Molly Beck

“I think having a lot of different opportunities, it creates a customized education experience because our kids (are not) one-size-fits-all,” he said.

He said he hasn’t made up his mind about whether to introduce a bill creating the accounts.

Among the states that offer Education Savings Accounts, just Nevada has implemented a program that allows any parent — regardless of income or a child’s ability status — to use the accounts.

But on Friday, the Nevada Supreme Court struck down the law that provides them, saying the program violated the state’s constitution by sending money reserved for public schools to parents who could use it to pay for private school tuition.

Bender said the Nevada court endorsed the idea of education accounts but rejected the funding mechanism.

Michael Skapinker

English is the language of business and science. The government in Rwanda, and many people in Tunisia, prefer it to French. Singapore makes sure every child is fluent in it. It is the world’s lingua franca, the key to success for every ambitious parent and a central part of the curriculum of every sensible school.

That is one way of looking at it. The other is that English is a “bully, juggernaut, nemesis”, an “unnerving border crosser, criminal and intruder”, an international conspiracy run by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, Nato, the British Council and the massed ranks of Anglo-American capitalism. The worldwide spread of English reflects the “Washington linguistic consensus”, which is the “aggressive promotion of English to serve Western political and economic interests”. The supposed benefits of English to ordinary people around the world — better jobs, higher salaries, access to new technologies — have been vastly oversold. Only national elites and their foreign sponsors benefit from the penetration of English. For the vast majority, “English promises much but delivers little.”

Kellee Azar:

Some parents in Aloha are concerned about a “white privilege” survey their children received as homework.

Jason Schmidt’s son, a senior at Aloha High School, was given the survey as homework. Schmidt said he’s not too happy about the form.

“I think he should be learning actual education and not be a part of some social experiment or some teacher’s political agenda,” Schmidt said.

Robby Soave:

You would think students instructed to report to the Gender-Based Misconduct Office had committed serious transgressions. Its name conjures images of creepy guys harassing and violating women.

Columbia University graduate Benjamin Sweetwood claims he did nothing of the sort. He got in trouble for doing something completely inoffensive: he referred to himself as handsome in a class.

“Now I’ve graduated from Columbia University, I am finally ready to reveal a dark and shameful secret I have kept buried for almost two years,” writes Sweetwood in a recent article about his experience. “I, Ben Sweetwood, committed ‘gender misconduct’ while a student at the above mentioned institution of higher learning.”

Jillian Follert:

Whitby mom of two Elaina Daoust says she was “infuriated” last year when her son, then in junior kindergarten at Romeo Dallaire P.S. in Ajax, was told he was not allowed to eat a small piece of banana bread for his morning snack, because it contained chocolate chips.

Instead he was instructed to eat grapes out of his lunch.

“He came home with a chart (listing healthy snack ideas) and told me he and the teacher talked about it and healthy choices. She also sent a note to me. I was really, really, really mad for several reasons,” Daoust says.

She explains that her son is a picky eater, and that she bought the snack-size banana bread because many teachers discourage home-baked treats, and these were labelled as being nut-free and safe for school.

Vishaka Sonawane:

Halloween is approaching and a school district in Connecticut has called for a ban on clown costumes and any “symbols of terror” as the “creepy clown” phenomena has put Americans in multiple states on edge, the Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday.

Authorities at New Haven Public Schools said Monday that principals and building leaders were urged to ban clown costumes until more information on clown-related incidents is available, according to the AP.

The development comes as investigators examine an Instagram account that posted four photos of the clowns. The photos were captioned warning several school areas to “watch out” and “wait and see.” Authorities are looking into whether the threats are authentic or fake.

Ashley Bateman:

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta stands a city that has overcome an economy built and sustained on slave labor, a cotton industry built on the backs of field hands, and now a high school that has integrated itself more equitably than any school in the Delta.

But while Cleveland, Mississippi, has transformed itself from the land up, federal government has chosen to make the city’s schools a national example, forcing local schools to consolidate in the name of desegregation. But many local families of all races don’t want that, and they don’t necessarily consider the effects their individual choices to constitute systemic racism.

U.S. courts hold a legal responsibility to eliminate forced integration. So last May, Judge Debra Brown ordered Cleveland’s middle and high schools to consolidate, in keeping with a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice motion “to enforce the previously-entered desegregation orders governing the district and compel the district’s compliance with federal law.”

Jonathan Margolis.

Joseph Menn:

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

Molly Hensley-Clancy

The campus that launched New York University’s aggressive global expansion misled students and charged them exorbitantly high prices, according to allegations in a new lawsuit. NYU’s Tisch Asia, the suit says, was an “educational scam” that was “not even remotely worth” its $50,000 yearly tuition fees.

The now-defunct Tisch Asia campus in Singapore promised students the same education they’d get in New York, the lawsuit says. But while they forked over the same sky-high tuition charged by NYU’s campus in lower Manhattan, Tisch Asia students got subpar faculty, inadequate equipment, limited access to fellowships, and a dysfunctional building, the suit alleges.

George Will:

The “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor-force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.

Associated Press

First lady Michelle Obama will mark International Day of the Girl on Oct. 11 by Skyping with girls around the world about education challenges in their lives.

The event is sponsored by Glamour magazine’s The Girl Project, which offers education help to more than 50 million girls worldwide.

Obama will be joined from the Newseum in Washington, D.C., by “Black-ish” actress Yara Shahidi and Glamour editor-in-chief Cindy Leive.

Clare Milliken:

“I would say that journalism education is slowly recognizing … that the jobs and opportunities that they traditionally trained students for are changing and expanding,” Ferrier said. “And so we see new job opportunities in social media management or engagement editor or engagement reporter. These are new job titles that didn’t even exist in 2010.”

Ferrier said there are now more classes focused on social media campaigns, social media marketing and analytics, as well as the development of different content forms. At Scripps, Webb’s report explained, Ferrier devised a two-week module on mobile technology. The time for the module was integrated into course syllabi, and Ferrier brought in an expert to teach the “class-within-a-class.” This educated both students and teachers about a specific topic without disrupting the curriculum, and Ferrier said faculty began teaching the module on their own.

The bad news, according to Newton, is that not enough schools are changing and adapting. Newton cites a report from Columbia Journalism School and Stanford University that looked into data journalism education in the U.S. The report found almost 50 percent of journalism programs offer no classes in data journalism, defined as “using data for the journalistic purpose of finding and telling stories in the public interest,” and the classes that are offered are, in large part, introductory.

mindshift

Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum.

School 21, a public school in London has made “oracy” a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another’s thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven’t been taught how to make “turn and talks” truly effective.

Kenneth Saltman:

At more than $1.3 trillion dollars as of 2016, US student loan debt has become widely discussed in the media, the business press and academia as a new debt bubble with the potential to burst and trigger a global economic crisis that puts everyone at risk. The student debt bubble is regularly compared to the subprime mortgage debt bubble that resulted in the failure of banks, the great recession and the public bailout of Wall Street and the auto industry in 2008. Prior to the subprime crisis, high- and low-risk mortgages were packaged together into investment bonds so that when enough of the high-risk mortgages defaulted, the bonds that had been rated as safe collapsed. Similarly, one form of student debt investment security, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), is composed of pooled student debt.

A crucial difference between the subprime debt bubble and the student debt bubble is that the properties that comprised subprime mortgage securities served as collateral to the mortgage debt. If a homeowner defaults on a mortgage, the bank claims the property in its stead. Student loan debt has traditionally not been collateralized. In other words, if a student or former student defaults on student loans, there is no tangible asset for the bank to claim. However, since a great deal of student loan debt has been federally subsidized and especially reinsured, private banks that package student loan debt into investment securities have been able to sell these investment securities because they carry the full faith and credit of the federal government. Despite having no collateral, they have the federal guarantee.

Kate Irby:

With costly healthcare, a stereotype of obesity and a culture of creatively fatty foods, “healthy” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of the United States.

But according to the Legatum Prosperity Index’s findings for 2015, the U.S. is the healthiest country in the world. However, when it comes to freedom, an ideal most Americans pride themselves on, the U.S. falls to 15.

So what’s the country with the most personal freedom? Canada, followed by New Zealand, Norway, Luxembourg and Iceland.

Personal freedom, as defined by the London-based Legatum Institute, measures a nation’s performance at both guaranteeing individual freedom and encouraging social tolerance. Canda was ranked No. 1 due to 94 percent of its citizens saying they believed they had the freedom to choose the course of their own lives and 92 percent saying there was tolerance for ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Russell Rickford:

I’m delighted that you are mobilizing. Your demonstration reflects your recognition that the escalating crisis of racial terrorism requires a firm and uncompromising response.

Your protest in the face of daily atrocities is a sign of your humanity and your determination to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.

But as we demonstrate, we must take pains to avoid certain tactical and programmatic errors that often plague progressive protest in a neoliberal age.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy.

Tressiemc:

I have watched many cities burn over the past two years.

I cried over Ferguson.

I cried over Baltimore.

But there’s nothing like seeing your hometown on social media with a hashtag.

I don’t want to talk about my family and friends. Worrying about them keeps me up at night. I don’t want to talk about.

I am only giving myself permission to think about Charlotte in public, not feel. Feeling is for private.

The first night of protesting I remarked that we don’t do this in Charlotte. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of inequality that defined Ferguson. We do. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of urban warfare between citizens and police that defined Baltimore. I didn’t mean that we don’t do extra-judicial murder. I have written about Johnathan Ferrell. I know that we do.

I meant that Charlotte does not have the deep, varied social organizing culture to quickly mobilize mass actions. We are not Chicago.

We certainly have a robust civic community. But, that isn’t the same thing.

Matt Wirz & Heather Gillers:

The Chicago school system needed money—fast. Two Wall Street players saw an opportunity to invest.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Chicago-based Nuveen Asset Management have made realized and paper profits exceeding $110 million on purchases this year of $763 million in Chicago Public Schools bonds. The school system has said it needed the money to replenish its dwindling coffers before the new school year and to build and repair facilities.

The terms of the bond sales highlight the choices the school district faces after years of pension shortfalls and relying heavily on borrowing. The 397,000-student school district struggled to sell municipal bonds in February until Nuveen bought about one-third, and the district decided in July to borrow directly from J.P. Morgan for fear that investors might balk again, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board of Education said.

Carolyn Phenicie:

As a child growing up in the nation’s capital, in a tough neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs, Christopher liked school — mostly — except for math. His favorite subject was social studies.

“I guess that’s where my strength is at, stuff like that,” said the sturdy young man, dressed in dark sweatpants on a cool-for-August day, his work ID swinging on a lanyard around his neck.

Yet by the time he was 21, after several years in and out of various D.C. schools and juvenile detention facilities across the country, all he had to show for it was a single high school credit.

Petra Sauer

Using the IIASA/VID dataset of populations by age, sex and level of education, I calculate education Gini coeffients and decompose the overall degree of educational in-equality into age, sex and within-group components. I analyze the relative relevance of these components for inequality reduction and investigate the distributional outcomes of education expansion. I find that, on average, equalization between males and females, younger and older cohorts as well as within these subgroups of the population has signif- icantly contributed to declining educational inequality over the observed sample period around the globe. But the relative role of these components fluctuates in the process of education expansion. First, as improvements are initiated by enhancing the educational opportunities of the youth, the gap between cohorts widens in transition phases but van- ishes thereafter. Second, gaps between sexes have been reduced but are predicted to widen again if either males or females are the first to enter higher education levels. To a lesser extent, this is also true for gaps within population subgroups which can be due to the ethnic background or the social and economic status of people.

Dan Mihalopoulos and Lauren FitzPatrick:

The top attorney for the Chicago Public Schools supervised work done for CPS by a law firm that’s still making $200,000-a-year severance payments to him, email records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

When the Sun-Times first reported in July that CPS had hired Jenner & Block LLP, schools CEO Forrest Claypool said his hand-picked general counsel, Ronald Marmer, “recused himself” and had no role in choosing the firm.

But the newly obtained documents show Marmer reviewed drafts of a lawsuit the firm was preparing to file on behalf of CPS and sent revisions of the planned suit to Jenner & Block lawyers.

Sarah Phillips

The state of Texas recently threatened to pull out of the federal refugee resettlement program over security concerns related to Syrian refugees, a move that the Texas Civil Rights Project has condemned as furthering suffering of populations of the world.
On Sept. 21, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced its intention to withdraw from the resettlement program if the Office of Refugee Resettlement cannot assure security.
“Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people,” Abbott said in a statement. “Therefore, Texas will withdraw from the refugee resettlement program. I strongly urge the federal government to completely overhaul a broken and flawed refugee program that increasingly risks American lives.”

Embedded in Academia

The other day a non-CS friend remarked to me that since computer science is a quantitative, technical discipline, most issues probably have an obvious objective truth. Of course this is not at all the case, and it is not uncommon to find major disagreements even when all parties are apparently reasonable and acting in good faith. Sometimes these disagreements spill over into the public space.

The purpose of this post is to list a collection of public debates in academic computer science where there is genuine and heartfelt disagreement among intelligent and accomplished researchers. I sometimes assign these as reading in class: they are a valuable resource for a couple of reasons. First, they show an important part of science that often gets swept under the rug. Second, they put discussions out into the open where they are widely accessible. In contrast, I’ve heard of papers that are known to be worthless by all of the experts in the area, but only privately — and this private knowledge is of no help to outsiders who might be led astray by the bad research. For whatever reasons (see this tweet by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt) the culture in CS does not seem to encourage retracting papers.

Brian Rosenthal

The federal government on Monday ordered Texas state officials to eliminate an 8.5 percent benchmark on special education enrollment enforced in the state’s 1,200 school districts unless they can show that it had not kept children with disabilities from receiving appropriate educational services.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

I’ve always believed that university professors are willing and able to govern academics, but now I am not so sure. I am worried about growing fatalism among even tenured faculty activists. I’m concerned about the tacit belief that unstoppable historical forces have already destroyed the universities they want to keep. From this standpoint, local resistance can work but remaking is futile, though remaking is the premise of shared governance and of academic freedom.

My summer travels took me to London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Liverpool, Bonn, Cambridge, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Crewe, York, and Valencia, mostly for lectures and discussions with faculty members about the state of universities in their country. I was struck by the contrast between the great intelligence and professional commitments of the professors on the one hand, and their lack of hope for universities on the other. Several of the visits revolved around higher education conferences, where I heard brilliant analyses of the nuts and bolts of national education initiatives that lacked a standpoint for faculty intervention.

Zaid Milani & Naomi LaChance:

Since NFL 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem in August to protest oppression of people of color, many Americans, particularly professional athletes and students, have followed suit. But their constitutional right to engage in such gestures of dissent is not always being respected.

Threats from school administrators and teachers have put free speech advocates like the ACLU on high alert. At Lely High School, a public school in Naples, Florida, the principal told students that they would be removed from athletic events if they refused to stand during the national anthem — though he said the quote was misunderstood when the ACLU of Florida reached out.

Robby Soave

A student has taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by University of Michigan’s new pronoun policy, which allows students to list their chosen pronouns on the official bios that are sent out to their teachers.

The student, Grant Stroble, has listed his pronoun as “His Majesty.”

He is stunning and brave. Applaud his courage. Weep openly, if you must.

Are you finished? Still reading? It’s quite a moving story, I know.

Joe Sanka:

Kentucky joined a number of other states with disappointing results from this summer’s bar exams, as only 65 percent of those taking the state exam passed in July. The total pass rate of 69.9 percent from all winter and summer exams in 2016 marked a low point for Kentucky in the past decade, falling over 10 percentage points from its previous high in 2011.

The fall in pass rates over the last five years among first-time bar exam takers in Kentucky was even larger, with this year’s rate at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law and University of Kentucky College of Law decreasing by nearly 20 and 15 percentage points from their previous high marks in 2011, respectively.

The Economist

IN 1962 Jacob Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He had analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical “power” (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.

Wind the clock forward half a century and little has changed. In a new paper, this time published in Royal Society Open Science, two researchers, Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Merced, and Richard McElreath at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, show that published studies in psychology, neuroscience and medicine are little more powerful than in Cohen’s day.

Joel Handley:

rk called Willie Mae Swansey’s case in a crowded courtroom last February, the 72-year-old approached the judge slowly, supporting herself with a four-pronged cane. It had been a busy afternoon in the Daley Center’s civil forfeiture courtroom, with more than a dozen quick hearings and a pair of trials preceding her own. The crush of defense lawyers and hopeful claimants had thinned by the time Swansey stepped up to the bench. She steadied herself beside a prosecutor and stood with a stately straightening of her back.

Swansey was here to reclaim her car. The Chicago Police Department had seized the 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser two years prior, arresting the driver, Swansey’s son, and charging him with manufacturing or delivering 15 to 100 grams of heroin. The car had been impounded ever since. Swansey herself was never charged with a crime, and it was her name, not her son’s, on the title. All the same, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had agreed with CPD that the vehicle, which the office valued at $1,400, was worth keeping for good.

John Wisely

A report finds the nation’s most segregated school district border sits between Detroit and the Grosse Pointes.

Story Highlights

Lawsuit is part of growing trend of litigation aimed at failing schools.
Because it’s a federal case, it could reach the U.S. Supreme Court and have nationwide impact.

Everyone knows that literacy is important, but is it a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution?

That’s the question being raised in a lawsuit filed against the State of Michigan on behalf of Detroit schoolchildren who struggle in some of the state’s worst-performing schools. Advocates insist that it is, saying that people who can’t read can’t exercise other constitutional rights such as voting, accessing the courts and serving in the military.

To argue the case, they have assembled a nationwide legal team that includes Carter Phillips, a Washington lawyer who has argued more than 80 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s most frequently cited experts on the Constitution.

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

Michael Stratford:

But what Sallie Mae wanted to preserve was widely criticized as a taxpayer boondoggle — and the company has drawn the ire of progressives like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Kaine’s little-known intervention on behalf of Sallie Mae, as detailed in about a half dozen emails in 2009, reveal a pragmatist who, in this case, was willing to forward a special interest’s concerns to the right people — albeit without his full-throated endorsement.

While the Clinton campaign has cast her vice presidential pick as a fighter on progressive issues, his involvement with Sallie Mae suggests a more conventional politician willing to carry water for a constituent dangling hundreds of local jobs — even if progressives might criticize it as working against the interests of taxpayers and needy students who would get additional financial aid under Obama’s proposal.

Kaine’s involvement with Sallie Mae is not the only time he has supported the agenda of banks: This summer, just before Clinton tapped him as her VP nominee, he came out in favor of loosening some regulations for regional banks — a move that drew fury from progressive groups.

Neerav

Mojo Moment #3: Thousands Rally for 100,000 More Charter Seats

Thousands of families and educators, joined by special guest Common, marched in New York City to support the doubling of the charter sector from 100,000 to 200,000 students.

I wish that those who criticize charters would grapple with the reality that families who are forced to send their children to failing public schools are marching in the streets for more high-quality charter schools.

With these rallies as a backdrop, calling for a moratorium on charter schools seems out of touch at best and malevolent at worst.

Government and civic leaders should be serving, not denying, families in need.

Gene Epstein:

Who won last Monday’s verbal smack-down between the two main presidential candidates? On issues relating to the economy, it was too close to call: They both lost, each having matched the other with displays of economic illiteracy. Space limitations permit only one ignoramus award per candidate.

Consider Democrat Hillary Clinton’s analysis of the Great Recession of 2008-09. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession,” she noted, “the worst since the 1930s.” After that valid observation, she declared that the disaster “was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”

That somewhat jumbled formulation almost seemed calculated to stir class hatred. The horrors of the Great Recession must still haunt millions of Americans. As Clinton herself went on to remark, “Nine million people lost their jobs” and “five million people lost their homes.” Yet in her view, “slashed taxes on the wealthy” was a principal cause of this misery, while the “tax policies” that apparently kicked “the middle class” to the curb was a related factor.

Jonathan Gruber on “stupid Americans”.

Alexandra Wolfe

For younger students, Prof. Christensen thinks that education needs to be reformed across the board. In his 2008 book “Disrupting Class,” he asked why government investment in education has yielded so little progress. He believes that his latest theory can help here too. “The job is that kids need to feel successful every day,” he says. As one example, he points to Khan Academy, which offers free online courses. Students have to master each level before they can move on, giving them a feeling of achievement.

DN Lee

I am sitting in on a big lecture course – Biology for Majors – that I will teach next fall. Faculty, both junior and senior faculty, rotate and teach core courses here. I haven’t had to think about foundational biology in a decade and I’m taking notes on the material as well as the presentation emphasis of my senior colleague.

Thought bubble: Was there a memo about the rearranging and reassigning of organisms into different groups? Domains, Kingdom, Paraphyletic groups #howsway?!

Seriously, here I am in the course, sitting mid-range in this huge auditorium. I can see both my colleague’s expression and note the level of engagement (via facial expressions and the amount of scribbling students are doing)…He asks simple feedback questions and no response.

Chemistry Blog

Future chemistry faculty will have to be twice as smart, work with twice the efficiency, and reach the correct positions of influence if they want this type of unhealthy cultural attitudes to finally be put to rest. This is my goal at least.

Update 1: Guido Koch now.

Update 2: The underlying macroeconomic cause for why professors can get away with this behavior.

Update 3: This story has really struck a cord, thank you for sharing this link and supplying our first 20,000 visitor day!

Update 4: A transcribed letter from Robert Tjian

Maia Szalavitz

Drug education is the only part of the middle school curriculum I remember — perhaps because it backfired so spectacularly. Before reaching today’s legal drinking age, I was shooting cocaine and heroin.

I’ve since recovered from my addiction, and researchers now are trying to develop innovative prevention programs to help children at risk take a different road than I did.

Greg Durrett

The Berkeley Document Summarizer is a learning-based single-document summarization system. It compresses source document text based on constraints from constituency parses and RST discourse parses. Moreover, it can improve summary clarity by reexpressing pronouns whose antecedents would otherwise be deleted or unclear.

Kolmogorov Complexity

And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, each string has an equal chance (2^{-50}) in being chosen at random from all sequences of 50 binary digits. So in a sense, the huge body of mathematics underlying probability has already failed us at this basic juncture because we cannot speak of how random one particular outcome of an experiment is. We need a new notion that overcomes this difficulty.

Definition: The Kolmogorov complexity of a string w, denoted K(w) is the length of the shortest program which outputs w given no input.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

On Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm CST, more than 130 local Black men will participate in Madison’s Premiere Black Male Photo Shoot on the steps of Wisconsin’s State Capitol, City Hall and the Monona Terrace. The photo shoot has been organized One City Early Learning Centers in partnership with Marcus Miles Photography, Justice Productions and Hedi Rudd Photography.

As part of One City’s Ready by 5 Campaign that will kick-off in November 2016, this unique photo shoot will benefit the children of One City Early Learning Centers and promote the importance of high quality preschools being available, affordable and accessible to all children in Dane County. One City will sell printed calendars, posters and photos as a fundraiser during the 2016 holiday season to support the operations of our school. The Campaign will also promote positive images of Black men to children and adults across Dane County.

Participants include:
University of Wisconsin’s Associate Head Basketball Coach Howard Moore

UW-Madison Vice Provost for Diversity & Climate Patrick J Sims

UW-Madison Assistant Dean José J. Madera

UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Randolph Ashton

Deputy Mayor Enis Ragland

Judge Everett Mitchell

Madison Metropolitan School District Board President James Howard and Chief of Secondary Schools Alex Fralin

Health & Fitness champion Haywood Simmons

Pastors Colier McNair, David Smith Sr., Rick Badger and Kevin Doss

Several Members of the Madison Fire and Police Departments

Councilman Samba Baldeh

YWCA’s Bill Baldon

The Duke Dennis McClain

Radio Personality Derrell Connor

Retired Police Lt. and South Side Raiders President Wayne Strong

County leader Andre Johnson

…and many more

For more details about the photo shoot, please visit goo.gl/d9e36g. One City will host additional photo shoots featuring more diverse citizens to build a movement of awareness and support for its preschool, and for preschool education in general in Dane County.

Three additional photo shoots: Real Women of Madison – We Do Everything, Real Leaders of Madison – We Support All Children, and Future Leaders of Madison – Yes, We Have A Plan will take place during the winter and spring with a release at One City’s first annual event next year.

Caire stated that, “The photo shoots are fun and meaningful activities designed to build awareness, support and a movement for high quality, affordable and accessible early education for all children. They will also help cultivate a new vision of future career possibilities among our children while highlighting the widespread support that exists in all segments of our community to eliminate poverty and achievement gaps.”

Marcus Miles of Marcus Miles Photography added, “I’m very happy to be a part of this project. Our children’s future depends on how well we prepare them before age 5. They must be ready by then if we want them to succeed in school and life.”

About One City Early Learning
One City is a nonprofit preschool located in South Madison that opened in September 2015. They presently serves 35 children ages 1 to 5 and plan to grow to serve 110 (including infants) by 2018 in our current location. The organization’s mission is to prepare young children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life, and ensure they enter grade school reading-ready. We operate a year-round program from 6:45am to 5:30pm Monday through Friday. For more information about One City Early Learning Centers, visit www.onecityearlylearning.org and click below to like us on Facebook and Twitter.

Get Involved.

“Progressive Army”

A leaked memo titled “BRL Interview Prep MEMO – CO03, CO06, IA01, NE02, UT04” detailed the state of five competitive Congressional races. The document reveals the Party’s collusion and close tie with the press, its active work to control the narrative and ensuring positive press coverage in Utah’s 4th district:

Most reporters are a rather long way from Mencken.

Brian Krez’s:

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.

The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
Vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into “bots,” forcing them to report to a central control server that can be used as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The Hackforums user who released the code, using the nickname “Anna-senpai,” told forum members the source code was being released in response to increased scrutiny from the security industry.

“When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn’t planning on staying in it long,” Anna-senpai wrote. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO [link added]. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.”

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Mirai is one of at least two malware families that are currently being used to quickly assemble very large IoT-based DDoS armies. The other dominant strain of IoT malware, dubbed “Bashlight,” functions similarly to Mirai in that it also infects systems via default usernames and passwords on IoT devices.

According to research from security firm Level3 Communications, the Bashlight botnet currently is responsible for enslaving nearly a million IoT devices and is in direct competition with botnets based on Mirai.

Erin Richards:

On a mid-September morning, Pulaski High School on Milwaukee’s south side appeared peaceful and studious, its hallways free of roaming students and Principal Lolita Patrick holding sway in front of the auditorium.

Teachers instruct with the doors open now. Students wear uniforms, suspensions and incidents are down and the lunchroom is far more civilized this year, she said.

Those are small but meaningful steps for Pulaski, a struggling high school embarking on a big, urgent turnaround while hosting a new upstairs neighbor: Carmen Southeast, the third campus of the Milwaukee-based Carmen Schools of Science and Technology charter network. Downstairs, Pulaski is working on cementing an International Baccalaureate program into its curriculum.

The co-location deserves particular attention because the proposal to put Carmen in Pulaski drew a pitched fight last fall between Carmen supporters and the teachers union. Carmen is a popular, high-expectations charter school that wanted to add a third campus. Pulaski is a traditional high school with extra space because of declining enrollment. Patrick and MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver were in favor of the co-location, but the Milwaukee School Board was split. A key member changed his mind, and a narrow 5-4 vote let the partnership proceed.

Simon Keper:

‘A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain’

I’d like to have a soldier stationed outside the classroom door,” my son’s teacher told the parents’ meeting. “And I’d like him to be young and handsome.” My children’s primary school in Paris is a few minutes’ walk (or a frantic sprint) from the sites of last year’s terrorist attacks. Across the city, the new term has started with drills on what to do if terrorists get into the school. The teacher announces “Intrusion”, turns off the lights, puts something in front of the door, and everyone hides under their desks.

My kids don’t seem traumatised. One of my sons came home chuckling at the memory of his fat middle-aged teacher trying to squeeze under her desk. Still, his generation will be shaped by the spectre of terrorism.

Every society tries to make the trade-off between security and freedom. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s at the tail-end of a western era that prioritised freedom. According to Google, mentions of “freedom” exceeded mentions of “security” in English-language books every year from about 1830 through to 1985. When I was eight, living in a small Dutch town, all the children in my class cycled to school alone. Our parents rarely knew where we were (and probably didn’t care). Freedom was the spirit of the times.

Statistically, in fact, we were in much greater danger than children today. My two schoolmates who died of cancer might well have survived now. And when I was eight, Dutch traffic deaths were more than triple today’s level.

By the end of my childhood, society began getting more protective. In 1985, mentions of “security” surpassed “freedom” in books, and the word has steadily expanded its lead since. We entered an era of compulsory seatbelts, bans on public smoking and laws against drink-driving.

“Oh ye of little faith”….

Lawrence Summers

On the basis of these factors, I expect that more than one-third of all men between 25 and 54 will be out work at mid-century. Very likely more than half of men will experience a year of non-work at least one year out of every five. This would be in the range of the rate of non-work for high school drop-outs and exceeds the rate of non-work for African Americans today.

Will we be able to support these people and a growing retired share of the population? What will this mean for the American family? For prevailing ethics of self-reliance? For alienation and support for toxic populism? These are vital questions. Even more vital is the question of what is to be done.

Elizabeth Campbell

Chicago, the nation’s biggest junk-rated city, has raised taxes and moved to shore up its debt-ridden pension system, but for its schools, the triage still has a ways to go. […]

The Chicago Board of Education is facing a potential strike by its teachers, which could further strain its coffers. The third-largest U.S. school district’s budget counts on state aid and union concessions that may not come. And this week, Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating deeper into junk, citing its “precarious liquidity” and reliance on borrowed money, as preliminary data showed an enrollment drop of almost 14,000 students — a loss that may cut into its funding.

The chronic financial strains may lead investors to demand higher interest rates from the debt-dependent district. With $6.8 billion of general-obligation debt, it’s already paying yields of as much as 9 percent, according to Moody’s. More than 10 percent of this year’s $5.4 billion budget is eaten up by principal and interest costs.

Brian Resnick:

But Michèle Nuijten, a PhD student at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who co-created Statcheck, has her sights on fixing a much smaller but surprisingly impactful problem in science: rounding errors.

“When starting this project, I wouldn’t say [this was a big problem],” Nuijten tells me. “We’re detecting when people are making rounding errors, who cares?”

But she and some colleagues in the Netherlands were curious enough to check. They built a computer program that could quickly scan published psychological papers and check the math on the statistics. They called their program “Statcheck” and ran it on 30,717 papers.

Related: Math Forum.

David Tran:

I grew up in East Oakland, California, as the youngest son of Teochew-Vietnamese immigrants. School was always easy for me — I never really felt challenged throughout elementary school. Amid the droves of teacher strikes and substitutes, the truly dedicated teachers of Oakland’s Maxwell Park Elementary School were few and far between.

But in fifth grade, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mrs. Harris, who changed my life forever. On weekends, Mrs. Harris invited students to her house for lunch. Using her own money, she gave away trinkets to those who did well on assignments.

And during a parent-teacher conference, she did something unthinkable and so incredible that I didn’t fully comprehend its impact until years later. She begged my parents to have me apply to private middle schools to get me out of the failing Oakland public schools.

David Robson.

Thomas Donlan:

The dry-run delegates proposed:

• Requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to approve any increase in the national debt, and ending the power of Congress to mandate spending by states or municipalities.

• Placing 12-year term limits on members of Congress.

• Limiting the powers under the constitutional clause that authorizes Congress to regulate interstate and international commerce.

• Giving Congress a right of approval of federal regulations. No regulation challenged by 25% of the members of either house would go into effect without support from majorities in both houses, and the president would have no veto against their decisions.

• Repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized imposition of the income tax in 1913, and requiring supermajority votes for creating or raising federal taxes.

• Giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order by votes of three-fifths of state legislatures.

See more at conventionofstates.com.

David Pilling

For a group that has helped change the way economics is taught at universities up and down Britain, the Post-Crash Economics Society had a less than momentous start.

It was November 2012 when seven undergraduates met in a cramped room on the top floor of Manchester university’s student union. Chairs drawn into a semi-circle, they listened as the two founding members went through a brief PowerPoint presentation explaining what they thought was wrong with the economics curriculum. A polite discussion followed before everyone shuffled off for the Christmas holidays. It wasn’t exactly Paris 1968.

The students had gathered in response to an email with the subject line: “CALL OUT TO ALL THE ECONOSCEPTICS OUT THERE”. “In the middle of the biggest global recession for 80 years,” the email read, “students across the world are questioning the very foundations of our discipline.”

Sam Biddle:

Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.

This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address — which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that “we do not store data related to customers’ location,” identify a customer’s location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices,” orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.

The Intercept received the document about Apple’s Messages logs as part of a larger cache originating from within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Electronic Surveillance Support Team, a state police agency that facilitates police data collection using controversial tools like the Stingray, along with conventional techniques like pen registers. The document, titled “iMessage FAQ for Law Enforcement,” is designated for “Law Enforcement Sources” and “For Official Use Only,” though it’s unclear who wrote it or for what specific audience — metadata embedded in the PDF cites an author only named “mrrodriguez.” (The term “iMessages” refers to an old name for the Messages app still commonly used to refer to it.)

Elizabeth Patitsas, Jesse Berlin, Michelle Craig, and Steve Easterbrook

Although it has never been rigourously demonstrated, there is a common belief that CS grades are bimodal. We statisti- cally analyzed 778 distributions of final course grades from a large research university, and found only 5.8% of the dis- tributions passed tests of multimodality. We then devised a psychology experiment to understand why CS educators believe their grades to be bimodal. We showed 53 CS pro- fessors a series of histograms displaying ambiguous distri- butions and asked them to categorize the distributions. A random half of participants were primed to think about the fact that CS grades are commonly thought to be bimodal; these participants were more likely to label ambiguous dis- tributions as “bimodal”. Participants were also more likely to label distributions as bimodal if they believed that some students are innately predisposed to do better at CS. These results suggest that bimodal grades are instructional folklore in CS, caused by confirmation bias and instructor beliefs about their students.

CeliaSue Hecht

Every night and every morning, I wonder how it got to be like this. If I’m lucky, I’ll get maybe six hours of shuteye, but usually it’s a lot less. The fear of police or someone else finding me makes me nervous. After a while, the lack of sleep sets in. I feel groggy, low energy, and my legs and feet get swollen and stiff. Sleep deprivation is a torture technique the military uses, and it works just as effectively on an old lady like me.

Not having a home is hard. Now imagine not having a home at the age of 66.

Derek Thompson

A “crisis of abundance” initially seems like a paradox. After all, abundance is the ultimate goal of technology and economics. But consider the early history of the electric washing machine. In the 1920s, factories churned them out in droves. (With the average output of manufacturing workers rising by a third between 1923 and 1929, making more washing machines was relatively cheap.) But as the decade ended, factories saw they were making many more than American households demanded. Companies cut back their output and laid off workers even before the stock market crashed in 1929. Indeed, some economists have said that the oversupply of consumer goods like washing machines may have been one of the causes of the Great Depression.

Marybeth Gasman:

While giving a talk about Minority Serving Institutions at a recent higher education forum, I was asked a question pertaining to the lack of faculty of color at many majority institutions, especially more elite institutions.

My response was frank: “The reason we don’t have more faculty of color among college faculty is that we don’t want them. We simply don’t want them.” Those in the audience were surprised by my candor and gave me a round of applause for the honesty.

Given the short amount of time I had on the stage, I couldn’t explain the evidence behind my statement. I will do so here. I have been a faculty member since 2000, working at several research universities. In addition, I give talks, conduct research and workshops and do consulting related to diversifying the faculty across the nation. I have learned a lot about faculty recruitment over 16 years and as a result of visiting many colleges and universities.

Nico Savage:

Out-of-state students and those in UW-Madison’s professional schools could soon see another round of tuition increases after Chancellor Rebecca Blank told faculty Monday she plans to ask the university’s governing board in the coming months to raise prices for those students.

Blank also said UW-Madison plans to distribute $9 million in raises and bonuses to its faculty and academic staff in a move aimed in part at shoring up morale among employees.

The chancellor announced the initiatives during her State of the University speech Monday at a meeting of the UW-Madison faculty senate, where she touted the university’s achievements over the past year but acknowledged the challenges it faces in creating a “more stable financial base” amid declining state funding.

Brianna Reilly:

Two West High School students were arrested Thursday afternoon after an officer stationed at the school took a BB gun from one of them, Madison police said.

The students, both 14-year-old boys, were outside the school on Regent Street at 1:25 p.m. when the officer took the gun away from them, Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said.

After the officer took the gun, the students ran to the high school and tried to get in, but the door was locked, police said. One student broke a window after punching it while trying to get in.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio/video.

Madison West Principal Beth Thompson, via a kind reader email:

Dear West HS Families:

I’m writing to let you know that this afternoon, we briefly directed students to remain in their classrooms while we investigated a safety concern that originated outside our school. Shortly after 1:30 pm, our ERO was talking to a student near the Regent Street Market when he noticed the student had a gun. The officer was able to obtain the gun safely, which turned out to be a BB gun. The student and a companion then ran toward the school and attempted to gain entry into the building. In the process of forcibly knocking on the door, a window was shattered. Both students were taken into custody by the police.

Please know that the safety of our students is a top priority in our school and that we communicate closely with the police to ensure the safety of our students. I want to reassure you that school safety was not compromised and staff responded quickly and appropriately to help manage the incident and to re-direct students.

We make every effort to keep our families informed about incidents that occur in our school.

Please contact me if you have any questions,

Respectfully,

Beth Thompson, Principal
West High School

Robby Soave:

A senior at John Glenn High School in Westland, Michigan, was suspended for three days after she took a photo of the disgusting water in the girls’ restroom and posted it on Twitter.

The student, Hazel Juco, had aimed to call attention to the dirty water. But it’s against school rules to take pictures in bathrooms.

“I was called to the office and told by one of the assistant principals that an administrator found a photo of the girl’s bathroom on social media and that I’d be issued a three-day out-of-school suspension for ‘inappropriate use of electronics,'” Hazel told CNN.

I’m often quick to criticize schools for needlessly punishing students, though in this case I agree that Juco deserved a little bit of scolding. Privacy is important, and young people do need to learn that there are some places in the world where selfies just aren’t appropriate. The school bathroom is one of those places.

But a three-day suspension is a fairly strict punishment for a well-intentioned lapse of judgment. Why not simply give her after-school detention, or something?

Debra Heine:

The president of Northwestern University told students on Monday that anyone who opposes “trigger warnings” or who ridicules the pain of those “microaggressed” is an “idiot” and a “lunatic.”

In his convocation address on Monday, NU President Morton Schapiro took a firm stance against censorship, but said he disagreed with University of Chicago Dean of Students John Ellison, who recently told first-year students they should not expect “safe spaces” in which to escape from ideas that make them uncomfortable.

Lauren McGaughy:

Most Texans believe student loan debt is a major problem and that state government needs to fund financial aid for all college students, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

“The most interesting thing that you see here is, on one hand, a set of very clear concerns by very high margins about student debt loan as a problem, and cost as an impediment for Texans who don’t have a degree,” said Jim Henson, a pollster and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conducted the poll.

“People are concerned about those things not because they think there’s something wrong about higher education, but because they still attach such importance” to getting a college degree, he added.

Philippe Sigl:

Ask for the passport. It better be Chinese. Eight in ten Chinese living in extreme poverty in 1990 no longer did so in 2010*. In Sub-Saharan Africa, not only were you probably still poor in 2010, but your children might be so as well (this excludes South Africa). The number of people living of less than $ 1.90 per day in the region increased by 40% from 1990 to 2010.

While the jury on aid and international development is out, it is remarkable that 73% of the reduction in global poverty over the last 20 years comes from a country where the government, not donors are in charge. This contrasts sharply with the trend in donor hotspot Sub-Saharan Africa.

Bernard Condon:

NEW YORK — They sell diamond rings in malls and used cars at dealerships, make wrench sets for mechanics and giant combines for farmers.

Not one has “bank” in its name, but they are all big lenders, and getting bigger by the day.

If you’re wondering how companies can get people to buy things when wages have been barely rising, check out the financial statements of some of the nation’s retailers and manufacturers. Money lent out at Signet Jewelers, CarMax and tool maker Snap-on has jumped more than 50 percent in four years at each of these companies, 2.5 times the growth of loans at banks. Financing at Deere & Co., which leases much of its farm and construction equipment, has risen 27 percent.

Companies see the loans as a useful, safe way to drum up business. Customers seem to love them, too.

What’s not to like?

If you listen to short sellers, plenty. Short sellers are investors who place bets that pay off when stocks drop, and they say that is going to happen with stocks of some of these non-traditional lenders. They say companies have gotten sloppy in picking who to lend to after seven years of super low interest rates and easy-money monetary policy, and defaults are coming.

MP: My suggestion is to fire the 200+ employees of the Harvard Management Company team (whose top six executives were paid salaries between $4.4 million and $13.8 million in 2014) and have the Vanguard Group’s Nonprofit Institutional Investment Services team manage the $36 billion Harvard endowment, probably for higher returns at definitely at a much lower cost. As Warren Buffett advises, “Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.”

Russell Rickford:

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy.

Neoliberalism’s goals are not merely privatization and the decimation of unions and the social safety net. It also seeks to manage the social order and ensure the continued political dominance of the ruling class by absorbing social threats.

Hatem Bazian

As the sponsoring faculty member for the now “suspended” student-led DeCal course Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis, I must set the factual record straight and provide a list of the institutional academic procedures followed to approve the class offering.

The Chancellor’s Office letter providing the reason for “suspension” stated that: “it has been determined that the facilitator for the course in question did not comply with policies and procedures that govern the normal academic review and approval of proposed courses for the Decal program.” Certainly, one would expect that the Dean and the Chancellor’s office would have reached out and communicated with the student facilitator and sponsoring faculty to clarify and consult before taking action to suspend the course two weeks into the semester, but it was not the case. Up to Tuesday morning September 13, 2016, I and Paul Hadweh, the student facilitator, did not receive any communication or requests for clarification from the Administration regarding this course or any issues related to it.

David Barnes:

ObamaCare won’t work without young Americans like me, and the Obama administration knows it. That’s why the president is holding a Millennial Outreach and Engagement Summit focused on the Affordable Care Act at the White House on Tuesday. But no matter what the president says, many young Americans simply aren’t buying what he’s selling—mainly because we can’t afford it.

The administration has targeted my generation to sign up for ObamaCare for one reason: We’re healthy. The health-insurance companies selling plans on the law’s exchanges need us to pay a pretty penny in premiums without using much medical care. We’re supposed to subsidize the system so that it stays afloat. That was the plan, anyway. It fell apart when we didn’t sign up in droves like the White House expected.

Elaina Giolando:

Most of us want to do it all: find meaningful work, travel while we’re young, say no to the wrong opportunities, say yes to the right ones, experiment with entrepreneurship, save for the future and create a lifestyle that allows us to live life to the fullest.

Unfortunately, the financial structures behind higher education in the United States today are constructed in ways that hinder freedom of some Americans, and we’ve only begun to understand the social and economic implications of this systemic malpractice.

I believe student loans were created with good intentions. The plan was to help provide a vehicle for upward mobility for the lower classes. With no possible way to fund a higher education, a loan was a sensible way to get a leg up.

Evan Ackerman

MIT’s Personal Robotics Group has been one of the driving forces behind social robotics since… well, since they pretty much invented social robotics. Led by Professor Cynthia Breazeal, who is also founder of social robot startup Jibo, the MIT group has built an amazing collection of smart, cute, and squishy creatures, and now they have a new one. The latest, smartest, cutest, and squishiest social robot that MIT has been testing out is named Tega, and it’s already gotten to work, adorably teaching Spanish to preschoolers.

We spoke with Jackie Kory Westlund, a Ph.D. student in the MIT Media Lab who’s been doing research with Tega, about why it’s such a useful social assistive robotics platform and how to keep preschoolers from utterly destroying it with hugs.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

I’ve always believed that university professors are willing and able to govern academics, but now I am not so sure. I am worried about growing fatalism among even tenured faculty activists. I’m concerned about the tacit belief that unstoppable historical forces have already destroyed the universities they want to keep. From this standpoint, local resistance can work but remaking is futile, though remaking is the premise of shared governance and of academic freedom.

My summer travels took me to London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Liverpool, Bonn, Cambridge, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Crewe, York, and Valencia, mostly for lectures and discussions with faculty members about the state of universities in their country. I was struck by the contrast between the great intelligence and professional commitments of the professors on the one hand, and their lack of hope for universities on the other. Several of the visits revolved around higher education conferences, where I heard brilliant analyses of the nuts and bolts of national education initiatives that lacked a standpoint for faculty intervention.

Pat Schneider:

UW-Madison is cutting the work week of its student employees to no more than 29 hours to conform to requirements of the Affordable Care Act, a move some student workers say will make it harder for them to stay in school.

“With less hours, many students will have to juggle two jobs, and that will definitely hurt academic success,” undergraduate student worker Reid Kurkerewicz said in comments provided by the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC).

“UW-Madison student workers would love to work less hours so they can put their academics first, but Chancellor Blank refuses to pay a living wage, making that impossible for many working class students,” said Jia Gonitzke, an undergraduate student worker.

Student leaders at SLAC, whose mission is to engage students in labor issues, say they are concerned that not only student workers, but other limited term employees of the UW-Madison will see cuts to their hours so that the university doesn’t have to offer them health insurance.

Kenneth J. Saltman:

At more than $1.3 trillion dollars as of 2016, US student loan debt has become widely discussed in the media, the business press and academia as a new debt bubble with the potential to burst and trigger a global economic crisis that puts everyone at risk. The student debt bubble is regularly compared to the subprime mortgage debt bubble that resulted in the failure of banks, the great recession and the public bailout of Wall Street and the auto industry in 2008. Prior to the subprime crisis, high- and low-risk mortgages were packaged together into investment bonds so that when enough of the high-risk mortgages defaulted, the bonds that had been rated as safe collapsed. Similarly, one form of student debt investment security, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), is composed of pooled student debt.

A crucial difference between the subprime debt bubble and the student debt bubble is that the properties that comprised subprime mortgage securities served as collateral to the mortgage debt. If a homeowner defaults on a mortgage, the bank claims the property in its stead. Student loan debt has traditionally not been collateralized. In other words, if a student or former student defaults on student loans, there is no tangible asset for the bank to claim. However, since a great deal of student loan debt has been federally subsidized and especially reinsured, private banks that package student loan debt into investment securities have been able to sell these investment securities because they carry the full faith and credit of the federal government. Despite having no collateral, they have the federal guarantee.

Sanya Manor:

Unfolded laundry sits in a basket and dishes stack up in the sink at Dawn Cardenas’ home.

“Things that are not important don’t get done,” said Cardenas, who teaches at O’Banion Middle School in Garland ISD.

Instead, Cardenas, 54, devotes nearly all of her time to making sure her four grown children —three of whom are in college — have enough money for rent, groceries and incidentals. Sometimes a single textbook can cost $400.

That means that on top of teaching U.S. history, Cardenas also sells cosmetics at Dillard’s. In one week, she spends close to 75 hours teaching, preparing for class and communicating with parents. She works 25 to 30 additional hours at the department store.

Cardenas is one of many teachers who moonlight to make ends meet.

Nearly one-third of teachers who responded to a survey released by Sam Houston State University in August said they have a second job to supplement their income. That’s down from 44 percent in 2012 and 41 percent in 2010.

Public school teachers who moonlight during the academic year put in an average of about 13 hours a week at their extra jobs, the study found. Eighty-six percent of them wanted to quit their extra jobs, but reported they’d need a $9,000 raise to do so.

At $51,758 a year, teacher pay in Texas is more than $6,000 below the national average, according to a 2015-16 school year survey by the National Education Association.

Jason Delisle:

The federal government is making more data available about the performance of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program for federal student loans. Many policymakers are not aware of this program, but the new data reveal PSLF is growing rapidly and is larger than most observers expected. Budget agencies recently revised the projected cost of the program upward by a staggering amount, and the U.S. Department of Education reports that many PSLF enrollees borrowed over $100,000 to finance graduate degrees. Recent research suggests that borrowers in certain professions stand to have their entire graduate and professional educations paid for through loan forgiveness under PSLF. In light of these developments, reforms that limit the most excessive features of PSLF are warranted, although repealing PSLF altogether and letting the federal Income-Based Repayment program (IBR) accomplish the goal of PSLF is an even better course of action.

Michael DeArmond

Twenty-five years ago, I was a young history teacher soaking up progressive teaching methods that aimed to foster deep, personalized learning for my students. My classroom was decidedly low-tech, but I can see how today’s technological advances might have made it easier for me to manage the significant demands of progressive teaching. Yet in the personalized learning (PL) schools we’ve visited so far for this project, few teachers appear to be taking advantage of technology’s potential to support progressive teaching.

In the late 1990s, I was part of Brown University’s Undergraduate Teacher Education Program (UTEP). UTEP allowed me to graduate with my BA in American History and a secondary teaching credential. Ted Sizer, the chair of Brown’s education department at the time, heavily influenced the program’s curriculum; his belief in the power of coherent, mastery-based, and personalized schools has guided my sense of what schools and teaching should be like ever since.

As a student teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, I spent untold hours earnestly crafting history lessons around “big ideas,” developing case-based learning activities, and learning how to facilitate group work. I asked my students (my “historians”) to work with primary documents and make what today’s Common Core advocates would call evidence-based claims. With these and other progressive approaches, my fellow teacher candidates and I were pushing students toward deeper and individualized learning, though we didn’t use those terms. Teaching this way was incredibly exciting, but it was also extraordinarily time-consuming and challenging.

Dominic Russel, Alan Smith, Carrie Sloan:

Higher education in the U.S. is in a state of crisis. We see evidence of this crisis in huge cuts in funding for public schools, skyrocketing costs of attendance at both private and public schools, and increases in student debt burdens.

Financialization has a number of disturbing consequences for higher education, including increases in overall borrowing by colleges and universities, increases in the cost of interest payments on debt on a per-student basis, and a concentration of endowment assets at a small group of the wealthiest institutions—a form of concentration of wealth.

This research is brought to you by the biggest victims of these deals: the students who have been shut out of the decisions that will shape their future.

Suzanne Woolley:

More than 55 percent of them think their generation is more entrepreneurial than were Generation X, or even baby boomers. In reality, not only are there fewer entrepreneurs among millennials, they’re moving in the opposite direction: More view rising through the ranks of existing companies as the best route to success.

Sixty-two percent of millennials have considered starting their own businesses, and 72 percent think startups are “essential for new innovation and jobs,” according to The Millennial Economy (PDF), a survey of 1,200 18- to 34-year-olds commissioned by EY (formerly Ernst & Young LLP) and the Economic Innovation Group (EIG). At the same time, a total of 42 percent said that they don’t have the means to be entrepreneurs, in part due to student debt, which 48 percent believe has limited their career prospects.

Jack Grove:

Using automatic text generation software, computer scientists at Italy’s University of Trieste created a series of fake peer reviews of genuine journal papers and asked academics of different levels of seniority to say whether they agreed with their recommendations to accept for publication or not.

In a quarter of cases, academics said they agreed with the fake review’s conclusions, even though they were entirely made up of computer-generated gobbledegook – or, rather, sentences picked at random from a selection of peer reviews taken from subjects as diverse as brain science, ecology and ornithology.

“Sentences like ‘it would be good if you can also talk about the importance of establishing some good shared benchmarks’ or ‘it would be useful to identify key assumptions in the modelling’ are probably well suited to almost any review,” explained Eric Medvet, assistant professor at Trieste’s department of engineering and architecture, who conducted the experiment with colleagues at his university’s Machine Learning Lab.

Tech Dirt:

In all of our coverage of copyright trolls, those rent-seeking underdwellers that fire off threat letters to those they suspect of copyright infringement with demands designed to extract cash without having to actually take anyone to court, it’s quite easy to become somewhat numb to the underhanded tactics they employ. Between specifically targeting folks over pornography in order to minimize the chance that anyone might want to actually go to trial, to the privacy invading tactics occasionally used when a court case actually commences, it becomes easy to simply shrug at the depravity of it all.

But there is a special place in hell for copyright trolls who falsely inform students that failure to pay on receipt of threat letters, or who falsely inform foreign students that deportation could result from a failure to pay. According to at least one university in Canada, this is apparently a new favored tactic among some copyright trolls.

Sean Gill, Sarah Yatsko, Robin Lake

More than 23 cities have signed District-Charter Collaboration Compacts— formal agreements between school districts and charter schools that aim to share resources and responsibility and build trust and collegiality to ensure equal access to high-quality schools for all students. Yet, within the charter sector itself there are highly varied perspectives on and motivations for collaboration. Based on dozens of interviews and observations over four years, we look at why many cities have missed opportunities to create more lasting relationships between their district and charter sectors, and offer suggestions for fostering stronger partnerships that could help improve outcomes for all of the students in their cities.

Jason Stein and Haley Henschel:

Over the next generation, Wisconsin’s taxpayers and public workers must deal with at least $6.5 billion in unfunded retirement promises made by local governments, with more than $4.7 billion in the state’s largest county alone, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation has found.

From Milwaukee to Eau Claire, local governments face problems more severe than any in a generation, a review of thousands of pages of financial documents shows. The biggest challenges lie in southeastern Wisconsin, with the city, county and schools in Racine, for instance, combining for at least $686 million in unfunded liabilities to retirees and workers — $3,500 for every person in the county.

asimov institute

With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) can be a bit overwhelming at first.

So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these are neural networks, some are completely different beasts. Though all of these architectures are presented as novel and unique, when I drew the node structures… their underlying relations started to make more sense.

Carl Straumsheim

Fourteen universities around the world are today launching modular master’s degree programs in which students can complete up to half of the course work online, earn a credential and then decide whether they want to apply to pursue the full degree.

The launch of the 19 programs, known as MicroMasters, follows a pilot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT has since early this year tested the model in its supply chain management program. Learners start the program by taking massive open online courses hosted on edX, the MOOC platform MIT helped found. After completing five MOOCs, learners who pay a fee can either call it quits and walk away with a certificate — or apply and, if accepted to MIT, eventually earn a master’s of engineering in logistics.

Mark Rumold

In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history.

The Playpen investigation—driven by the FBI’s hacking campaign—resulted in hundreds of criminal prosecutions that are currently working their way through the federal courts. The issues in these cases are technical and the alleged crimes are distasteful. As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the significant legal questions these cases raise.

But make no mistake: these cases are laying the foundation for the future expansion of law enforcement hacking in domestic criminal investigations, and the precedent these cases create is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come. In a series of blog posts in the coming days and weeks, we’ll explain what the legal issues are and why these cases matter to Internet users the world over.

Room for Debate:

Last week a Connecticut judge ruled that the educational disparities between rich and poor districts were so great and so persistent that the state needed to revise every major aspect of its school system. The problems he found exist throughout the United States. Why is failure so widespread and persistent in poor districts and how can it be resolved?

Rich Lowry:

The TV cable-news network MSNBC runs sermonettes from its anchors during commercial breaks. They are like public-service announcements illuminating the progressive mind, and perhaps none has ever been as revealing and remarkable as the one cut by weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry.

Harris-Perry set out to explain what is, by her lights, the failure to invest adequately in public education. She located the source of the problem in the insidious idea of parental responsibility for children.

“We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children,” she said, in the tone of an anthropologist explaining a strange practice she discovered when out doing far-flung fieldwork. “Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.” So long as this retrograde conception prevails, according to Harris-Perry, we will never spend enough money on children. “We have to break through,” she urged, “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wondered, “Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?” Harris-Perry’s contribution falls into the former category, at least within her orbit of left-wing academia (she teaches at Tulane University, after stops at Princeton and the University of Chicago) and journalism (she writes a column for The Nation as well as holding forth on MSNBC).

Mychal Denzel Smith:

“The only demand we would have received without the help of the football team is an apology from Tim Wolfe, which he wouldn’t have issued had Jonathan Butler not went on the hunger strike,” Ervin said.

On the seventh day of Butler’s hunger strike, there was no rest, and there was no football. The work was just beginning, and the black members of the football team issued a statement: “We will no longer participate in any football-related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences.” Thirty-two young men joined in arms and in struggle.

Jon Hamilton

People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain.

A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“And as the equations get harder and harder, activity in these areas goes up in a blind person,” says Marina Bedny, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Allen Young

If all of California’s public pension debt were divided evenly by household, each house would need to pay $77,700, according to a new project from a Stanford University researcher.

The relatively high debt-to-household ratio makes the Golden State the third worst in the nation for total pension debt burden, behind Alaska and Illinois. That’s not to say that each Californian is responsible for paying $77,000, but the costs will fall on residents in different ways, as state and local governments figure out how to pay the debt, said Stanford researcher Joe Nation.

Ted Sickinger:

Bad enough that Rukaiyah Adams, the normally polished investment professional who is vice chair of the Oregon Investment Council, broke down in tears last week as she spoke of passing a record $22 billion in unfunded promises to future taxpayers.

“My call to the Legislature and to the governor is for leadership on this, and I mean right now,” Adams said during last Wednesday’s joint meeting of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System board and the citizen panel that oversees its investments. “This is becoming a moral issue. We can’t just talk about numbers anymore.”

The numbers are bleak. Oregon’s pension system owes billions of dollars more to retirees than it has, and the last major attempt to fix the problem was shot down in courts.

This month, cities, school districts and others will find out how much more they’ll pay to help prop up the system. Higher pension costs could come at the expense of funding for other needs, including social services, infrastructure investments and education programs.

Rex Huppke

We all work, but we rarely take time to think about what a job means, how it shapes our identity and what it is, specifically, about what we do that matters in the grand scheme of things.

“So much of our life is defined by work,” said Jane Saks, president and artistic director of Project&, the group that created the exhibit. “It’s not just monetary. It’s not just skill or talent. It has so much to do with self and identity.”

The exhibit was inspired by Terkel’s classic book “Working,” a collection of interviews with working Americans. As you walk past the stunning photographs, taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Lynsey Addario, you are given only general descriptions of each person: a name, a job title, where the person lives.

Zara Kessler:

What if somebody offered you a small fortune to … live in the Midwest?
Insert Garrison Keillor joke here. And then, if you’re thinking about getting an MBA and can demonstrate a bond with the region, you might want to get your application ready for January.

That’s the next deadline to apply for the new Stanford USA MBA Fellowship, which will cover tuition and associated fees for as many as three students in next year’s entering MBA class. It adds up to approximately $160,000 over the two-year program.1

The fellowship, offered by Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, is for people who qualify for need-based financial aid and are “committed to economic development in underserved regions of the United States.” In this first iteration, it targets the Midwest. Would-be fellows must show strong connections with at least one state in the area—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin fit the bill—such as living there, currently or for at least three consecutive years in the past, or being a graduate of a Midwestern high school.

Karen Herzog:

“Frankly, competition is fierce,” said Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “There’s a big incentive to go after tuition revenue. We’re experiencing competition from institutions that haven’t competed with us in the past, including the four-year campuses.”

Several factors likely contributed to UW Colleges’ early loss of about 3,000 students this fall, she said.

When the economy picks up, enrollment at two-year institutions often declines as more jobs become available, especially for nontraditional students, Sandeen said. The national conversation about affordability, student loan debt and the value of higher education also has been “very negative,” she added. Some new high school graduates may delay college and choose to earn tuition money first to avoid taking out loans, the chancellor said.

Two-year campuses hit the hardest are in counties that have been severely affected by the demographic shift, she said. “We’re in a trough, in terms of the number of high school graduates. We’re at a low point in that demographic, and that’s the demographic that traditionally comes to our campuses.”

Better Explained:

Whoa. There’s so much information conveyed in a simple numbering scheme! Without looking at a map, I know I can drive from Seattle to Boston on I-90. Maybe I’ll take I-95 South when I’m there and make my way to Florida. On the way I’ll take I-10 West, over to LA, then drive up I-5 North back to Seattle.

How does this work?

We have a concept of a number, and all its properties (even/odd, size, number of digits…)

We noticed a real-world object (a highway) that had various properties (North/South, position, major/minor)

We associated the properties of the number to the properties of the object

Harry Cheadle

James Duane doesn’t think you should ever talk to the police. Not just, “Don’t talk to the police if you’re accused of a crime,” or, “Don’t talk to the police in an interrogation setting”—never talk to the cops, period. If you are found doing something suspicious by an officer (say, breaking into your own house because you locked yourself outside), you are legally obligated to tell the cop your name and what you’re doing at that very moment.

Other than that, Duane says, you should fall back on four short words: “I want a lawyer.”

In 2008, Duane, a professor at Virginia’s Regent Law School, gave a lecture about the risks of talking to police that was filmed and posted to YouTube. It’s since been viewed millions of times, enjoying a new viral boost after the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer spurred interest in false confessions. His argument, which he’s since expanded into a new book called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, is that even if you haven’t committed a crime, it’s dangerous to tell the police any information. You might make mistakes when explaining where you were at the time of a crime that the police interpret as lies; the officer talking to you could misremember what you say much later; you may be tricked into saying the wrong things by cops under no obligation to tell you the truth; and your statements to police could, in combination with faulty eyewitness accounts, shoddy “expert” testimony, and sheer bad luck, lead to you being convicted of a serious crime.

Julie Rehmeyer:

If your doctor diagnoses you with chronic fatigue syndrome, you’ll probably get two pieces of advice: Go to a psychotherapist and get some exercise. Your doctor might tell you that either of those treatments will give you a 60 percent chance of getting better and a 20 percent chance of recovering outright. After all, that’s what researchers concluded in a 2011 study published in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, along with later analyses.

Problem is, the study was bad science.

And we’re now finding out exactly how bad.

Under court order, the study’s authors for the first time released their raw data earlier this month. Patients and independent scientists collaborated to analyze it and posted their findings Wednesday on Virology Blog, a site hosted by Columbia microbiology professor Vincent Racaniello.

Stephen Dinham

In health there are well-established protocols that govern the introduction of any new drug or treatment. Of major consideration is the notion of doing no harm. In education there are no such controls and plenty of vested interests keen to see the adoption of new strategies and resources for a variety of ideological and financial reasons.

Teachers need to be critical consumers of research – as with medicine, lives are also at stake – yet with the best will in the world and without the knowledge and time to do so, decisions may be made to adopt new approaches that are not only ineffectual, but can actually do harm. A case in point is learning styles.

Bert

This week, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (“PCAST”) released a system-shaking report that explains how several fields of forensic analysis—including bite-mark analysis, hair comparisons, and shoeprint analysis—lack adequate scientific validation. Although many of these techniques have not been shown to be sufficiently reliable, they have been permitted to produce evidence in criminal cases across the country for many years. It is no wonder that D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harry Edwards and Jennifer Mnookin, the dean of UCLA’s law school, wrote in the Washington Post that “[t]he report is a much-needed wake-up call to all who care about the integrity of the criminal-justice system.” Rather than waking up, however, the National District Attorneys Association (“NDAA”) is doubling down on the pseudo-science masquerading as forensic evidence. Given that district attorneys themselves widely evade accountability and face inadequate constraints on their power, perhaps it is no surprise that their representative organization is unwilling to stomach expert scrutiny of the evidence prosecutors introduce in criminal trials every day.