000 of them, are at top-ranked schools. That surplus will grow as enrollment, which has been plummeting for years, is projected to decline further by 5.1 percent over the next three years. What that means is the cash-strapped district is moving toward having nearly one extra seat for every two of its students.

The document effectively shows that, in many areas of the city, students are skipping out on nearby options, with less than half of district students attending their designated neighborhood schools.

In a city still reeling from the largest mass school closure in U.S. history, this report could lay groundwork for another round of difficult decisions.

Jennifer Kobe:

Over the weekend, allegations emerged surrounding the use of Facebook user data by a data analytics firm called Cambridge Analytica. But while they have allegedly broken Facebook’s rules, the real problem is Facebook’s business model. And it’s a model that isn’t unique to Facebook. It originated with Google, which realised that the data gathered as people used its search engine could be analysed to predict what they wanted and deliver targeted advertising, and it’s also employed by most ‘free’ online services.

This isn’t just a problem with Facebook. It’s a problem with the internet as it exists today.

Ryan Nakashima:

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company will let you “pause” a setting called Location History.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

Storing location data in violation of a user’s preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer’s lab confirmed the AP’s findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.

“If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Mayer said. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”

Google says it is being perfectly clear.

Citizen Stewart:

I mention that routine because last week I felt like a victim of Sandburg’s non-wrath when Twitter’s anti-school reform voices suggested school reformers were wearing facial egg because “King” LeBron James’ celebrated new school opened in Akron, Ohio as a “traditional” public school rather than a charter.

Frankly, I didn’t get the joke.

Why would charter school supporters feel rebuffed by a new school opening in a city that desperately needs new schools?

Diane Ravitch and her digital accessories told us. I guess reform robots are such one-dimensional creatures that we expect every new school to be a charter.

“I salute LeBron James for investing his funding in a public school, not a charter school,” Ravich crowed.

That’s a tired language trick intended to frame charters as unpublic. It’s an intentional mark of dishonesty. As she said years ago: “charter schools are public schools.”

Citizen Stewart:

“I shared it, and I’m not sorry I did…And I meant it because it shows hypocrisy in our country. Some people can get away with it and some people can’t. It was not racist…It had nothing to do with color. It had nothing to do with race…I’ve seen all kinds of people say vile, ugly remarks on the media, on television and some of ’em get in trouble. Some of ’em don’t. I thought that was a way to show the hypocrisy that happens.”

Were Pike easily disregarded as one sock lost in the dryer we could move on.

But she is not aberrant. She’s more common than we think. Elections are weak. It takes little to win a board seat in many of America’s podunks.

If you watch school boards as I do, you get to see just how nutty then can be, and it should worry you.

Watch a few of Seattle’s or Minneapolis’ school board meetings for instance and you’ll likely feel as though someone put peyote in your tea and turned on Mork and Mindy reruns.

Reuters:

An 11-year-old boy managed to hack into a replica of Florida’s election results website in 10 minutes and change names and tallies during a hackers convention, organizers said, stoking concerns about security ahead of nationwide votes.

The boy was the quickest of 35 children, ages 6 to 17, who all eventually hacked into copies of the websites of six swing states during the three-day Def Con security convention over the weekend, the event said on Twitter on Tuesday.

The event was meant to test the strength of U.S. election infrastructure and details of the vulnerabilities would be passed onto the states, it added.

The National Association of Secretaries of State – who are responsible for tallying votes – said it welcomed the convention’s efforts. But it said the actual systems used by states would have additional protections.

Katie Lobosco:

That’s no surprise. After paying bills, rent and making student loan payments, there’s often not much leftover each month for young people, many of whom entered the workforce at a time of stagnant wages and high unemployment.

But a new report shows just how far off track they might be. About 66% of people between the ages of 21 and 32 have absolutely nothing saved for retirement, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security. The report is based on Census data collected in 2014.

“I see in practice that a lot of us are putting retirement down the goal priority list, in favor of paying off student debt or buying homes,” said Douglas Boneparth, a certified financial planner and author of The Millennial Money Fix.

Yevgeniy Brikman:

First, it looks like similar 10:1 rules show up in film, journalism, music, and photography! How cool is that?

Second, a common response is that even a single character change may show up in Git as an “inserted line” or “deleted line”, so when you see 100,000 lines were changed, it doesn’t mean that all the text in those lines was rewritten. This is true, but as I wrote above, there are also many types of changes missing from the data:

I don’t do a commit for every single line that I change. In fact, I may change a line 10 times, and commit only once.
This is actually even more pronounced for code. While doing a code-test cycle, I may change a few lines of code 50 times over, but only do one commit.
For my books, a lot of edit rounds and writing happened outside of Git (e.g., I wrote some of the chapters in Google Docs or Medium and O’Reilly does copyediting in a PDF).
My guess is that these two factors roughly cancel out. It won’t be exact, of course, and the actual ratio may be 8:1 or 12:1, but the order of magnitude is probably correct, and 10:1 is easier to remember.

Donald Hall:

Suppose I am the hundred-fifty-year-old maple outside my porch. When winter budges toward spring, I push out tiny leaves, which gradually curl yellowish green, then enlarge, turning darker green and flourishing through summer. In September, flecks of orange seep into green, and October turns the leaves gorgeously orange and red. Leaves fall, emptying the branches, and in December, only a few remain. In January, the last survivors flutter down onto snow. These black leaves are the words I write.

Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at five. By this time, I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I rise to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed by further exhaustion. At night I watch baseball on television, and between innings run through the New York Times Book Review. I roll over all night. Breakfast. Coffee.

When Jane was alive, our dog Gus needed walking every day. Jane walked him when she woke, feeling sleepy before breakfast. When they left, I lifted my hand from the page, waving goodbye. Midday, we had lunch and a nap, and then I walked Gus. In my car, I drove him up New Canada, the dirt road near our house, and parked where the single lane widened. We walked the flat earth, not for long because I wanted to get back to the manuscript again. Now when someone brings a dog to the house, I barricade myself in a big chair. An attentive dog would break my hip.