The Economist:

ANY sufficiently advanced technology, noted Arthur C. Clarke, a British science-fiction writer, is indistinguishable from magic. The fast-emerging technology of voice computing proves his point. Using it is just like casting a spell: say a few words into the air, and a nearby device can grant your wish.
 
 The Amazon Echo, a voice-driven cylindrical computer that sits on a table top and answers to the name Alexa, can call up music tracks and radio stations, tell jokes, answer trivia questions and control smart appliances; even before Christmas it was already resident in about 4% of American households. Voice assistants are proliferating in smartphones, too: Apple’s Siri handles over 2bn commands a week, and 20% of Google searches on Android-powered handsets in America are input by voice. Dictating e-mails and text messages now works reliably enough to be useful. Why type when you can talk?

HackerRank

At HackerRank, millions of developers, including hundreds of thousands of students, from around the world regularly solve coding challenges to improve their coding skills. In order to figure out which colleges have the best coders, we hosted a major University Rankings Competition. Over 5,500 students from 126 schools from around the world participated in the event. Companies also assess developers’ coding skills using HackerRank to hire great developers.

According to our data, the top three best coders in the world hail from:

Robert Kuehn:

Under ABA Accreditation Standard 301, law schools have two educational objectives: prepare their students “for admission to the bar and for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession.” There has been much concern lately over declining bar passage rates, focusing attention on whether some schools are admitting students who may not be capable of passing the bar exam and whether a school’s program of legal education adequately prepares its graduates for the exam.

In focusing on the bar exam, it’s important not to lose sight of legal education’s primary duty of ensuring that law school prepares students for entry into the legal profession and a successful career. If studies of practicing lawyers and recent law graduates matter, it is clear that law schools are failing, even worse than in preparation for bar admission, to adequately prepare their students for legal practice.

A 2012 study by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) analyzed the job activities of newly-licensed lawyers to determine which knowledge domains and professional skills and abilities are most significant to their job. Acquisition of professional skills and abilities were deemed significantly more important to newly-licensed lawyers than legal knowledge — 25 skills and abilities were deemed more important than the highest rated knowledge domain. The percentages of lawyers using these 25 skills in their work (all rated between 89% to 100%) also were all greater than the percentage using the highest rated knowledge domain (86%). Yet these skills and abilities generally are not developed in traditional doctrinal law classes but in the experiential and first-year legal writing courses that, under the ABA standards, need only account for ten percent of a student’s legal education.

Judith Curry:

Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?

I’m ‘cashing out’ with 186 published journal articles and two books. The superficial reason is that I want to do other things, and no longer need my university salary. This opens up an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make a new hire (see advert).

The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.

Wrong trousers

I’ve been in school since I was 5 years old. Until a few years ago, I regarded a tenured faculty position at a major university to be a dream job, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Apart from my own personal career trajectory and the ‘shocks’ that started in 2005 with our hurricanes and global warming paper, and the massive spike in 2009/2010 from Climategate, I’ve found that universities have changed substantially over the past 5-10 years.

At first, I thought the changes I saw at Georgia Tech were due to a change in the higher administration (President, Provost, etc). The academic nirvana under the prior Georgia Tech administration of Wayne Clough, Jean-Lou Chameau and Gary Schuster was a hard act to follow. But then I started to realize that academia and universities nationwide were undergoing substantial changes. I came across a recent article that expresses part of what is wrong: Universities are becoming like mechanical nightingales.

Alan Borsuk:

The Underestimated Development of 2016 Award: The launch of special education vouchers statewide. Only 206 students statewide qualified in September for these $12,000 vouchers (which was about 10 times what I expected given the narrow eligibility rules). It was a foot in the door, and I’ll be surprised if the rules aren’t changed so that more students can take part in coming years.

The Stuck Needle Award: The state’s new accountability systems. The first results of the Forward test were released in 2016, along with the first round of revised school report cards. The results were not much different from those using the old tests and report cards. Overall, fewer than half of the state’s third- through eighth-graders were rated proficient in reading and language arts. Is this satisfactory? Tell me again, how are we going to move forward in 2017 and beyond?

Garrett Epps:

Even worse, however, is the continued conduct of open hostilities in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State despite the refusal of Congress to approve the military campaign. No one questions that the Constitution applies here; but because the two branches are unable to agree on the scope of American intervention, this most crucial of constitutional guarantees—the power of Congress to authorize military action—has gone by the board. This is not entirely the president’s fault—the administration and its allies have repeatedly begged Congress to at least hold hearings on an authorization bill. As is often the case in history, legislators would prefer to stay out of the arena so that they can later claim credit for victory but disclaim any role in disaster.

And just to underline how obsolete Congressional authorization has become, consider that the most searing foreign-policy attacks on Obama arise from the one occasion on which he announced he would not intervene abroad without Congressional authorization—his 2013 decision not to launch airstrikes against Syria without first going to Congress. Whether he was using constitutional caution as an excuse or not, the Constitution clearly required authorization, while the political class of both parties has treated Obama’s caution as contemptible.

As a civil-libertarian, Obama had his limits. Obama hands over to the Trump administration a National Security Agency that is pursuing a robust a program of domestic and foreign surveillance, under the relatively thin constraints provided by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008. The Obama administration has been stunningly aggressive in its incursions on news-gathering by reporters, prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act and demanding the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters as part of a leak investigation. These were far beyond the previous norms––and are now part of the background practices inherited by the Trump Administration.

Steve Stecklow and Alexandra Harney

When the new SAT was given for the first time in March, the owner of the test took unprecedented steps to stop “bad actors” from collecting and circulating material from the all-important college entrance exam.

But in the months since, China’s largest private education company has been subverting efforts to prevent cheating, Reuters found.

The company, New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc, has regularly provided items from the tests to clients shortly after the exams are administered. Because material from past SATs is typically reused on later exams, the items New Oriental is distributing could provide test-takers with an unfair advantage.

New Oriental has put some of the exam items on its Chinese website. On Dec. 6, for instance, the Beijing-based company posted a reading passage that had been used on a version of the SAT administered in the United States three days earlier. New Oriental also has been posting information about recent questions on the TOEFL, the English-language exam widely used by colleges to assess foreign applicants. TOEFL questions are also sometimes recycled.

Jeremy Scahill:

The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. The department announced that it has designated Ibrahim al Banna “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to al Banna’s killing or capture.

Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. Awlaki’s family insists he was having dinner with his teenage cousin and some others in Shebwah, Yemen, when they were killed in the strike. The Obama administration has never explained why Awlaki was killed, other than anonymous officials implying he was with a terror target at the time or that it was a lethal mistake. Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. The elder Awlaki, who was also a U.S. citizen, was an enigmatic figure who supported George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign, spoke at the Pentagon shortly after 9-11, and went on to become an important propaganda figure for the growing radical Islamist movement after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks before his son was killed.

Martin Gottesfeld:

On the 43rd day of my hunger strike I was told the U.S. Marshalls had ordered my transfer to a facility in New York that was better equipped to handle my medical condition. At that point I had gone about four days without any fluids whatsoever and to make my wishes and refusal to provide medical consent crystal clear, I had written “No IV DNR” on the inside of both my elbows. Hey, if the DOJ wanted to allow notorious federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz and her lackeys to keep holding me because I tried to protect innocent, learning disabled, teenager Justina Pelletier from abuse, torture, and an agonizing death, then I wanted to make sure they were fully committed to backing Ortiz up as she makes a pet toy and total mockery of our justice system yet again. After all, when Justina was suffering Ortiz’s office couldn’t be bothered to even make a phone call to inquire as to whether her civil and human rights were being upheld (and they weren’t). But I digress, I was not allowed to call my wife before the prison transfer, but I was promised I’d be able to call her upon my arrival.

Laura Waters:

Look at this picture. What do you see? A group of (almost all) white suburban people in front of the New Jersey Statehouse protesting the expansion — indeed, the existence — of public charter schools. As a white suburban N.J. resident I’m a bad proxy for urban parents of color, particularly those relegated to long-failing school districts who rely on (or wait for) seats in high-performing charter schools. So let them speak for themselves.

First, a little context.

The N.J. Board of Education is considering several regulatory changes to the state’s twenty-two year old charter law. These changes would allow the highest-performing charters to hire teachers without traditional certification who have Bachelor’s degrees, 3.0 GPA’s, demonstrate content knowledge and/or have classroom experience. Principals wouldn’t need Master’s degrees and hiring requirements for Business Administrators would be relaxed. In addition, some charter school students would be able to join sports teams in traditional schools and charters would be allowed to hold weighted lotteries to give economically-disadvantaged students better odds of enrollment.

Philip Oehmke:

It’s a Friday afternoon in Oberlin, Ohio, around one month before the country heads to the polls to elect Donald Trump as its next president. The final classes and lectures of the week have just ended, and a young woman comes walking by in bare feet with a hula hoop gyrating around her waist while others are performing what seems to be a rhythmic dance to the African music that’s playing. Two black students are rapping.

It’s the kind of scene that could easily play out on a beach full of backpack tourists, but this is unfolding at one of the country’s most expensive universities.

Many female students here have dyed their hair green or blue, they have piercings and their fashion sense seems inspired by “Girls” creator and millennial star Lena Dunham, who, of course, also studied here.

Sean Illing:

Bioengineering has already allowed human beings to take control of their own evolution. Whether it’s emergent cloning technologies or advanced gene therapy, we’re quickly approaching a world in which humans can — and will — change the way they live and die.

Michael Bess is a historian of science at Vanderbilt University and the author of a fascinating new book, Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in a Bioengineered Society. Bess’s book offers a sweeping look at our genetically modified future, a future as terrifying as it is promising.

Justin McCurry:

A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year.

The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.

The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”.

Sabriya Rice:

A Dallas couple is planning to construct a $12 million community for people with autism on nearly 29 acres of land that was formerly a polo ranch in the Denton County town of Cross Roads.

It will include 15 homes, a community center and access to a ‘transitional academy’ that is designed to help young adults with autism develop the skills needed to live and work independently.

Clay Heighten, a retired emergency doctor and founder of a real estate management company, and his wife Debra Caudy, a retired medical oncologist, are leading the project.

Retired doctors Debra Caudy and husband Clay Heighten (right) with their  19-year-old son Jon. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)

Staff Photographer

Retired doctors Debra Caudy and husband Clay Heighten (right) with their 19-year-old son Jon. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)
Staff Photographer

The inspiration is their 19-year old son, Jon, who is on the severe end of the autism spectrum and requires a high level of supportive care.

Artificial intelligence is growing fast. Recent research puts it as a $5 billion market by 2020, and Gartner estimates that 6 billion connected “things” will require AI support by 2018. Connected machines, wearables, and other business tools like voice assistants are already boosting productivity at work and at home.

Two reports just surfaced that tackle the troubling predictions that automation, artificial intelligence, and robots are going to supplant human workers. The McKinsey Global Institute and Glassdoor research indicates that we don’t have to worry that we humans will become obsolete.

Matt Gould, chief strategy officer at Arria NLG, U.K.-based company offering AI technology in data analytics and information delivery, explains that AI has the ability to distill expertise into the machine. “Knowledge work, for the first time, can be produced at volume from NLG-AI systems,” Gould says. “Far from killing the jobs of knowledge workers, this tends to free them up to do what they are paid to do—innovate, model, refine, and improve on the expertise of their business.”

Eugene Volokh:

People often support disciplining and even firing professors who say things that are perceived as racist on the grounds that 1) those professors can’t be trusted to evaluate minority students fairly, 2) students will be afraid that they won’t be judged fairly, or 3) students will more broadly lose confidence in the professors (or just couldn’t stand to be in the room with them) or even in the institution, and won’t learn as effectively. I’ve seen these arguments made often, most recently as to the University of Oregon controversy. One response to my Oregon post, for instance — a tweet by @TimothyWright3, “What does the institution say to students of color by allowing [Prof. Nancy] Shurtz back into a classroom?” — seems to be implicitly making these arguments (though it seems to focus most clearly on No. 3. But, again, this is just one example among many.

Heather Mac Donald:

The Black Lives Matter crusade against the police continued to cost lives and destroy civil peace in 2016. Two recent estimates of violent crime in the nation’s largest cities show that murders and shootings remained on an upward trajectory this year, as officers backed off of proactive policing. The Brennan Center for Justice projects that murders in the 30 largest cities will be 14 percent higher in 2016 compared with 2015, a stunning increase coming as it does on top of 2015’s already massive homicide rise, which was 14.5 percent in all cities with populations over 250,000 and 20 percent in cities with populations from 500,000 to 1 million. The Wall Street Journal found that homicides increased in 16 of the 20 largest police departments in 2016. Meanwhile, gun murders of police officers are up 68 percent through December 23, compared with the same period in 2015.

Rob Scmitz:

The Shanghai city government thinks it can make citizens more honest through a smartphone app. The city released the app, Honest Shanghai, in November during “honesty week,” a celebration of virtuous behavior throughout the city.

Here’s how the app works: You sign up using your national ID number. The app uses facial recognition software to locate troves of your personal data collected by the government, and 24 hours later, you’re given one of three “public credit” scores — very good, good, or bad.

“We want to make Shanghai a global city of excellence,” says Shao Zhiqing, deputy director of Shanghai’s Commission of Economy and Informatization, which oversees the Honest Shanghai app. “Through this app, we hope our residents learn they’ll be rewarded if they’re honest. That will lead to a positive energy in society.”

Shao says Honest Shanghai draws on up to 3,000 items of information collected from nearly 100 government entities to determine an individual’s public credit score.

IGM Booth

Granting every American citizen over 21-years old a universal basic income of $13,000 a year — financed by eliminating all transfer programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing subsidies, household welfare payments, and farm and corporate subsidies) — would be a better policy than the status quo.
Responses:

Robert Oscar Lopez:

As these five controversies converged in a perfect storm of “academic freedom” controversies, part of me still felt loyal to academia. I had written a long letter (which I still stand by) in defense of Anthony Esolen at Providence College, so I was feeling a little nostalgic for the old view of college as a place to learn about ideas and be exposed to many perspectives. I signed a petition defending one of these professors’ academic freedom.

The response to my comment on the petition was more of what has always made me abhor the left. Try to build bridges to them, and they punish you for it. The history of my disastrous attempt to engage Prof. Potter on the Chronicle of Higher Education is symptomatic of the left’s longstanding history of taking kind gestures from conservatives as a sign that such conservatives are weak. Rather than say, “Wow, what a great chance to speak across party lines,” lefties usually perceive an invitation to shame you publicly, using anything you say against you.

Doug Erickson:

If successful in its bid, the academy would become what’s called an “instrumentality” of the district. It would retain considerable autonomy but receive state education funding and be tuition-free just like any public school. As an instrumentality charter, the School Board would have ultimate governance responsibility and employ the school staff.

The academy’s leaders say the Montessori method would help the district close achievement gaps while expanding options for students who aren’t thriving in conventional schools. The educational approach, developed by Dr. Maria Montessori in the early 1900s, includes multi-age classroom groupings, customized learning plans, uninterrupted blocks of work time, guided choice of work activity, and specially designed learning materials.

The district’s charter school review committee evaluated the school’s initial proposal last summer and fall and found it met preliminary expectations in 10 of 11 areas. However, it fell short in its five-year budget plan.

Members of the charter review committee for the proposal are: Kelly Ruppel, district chief of staff; Nancy Hanks, chief of elementary schools; Alex Fralin, chief of secondary education; and Sylla Zarov, principal of Franklin Elementary School.

Related: a majority of the Madison School,Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter School. This, despite the District’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Christina Hoff Summers:

But less excitable analysts are drawing more sober conclusions: Perhaps the women’s movement is too elitist and out of touch with ordinary citizens, especially working-class women. That seems right, but I would go one step further. Today’s feminism is not merely out of touch with everyday Americans; it’s out of touch with reality. To survive, it’s going to have to come back to planet Earth.

Meghan Cox Gurden:

Ranking high among the surrealities of 2016 was the meltdown at a literary festival in Australia when the American-born novelist Lionel Shriver defended the freedom of fiction writers to conjure characters unlike themselves.

“Taken to their logical conclusion,” Ms. Shriver warned, “ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all.” Among the concepts she skewered was “cultural appropriation,” the notion that members of one ethnic group mustn’t use (or eat or wear or write about) things emanating from other ethnic groups. The illogical impracticality of the idea, especially with fiction, hasn’t impeded its spread, and the resulting umbrage was a wonder to behold: An Australian writer of Egyptian and Sudanese origin stormed out of the speech, later blaming Ms. Shriver for celebrating “the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.” The officials in charge of the event disavowed their keynote speaker’s remarks.

Jane Shaw:

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump argued that requiring wealthy universities to spend more of their endowment funds on tuition aid would reduce students’ financial burdens.

Whether implementing that idea—which has floated around Congress since 2008—would lower college costs on the whole is doubtful. And, in my view, the federal government is already meddling too much in university policies.

Nevertheless, Trump raised an important issue when he discussed endowment spending at a campaign stop in September. Universities, by hoarding their donations, may not be serving the best interests of students and benefactors.

To unpack this issue, I would like to ask a fundamental question: why do universities have endowments, anyway?

Bryan Dik:

Do U.S. colleges provide students what they need to build successful careers? According to an article in a recent issue of The Atlantic, maybe not. Citing the results of a recent Gallup-Purdue Index study suggesting that just one in six college graduates in the U.S. found their Career Services office to be “very helpful,” the article argues that perhaps colleges should spend fewer resources on attracting inbound students and more on helping existing students establish a meaningful career once they graduate. The poll found that graduates who visit their career center and have a good experience fare better than those who don’t, but the proportion who visit at all is barely more than half. Some students expressed concern that the services they received were too basic, focused primarily on interviewing tips or resume support; others felt there was a mismatch between what they most needed and what they received. “All of this would indicate that there’s room for colleges to improve,” wrote the article’s author, Emily DeRuy, “not only how they connect with students, but also what they offer.”

Rosanna Xia

When that first class ended, she signed up for the next level, then another and eventually declared a joint major of computer science and math. Cheering her on were professors who had set out to show her that women belonged in computer science just as much as men did.

It’s a message that goes unheard at many universities. Nationwide, according to the Computing Research Assn., more than 84% of undergraduates who major in computer science are men.

Not so at Harvey Mudd, where more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago.

Glenn Fleishman

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It’s a small, infuriating difference: “this” versus “this.”

Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. But there’s a seemingly contrary motion afoot with quotation marks: At an increasing number of publications, they’ve been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes’ time has come and gone.

Mainichi:

The insurance firm will introduce an AI system based on IBM Japan Ltd.’s Watson, which according to IBM is a “cognitive technology that can think like a human,” and “can analyze and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video.” The Watson-based system will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names.

Molly Beck:

“This is a sleazy deal that lets a candidate for public office keep getting paid by taxpayers, with no oversight for how he spends his days,” said Ross. “All the while promoting selling out our public schools to chase campaign cash from the private school voucher industry and the billionaires that support it.”

Humphries said Ross’ comments were “unfortunate.”

“Running for office is quite challenging if you are not independently wealthy and I am making a very serious commitment to this effort while also trying to sustain my family,” he said. “I hope Mr. Ross could recognize this.”

Humphries is one of two candidates backed by conservatives seeking to defeat Evers in his bid for a third term as the head of DPI.

Madison’s former assistant Superintendent for Business Services administrator Erik Kass left (2012) to setup a consulting firm. (Linkedin)

Riseling Group.

Several current public employees offer consulting services via the Riseling Group, including University of Wisconsin-Madison Vice Provost and Dean of Students Lori Berquam and Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Jake New:

In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter spelled out how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and for the past five years it has been the guiding document for colleges hoping to avoid a federal civil rights investigation into how they handle complaints of sexual violence.

The department’s views were praised by victims and their advocates and led to many changes on college campuses, particularly on the issue of burden of proof when campus judicial systems handle sex assault charges. Republican lawmakers and other critics have argued that the guidance goes farther than just clarifying Title IX. They say the department illegally expanded the gender discrimination law’s scope without going through proper notice-and-comment procedures. At the center of that argument — as well as several recent lawsuits against colleges and the Department of Education — is the lower standard of proof.

Olivia Goldhill:

Scientists are able to use brain tests on three-year-olds to determine which children are more likely to grow up to become criminals. It sounds like Minority Report come to life: An uncomfortable idea presenting myriad ethical concerns. But, though unnerving, the research is nuanced and could potentially be put to good use.
In the study, published in Nature Human Behavior this week, researchers led by neuroscientists at Duke University showed that those with the lowest 20% brain health results aged three went on to commit more than 80% of crimes as adults. The research used data from a New Zealand longitudinal study of more than 1,000 people from birth in the early 1970s until they reached 38 years old. This distribution, of 20% of a population accounting for 80% of an effect, is strong but not unusual. In fact, it follows the “Pareto principle.” The authors write in their paper:

Lyell Asher:

Every year for nearly a decade, I’ve assigned Anna Karenina to students enrolled in my course on the novel. At more than 800 pages, Tolstoy’s saga can invite hurried reading, so a lot of class time is spent applying the brakes: “Not so fast.” “How do you know that?” “What’s it look like from her point of view?” There’s a useful speed bump in that famous first line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In its own way. Don’t assume you know who these people are, Tolstoy cautions, however familiar they may seem.

The book then proceeds to earn that caution, for what follows is a fantastic braid of self-deceptions, mistakes, and misunderstandings, all of which we see (as the characters themselves never can) from Tolstoy’s skybox of omniscience. The knowledge we’re exposed to can often seem too much—not just to take in, but to bear. Karenin’s solemn, impassive reaction to Anna’s tearful declaration of love for Vronsky, for example, seems initially to confirm Anna’s description of her husband as a mechanical functionary for whom time is a schedule and life a series of kept appointments. Only later do we learn that the dead look on Karenin’s face conceals a man so fully alive to his wife’s tears that he had to will himself inert so as not to fall apart. As happens so often in the book, just when we think we finally understand someone, Tolstoy drops a more powerful lens into the scope, or shifts its viewing angle, and we’re bewildered all over again.

RAJ CHETTY, JOHN N. FRIEDMAN, NATHANIEL HILGER,EMMANUEL SAEZ, DIANE WHITMORE SCHANZENBACH & DANNY YAGAN:

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the exper- imental data to administrative records. We rst demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are signi cantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a signi cant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings.

Christian Kriticos:

I learned more from Isaacson’s biography than I have from a single book in a long time, simply by virtue of the fact that it concerned a subject I previously knew nothing about and assumed I had no interest in. It is a credit to Isaacson that he manages to make the complex evolving world of computer technology so accessible and fascinating to a novice like me; when he concludes that Jobs will be placed “in the pantheon next to Edison and Ford” I can now see where he is coming from, where previously I would have, in my ignorance, snorted in disbelief at the notion.

Stephen Askey:

Once we were mighty. Once we were legion. Once we reigned over colleges and universities like demigods. Well, OK, we English majors were never that important, except maybe in our own eyes. According to a report in the New York Times, degrees awarded in English at American universities fell from seven point six percent of the total in 1971 to three point one percent of the total in 2011 — which goes to show, I suppose, that the golden age was never quite so golden. Still, better the periphery than where we are now — the periphery of the periphery.

One of the less-happy consequences of my decision to major in English 40 years ago is that I haven’t met many (or any) people who share my enthusiasm for the writings of John Dryden. Another is that I make about as much money as a janitor and live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I knew what I signed up for. My life sentence as an English major has taught me not to care overly much about what are laughingly called “the good things in life.” For better or worse, I can’t look at the glossy advertisements in The New Yorker without a feeling of cognitive dissonance. How could anyone who reads the poems and short stories and criticism in that magazine really want all that crap? If that’s a prejudice, the fault lies in me, not in my discipline, which includes plenty of practitioners with a somewhat more realistic financial outlook than my own. Anyway, for me, it’s less a discipline than a passion. I expect that that beleaguered three point one percent on campuses today feel much the same way. Against the advice of their parents, the social pressure of their peers, and the severely utilitarian direction of American society, they obdurately go on piling up their useless, unremunerative literary courses. See the trouble you get into when you listen to your soul?

Veronique Greenwood:

Babies’ ability to soak up language makes them the envy of adult learners everywhere. Still, some grown-ups can acquire new tongues with surprising ease. Now some studies suggest it is possible to predict a person’s language-learning abilities from his or her brain structure or activity—results that may eventually be used to help even the most linguistically challenged succeed.

In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, a team of researchers looked at the structure of neuron fibers in white matter in 22 beginning Mandarin students. Those who had more spatially aligned fibers in their right hemisphere had higher test scores after four weeks of classes, the scientists found. Like a freeway express lane, highly aligned fibers are thought to speed the transfer of information within the brain. Although language is traditionally associated with the left hemisphere, the right, which seems to be involved in pitch perception, may play a role in distinguishing the tones of Mandarin, speculates study author Zhenghan Qi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jason Ruiter

The fictional character was concocted by two employees at the library, complete with a false address and drivers license number.

After allegations by an unidentified person made in November, an investigation by the Lake County clerk of courts’ inspector general’s office concluded that Finley was a fake, and the county has since requested a systemwide audit of its libraries.

The goal behind the creation of “Chuck Finley” was to make sure certain books stayed on the shelves — books that aren’t used for a long period can be discarded and removed from the library system.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Cal Newport

On the other hand, as a writer I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media and am indifferent to my smartphone.

Recently, I’ve been trying to clarify the underlying philosophy that informs how I think about the role of these technologies in our personal lives (their role in the world of work is a distinct issue that I ‘ve already written quite a bit about). My thinking in this direction is still early, but I decided it might be a useful exercise to share some tentative thoughts, many of which seem to be orbiting a concept that I’ve taken to calling digital minimalism.

By Daniel Geng and Shannon Shih:

So what is Machine Learning?

At its core, machine learning is not a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, the vast majority of machine learning algorithms are concerned with just one simple task: drawing lines. In particular, machine learning is all about drawing lines through data. What does that mean? Let’s look at a simple example.

Classification

Let’s say you’re a computer with a collection of apple and orange images. From each image you can infer the color and size of a fruit, and you want to classify the images as either an image of an apple or an orange. The first step in many machine learning algorithms is to obtain labeled training data. In our example, this means getting a large number of images of fruit each labeled as either being an apple or an orange. From these images, we can extract the color and size information and then see how they correlate with being an apple or an orange. For example, graphing our labeled training data might look like something this:

Emily Ann Epstein & Alan Taylor:

This week’s Americans at Work essay focuses on inner-city agriculture programs by photographer Preston Gannaway: “Today, about a third of West Oakland residents live in poverty and with food insecurity. It’s a place where most people get their food from McDonald’s, the 99-cent store, or one of the many corner liquor stores. Due to a lack of nutritious food, low-income areas like this one face overwhelming rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes. In an effort to fill this need, new groups have formed to help combat the neighborhood’s food desert—a term to describe an area where most residents live below the poverty line and a mile or more away from a supermarket.

City Slicker Farms, which formed in 2001 and is one of the most established, recently built a 1.4-acre Farm Park complete with a sliding-scale farm stand and 28-plot community bed. Justin Vandenbroeck runs Fleet Farming Oakland, which constructs small farms in neighborhood yard spaces proclaiming, ‘grow food, not lawns!’ Working an economic angle as well as a dietary one, West Oakland Woods (WOW) Farms formed to help fill an employment need while taking advantage of the changing area’s restaurant boom. WOW operates both a produce and a flower farm that supplies high-end restaurants while training and employing local high-school students with financial need.

But industrial urban areas like West Oakland must also contend with decades of pollutants. The farmers say the soil is too toxic and must be either hauled away or lined to accommodate organic soil beds built on top. Water, soil, and air are all problems in West Oakland, said Vandenbroeck.”

Jefferson Pooley:

WHEN MARSHALL MCLUHAN published Understanding Media in 1964, the Cambridge-trained literary scholar was not well known, even inside the academy. By 1967, he was on the covers of Newsweek and the Saturday Review, and the subject of an hourlong NBC documentary, all in the same month. Over three manic years, McLuhan had shot from scholarly obscurity to klieg-lit fame.

Like most celebrity ascensions, McLuhan’s was the product of a conscious publicity campaign. Handlers, press agents, and impresarios worked together to make “McLuhan” a household name. He was packaged and promoted like a promising starlet, with multimedia gusto. Understanding Media garnered a few mainstream print reviews upon publication, but McLuhan’s break came in early 1965, when a pair of San Francisco prospectors — one, Gerald Feigen, a physician, the other, Howard Gossage, an ad-agency executive — “discovered” McLuhan and promptly arranged to visit the Canadian in Toronto. Feigen and Gossage were self-fashioned avant-gardists, using profits from their business consulting firm for “genius scouting”; the doctor read Understanding Media and alerted his partner. Together they plotted a full-fledged publicity rollout, starting with cocktail parties in New York City with media and publishing figures. The pair staged a weeklong “McLuhan Festival” that summer, with nightly parties and a rotating cast of ad executives, newspaper editors, mayoral aides, and business leaders in attendance.

John Harris:

By way of a gloomy seasonal party game, try this. Take the proverbial back of a cereal box, divide it into six rectangles, and on each one, write a supposed cause of the political turbulence now gripping the west: “the financial crash of 2008”, “inequality”, “racism and xenophobia”, “Tony Blair, basically”, and all the rest. Then get out the gin, maybe put on a Radiohead album, and enjoy hours of doom-laden conversational fun.

Were I daft enough to play the game myself, on one rectangle, I think I’d write an explanation so far barely mentioned in the acres of coverage of 2016’s chaos, but one right at the heart of it all: “Ever-increasing complexity, and the diminishing returns it now creates.” It’s not the snappiest conversation starter, I know. But if you’re looking for a grand catch-all theory that ties together Donald Trump, Brexit, and the general sense of a world spinning into chaos, it might not be a bad place to begin.

Stephanie Lee

At the same time, relatively few people took the extra step of doing some of the tasks that the app asked them to do. Just shy of 5,000 people completed a six-minute walk test, a common proxy of heart health, with their phones in hand, according to the study. And while 40,000 people filled out some portion of the app’s health questionnaires, only about 1,300 provided all the information needed to calculate their personalized health risks.

That squares with a recent study that showed that for the first five ResearchKit apps that launched, including MyHeart Counts, the percentage of daily users quickly dropped to 25% or below within the first three months.

“This is a very significant problem with this new form of medical research,” Topol said. “You accrue lots of people, but to keep them engaged, long-term, is perhaps the greatest challenge.” Apps could keep people coming back, he suggested, by offering participants something valuable in return, like personalized insights about their health.

Eliza Strickland:

Nimesh Patel, aggrieved user of Facebook and Illinois resident, isn’t naive: He well understands that the social networking company collects information about him. But Facebook went too far for his liking when it collected certain intimate details about his physiognomy, such as how many millimeters of skin lie between his eyebrows, how far the corners of his mouth extend across his cheeks, and dozens of other aspects of his facial geometry that enable the company’s face recognition software to identify him.

Patel is a named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Facebook alleging that the company’s use of face recognition technology violates an Illinois law passed in 2008. The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) sets limits on how companies can store and use people’s biometric identifiers, which the law defines as fingerprints, voiceprints, retina or iris scans, and scans of hand or face geometry. The case is scheduled for trial this October, and similar Illinois-based lawsuits are proceeding against Google and Snapchat. In the upcoming year, the courts will host a debate over who can keep our faces on file.

Alan Borsuk:

Overall, the number of bright spots on the Milwaukee education scene is increasing and there’s more reason for optimism. Someone who has a good handle on these things tried to convince me of this recently.

He made a pretty good case. I’m not exactly giddy — as you will see — but there are promising things happening. I’ve seen more willingness lately in some places to confront issues of quality, both overall and at specific schools. There are some new schools being run by talented leaders. There’s even occasional evidence of less acrimony among those involved in Milwaukee’s sometimes befuddling education landscape.

But when the overall indicators of student success remain generally so troubling — test scores, graduation rates, attendance, suspensions, the gap between kids from have and have-not backgrounds – we still have a crisis.

On that mixed note, I offer some awards for outstanding performance in 2016 in education matters in Milwaukee. In fact, there’s so much to say, I’m going to stretch this into two weeks, so come back next Sunday for more.

aEvan Goldstein:

The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. “I wrote in a fever,” he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.”

Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, pinned the blame, in part, on academe and its fixation on identity politics. “How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose … gender pronouns?” he asked. “How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?”

Ian Gordon:

Elizabeth Abel walked up to the front door of her house for the first time in four months and rang the bell. She’d just flown halfway around the world to drop in, unannounced, on the man who’d taken over her home.

When he came to the door, Abel says, the man didn’t seem surprised to see her—or the police officer standing beside her. “Oh, hi,” he said.

Abel peered behind him into her living room, which was practically empty. Most of her furniture was gone: a dining table and four chairs, two easy chairs, an antique piece. Her books and rugs were nowhere to be seen. Even the artwork had been taken off the walls.

As Abel walked around the place she’d called home for three decades, she had the distinct feeling that her life had been erased. In the family room, a small sofa, a table, and a television had been removed. Out on the back deck, the wooden table and benches were missing. The bedrooms were emptied out, her mattresses crammed into the office. Closets were sealed with blue painter’s tape. She turned to the man, who had been renting her place for the past several months—without paying. “What is going on here?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

Tyler Durden:

The end of the year is approaching, and data concerning government abuses of power has begun pouring in.

According to Facebook’s Global Government Requests Report, government’s requests for Facebook account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016.

Facebook’s official announcement explained that requests for user data went from 46,710 in the last half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016. At least 56 percent of these requests, Facebook added, “contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user.”

Law enforcement agencies from across the globe, Facebook continued, often send restriction requests demanding Facebook remove content from its forums. Fortunately, these requests dropped substantially this year, from 55,827 in the last half of 2015 to 9,663 in 2016 — an 87 percent drop. Most of the 2015 requests revolved around “French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks.”

Additionally, Facebook used its report to disclose for the first time what the company does when law enforcement agencies request “snapshots” of a user account that might be relevant to law enforcement for undisclosed reasons.

Po-Hung Liu:

This study aimed to reveal the effects of teaching with concrete learning objects taken from the history of mathematics on student achievement. Being a quasi-experimental study, it was conducted with two grade 8 classes in a secondary school located in Trabzon. The experimental group consisted of 27 students and the control group consisted of 25. Data were collected by using worksheets, an achievement exam and written opinion forms. The data from the achievement exam were analysed by using the Mann-Whitney U-test while the data from written opinion forms were analysed through content analysis. The Mann–Whitney U-test results showed a significant difference between the mean ranks of the experimental and control groups in favour of the former. Findings from the written opinion forms suggested that the students found the activities to be instructive and fun, enjoyed using concrete models in their classes, and learned from discovering the rules. It was also found that students had previously not engaged in similar activities and had only experienced the history of mathematics through the life stories and works of mathematicians and the representation of ancient numbers at the beginning of each unit.

Modern Algebra: Video.

Tony Sudbury:

So sang Doris Day in 1956, expressing a near-universal belief of humankind: you can’t know the future. Even if this is not quite a universal belief, then the universal experience of humankind is that we don’t know the future. We don’t know it, that is, in the immediate way that we know parts of the present and the past. We see some things happening in the present, we remember some things in the past, but we don’t see or remember the future.

Heather Mac Donald

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

FIRE:

Consumer Reports has included FIRE in its recently-released list of the “Best Charities for Your Donation.” The publication chose FIRE as one of its top five, highest-rated Human and Civil Rights charities alongside the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Community Change, the Fund for Global Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch.

To compile its list, Consumer Reports compared data from the three major charity watchdogs—CharityWatch, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance—to determine the best (and worst) charities in a variety of fields and help consumers “find one that really puts your money to work.”

Sarah Knapton:

High street shops including Marks & Spencer are secretly tracking the movements of their customers using their smartphones, it has emerged.

Companies such as footwear supplier Dune, Morrisons and Topshop are among major retailers taking advantage of new technology which picks up the pings emitted by phones as they look for wi-fi networks to join.

The ceilings of many major stores now contain small white receiver boxes which are continuously gathering data.

The shops use the data not only to record the numbers of their customers, but also to see where they move about in the shop, so they can alter the layout to make walking between departments more convenient, or steer customers towards goods they may have missed.

Jeffrey Mitchell:

Do apostrophes matter, even though “nothing matters” in the end? German Lopez thinks they do. Is the period “no longer how we finish our sentences”? So says Jeff Guo. If you’re an editor like me, you notice writing about little things like apostrophes and periods, especially when you see it in big news outlets. First, in Vox in January, came “Apostrophes, explained.” Then, in the Washington Post in June, came “Stop. Using. Periods. Period.” Lopez and Guo are on opposite sides in the long-running “language wars” over English usage between prescriptivists, who (as caricatured) believe that nothing is right in usage except what their outmoded rules permit, and descriptivists, who (as caricatured) believe that nothing can ever be wrong. Those wars aren’t news if you follow the story of English, but how the two writers took their positions did seem new. In each article, I saw an oddness and wondered what it might mean about the state of battle.

Alastair Gee:

Every night for the past year or so, Adriana and Omar Chavez have slept in an RV parked in East Palo Alto, a downtrodden community in Silicon Valley.

On a recent morning before sunrise, they emerged on to the empty street. Omar showed his phone to his wife: 7.07am. “Shall I wake up the girls?” he said, his breath visible in the freezing air.

He headed inside to rouse their three daughters, huddled together in the low-ceilinged bed just above the driver’s cab, and ready them for school.

Robert Shibley:

The University of Minnesota football team’s dramatic walkout in protest of what they saw as unfair treatment of 10 fellow players in a campus sexual-assault investigation came to an end on Dec. 17. But it made national headlines for imperiling the team’s trip to the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl and for the players’ demands that their accused teammates receive a “fair hearing”.

Ed Erhart, Samantha Lien:

Anecdotally, 2016 was a year of transition and change in much of the western world. Some events could be described as tragedy, others as cause for celebration.
Regardless of how you feel about this year, Wikipedia editors were there to help you understand what happened in 2016 and then some. Without further ado, here is 2016 as seen through the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia, both for the full year and by month.

As might be expected, politics features heavily—given the vote on ‘Brexit’, which seems likely to end in the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, and the United States’ presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Four of the top five most-edited articles related to the American election.

A number of celebrities, politicians, and household names passed away, like David Bowie, Prince, politician Jo Cox, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, boxer Muhammad Ali, and singer Christina Grimmie. All showed up in either the full list of most-edited by year/by month breakdowns, but are dwarfed by the article on deaths in 2016. Similar to last year, it was by far the most-edited of the year.[1]

Anthony Gockowski:

An extended legal battle between the University of Arkansas and one its law professors has come to a close after the school agreed to let him study the effects of race-based admissions policies.

Campus Reform initially reported in November 2015 that law professor Robert Steinbuch was provided with heavily redacted data in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request he had filed with his school seeking to obtain an internal spreadsheet the law school maintains to conduct analyses of admissions.

“What are we to make of these dramatic differences between my snapshot and the administration’s?” Tweet This

However, when Steinbuch’s FOIA request was returned, he was surprised to learn that the school had redacted information about race, LSAT scores, and undergraduate GPA, telling Campus Reform at the time that “they took out essentially all of the relevant information.”

Steinbuch later sued the school’s administration on the grounds that it had violated the state’s FOIA statute, simultaneously alleging that he had also faced retaliation from two fellow professors in an effort to discourage his research, which they complained could be “distressing” to students.

Center for digital democracy:

Personal health wearable devices that consumers are using to monitor their heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels raise new privacy and security risks, according to a report released today by researchers at American University and the Center for Digital Democracy. Watches, fitness bands, and so-called “smart” clothing, linked to apps and mobile devices, are part of a growing “connected-health” system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health. But while consumers may think that federal laws will protect their personal health information collected by wearables, the report found that the weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system fails to provide adequate safeguards. The report, Health Wearable Devices in the Big Data Era: Ensuring Privacy, Security, and Consumer Protection, provides an overview and analysis of the major features, key players, and trends that are shaping the new consumer-wearable and connected-health marketplace.

Laura Kusisto:

The volatile housing market of the past 15 years is widening the divide between pricey urban and coastal areas and more affordable inland regions, creating large swaths of winners and losers based largely on geography.

Average U.S. home prices rose 5.6% in the 12 months through October, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which covers some of the U.S.’s largest metropolitan areas.

Lily Werlinich:

Katrin Schultheiss, the chair of the history department, said faculty made the changes to the requirements largely due to enrollment pressures. She said by becoming more flexible and more responsive to students’ interests, the department hopes to recruit students who might not have decided to major in history otherwise.

“I think the main gain for students is that they have a great deal more flexibility than they had before, and they can adapt it to whatever their plans are for the future,” Schultheiss said. “Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.”

The history department had 153 majors in 2011, but enrollment has dropped significantly since then: Only 72 undergraduate students majored in history in 2015 and 83 students majored in 2016, according to GW’s institutional research office.

Scott Jaschik:

Billy Willson finished his first (and his last) semester at Kansas State University this week — and in so doing has set off a debate there and beyond on the value of college and of general education in particular.

In a Facebook post, he announced that he was dropping out, despite having earned a 4.0 grade point average. He said that he would start his own business and learn more from that experience than anything he could hope to achieve at Kansas State or any college. He ran a photo of himself giving the finger to Kansas State, although he’s since said he really wants to be doing that to all of higher education.

Many Inside Higher Ed readers will likely find his comments insulting and ill informed, and some faculty members and students at K-State have pointed out that he wrote some things that are factually questionable. But Willson is attracting many fans online as his Facebook post has gone viral — and trashing course requirements and general education seems to be a big part of Willson’s appeal.

Jeff Guo:

Asian Americans seem to offer proof that minorities can prosper — and even leapfrog whites — if they work hard and jump through the right hoops. For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanics.

But why do typical Asian American households outearn typical white households? Like many statistics showing an Asian American advantage, this fact proves illusory upon closer examination. A common explanation is that Asian Americans are better educated. While that’s true, there’s another factor that can completely account for the income gap between Asians and whites.

Tom Dotan and Reed Albergotti:

Be careful what you say around your Amazon Echo. Your words may be recorded and used against you in court.

In what may be the first case of its kind, police investigating a murder in Bentonville, Arkansas, issued a warrant to Amazon.com to turn over audio and other records from an Echo. The device in question belongs to James Andrew Bates, who was charged earlier this year with first-degree murder. The victim, Victor Collins, was found dead in Mr. Bates’ hot tub one Sunday morning in November of last year.

The Takeaway
Internet of Things devices that are always listening are emerging as a new tool for police, raising the prospect of more battles between tech companies and law enforcement. In this case, Arkansas detectives got a search warrant for an Amazon Echo in the house where a man was murdered late last year.

According to court records, Amazon twice declined to hand over information the Echo transmitted to its servers. The company did hand over Mr. Bates’ account information and purchase history. Police also said they took the device and extracted data off it, the records show. Amazon did not respond to questions about the case or how it responded to the search warrant.

Mr. Bates pleaded not guilty in April and is out on bail. The case is due to go to trial in early 2017, according to Mr. Bates’ defense attorney. Police referred questions to the prosecutor’s office, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Greg Miller:

It’s been a good year for map lovers. Whether you’re into old maps, new maps, or new ways of interacting with old maps, there was much to cheer about in 2016.

Lots of great historical maps became more accessible this year. One of the world’s great private map collections is now open to the public at Stanford University. The Central Intelligence Agency, which isn’t exactly known for sharing, released a slew of historical maps to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Cartography Center. Here at All Over the Map, we were excited to publish a few maps that haven’t been readily available online, including secret Japanese military maps and a map used in 1783 at the Treaty of Paris to negotiate the borders of the brand-new United States of America.

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the innovative and beautifully designed maps being made these days. And thanks to the proliferation of digital cartography tools, lots of non-cartographers are making maps now too. This year, scientists mapped the rise of “megaregions”—clusters of interconnected cities—and documented the increasingly fragmented areas of Earth that can’t be reached by road. Journalists got into the act too, making sophisticated and attractive maps to examine everything from the presidential election to the aerial surveillance of U.S. cities.

Charles Kupfer:

Sometimes a pop culture class becomes an extramural joke, such as the “Zombie Studies” courses that were all the rage a few years ago. And sometimes an American Studies professor decides to use the classroom for “social activism” where the idea is to substitute studying with protesting.

I might chuckle if I weren’t employed and mentally invested in the field, and if I did not have residual respect for the open-minded, pragmatic approaches which marked American Studies for the first decades of its existence. But sadly, for the last generation, American Studies—beset by a nagging awareness that making interdisciplinarity the norm when studying culture became mission accomplished at least 20 years ago—has scooted pell-mell towards politicization in a misbegotten effort to remain relevant.

The result today is an academic sub-specialty wedded to a tightly-corseted belief that the United States represents the locus of sin (racism, sexism, colonialism, and the like) in the modern world, and that any study of America should restrict itself to call-outs and condemnations. American Studies now serves chiefly as validation system for academicians who know their findings in advance: racism, sexism, and imperialism.

Increasingly, the field is hostile to scholars who don’t want to use it just to berate American traditions and signal their imagined virtue.

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Becky Vevea

“There’s 41 of you here, and 41 minds have to be completely locked into what we’re doing in order for us to get that sound,” teacher Kelsey Tortorice tells her students at UIC College Prep, a campus of the Noble Street Network of Charter Schools in Chicago.

A new study by the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University revealed music instruction, and studying music in general, changes the teenage brain, so long as students participate for at least two years.

The researchers found that studying music alters teen brains in a way that makes them better able to focus and process sound — a development that’s particularly important for learning.

Sheila Bair:

Donald J. Trump has made bold and provocative campaign promises on taxes, trade, immigration and infrastructure. These pledges are all in service of bolstering our economic future. While we hope these initiatives will help our economic prospects, there is one important measure missing from the debate. And it could have an even more immediate and direct impact on economic growth: student debt relief.

Student debt now stands at $1.3 trillion. More than half of student borrowers are unable to repay their loans according to the original terms. In a well-intended but poorly executed effort to make college broadly accessible, the government has lent freely to students, with little attention to whether they can repay those loans. The result is millions of young people with debt they cannot afford.

Susan Svrlugo:

More than 1,500 people have had genetic testing done at West Chester University, part of a campuswide DNA Discussion Project. Anita Foeman, a professor of communication studies at the public university in Pennsylvania, hoped to use the project to build connections among people. Students in a freshman honors class took the test this fall, and many were surprised when the results upended their self-identity.

Urban Dictionary:

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines…

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on…

Eugene Volokh:

1. Last week, the University of Oregon made clear to its faculty: If you say things about race, sexual orientation, sex, religion and so on that enough people find offensive, you could get suspended (and, following the logic of the analysis) even fired. This can happen even to tenured faculty members; even more clearly, it can happen to anyone else. It’s not limited to personal insults. It’s not limited to deliberate racism or bigotry.

This time it involved someone making herself up as a black man at a costume party (as it happens, doing so in order to try to send an antiracist message). But according to the university’s logic, a faculty member could be disciplined for displaying the Mohammed cartoons, if it caused enough of a furor. Or a faculty member could be disciplined for suggesting that homosexuality may be immoral or dangerous. Or for stating that biological males who view themselves as female should be viewed as men, not as women. Or for suggesting that there are, on average, biological differences in temperament or talents between men and women.

g, The State University of New York:

Who is this class for: We are thrilled to make this course available for anybody who is interested in learning how to evaluate the quality of news and journalism in order to judge the reliability of information and make informed judgment. It is an online version of the News Literacy curriculum developed at Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Hong Kong. More than 15,000 university students in ten countries have taken it over the last ten years. We have been constantly updating our course material by incorporating the impact of the growing popularity of smart phones and social media services around the world. We hope you enjoy the course!

Rebecca Rosen:

The Ambition Interviews began as a project between two friends, Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace, who had attended Northwestern University in the early ’90s. What had happened, they wondered, to all of their brilliant, hard-working friends from their college days? Had life come together as they had hoped? They reached out to 37 other members of their sorority’s graduating class, and those conversations became the foundation of the essays we now present.

We recommend starting with Hana’s introduction essay, which details the project, and from there the essays—listed here—can be read in any order.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

Thanks to American Educator for E.D. Hirsch’s new article on the necessity of a coherent curriculum in the elementary grades. Everything he writes on this is sensible and of the greatest value.

But why oh why is the effort of the student always left out? I was a much
better teacher with a student who paid attention in class and did the
homework, and a much less effective teacher with a student who did
not pay attention in class and did not do the homework.

Yet, for some reason, the student has no place in our
discussions of teacher effectiveness, school reform, etc.

Imagine discussing the performance of a football team and never mentioning
what any of the players did on the field, or their degree of attention to the coach,
and their own preparedness for the part they played in games.

Yet from the way we discuss reform in education, there must be the assumption
that students have no part to play in their schooling.

This makes no sense at all. What could be the reason for it?

The Concord Review.

Doug Erickson:

Each partner is asked to make a commitment of at least one year and to make a contribution of some sort, whether human, financial or material, Bartzen said. A financial donation is not a requirement for participation, she said.

Partners provide many things, such as tutors, mentors, in-kind donations, guest speakers, lunch buddies and off-site space for occasional school-related functions.

“The small things are just as important as the big things,” Bartzen said. “It really is all about developing long-term relationships. If a financial piece is possible, that’s wonderful, but a donation of the size given by Great Lakes is not the norm.”

For more information on adopting a school or donating to the foundation, go to fmps.org.

Chris Rickert:

If I were Santa Claus, my Christmas gifts to Republican state Rep. Dave Murphy and Republican state Sen. Steve Nass would be vouchers to enroll in the UW-Madison class “The Problem of Whiteness.”

According to a course description, it offers the chance to wonder “what it really means to be white” and asks: “Since white supremacy was created by white people, is it not white folks who have the greatest responsibility to eradicate it?”

For the professor teaching the class and other identity politics-obsessed UW faculty, I’d provide bus tickets to some struggling rural hamlets in Murphy’s and Nass’ districts, where if whiteness is a problem, pretty much everybody is problematic — even if the real problems have less to do with race than with garden-variety social dysfunction and lack of income.

Maybe then conservative legislators would stop measuring academia according to their politics, and ivory tower academics would stop conflating teaching with pontification.

Ted Chiang:

Catching crumbs from the table
JACEY
It has been 25 years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehensibility of humans?

No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language.

Without DNT, humans could not fully grasp earlier developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.

Oliver Burkeman:

The eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann. Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital blight that was colonising more and more of their hours, squeezing out time for more important work, or for having a life. And Mann, a rising star of the “personal productivity” movement, seemed like he might have found the answer.

He called his system “Inbox Zero”, and the basic idea was simple enough. Most of us get into bad habits with email: we check our messages every few minutes, read them and feel vaguely stressed about them, but take little or no action, so they pile up into an even more stress-inducing heap. Instead, Mann advised his audience that day at Google’s Silicon Valley campus, every time you visit your inbox, you should systematically “process to zero”. Clarify the action each message requires – a reply, an entry on your to-do list, or just filing it away. Perform that action. Repeat until no emails remain. Then close your inbox, and get on with living.

Josh Blackman:

Nancy Shurtz, a tenured professor at the University of Oregon Law School, wore black face to a halloween party. Her costume, which also included a white lab coat and stethoscope, was meant as some sort of social commentary about the book “Black Man in a White Coat.” Nearly two dozen of Shurtz’s colleagues called on her to resign. Shurtz was suspended with pay, pending an investigation. That investigation came to a close on November 30.

Yesterday, the Provost of the University of Oregon released a statement, along with a redacted version of the investigative report, explaining why Shurtz can be disciplined consistent with the First Amendment and principles of academic freedom. Here is the Provost’s summary:

Annysa Johnson:

“Persistence.”

It was the final page of the PowerPoint presentation, and all eyes were on Kimberly Easley.

For the better part of an hour, student advisers Easley and Tre’Quan Martin had run a class of mostly ninth-graders through a primer highlighting much of what they’ll need to do over the next four years to graduate, get into college and succeed there.

Get good grades. Take part in extracurricular activities. Volunteer. Save money. Research colleges and career paths. Fill out the FAFSA. Pursue every scholarship possible.

You could see, for a teenager, how it could all be overwhelming. And then they landed on that final page: “Persistence.”

“That is probably the most important thing we want you to walk away with, because without that you really can’t achieve anything,” said Easley, a first-generation college graduate who weathered her own challenges — poverty, an absentee father, a drug-using mother — en route to a master’s degree from Alverno College.

“I could have used (that as) my crutch … for not going to college and not being successful,” Easley said.

Eyder Peralta:

When he was in prison, Lorenzo Palma strongly suspected he was an American citizen. He had spent his whole life in the United States, and he knew his grandfather was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1914.

Palma had served five years for an assault conviction and was about to be released on parole, but immigration officials had stopped his release because they wanted to deport him. They said he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

So in the summer of 2014, Palma found himself among dozens of inmates about to face an immigration judge in Huntsville, Texas. “They would sit us by groups of 10 and they would start deporting left and right,” he said.

A far cry from the Apostle Paul, who declared his Roman citizenship when he was about to be beaten (Acts 22)

Nick Statt:

The US Customs and Border Protection has started demanding that foreign travelers hand over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media account information upon entering the country, according to a report from Politico. The new policy follows a proposal laid out back in June and applies only to those travelers who enter the US temporarily without a visa through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, process. The goal, the government says, is to “identify potential threats,” a spokesperson tells Politico.

ACTIVISTS FEAR THE POLICY COULD BE A THREAT TO HUMAN RIGHTS
The new policy went into effect on Tuesday, and the request is currently “optional.” It asks foreign travelers to “enter information associated with your online presence,” and offers a drop-down menu allowing participants to enter in account names for most major social networks, including LinkedIn and even Google+.

aljazeera:

Saada governorate, the most heavily bombed region in Yemen, has the world’s highest stunting rates among children, affecting eight out of 10 in some areas, it said.

Stunting – where a child is short for their age – is another sign of chronic malnourishment and has irreversible consequences for both physical health and cognitive function.

Other governorates – Hodeida, Taiz, Hajjah and Lahej – were also badly affected after 20 months of war, UNICEF said.

Julia Friedman:

In Perspectiva Corporum Regularium, Jamnitzer rotates and carves each of the solids to demonstrate how they might function as the building blocks of the world. Though science has since demonstrated the atom to be the most basic part of all matter, Jamnitzer’s studies possess a captivating artistic merit. With the manipulation, repetition, and layering of basic shapes, they seem like distant precursors to Minimalism and its concerns.

Jamnitzer sometimes sketches solids in sculptural positioning — a shape upon a pedestal — enhancing an understanding of the three-dimensional form in space. The resulting manipulations are often so varied it can be hard to discern from which Platonic solid they originated. This is Jamnitzer’s point: to show that all matter might be constituted by these primary shapes. Although our understanding of the essence of matter has changed, interestingly, the underlying concept of building blocks has not. All matter is constituted of molecules made of atoms, adding up to their own kind of minimal, molecular geometry.

John Baez

Information geometry is the study of ‘stochastic manifolds’, which are spaces where each point is a hypothesis about some state of affairs. This subject, usually considered a branch of statistics, has important applications to machine learning and somewhat unexpected connections to evolutionary biology. To learn this subject, I’m writing a series of articles on it. You can navigate forwards and back through these using the blue arrows. And by clicking the links that say “on Azimuth”, you can see blog entries containing these articles. Those let you read comments about my articles—and also make comments or ask questions of your own!

Mike Gordon:

Margaret Kocaj has one more semester before she earns her degree from Charlotte School of Law.

Now she doesn’t know whether she will get a diploma or even if she has a school.

On Monday, Kocaj and CSL’s 700 other students at the for-profit school learned that the Department of Education will cut off millions of dollars in student loans and other financial assistance on Dec. 31. That’s money that most of the students need to continue their classes.

The government’s reason: a “substantial and persistent” failure by Charlotte School of Law to meet admission and curriculum standards while intentionally misleading current and prospective students about the extent of its problems.

Chris Kirkham:

Almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in 2015, the largest percentage since 1940, according to an analysis of census data by real estate tracker Trulia.

Despite a rebounding economy and recent job growth, the share of those between the ages of 18 and 34 doubling up with parents or other family members has been rising since 2005. Back then, before the start of the last recession, roughly one out of three were living with family.

The trend runs counter to that of previous economic cycles, when after a recession-related spike, the number of younger Americans living with relatives declined as the economy improved.

The mind unleashed:

“Now that I’ve finished my first semester I think it’s safe to say… FUCK COLLEGE. Now before all you of you go batshit crazy… I have a few points to make.

1. Yes I have dropped out after finishing my first semester (with a 4.0 GPA). And it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Not because I am averse to learning, but actually the exact opposite.

2. YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will see it some day. Heck you may have already seen it if you’ve been through college. You are being put thousands into debt to learn things you will never even use. Wasting 4 years of your life to be stuck at a paycheck that grows slower than the rate of inflation. Paying $200 for a $6 textbook. Being taught by teacher’s who have never done what they’re teaching. Average income has increased 5x over the last 40 years while cost of college has increased 18x. You’re spending thousands of dollars to learn information you won’t ever even use just to get a piece of paper. I once even had an engineer tell me “I learned more in my first 30 days working than in my 5 years of college.” What does that tell you about this system? There are about a million more ways you’re being scammed into this.. just watch the video i’m gonna comment if you want to see more.

Charles Murray:

Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.

Dear Virginia Tech community,

Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”

Fred Smith

Game begins with the San Fernando Valley Patriots, a small public policy group that sought 501(c)4 tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. A routine matter taking only a few months for most non-profit organizations, the Patriots’ application was delayed as they were required to meet a series of demands for supporting information. The Obama administration, it turns out, was displeased with right-of-center groups’ opposition to its initiatives, and that attitude worked its way down to federal agencies.

For many years, commercial speech has been regulated to prevent fraud, but the newer goal of regulating political speech was a harder climb. Courts, in particular, protected political speech for much of the nation’s early history. Still, given the growing distrust of big businesses, campaign finance laws gained political momentum. As Strassel notes, some free speech advocates came to favor disclosure of advocacy organizations’ donor information. After all, what could be wrong with “transparency?”

Republicans were slow to recognize the threat posed by such mandates, though it has been clear for more than half-a-century. In one of the key court cases, Alabama officials, irate over the NAACP’s role in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, demanded the state chapter disclose its membership and donors. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this attack as a violation of the rights to privacy and free association.

Oliver Cameron:

You may have seen this incredible video from NVIDIA, one of our Nanodegreepartners, which highlights their efforts of teaching a car how to drive using only cameras and deep learning. The second challenge for the Udacity Self-Driving Car initiative is to replicate these results using a convolutional neural network that you design and build! End-to-end solutions like this, where a single network takes raw input (camera imagery) and produces a direct steering command, are considered the holy-grail of current autonomous vehicle technology.
 
 The top scoring network (measured by how close the steering angles generated were to a human) for Challenge #2 was built by the amazing Ilya Edrenkin, a Senior Researcher at Yandex. He generously wrote an iPython Notebook explaining how his neural network was constructed, and I thought it needed to be shared with the world. Enjoy!

Jared Bernstein & Ben Spielberg:

DeVos and other ideological enemies of teachers unions may well try to block that vision. But as most education policy gets hashed out at the local level, they will hopefully fail. The desire for cross-sector collaboration with a goal of promoting equity for all students is growing, and fostering that growth will deliver a big win for our children.

Choice schools often spend substantially less per student than traditional, no choice schools.

Explanatory Colombo M, et al. Rev Philos Psychol. 2016.

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.

Mack Morris:

Fortunately, educational reforms that expand choices and opportunities for families look to be a top issue during the upcoming Texas legislative session, and most promising of all is legislation creating education savings accounts.

These accounts would give parents more control over how they spend their education tax dollars so that they can choose education options that best fit their child’s needs.

Five states have already adopted education savings account programs, with Arizona, Florida, and Nevada having the most robust programs.

The Texas program, as suggested by former Arlington state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, would most closely follow the Nevada model.

Dave Umhoefer and Sarah Hauer:

But the steep decline in the number of teacher candidates started before Act 10’s passage, it follows a national trend, and Wisconsin is faring better than its neighbors, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examination found.

Experts say root causes of the drop include tougher training and licensure requirements and tight school district budgets at a time when high student-loan debt and an improved economy are sending graduates into other fields.

Act 10’s chief contribution to the continuing trend: a cloud of pessimism hanging over the much-changed profession.

Oconomowoc thought differently regarding teacher time and compensation.

Peter Wong:

Oregon’s public-pension contribution rate has an 80 percent likelihood of exceeding 30 percent of payroll within the next few years, according to an analysis presented to the system’s governing board.

The projection was offered by Milliman, the firm that does the actuarial work for the Public Employees Retirement System, as the agency and lawmakers consider how they can deal with rising costs.

Those increased payroll costs will mean less money available for other government services, or potentially higher taxes.

The PERS board and agency staff say that policy changes are up to the Legislature, but through Milliman, they can analyze potential effects of various proposals. Milliman has offered such reports already.

A legislative work group has reviewed proposals for the 2017 session, which gets down to business starting Feb. 6.

The base rate set by the board for employer contributions the 2017-19 budget cycle is already at 20.8 percent. Although none of Oregon’s more than 900 government employers pays that rate, it is an indicator of upward trends – more than 3 percentage points greater than the current rate.

Actual rates paid by employers hinge on the mix of employees hired before and after August 2003 – when lawmakers made pension benefits less generous for future workers – and the employer’s proportion of public safety employees, who qualify for greater benefits.

thekidshouldseethis.com:

Every day, we move and operate within systems of power that other people have constructed. But we’re often uncomfortable talking about power. Why? Eric Liu describes the six sources of power and explains how understan…

William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.