David Moreau*, Ian J. Kirk and Karen E. Waldie:

The prospect of enhancing cognition is undoubtedly among the most exciting research questions currently bridging psychology, neuroscience, and evidence-based medicine. Yet, convincing claims in this line of work stem from designs that are prone to several shortcomings, thus threatening the credibility of training-induced cognitive enhancement. Here, we present seven pervasive statistical flaws in intervention designs: (i) lack of power; (ii) sampling error; (iii) continuous variable splits; (iv) erroneous interpretations of correlated gain scores; (v) single transfer assessments; (vi) multiple comparisons; and (vii) publication bias. Each flaw is illustrated with a Monte Carlo simulation to present its underlying mechanisms, gauge its magnitude, and discuss potential remedies. Although not restricted to training studies, these flaws are typically exacerbated in such designs, due to ubiquitous practices in data collection or data analysis. The article reviews these practices, so as to avoid common pitfalls when designing or analyzing an intervention. More generally, it is also intended as a reference for anyone interested in evaluating claims of cognitive enhancement.

Jacob L. Orquin & Robert Kurzban:

The academic and public interest in blood glucose and its relationship to decision making has been increasing over the last decade. To investigate and evaluate competing theories about this relationship, we conducted a psychometric meta-analysis on the effect of blood glucose on decision making. We identified 42 studies relating to 4 dimensions of decision making: willingness to pay, willingness to work, time discounting, and decision style. We did not find a uniform influence of blood glucose on decision making. Instead, we found that low levels of blood glucose increase the willingness to pay and willingness to work when a situation is food related, but decrease willingness to pay and work in all other situations. Low levels of blood glucose increase the future discount rate for food; that is, decision makers become more impatient, and to a lesser extent increase the future discount rate for money. Low levels of blood glucose also increase the tendency to make more intuitive rather than deliberate decisions. However, this effect was only observed in situations unrelated to food. We conclude that blood glucose has domain-specific effects, influencing decision making differently depending on the relevance of the situation to acquiring food.

Scott Hodge:

There are many reasons to reform the U.S. tax code. The United States has a high marginal corporate tax rate, a poorly defined tax base, and an out-of-date international tax system. However, one often overlooked issue in tax reform is complexity. For decades, the tax code has become more and more detailed, with thousands of additional pages of statutes, regulations, and case law. This added complexity imposes a real cost on the U.S. economy. Tackling the cost of tax complexity to our nation’s economy should be a priority for lawmakers.

The Expanding Size of the Tax Code
Over the last century, the federal tax code has expanded dramatically in size and scope. In 1955, the Internal Revenue Code stood at 409,000 words. Since then, it has grown to a total of 2.4 million words: almost six times as long as it was in 1955 and almost twice as long as in 1985.

However, the tax statutes passed by Congress are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tax complexity. There are roughly 7.7 million words of tax regulations, promulgated by the IRS over the last century, which clarify how the U.S. tax statutes work in practice. On top of that, there are almost 60,000 pages of tax-related case law, which are indispensable for accountants and tax lawyers trying to figure out how much their clients actually owe.

Laura Kusisto:

Across the country, a divide is emerging between cities that are growing outward and remaining affordable and ones that are hemmed in by geography and onerous zoning codes and are becoming more and more expensive.

As a whole, U.S. cities are expanding as rapidly as they have throughout the last half-century. From the 1950s until the 2000s they have added about 10,000 square miles per decade, or an area roughly the size of Massachusetts, according to research by Issi Romem, chief economist at real-estate site BuildZoom, to be released Monday. But beneath the surface a divide is deepening.

Nicole Pelletiere:

School and Sports College in St. Helens. In second grade, students take stage one of their SATs in various subjects and then measured again in grade six, Twist said.

Lansbury is a school for children with special needs. Ben was the only child in his school to take the SATs this year, his teacher’s assistant Ruth Clarkson confirmed to ABC News today.

On July 8, Twist received Ben’s test results from Clarkson. Ben also received a special letter from Clarkson, who commended him on his many strengths and abilities, highlighting that the SATs “only measure a little bit” of who he is as a person and as a student.

Clarkson goes on to list talents Ben possesses, such as his kindness, ability to keep friends and musical talent, among others.

Thomas Toch:

In the nearly 650,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, the local union, United Teachers Los Angeles, recently won changes that permit veteran teachers in the nation’s second largest school system to be evaluated as infrequently as twice a decade; makes it more difficult to use evaluations to establish “master” teacher positions, career ladders, or performance-based pay by eliminating the top category of “highly effective;” and plays down the role of student achievement in teacher evaluations.

Martin Daubney:

One of the world’s most respected campaigners on men’s issues believes “dad deprivation” is directly causing what he’s termed “the boy crisis” – and unless society urgently intervenes, we will be in danger of writing off a generation of men.

This Saturday, Warren Farrell – pioneering men’s activist, author of The Myth Of Male Power and a mentor who once coached John Lennon – will give a hugely-anticipated keynote speech at Male Psychology Conference in London.

Jong-Wha LeeHanol Lee:

This study presents new data sets on long-run enrollment ratios, educational attainment, and human capital stock measures for numerous countries. We construct a complete data set of historical enrollment ratios, subdivided by education level and gender, for 111 countries from 1820 to 1945 (at five-year intervals) by using newly compiled census observations and information on the year of establishment of the oldest school in individual countries. Then, by utilizing these enrollment ratios, as well as available census data from 1945 onward on different age groups’ educational attainment, we construct a data set of estimated educational attainment, disaggregated by gender and age group, and aggregate human capital stock that spans from 1870 to 2010. The data show that over the past two centuries, there has been remarkable growth in average educational attainment and human capital stock as well as a narrowing of the gap in average educational attainment between nations.

Julie Bosman:

“Our local grade school is now the government school,” State Senator Forrest Knox wrote in an op-ed article last year, echoing conservative concerns that the government had inserted itself unnecessarily into education.

The intent was obvious to her, Ms. Massman said. “They are trying to rebrand public education,” she said.

The use of the term has set off alarms even among some Republicans, who fear that it signals still less support, financially and otherwise, for the public schools in a state that had long felt pride over the quality of its education system. The recent adoption of a school finance plan that was acceptable to Mr. Brownback, the Legislature and the Kansas Supreme Court has not entirely assuaged those concerns.
Davis Merritt, a columnist for The Wichita Eagle, said in a column in May that state legislators’ “deaf and blind” ideology was threatening public schools.
“Some have begun to call public schools ‘government schools,’ a calculated pejorative scorning both education and anything related to government,” he wrote.
That elicited a response from Bob Weeks, the host of “WichitaLiberty.TV,” a show about Kansas politics and public affairs.
“It is surprising to me that liberals and progressives object to the term ‘government schools,’” he said on the show. “They like government, don’t they? These people want more taxation and government spending, don’t they? Well, when we think about our public schools, we find they have all the characteristics of government programs.”

The Economist:

A PICTURE is said to be worth a thousand words. That metaphor might be expected to pertain a fortiori in the case of scientific papers, where a figure can brilliantly illuminate an idea that might otherwise be baffling. Papers with figures in them should thus be easier to grasp than those without. They should therefore reach larger audiences and, in turn, be more influential simply by virtue of being more widely read. But are they? Bill Howe and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, decided to find out.

First, they trained a computer algorithm to distinguish between various sorts of figures—which they defined as diagrams, equations, photographs, plots (such as bar charts and scatter graphs) and tables. They exposed their algorithm to between 400 and 600 images of each of these types of figure until it could distinguish them with an accuracy greater than 90%. Then they set it loose on the more-than-650,000 papers (containing more than 10m figures) stored on PubMed Central, an online archive of biomedical-research articles.

Holly Dagres:

There is a conundrum facing Iranian officials. The government, on the one hand, wants Iranians to read more. At the same time, with the other hand, it wants to cover their eyes.

Love of the written word is deeply rooted in Iranian society, due to its extraordinary history of arts, sciences and literature. However, Iranians aren’t reading enough. Bookstores in Iran are a rarity, with some 1,500 shops for a population of almost 80 million. There was a time when publishers gave books a print run of 3,300-5,500 copies. Now, the numbers have dropped drastically to 500, sometimes even 300 copies.

That’s why the Iranian government recently announced it would be opening the largest bookstore in the world – by square footage – during the coming months. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this title was held by the Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York City, which covered 154,250ft². Unfortunately, the 5th Avenue flagship store closed down in 2014.

Claudio Sanchez:

Roughly seven out of 10 high school grads are headed to college every year — but that leaves hundreds of thousands who aren’t. And survey after survey shows that employers are demanding — even of college-bound students — some level of job skills and professionalism: punctuality, customer service, managing people and teamwork.

That’s the message students at Willamette High hear just about every day over the PA system: You need job skills with real market value. The school’s career and technical education program offers courses and training in all kinds of fields; culinary arts, health careers, robotics and welding. Students train as bank tellers with a local credit union, or learn food service and restaurants at Willy’s Cafe.

Wall Street Journal:

Facebook’s role in providing Americans with political news has never been stronger—or more controversial. Scholars worry that the social network can create “echo chambers,” where users see posts only from like-minded friends and media sources. Facebook encourages users to “keep an open mind” by seeking out posts that don’t appear in their feeds.

Karen Fancher:

I’m a professor at a well known local university, and my office is located directly across from the elevators. Because I maintain a literal “open-door” policy for my students, visitors often mistake me for the department secretary, as I am the first person they see when the elevator doors open. At this time of year, the same scenario happens repeatedly:

something, but out of the corner of my eye I see the elevator doors slide open. It’s a teenage girl and a middle-aged woman, presumably her mother. The parent walks into my office, with the girl trailing sheepishly behind. The mother says, “My daughter will be starting here in the fall. We’ve got a problem with her class schedule.” I try to make eye contact and address the girl as I politely give them directions to the Office of Student Services down the hall, but it’s the mother who apologizes for interrupting me. They leave my office, Mom leading the way with the class schedule in her hand.

Marlow Scmauder:

The school system works for many, but not all. What do you do when you’ve made the decision to homeschool, but don’t know how to get started? We’ve got it summarized to seven steps for you.

1. Leave school
You can notify the school in advance, or withdraw your child the same day. The approach you choose may depend on why your child is leaving: if school was a bad mismatch, the sooner, the better. If the situation is less about a mismatch than just wanting to try something different, two weeks’ notice or even the end of the term may feel right.

Dirk van Damme:

The international statistical system, one of the great achievements of international organisations, has mirrored the evolution of the nation-state. International statistics – and those related to education are no exception – were tuned towards comparing and benchmarking countries against each other. National averages thus became the dominant data. Most of the data points in Education at a Glance, for example, are national averages. However, the expansion and increased sophistication of data collection and data processing have allowed for the development of many more measures than just national averages. Indeed, averages without m

Ana Swanson:

The key to their findings isthat not every country experiences a “parenting happiness gap” like the United States does. On average, an American parent reports being 12 percent unhappier than a non-parent in America – the biggest gap in the 22 countries the researchers looked at, followed distantly by Ireland. In 12 other countries, non-parents also described themselves as happier than parents. However, in eight countries – Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France and Russia – parents actually reported being happier than non-parents.

The fourth commandment and Luther’s explanation are useful:

shalt honor thy father and thy mother [that it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long upon the earth].

What does this mean?–Answer.

We should fear and love God that we may not despise nor anger our parents and masters, but give them honor, serve, obey, and hold them in love and estee

Stephen Wolfram:

The book is about lives and ideas, and how they mix together. At its core it’s a book of stories about people, and what those people managed to create. It’s the first book I’ve written that’s fundamentally non-technical—and I’m hoping all sorts of readers without deep technical interests will be able to enjoy it.
There’s a common stereotype that techies like me aren’t interested in people. But for some reason I always have been. Yes, I like computers and abstract ideas and those sorts of things very much, and I certainly spend a great deal of my time on them. But I also like people, and find them interesting. And no doubt that has something to do with why I’ve chosen to spend the past 30 years building up a company that is—like any company—full of people.
One of the things I always find particularly interesting about people is their life trajectories. I’ve been fortunate enough to mentor many people, and I hope to have had a positive effect on many life trajectories. But I also find life trajectories interesting for their own sake—as things to understand and learn from.
Idea Makers is in a sense an exploration of a few life trajectories whose intellectual output happens to have intersected with my own. Some of the people in the book are extremely well known; others less so. I had all sorts of different reasons for writing the pieces that have ended up in the book. Sometimes it was to celebrate an anniversary. Sometimes because of some event. And sometimes—sadly—it was because the person they’re about just died. And although I didn’t plan it this way, the sixteen people in the book turn out to represent an interesting cross-section. (Yes, it would have been nice to have a bit more diversity among them, but unfortunately, with my subjects being from past generations, it didn’t work out that way.)

Jim Brunker:

Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have reached an early but important milestone in DNA storage by storing a record 200 megabytes of data on the molecular strands.

The impressive part is not just how much data they were able to encode onto synthetic DNA and then decode. It’s also the space they were able to store it in.

Once encoded, the data occupied a spot in a test tube “much smaller than the tip of a pencil,” said Douglas Carmean, the partner architect at Microsoft overseeing the project.

Think of the amount of data in a big data center compressed into a few sugar cubes. Or all the publicly accessible data on the Internet slipped into a shoebox. That is the promise of DNA storage – once scientists are able to scale the technology and overcome a series of technical hurdles.

Kames Redford & Karen Pritzker:

Today, much has changed in Kelsey’s life. She graduated from Lincoln this spring with a 4.0 GPA while also taking classes at a community college. She is articulate, confident, and happy. Kelsey believes Lincoln changed her life.

A deeper understanding of Kelsey’s journey could offer answers to critical questions about how to help millions of traumatized children—particularly those growing up in poverty—succeed in school and beyond.

Akhilesh Pathipati:

Like many aspects of health care, medical education evolves slowly. The modern curriculum is based on the Flexner Report — a review published in 1910. It hasn’t changed much since then.

It needs to.

As a medical student at Stanford, I’ve seen firsthand the limitations of today’s physician training. We can do better. Here are five reforms that I think would prepare doctors for medicine in the 21st century.

Teach skills, not just facts

Every medical school course list includes a slew of classes on physiology, pathology, and pharmacology. All important topics, but the emphasis on scientific information leaves physicians unprepared in a world where today’s facts may be outdated tomorrow.

David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and Björn Wallace:

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the cross-sectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income. JEL Codes: I10, I14, J24.

Kyle Petersen:

Bryan Garner, one of the world’s leading authorities on the English language, first began reading the dictionary as a teenager—because of a girl. He had used the word facetious. She admiringly noted his vocabulary. “I thought, ‘Well, I can really work on this,’ ” Mr. Garner tells me wryly. So he began copying good words, perhaps 20 keepers a day, into a notebook. “It took me about two years to realize that having an enormous vocabulary does not work on females by itself,” he says. “By that time I had fallen in love with the English language.”

Today, Mr. Garner is the editor in chief of “Black’s Law Dictionary” and a contributor to “The Chicago Manual of Style.” He has even become an eponym: “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” the fourth edition of his widely acclaimed guide to stringing words together well, dropped in April. Mr. Garner gives about 200 seminars a year, teaching lawyers—the best-paid writers in the world, he likes to say—how to polish their prose.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

One City Early Learning Centers of Madison, Wisconsin will be the first U.S. pilot site for the ground­breaking AnjiPlay curriculum. One City will feature environments and materials designed by AnjiPlay program founder Ms. Cheng Xueqin, and One City teachers and staff will receive training from Ms. Cheng and Dr. Chelsea Bailey of AnjiPlay World. Additionally, a series of AnjiPlay related events will be held in Madison from July 20­26, 2016 making the city of Madison a leader in bringing the AnjiPlay approach to children outside of China.

AnjiPlay is a comprehensive educational approach grounded in a philosophy of love,risk,joy,reflectionandengagement.AnjiPlayiscurrentlythefull­timecurriculumof 130 schools serving 14,000 children ages 3­6 in Anji County, China. The AnjiPlay approach was developed over a period of 15 years by Ms. Cheng, Director of Pre­primary Education for Anji County. It was recognized by the President of China in 2014 with the National Award for Achievement in Early Childhood Education and will be adapted as a national curricular standard in China this year. Over the past two years, the world has begun to learn about AnjiPlay through conferences and talks at Mills College, Stanford University, Columbia University and MIT.

One City is a new preschool utilizing a two­-generation model to prepare children, ages 1 to 5 years old, for school and life success, while working in partnership with parents and the broader community to move its children’s families forward. One City believes that strong families and neighborhoods produce strong children. Presently, the school is serving 30 children on the South Side of Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most racially, ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods in Wisconsin. It will grow to serve 110 children in its present location, with an eye to serving more than 1,000 children in Dane County, Wisconsin in the next 10 years.

One City CEO and Founder Mr. Kaleem Caire and AnjiPlay founder Ms. Cheng Xueqin first met during Ms. Cheng’s February 2016 visit to Madison, WI in a meeting organized by Dr. Marianne Bloch, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin­Madison. Ms. Cheng was deeply moved by Mr. Caire’s commitment to ensuring access to affordable, high quality preschools in partnership with parents and the community. Mr. Caire was similarly moved by Ms.Cheng’s vision of how complex, self­organized play can shape the global future of early childhood education. Mr. Caire and Ms. Cheng agreed on­the­spot to work together to bring the joys of complex learning through true, creative and innovative play to the children of Madison.

Mr. Caire stressed that “It is important to us that our children develop the knowledge, habits, skills, consciousness, and passion for learning, and learning about all matter of different things, at a very young age. We also want active learning taking place, as we look to nurture more creative, innovative and analytical thinkers, doers and leaders among our children. Through AnjiPlay, our children get to learn and play while creating their own play every day. Through Anji, we can accomplish our mission and goals.”

Ms. Cheng added, “children benefit from love in their environments, love expressed by one another, by families, by teachers, by schools and by communities. Children must also be trusted to take risks and encouraged to seek their own understanding of the world. Children should enjoy challenging, open­ended environments and materials. All children should have access to these opportunities and resources. It is their right. In Anji, our views of childhood and approach to early childhood education involve entire communities and particularly the efforts of leaders in the community like Kaleem Caire. I am grateful that he has committed to providing all of the children in his community with access to the joys of a childhood filled with love, risk and discovery.”

Training of One City teachers in the AnjiPlay approach began in June and will continue through the summer of 2017. Dr. Bailey with work closely with Mr. Bryce Pickett, One City Director of AnjiPlay, and the One City teaching staff on site and virtually throughout the year, including site visits to the kindergartens of Anji, China. The first shipment of AnjiPlay materials will arrive in Madison from Anji during the second week of July. These sophisticated, minimally structured, nature­based materials were designed and developed by Ms. Cheng over 15 years of testing and observation in the kindergartens of China. These materials have been further standardized by RISD professor and noted toy designer Cas Holman.

Ms. Cheng will visit Madison from July 19 to 23 to take part in training of One City’s staff. Ms. Cheng, Dr. Bailey and Mr. Caire will be available to members of the press for interviews and comment. Ms. Cheng will participate in a series of events and activities during her visit to Madison, including a public presentation “The Benefits of Risky Play” hosted by the Madison Public Library (Saturday, July 23 from 2:30pm – 4:00pm, Central Library).

CLICK HERE: Download Flier of Madison Public Library Event
A selection of high­resolution images: www.anjiplay.com/pressroom
More information about AnjiPlay: www.anjiplay.com
More information about One City Early Learning Centers: www.onecityearlylearning.org

Citizen Contributor:

The result: My children missed the opportunity to enter the first round of the lottery by a mere two weeks.

This meant my son entering Kindergarten was guaranteed a slot in one of our city’s worst performing schools- something our city still promises for children being displaced due to being in foster care- compounding trauma onto trauma. The students who need the best are reserved the worst. They’re left vulnerable and unprotected because they have nobody influential to fight for them.

We were still somewhat lucky. For one, my child who missed the kindergarten lottery qualified for special education services and I happened to know people who helped us get him into a better performing school. His kindergarten team was incredible! However, things went downhill from there. At one point, knowing our child was on the sibling wait list at a high performing public charter school, a district teacher pulled me aside for a private conversation. As a parent of a Black male she disclosed, “THEY (the district) don’t do well with OUR (African American, male) children.”

Annie Reneau:

Can we talk for a minute about parents who ignore their kids when they are being disruptive?

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: A foreign language school in our area offered a story time for kids ages 4 to 6 at our local library. Each week, the stories and songs were conducted in a different language. I thought that sounded neat, so I took my 5-year-old one week. There were six or seven other families there with their preschool and kindergarten-aged children. The kids sat on the floor in front of the storyteller, and the parents all watched from benches on the perimeter a few feet back.

David Freedman:

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

Jena MacGregor:

But perhaps the most common and seemingly elementary tactic — compulsory diversity training aimed at helping people’s biases or preventing discriminatory behavior — appears to actually do more harm than good.

In the cover story of the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, sociologists from Harvard University and Tel Aviv University explore the counterintuitive idea that some of the most common tools for improving diversity — one of which is mandatory training — are not just ineffective. They could be detrimental to improving the number of women and minorities in the managerial ranks.

Making people attend diversity training may seem to make sense, said one of the study’s co-authors, Alexandra Kalev, in an interview: “But it doesn’t work. For decades, diversity management programs flourished with no evidence whatsoever about their effects and their success.”

Andrew Rotherham:

School districts around the country are getting ready for the 2017 school year, which for many starts in just a few weeks. Officials are thinking about transporting students to school, what they’ll feed them, health services for them, sports teams and schedules, and all the other things we call on school districts to do. Meanwhile, if you’re lucky, someone might also be focused on who is going to teach your child and what they’re going to teach.

Backward? Yes, of course it is. And like many things in our education system it’s not what we might design but instead what has evolved and embedded itself over time. Teaching and learning, ostensibly the core functions of schools and school districts, are now just one among many important things we expect them to do. Larger school districts operate food services rivaling restaurant chains and transportation programs on par with large bus companies. We wouldn’t ask Greyhound to also get really good at introducing students to algebraic concepts in the early grades or call on Five Guys to teach Shakespeare, so why we do expect school districts to be great at complicated work like transportation and food as well as teaching?

Related: A focus on adult employment.

Moriah Balingit and Donna St. George:

Under a new policy in Virginia’s Fairfax County, one of the nation’s largest school systems, middle and high school students can earn no lower than a score of 50 if they make a “reasonable attempt” to complete work. And for the first time this year, high school teachers who were going to fail a student had to reevaluate the student using “quality points,” making an F less detrimental to a student’s final grade. Prince George’s County in Maryland will limit failing grades to a 50 percent minimum score when students show a “good-faith effort.”

Related: When A stands for average.

Dan Primack:

At the time, it just felt like idle elevator conversation. But that was my mistake, because Miner is now planning to launch an education-focused company within Google GOOG -0.88% . This also means that he’ll be stepping down as a general partner with GV, transitioning into a venture partner role through which he’ll maintain some of his existing portfolio board seats.

“cost disease” opens many opportunites for diverse education services, rather the generally monolotithic k-12 world. The current system, despite spending more than any other country, often struggles with the essentials.

Paul Campos:

along a couple of interesting stories regarding what’s happening in the US economy to workers with different educational credentials.

This WSJ article looks at the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate among prime working-age men (the LFPR is the percentage of a group’s members who are either employed or looking for work). The LFPR among this group has been declining for more than half a century, and has now fallen to 83% among 25-54 men with a high school degree or less (it’s 94% among 25-54 men with a BA degree or more).

Meanwhile Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce has put out a report estimating that 99.2% of the jobs created since the end of the Great Recession have gone to workers with at least some college education.

Now to the extent that estimate is accurate it would appear to mean that workers “need” at least some college credits to be competitive for new jobs. But “need” is a tricky concept in this context. Do workers need college credentials because the jobs that demand them require either enhanced human capital or skills training provided by college in order for the jobs to be done, or at least done adequately? Or are employers using higher ed as a sorting and signaling device because they can?

One clue is provided by wage rates. If employers are hiring the college-educated because these credentials indicate that employees are acquiring scarce assets, either in the form of enhanced human capital or practical skills, then the increased wages paid to them should reflect that scarcity. On the other hand, if credentials are simply being used as sorting devices to winnow a overly large labor pool, then we wouldn’t expect to see wage increases for the lucky winners of this lottery.

MIT Technology Review:

Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.

Vonnegut mapped out several arcs in his lecture. These include the simple arc encapsulating “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole” and the more complex one of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.”

Vonnegut is not alone in attempting to categorize stories into types, although he was probably the first to do it in graphical form. Aristotle was at it over 2000 years before him and many others have followed in his footsteps.

Shane Vander Hart:

The SAT 2014 test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year. Some 13,549 homeschool seniors had the following mean scores: 567 in critical reading, 521 in mathematics, and 535 in writing (College Board, 2014a). The mean SAT scores for all college-bound seniors in 2014 were 497 in critical reading, 513 in mathematics, and 487 in writing (College Board, 2014b). The homeschool students’ SAT scores were 0.61 standard deviation higher in reading, 0.26 standard deviation higher in mathematics, and 0.42 standard deviation higher in writing than those of all college-bound seniors taking the SAT, and these are notably large differences.

Roberta Michnick, Ph.D. Golinkoff and Kathy, Ph.D. Hirsh-Pasek:

“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?”

When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn the question back to her and help her figure out the answer with plenty of encouragement.

No parent, teacher or caregiver has the time or patience to respond perfectly to all of the many, many, many opportunities like these that come along. But a new book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, is designed to get us thinking about the magnitude of these moments.

Londonist:

He didn’t get on with the librarian there either, and could never find the books he wanted. His solution? To set up a lending library on his own.

In 1840 Carlyle started generating public support, giving a rousing speech at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Covent Garden (now the site of the Freemason’s Hall) where he suggested that “the building of a library is one of the greatest things we can do.”

From a little acorn a mighty oak grew and by May 1841 the library had raised enough money to open its doors to the public.
In fact, three mighty oaks have grown from The Freemasons’ Tavern. The Geological Society was established there at a meeting held in 1807. The London Library came next and in 1863, The Football Association was established at a fiery meeting in which the rules of football were laid down. Blackheath FC were overruled in their wish to allow “hacking” (kicking an opponent in the leg) — a practise, we are pleased to say, that the library has never allowed.

Kyle Stokes:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has inked a deal bringing in an outside school turnaround group to run 20th Street Elementary School, averting a protracted court battle over a long-running “parent trigger” effort that would’ve wrested the school from the district’s control.

Under terms of a five-year agreement released Tuesday, the Partnership for L.A. Schools — a non-profit created by former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that already operates 17 schools — would assume control over most day-to-day operations at the school just south of downtown.

The decision represents a compromise between the district and parent advocates at the school, who in February petitioned the district to allow an independent charter operator to run the school. Under California law, if parents at low-performing schools gather enough signatures, the school district can be forced to introduce changes, including converting the school to a charter.

Marilyn Odendahl:

Valparaiso Law School is hardly the first to feel the pain of falling student applications, but as the subject of a recent profile in the New York Times, its troubles may be the most well-known.

In February, the northwest Indiana institution announced it was going to reduce its faculty and class sizes in response to fewer lawyers finding jobs and fewer students wanting to get a J.D. Valparaiso offered buyouts to all tenured faculty members.

The harsh spotlight was on Valparaiso again when The Gray Lady published a long article June 17 about the law school’s plight. The newspaper found alumni who were heavily in debt and interviewed professors who were rethinking the decisions to accept less-qualified students to keep enrollment steady when applications dropped.

Uri Freedman:

On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you’d think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user’s friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better “connecting people and ideas.”

But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new “world of self-reference” that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump’s appeal to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possess outsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.

For 16 years, Edelman’s company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm’s findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe “a person like me”—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A “person like me” is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways.”

Dave Gentry:

Never forget to pump a handshake three times- not one, and definitely not five. Seen from an autistic perspective, the social, shared, and flexible attributes of the modern shared office can be intimidating. As work and life spill into each other, they clash with coping mechanisms for autism spectrum disorder, in which high-level functioning depends on adherence to routine, scripts, and schedules. Despite this challenge, autistic professionals can have precious attributes, and demand better understanding of the relationship between the workplace and this complicated disorder.

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Intel

Intel believes governments should not weaken the security of technology. On the current policy discussions of whether governments should be able to access the content of encrypted communications, Intel has the following perspective.

Encryption is fundamental to the global economy

The law does not, and should not, mandate companies to include backdoors

Encryption must not be architected with backdoors

Government mandates on the design of technology are likely to impede needed innovation

Finding a path forward requires collaboration between industry and law enforcement

Laura Noonan

Goldman Sachs is abandoning the time-honoured practice of on-campus interviews for undergraduates at elite schools and will now ask students to use pre-recorded interviews to pitch for a job at the bank.

The Wall Street bank announced the new initiative on Thursday along with a range of other innovations it says will make its recruitment more consistent and rigorous.

“The number one priority is how do we find more terrific people that are potential candidates for the firm,” said Edith Cooper, global head of human capital management at the bank. “Leveraging technology will help you get to more places.”

Goldman attracts more than 250,000 applications from students annually, including almost 225,000 from undergraduates. But more than half of the undergraduates it traditionally hires comes from a group of less than 50 “target” schools, including prestigious Ivy League colleges.

The American Interest:

One of the under-appreciated tragedies of black history in the United States is that they have tended to win access to employment in certain sectors of the economy just as those sectors were starting to decline—or, as WRM put it several years ago, “blacks often only get to the gravy train when the locomotive is coming to the end of its run.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, when employers had access to mass low-skilled European immigrant labor, blacks were more-or-less shut out of Northern factory jobs, one of the underpinnings of middle class prosperity. Blacks started to make their way into manufacturing by midcentury, but by the 1970s, this sector of the economy had already peaked.

Ditto for government employment. A key objective—and success—of the civil rights movement was to grant blacks access to middle-class professional jobs in the civil service. In the 1970s and 1980s, blacks flocked to public sector jobs that provided middle-class wages and strong retirement security. But now state and local finances are starting to deteriorate, burdened by can-kicking legislators and mismanaged pension funds.

Molly Beck:

A majority of the state’s public school districts will receive more state general aid in the coming school year than they did the prior year, the latest state estimates show.

Of the state’s 424 school districts, 61 percent — or 260 — are projected to receive more aid in the 2016-17 school year, the state Department of Public Instruction said Friday.

The DPI estimates show Madison schools receiving about $53.7 million in state general aid next school year, a 2.3 percent increase.

On Monday, the Madison School Board passed a $376.5 million preliminary operating budget that was predicated, in part, on the conservative assumption that the district would get about $47.8 million in general state aid for the upcoming school year, said Rachel Strauch-Nelson, district spokeswoman.

While Friday’s estimate is good news, it does not mean the district suddenly has more money to spend, district officials said.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2016-2017 budget, here.

Rob Bensinger:

A Bayesian agent acting in a multi-agent environment learns to predict the other agents’ policies if its prior assigns positive probability to them (in other words, its prior contains a grain of truth). Finding a reasonably large class of policies that contains the Bayes-optimal policies with respect to this class is known as the grain of truth problem. Only small classes are known to have a grain of truth and the literature contains several related impossibility results.

In this paper we present a formal and general solution to the full grain of truth problem: we construct a class of policies that contains all computable policies as well as Bayes-optimal policies for every lower semicomputable prior over the class. When the environment is unknown, Bayes-optimal agents may fail to act optimally even asymptotically. However, agents based on Thompson sampling converge to play ε-Nash equilibria in arbitrary unknown computable multi-agent environments. While these results are purely theoretical, we show that they can be computationally approximated arbitrarily closely.

Rachel Becker:

An online debate is swirling around a tactic that academic publisher John Wiley & Sons uses to fight online piracy. The company created a webpage, accessible by several URLs, that appeared to be an academic paper to automated downloading programs. But any users who accessed the URLs were then blocked from viewing other Wiley content. Wiley and other publishers use these ‘trap’ URLs — which are invisible to most human users — to detect and prevent unauthorized downloading and republishing of their content. But some users say that the tactic is too heavy-handed.

Computational biologist Richard Smith-Unna of the University of Cambridge, UK, brought Wiley’s use of trap URLs to light in late May, after several users were locked out of the university’s Wiley subscription. Smith-Unna, who says that he inadvertently accessed some trap URLs during a data-mining project, tweeted about the lock-out and posted a Google doc containing the URLs. The post incited an outcry from scientists and librarians on social media, and curious onlookers who clicked on the URLs also reported losing access to Wiley content.

Farnam Street:

Legendary scientist Richard Feynman was famous for his penetrating insight and clarity of thought. Famous for not only the work he did to garner a Nobel Prize, but also for the lucidity of explanations of ordinary things such as why trains stay on the tracks as they go around a curve, how we look for new laws of science, how rubber bands work, and the beauty of the natural world.

Feynman knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. And was often prone to telling the emperor they had no clothes as this illuminating example from James Gleick’s book Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman shows.

Lynn Bonner:

The House overwhelmingly approved a bill that will change charter school oversight, allowing less frequent reviews of charter schools and making easier for struggling schools to keep their charters.

Under the bill, charters would no longer be reviewed at least once every five years. Instead, a school would be reviewed once before its charter expires, unless there are indications it’s in trouble.

Rep. Paul Stam, an Apex Republican, said the change will allow the state to focus on the schools that need the most help.

The State Board of Education would no longer be able to revoke a charter simply because a school is low performing. Charters with low test scores that meet or exceed growth, or those that are making progress on improvement plans would be able to stay open.

Are the same standards applied to traditional public schools?

Sumathi Reddy:

When Frank Biro walks into a class of second- or third-graders these days, there are almost always a couple of girls who look different than the rest.

“There will be quite a few girls that look like they’re going into early puberty,” says Dr. Biro, a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who gives talks about puberty at schools occasionally.

Dr. Biro researches a phenomenon that has increasingly captured the attention of researchers: Puberty appears to be starting earlier in healthy girls, and possibly even boys. At Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, clinicians begin assessing girls for changes related to puberty at age 6.

Marc Joffe:

Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university.

Among the most prominent of these scholars is Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Reich’s 2013 film, Inequality for All, is an indictment of a rigged U.S. economy that makes a select few richer while consigning the middle class to stagnation. A review of the film and Reich’s other work suggests that the economist and former Clinton-era Labor Secretary provided numerous talking points for Bernie Sanders’ high-profile – though ultimately unsuccessful – presidential campaign.

Wall Street Journal:

Do you think the gaokao is a good and fair way to select students?

Not so fair. For most ordinary families, Gaokao is a fair selection. I have watched some news reports that said people stole identity information to take the Gaokao. There is still vulnerability in this selection system.

Do you think Chinese students face more pressure than students in other countries?

Chinese students face more challenges, especially now it is hard to get a job in China. I just took the Gaokao this year. Chinese students have less happiness compared to students in other countries. Compared to the strict graduation here, it is easier to be enrolled in universities abroad. A lot of Chinese students lost their teenage during high school and are bound by their parents and teachers.

What do you think about the gaokao’s role in deciding a student’s future?

Gaokao is a turning point, but it can’t totally decide one’s life.

Rosanna Xia:

Hunkered down in the sub-basement of the Norman W. Church Laboratory for Chemical Biology, underneath a campus humming with quantum teleportation devices, gravity wave detectors and neural prosthetics, Rick Gerhart chipped away at a broken flask.

Blowtorch in hand, he pulled the softened glass apart like taffy, tweezing out glass shards with a flick of his wrist. Peering into the dancing flames, he examined his work for wrinkles — imperfections invisible to the untrained eye.

“It not only should be functional,” he said, smoothing the rim with a carbon rod, “it has to look good.”

Conor Dougherty:

The small city of Boulder, home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, has a booming local economy and a pleasantly compact downtown with mountain views. Not surprisingly, a lot of people want to move here.

Something else is also not surprising: Many of the people who already live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle somewhere else.

Federation of American Scientists:

This report contains short summaries describing warnings similar to the Miranda warning that are required in 108 jurisdictions around the globe. The summaries are divided into sections based on broad geographic categories: Americas and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub- Saharan Africa.

The warnings specified in the surveyed jurisdictions vary, but typically include the right to remain silent and the right to legal counsel. A number of countries also specify that a person who is arrested or detained has the right to be informed of the reasons for the arrest or detention or of the charges being brought. In some countries, the additional right to have these things explained in a language the detainee understands is explicitly stated. Commonwealth countries have traditionally followed the English Judges’ Rules developed in the early twentieth century, and some continue to do so, while many Member States of the European Union (EU) have adopted an EU directive on the issue.

Points of variance among the countries concern the timing of the warning and whether the detainee is told that the fact of remaining silent will or will not be used in legal proceedings.

Countries surveyed that have no Miranda-type warning were not included.

Philip Olterman:

Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

Katherine Mangan:

Many were once a boon to their universities, with revenues that subsidized money-losing parts of the institution. Now the money is frequently going in the opposite direction.

Melinda Anderson:

Nancy Gutierrez was primed to shine. As the new principal at Fischer Middle School in East San Jose, California, it was more than a new job for Gutierrez, it was a homecoming. She was a product of the heavily Mexican American, working-class, and immigrant community, and her mom still lived just a few blocks from the school in Northern California. “I grew up going to the same bodega on the corner as they did,” Gutierrez said, speaking of her students and their families. “I wasn’t someone who … had these expectations and didn’t know who the community was.”

Even so, she got a rude awakening at her first back-to-school meeting, and it ultimately changed her perspective. “Even though I was from that same [area], even though I was of the same [Hispanic] background, they still didn’t trust the school system,” she said. “I thought I would immediately earn credibility by just who I was, but that wasn’t the case. Rightfully so, I had to earn my stripes.”

The Economist:

After many false dawns, AI has made extraordinary progress in the past few years, thanks to a versatile technique called “deep learning”. Given enough data, large (or “deep”) neural networks, modelled on the brain’s architecture, can be trained to do all kinds of things. They power Google’s search engine, Facebook’s automatic photo tagging, Apple’s voice assistant, Amazon’s shopping recommendations and Tesla’s self-driving cars. But this rapid progress has also led to concerns about safety and job losses. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others wonder whether AI could get out of control, precipitating a sci-fi conflict between people and machines. Others worry that AI will cause widespread unemployment, by automating cognitive tasks that could previously be done only by people. After 200 years, the machinery question is back. It needs to be answered.

Megan Scudellari:

Seven years ago, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to map all the connections in the brain. In 2010, the Human Connectome Project (HCP) was born. It has provided funding to the tune of $40 million to two collaborating consortia whose aim was to acquire and share high-resolution data of structural and functional connections in the human brain. The researchers have sought to understand, on a scale never before attempted, the neural pathways that make us human, and how changes in those pathways make us sick.

At a symposium yesterday at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, top researchers from the HCP came together to provide an update on the project’s achievements and future directions. To date, the consortia have released brain-scanning data from hundreds of individuals and that data has been used in more than 140 scientific publications. Perhaps even more importantly, the effort has produced impressive new tech, including unprecedented magnetic resonance (MR) hardware. Among the gadgets are high-powered scanners and customized head coils. In addition, there are legions of software for analyzing, visualizing and sharing the petabytes of neuroimaging data being generated.

Kim Liao:

Last year, I got rejected 43 times by literary magazines, residencies, and fellowships—my best record since I started shooting for getting 100 rejections per year. It’s harder than it sounds, but also more gratifying.

In late 2011, a writer friend was sharing her experiences of having months of uninterrupted writing time at her residencies at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, and Yaddo. I was staggered by her impressive rates of acceptance. You probably have one of those friends, too—you know the one I’m talking about, that friend who is a beautiful writer, but who also seems to win everything? I could barely believe that she had the balls to apply to—let alone, get accepted to—several residencies, a prestigious fellowship, and publications in journals I had actually heard of.

Justin Fox:

A survey released this week by Bain and Kantar Worldpanel found that Chinese shoppers are increasingly turning to domestic brands and abandoning foreign ones. That’s not happening with post-secondary education, though! The number of Chinese students at foreign universities rose from 417,351 in the 2005/2006 school year to 712,157 in 2012/2013 (the most recent year for which I could find data). The U.S. is by far the leading destination:

Alan Borsuk:

Another possibility: I have floated in the past a fantasy of creating a school oversight board that would control the faucet for public money for schools in Milwaukee. Leave the structure of MPS, vouchers and charters in place, but put a board above them that would require individual schools to show good cause why they are worthy of public support. Sort of like a super chartering authority.

Of course, there is the option of not doing much to change things. Every year, the percentage of Milwaukee children enrolled in the conventional MPS system goes down by one to two points. Most likely, within three to four years, less than half will be in MPS, with the rest generally in charter schools, private schools, or suburban public schools available through the open enrollment option. In other words, MPS is in deep long-term trouble already. Maybe those who don’t like MPS can just let existing trends keep working.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial.

Laura Kusisto:

Inflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64% since 1960, but real household incomes only increased by 18% during that same time period, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data released by Apartment List, a rental listing website.

Becky Vevea:

Is it fair? That was what a panel of Illinois lawmakers tried to answer about how Illinois pays for its public schools. The discussion was held at a City Club luncheon on Mondayand WBEZ’s Becky Vevea was there.

Much more on per student spending, here. Madison is > $17k while Chicago is > $14k.

New America.

JD Vance:

During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford—the mystical “top three” schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed. I just needed to get to any law school, and then I’d do fine: a nice salary, a respectable profession, and the American Dream. Then my best friend, Darrell, ran into one of his law school classmates at a popular D.C. restaurant. She was bussing tables, simply because that was the only job available to her. On the next round, I gave Yale and Harvard a try.

I didn’t apply to Stanford—one of the very best schools in the country—and to know why is to understand that the lessons I learned as a kid were sometimes counterproductive. Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser.

I didn’t know the dean of my college at Ohio State. It’s a big place. I’m sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn’t ask. I had never met this person, never taken a class with her, and, most of all, didn’t trust her. Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider. The professors I’d selected to write my letters had gained my trust. I listened to them nearly every day, took their tests, and wrote papers for them. As much as I loved Ohio State and its people for an incredible education and experience, I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn’t know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D.

Alexander Holt:

Clinton’s second proposal is that “for young innovators who decide to launch either new businesses that operate in distressed communities, or social enterprises that provide measurable social impact and benefit, she will offer forgiveness of up to $17,500 of their student loans after five years.”

Let’s see how that would work. Government officials would first have to define “distressed community.” Perhaps they would define it as any ZIP code where average earnings are less than 150 percent of the poverty line. That means that a bunch of Stanford graduates with master’s degrees in computer science who work out of office space in a poor part of Oakland could get $17,500 loan forgiveness after five years — even if their company is being funded by venture capitalists. Why would we ever want that? If anything, this seems like a plan to speed up gentrification in Northern California.

Rachel Cohen:

But challenges loom for the movement—politically and philosophically. Some tensions can be chalked up to growing pains: a nationwide bipartisan coalition is bound to disagree at times, and certainly policy implementation can be far more contentious than passing legislation. Transforming the public education system, reformers have found, turns out to be hard, messy work.

But the problems run deeper than that. Internally, two main camps of reformers—market-driven advocates and accountability hawks—have been butting heads increasingly over goals and political priorities. For a long time, these two groups seemed to be one and the same—“choice and accountability” have always been buzzwords for the movement. But over time, the divisions between Team Choice and Team Accountability have grown more apparent. Today, some veteran choice advocates, those who have been pushing market-driven reforms for the last 25 years, have expressed feelings of being hemmed in, and in some cases crowded out, by others who are demanding formal checks and balances.

Reveal News:

generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access to higher education.

In its place, lawmakers created another profit center for Wall Street and a system of college finance that has fed the nation’s cycle of inequality. Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

Today, just about everyone involved in the student loan industry makes money off students – the banks, private investors, even the federal government.

Jessie Suren is an energetic 28-year-old who wanted a career in law enforcement. Albert Lord is a 70-year-old former accountant who became a multimillionaire executive. The two have never met, but their stories tell the history of America’s student debt crisis.

Suren attended a free boarding school for underprivileged youth in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and enrolled in La Salle University in Philadelphia. Scholarships didn’t cover the cost of the private college, so she borrowed about $71,000, much of it from Sallie Mae, the financial giant of the student loan industry.

Suren did well in school. But a job with the U.S. Marshals Service fell through, and by graduation in 2010, she had a soaring loan balance and no career prospects.

Thomas Davenport and Julie Kirby:

If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what’s on the public’s mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don’t expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon — they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans. In the face of a sprawling and fast-evolving set of opportunities, their challenge is figuring out what forms the augmentation should take. Given the kinds of work managers oversee, what cognitive technologies should they be applying now, monitoring closely, or helping to build?

Tucker Leighty-Phillips:

In the middle of the 19th century, a relatively unknown author named Pedro Carolino rapidly gained intercontinental popularity over a small Portuguese-to-English phrasebook. English as She Is Spoke (or O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez) was originally intended to help Portuguese speakers dabble in the English tongue, but was penned by a man who spoke little to no English himself. And, instead of helping Portuguese speakers learn a second language, it became a cult classic for fans of inept and unintentional humor.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee’s school kids face enormous challenges — many of those challenges are directly related to the fact that so many of them grow up in impoverished homes. Some are homeless. Some are hungry. Some have only one parent. Some have none. It is difficult — and expensive — to help students in such distress learn. And yet that is exactly what Milwaukee Public Schools must do. It must educate the children it has. Every school year, many teachers, principals and schools do exactly that. But for far too many children in MPS, the educational system is letting them down.

For too long, instead of trying sincerely to improve the schools — to put the kids first — various interest groups have fought one another and pointed fingers. The School Board and MPS administrators have played this game as well. This feels like another one of those times.

Minding the Campus:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Emma Platoff:

Dos Santos said that the school overreacted and that her son made a comment about snacks, not skin color.

“He said they were talking about brownies. . . . Who exactly did he offend?” dos Santos said.

The boy’s father was contacted by Collingswood police later in the day. Police said the incident had been referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The student stayed home for his last day of third grade.

Dos Santos said that her son was “traumatized,” and that she hopes to send him to a different Collingswood public school in the fall.

And she wants an apology. She said she graduated from Collingswood High School and has two other children, a 21-year-old who also went through Collingswood schools, and a 3-year-old. Her husband, the third grader’s father, is Brazilian, dos Santos said.

Lindsay Whipp:

Republican governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic House speaker Michael Madigan have refused to budge in their battle over how to eliminate the deficit — estimated to be $6.6bn according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Meanwhile, Illinois’ pension liabilities have hit $110bn; the state has racked up nearly $8bn in unpaid bills and $9.7m in fines for late payments, according to the state comptroller.

The dysfunction has pushed Illinois’ credit rating to the lowest level among the 50 US states. Fitch recently put Illinois’ BBB+ rating — just three rungs above junk — on negative watch over the implications of an extended budget impasse.

“It’s fairly clear to most people that you could not balance this budget with budget cuts alone, so there needs to be a meeting of minds on how to balance the budget — how to raise taxes,” said Karen Krop, a senior director at Fitch.

Policymakers finally agreed on Thursday afternoon on a stopgap budget to fund schools for the year starting on Friday, without which they would not have been able to open in the autumn. However, the rest of the stopgap budget only lasts six months and does little to address most of the key issues.

Money has been distributed through a series of ad hoc measures, creating a sense of uncertainty over funding, raising fears of school shutdowns and leaving a distrust in the state government that will be difficult to eliminate.

Illinois’ extensive financial problems have been a long time in the making. A pension bill passed 15 years ago delayed responsibility to pay into the fund and even now the requirement is not for full payments, Fitch said. An income tax increase had started to chip away at the unpaid bills and helped balance the budget but it was discontinued more than a year and a half ago.

The Climate of Opinion in Illinois 2008- 2016: Roots of Gridlock.

Kashmir Hill:

Last week, a Facebook spokesperson told me that users’ smartphone location data was among the signals that the social network uses to suggest “People You May Know” in real life. But after I published a story about it (and people freaked out) Facebook retracted the statement and said that, actually, the company isn’t using location data to make friend suggestions.

Facebook’s communications team says the confusion arose because there was a brief time when the social network used location for friend suggestions. It involved a small percentage of Facebook users and stopped last year.

Nathan Yau:

With some occupations, people make more annual income than others. Obvious. But we typically see figures in terms of means and medians when in reality, the difference between the person who makes the most and the one who makes the least can be significant.

The chart below shows the spread for major occupation groups, for several decades. Imagine you randomly select 50 people from each group, and this is what their annual income probably looks like.

Alex Mayyasi:

Pricing a product can be a thorny issue. Will customers interpret a low price as a bargain, or as a sign of a low quality? Is allowing people to pay what they want for a product a profitable strategy?

Despite Econ 101’s promise of finding the perfect price at the intersection of a supply and a demand curve, pricing advice accounts for countless books, management consulting projects, and Harvard case studies.

But the most fascinating case study about pricing does not have to do with iPhones, cable TV packages, or Uber rides. It concerns the price of a very special commodity: a human child.

Typically individuals only talk about a person’s “worth” in abstract terms. Yet there are situations that demand an exact financial figure. In wrongful death lawsuits, parents of a child who died in an accident will demand compensation from the negligent party. This puts a judge in the unenviable position of having to put a price on the parent’s loss.

Sekar Krisnauli

Morocco will receive millions of dollars in funding from the United States government through programs aimed to address challenges that prevent girls in the country from quality education, according to a Monday White House press release.

The Millenium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. Government foreign-aid agency, is expected to give nearly $100 million dollars to invest in a new model for secondary education in Morocco, the announcement stated. The U.S. Agency for International Development will also invest $40,000 to build five girls’ dormitories, known as “Dar Talibas”, by the next school year.

“I am so proud that the U.S. is working with the Moroccan Government to make…transformative new investments to educate and empower girls across Morocco,” stated United States First Lady Michelle Obama in the release.

The announcement was made as Obama visited Marrakesh Tuesday where she was joined by actresses Merryl Streep and Freida Pinto in a panel moderated by CNN’s Correspondent Isha Sesay to promote quality education for girls worldwide through the Let Girls Learn initiative.

Jay Greene:

And on the specific claim the article makes that “half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools” this is what the Stanford study has to say: “In reading, 47 percent of charter schools perform significantly better than their traditional public school market, which is more positive than the 35% for Michigan charter schools as a whole. In math, 47 percent of Detroit charter schools perform significantly better than their local peers, the same proportion as for the charters as a whole statewide.” The study found that only 1% of Detroit’s charters performs significantly worse than the traditional public schools in reading and only 7% in math. (See Table 7 on p. 44) To claim that half the charters perform the same or worse than traditional public schools is a grotesque distortion of the study’s findings.

Look, I don’t accept the Stanford CREDO study as “the gold standard” in charter evaluations. But if the reporter cites that research to demonstrate that one charter management organization has sub-par performance, it is journalistic malpractice not to mention the positive overall results. And those positive overall results contradict the very foundation of the entire article.

Besides a few anecdotes and a mis-reporting of the CREDO study,
the article mostly consists of scary words like “chaos” and “glut.” Imagine if the article were about phone providers instead of schools. Would anyone find it persuasive to wring one’s hands over the glut of phone companies after Ma Bell was broken up, causing “chaos” in the telephone market? I understand there are differences between phones and schools, but reporting should be based on evidence of outcomes rather than just invoking scary words.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results might suggest the benefit of avoiding non diverse governance.

Phienix Fry & Sarah Cox:

PhD student Tom Richards has spent the last three years poring over an unfinished project by Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003), one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music.

Oram was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and is credited with the invention of a new form of ‘drawn sound’ synthesis – Oramics, which was recently the subject of the ‘Oramics to Electronica’ exhibition at the Science Museum.

our world in data.

Yoni Applebaum:

American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.

That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they’ll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it’s why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts education.

Stanford:

Yewno is a discovery tool that provides a graphical display of the interrelationships between concepts. Yewno uses computational semantics, graph theory, and machine learning to extract concepts from scholarly publications including journals, books, and theses, and displays search results in a graphical interface that displays the interrelationships between those concepts. Users can follow links in that display to find the underlying publications from which concepts and relationships are extracted, and the system integrates with library resource licenses allowing users to have direct access to the full text of underlying publications.

James Wigderson:

Opportunity Schools Partnership Program Commissioner Demond Means announced his resignation Wednesday, citing the inability to forge a “collaborative partnership” with Milwaukee Public Schools.

“Over the last several months, it has become clear to me that efforts to implement the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program law will become increasingly adversarial at a time when adversity is the last thing our children need,” Means said. “Moreover, I made a promise when I volunteered for this position that I would not impose anything on Milwaukee Public Schools.”

The OSPP was created by the state legislature to “turn around” up to three failing schools in Milwaukee in the first year. Control of the program was given to Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, who then appointed Means, superintendent of the Mequon school district, as the program’s commissioner.

Hillel Aron:

often preposterously low, and some have suggested that a more prominent figure should be given direct control of the LAUSD. That was one of Antonio Villaraigosa’s major platforms when he ran for mayor in 2005. When he won, defeating incumbent James Hahn, Villaraigosa got the state Legislature to pass a law giving a council of mayors (with the most power apportioned to himself, naturally) control over LAUSD. But the school board sued, and the court ruled the law unconstitutional.

Villaraigosa then shifted tack, vigorously campaigning for school board candidates who supported his brand of “school reform.” He initially was successful, electing a majority, who then hired John Deasy as superintendent. But voters seem to be forever dissatisfied with the state of LAUSD, and have voted out incumbents time and time again. Villaraigosa lost control of the school board, and Deasy was fired.

When Garcetti ran for mayor, he made a conscious decision not to become embroiled in school board politics – though his campaign consultant Bill Carrick argues that Garcetti has hardly abandoned education.

Peter Diamondis:

Before I share the new “data” with you, it’s essential that you understand why this matters.

We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by negative news from every angle. If you turn on CNN (what I call the Crisis News Network), you’ll predominantly hear about death, terrorism, airplane crashes, bombings, financial crisis and political scandal.

I think of the news as a drug pusher, and negative news as their drug.

There’s a reason for this.

We humans are wired to pay 10x more attention to negative news than positive news.

Being able to rapidly notice and pay attention to negative news (like a predator or a dangerous fire) was an evolutionary advantage to keep you alive on the savannas of Africa millions of years ago.

MB Reilly:

Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by subject-matter expert and retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee — who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise — in a high-fidelity air combat simulator.

The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is “the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I’ve seen to date.”

Details on ALPHA – a significant breakthrough in the application of what’s called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes.

Mark A. Smylie, Stacy A. Wenzel with Elaine Allensworth, Carol Fendt, Sara Hallman, Stuart Luppescu and Jenny Nagaoka

This final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project addresses four central questions: (a) Did the Chicago Annenberg Challenge promote improvement of the schools that it supported? (b)

Among those schools, did it also promote improvement in student academic achievement and other outcomes? (c) What factors might explain improvement or lack thereof among Annenberg schools? and (d)

What can we learn from the Challenge’s experiences to promote school improvement in the future? In answer to these questions, this report provides a macro view of the Challenge’s success in promoting school improvement and student learning. Additionally, it looks closely at several Annenberg schools to understand what makes local school improvement successful.

This report focuses on the period between the 1996 to 1997 and 2000 to 2001 school years, the five full years during which the Challenge supported local school improvement. In all, the Challenge supported about 210 high schools and elementary schools, but because approximately 90 percent of these were elementary schools, this report focuses only on them
.
The Challenge’s “bottom line” was improving student achievement and other social and psychological outcomes. Our research indicates that student outcomes in Annenberg schools were much like those in demographically similar non-Annenberg schools and across the Chicago school system as a whole, indicating that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results: 2005 and 2013.

Peter Maass:

The Soviet Union is long gone, but in 2016 we live under the specter of far more surveillance than anything the KGB could have dreamed of with its rudimentary bugs and fearful informers. Not just government surveillance — law enforcement can easily obtain our phone and internet records with a warrant from the nearly always compliant courts — but corporate surveillance, too. It’s not just Google and Facebook that might know more details about our lives and friends than the KGB could have imagined in its most feverish dreams of information dominance, but even Zipcar and Amazon.

There are precautions one can take, and I did that with the Lamb. When we had our video chat, I used a computer that had been wiped clean of everything except its operating system and essential applications. Afterward, it was wiped clean again. My concern was that the Lamb might use the session to obtain data from or about the computer I was using; there are a lot of things he might have tried, if he was in a scheming mood. At the end of our three hours together, I mentioned to him that I had taken these precautions—and he approved.

Rolf Wegenke:

The report is critical of private, nonprofit colleges’ and universities’ six-year graduation rates. By excluding certain students from the calculations, the study makes these graduation rates appear worse than they are.

So what are the facts (derived from the same data used by Third Way) about graduations in Wisconsin? In 2015, the four-year graduation rate for four-year, public institutions stood at 29%, while the four-year rate for private, nonprofit institutions stood at 48%. The six-year rate for public institutions was 59% and for private, nonprofit universities it was 65%. As stated in the article, all of us are committed to doing better, but the way these data were sliced and diced in the study does not reflect reality and does not justify denigrating a particular sector of higher education.

First, in its calculation of graduation rates, the Department of Education considers only full-time students who have enrolled for the first time and remained at the same institution for all four or six years. In today’s economy, many more students are part-time and gain their degree by transferring among a number of institutions. These graduates “don’t count” under the study’s measure.

Second, although colleges and universities take responsibility for improving graduation rates, there are other factors not under our control: government mandates for certain professions (e.g. teachers and CPAs). These mandates increase the time to degree. For example, graduates seeking a CPA certificate are required by law to have 150 college credits, instead of the usual 120. In addition, public policy has been to encourage older workers to go back to school. Often, they do so part-time, which results in a longer time to graduation. Approximately 35% of students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private, nonprofit colleges are age 25 or over. Of those 25 or older, almost 60% are attending part-time.

Rachel Dwyer:

college degree has been the ticket to the middle class in America. That is even truer today than it was before the Great Recession. As the connection between college and the middle class has become common knowledge in our society, more and more young people have sought a college degree while at the same time more and more middle class families have lost the ability to pay for some or all of college, and loans have surpassed grants as a way to fund college education. The result: a generation carrying a large amount of student loan debt. Is this good public policy?

In this paper, Rachel E. Dwyer, a professor at The Ohio State University, examines a key aspect of this problem: whether and to what extent student loans impact graduation from college. This is because, as Dwyer notes “Student loans, then, represent both an opportunity and a risk, just as do other forms of credit.” They can be a good investment in a young person’s future or not. Or, as Dwyer puts it, “Are loans associated with graduation or do they represent a drag on completion?”

Quanta Magazine:

In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor” — a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory — in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry.

Arielle Martinez:

Private urban universities are outperforming their rural and suburban counterparts in enrollment and revenue growth, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service.

Private urban universities can use their locations to their advantages and attract more international students, graduate students, and students in continuing-education programs, according to the credit-rating agency’s report.

Enrollment at private urban universities rated by Moody’s grew 34 percent from 2000 to 2015, compared with 24-percent growth for all private universities, according to the report. Median operating revenue was $343 million for private urban universities and $131 million for non-urban private universities in the 2015 fiscal year.

Andrew Gellman:

Small sample size and variable measurements ensure that any statistically significant difference will be huge, thus providing Kahneman- and Gladwell-bait.

– Data processing choices were made after the data were seen. In this case, two-thirds of the data were discarded because they did not fit the story. Sure, they have an explanation based on ceiling and floor effects—but what if they had found something? They would easily have been able to explain it in the context of their theory.

– Another variable (mood scale) was available. If the difference had shown up as statistically significant only after controlling for mood scale, or if there had been a statistically significant difference on mood scale alone, any of these things could’ve been reported as successful demonstrations of the theory.

Todd Bishop:

“At UW and across the nation, student interest in computer science is booming,” said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in the UW department of Computer Science & Engineering, in an email to GeekWire this morning. “It’s visible in 3 ways: enrollment in introductory courses, interest in upper-division courses by students majoring in other fields, and demand for the major.”

The interest among students coincides with rising demand from major corporate players. The need for computer science graduates has reached new heights in the Seattle region due to a strong startup ecosystem, Amazon’s rapid growth, and the opening of Seattle-area engineering offices by Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies. In addition, engineering is becoming an increasingly important role at non-tech companies.

Steven Handel:

The author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality is a psychiatrist by the name of Elias Aboujaoude who is currently serving as the director at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The thesis of Dr. Aboujaoude’s new book is that the world wide web can have a very profound effect on our sense of self. In fact, it can cause a kind of “digital divide” between our digital self, how we often think and behave online, and our offline self, how we often think and behave in face-to-face, “real world” interactions.

Aboujaoude has observed this divide in many of his own patients who engage heavily in online behavior – anywhere from creating fakes profiles on dating sites to impulsive online shopping to delusional thinking about reality (to the point where individuals begin to consider the reality of virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft more real than their lives offline).

Frank Bruni:

Given all that has happened on so many campuses over the last few years, it’s hard to pick the one that has been roiled the most by struggles over political correctness. But Oberlin College would certainly be in the running.

A widely discussed series of events there included the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading “Antigone”; complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall; and a petition, signed by 1,300 students, calling for a semester in which the lowest possible grade was a C, so that anyone skipping classes or skimping on studies to engage in social activism wouldn’t pay too steep an academic price.

In the view of more than a few observers, these students were taking liberalism to illiberal extremes. But their actions were arguably proof of something else as well.

Open Source Society University:

of you who want to complete a Data Science course on your own time, for free, with courses from the best universities in the World.

In our curriculum, we give preference to MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) style courses because these courses were created with our style of learning in mind.

The Economist:

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Mr Thrun’s was completed by 23,000 people; Mr Ng’s by 13,000.

Such online courses, with short video lectures, discussion boards for students and systems to grade their coursework automatically, became known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In 2012 Mr Thrun founded an online-education startup called Udacity, and Mr Ng co-founded another, called Coursera. That same year Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got together to form edX, a non-profit MOOC provider, headed by Anant Agarwal, the head of MIT’s artificial-intelligence laboratory. Some thought that MOOCs would replace traditional university teaching. The initial hype around MOOCs has since died down somewhat (though millions of students have taken online courses of some kind). But the MOOC boom illustrated the enormous potential for delivering education online, in bite-sized chunks.